Colored coins on separate blockchain?

[bugm]

Does it exist, a colored coins solution that doesn't run on the Bitcoin blockchain?

The problem with Colored Coins today is that you still need some Bitcoin dust for every transaction, which is a disadvantage if you would like to promote the use of your own, small scale community coin. You don't want to force your users into having to buy Bitcoin (or any other crypto-currency) if you're trying to get them to use your own, community oriented altcoin (whether or not altcoins are a good idea, is not the discussion here ;-)

As far as we know, something like that doesn't exist yet. Or does it?

--
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[markm]

You always need to pay the fees of the chain on which you are implementing your coloured coin or user-issued token or user-issued currency or whatever.

So in order to pay such fees directly with your community currency, your community currency would itself need to be the medium.

So you could make a community coin then implement coloured coins on top of it so that other people who also want to run coloured coins and do not want to do so on the Bitcoin blockchain could run on your community coin instead, paying fees to your community coin's miners or stakeholders or whatever.

Two problems though: one, how are you going to secure your community coin securely enough for folks to trust it enough to run their own coins as coloured coins on its blockchain; and two, coloured coin code is very low level against the blockchain, so every little detail about the blockchain you use, such as at which blocks it turns on which BIPs and block-versions and how malleable its transactions are and so on could impact your code.

If it was easy to port coloured coin code from blockchain to blockchain it would have been done thousands of times over by now; any new shitcoin/scamcoin released without its own version of coloured coins would be considered garbage, people would complain just like if there was no windows version client or no pools or whatever, it would just be one of the standard things considered normal for coins.

There are of course things like Ripple and NXT and Bitshares and so on designed to allow users to issue tokens over them.

Maybe one of their tokens-you-pay-the-fees-with is cheap enough (aka the fees are cheap enough) that you might find it usable?

-MarkM-

[bugm]

Thanks a lot for your reply, MarkM!

Nowadays, it is indeed very easy to create your own altcoin, but as you also suggest, one does need one or more dedicated developers to keep the software secure and up-to-date. For a small community, it would be great though to be able to create their own altcoin on a bigger blockchain, maintained by a bigger group of developers, on which not only that specific altcoin is running, but through which everyone is able to run their own coin. It will not be the technologically most advanced coin, but at least it could be decent, solid and your own coin could grow on it, without having to be dependent of another coin, like Bitcoin (or another altcoin), basically because of technical reasons (dust). To put it very simply, you don't want your community coin users to have to worry about yet another cryptocoin, even if it's Bitcoin. Of course, thinking out loud, one could just define their "altcoin" unit to be equal to 1/10, 1/100, 1/12345, ... BTC. Then, only your front-end applications need to change, but you would still be working in Bitcoin underneath. Does this make any sense?

[poloskarted]

If it was easy to port coloured coin code from blockchain to blockchain it would have been done thousands of times over by now;

Multicurrency blockchains
Recall that tokenization protocols such as CoinSpark and Counterparty enable third party assets to
be issued and transacted over the bitcoin blockchain, in parallel to bitcoin’s native currency. These
techniques can equally be used on private blockchains created by MultiChain, without further
modification. However, in a blockchain running a private protocol, we can improve on these
schemes by integrating support for third party assets directly into the chain’s rules.

Source: http://www.multichain.com/

Also for what you describe (distributed community coin) you don't really need a cryptocurrency at all : http://hyperledger.com/

However if decentralization, full redundancy and maximum security are your priority I would just create a counterparty (bitcoin meta-layer) token and fund your community with some btc dust. I say counterparty because Colored coins has no decentralised order matching engine, no mechanism to distribute tokens/rewards for your community, no vending machines, no gateways etc.


So for instance your community coin could be BUGCOIN

You could use your BUGCOIN in a merchant/POS system. As access control for membership, or to pay for digital goods, some working demos are here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=236&v=Po3aDIgK_UE
https://pay.blockscan.com/

Further reading: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/tcv

you could create a vending machine allowing users to input BTC and be automatically credited with BUGCOIN
http://swapbot.tokenly.com/public/FrameLAlife/1feaa10d-b793-4abb-801d-7b782581faa5#choose

or you could create auctions where users have to pay for goods (whether digital or physical with BUGCOIN)
http://auction.letstalkbitcoin.com/

you could allow users to merge mine your coin, an example of a coin that has done that is here: (this is a project started in mid-2014 where members of Stanford’s Folding@Home project can be paid a portion of daily FLDC distributions)
http://foldingcoin.net/octoparty/
http://foldingcoin.net/

[Este Nuno]

I believe I saw something about Opal implementing Coloured Coins.

And then NXT has it's own very advanced decentralised asset exchange and monetary system.