How to clone Bitcoin to create your own crypto currency / crypto shares system

[mobodick]

Your whole story is based on a false premise.
All you would achieve is a dilution of network strength.
You would divide the miners across multiple bitcoin variants and that would make it easier to attack any single bitcoin variant.
This will deter investors and entrepeneurs.

Too much 'new world order' and too little how bitcoin actually works.

So you say. I say let's facilitate the creation a multitude of bitcoin clones. Some of them might get hacked and attacked, some of them might survive.

Through the process we will develop new technologies for protecting fledgling crypto currencies from attacks.

If there's really no point of cloning crypto currencies, how come there are already a dozen or so of them out there? Many skilled developers are working on those projects.

They're there because some people got gredy and thought they can start a new chain and mine a shitload solo and then hope others will put value into their personal coins.
Any successfull parallel chain would suck hashing power away from bitcoin.
When ASICS prove to be as powerfull as they are claimed to be and we get abundant hashing power we can maybe start this discussion.
But for now it would water down the network.

[killerstorm]

mobodick, you forget about merged mining. It doesn't suck hashing power away from it's host chain.

ASICs won't really fundamentally change anything: attackers can get ASICs too, so they will simply make GPU mining obsolete. Just like GPU mining obsoleted CPU mining. Hashing power did not become "abundant" when GPU mining was invented.

[mobodick]

mobodick, you forget about merged mining. It doesn't suck hashing power away from it's host chain.

ASICs won't really fundamentally change anything: attackers can get ASICs too, so they will simply make GPU mining obsolete. Just like GPU mining obsoleted CPU mining. Hashing power did not become "abundant" when GPU mining was invented.

Merged minig is only possible if the secondary chain is somehow related to the main bitcoin chain.
And i think the effect of ASICs would be a little more subtle.
Against people without the asic hardware it would become more secure and you could spread that hashing power across multiple chains and still have enough left to make the bitcoin chain stronger.
Seen from inside there could be problems when big miners switch coin as that would mean a direct transfer of security from one chain to another.

[guruvan]

I've been toying with this idea, as well as using "closed" alt-coin clones for internal company accounting.

However, having run across coloured(smart) coins, contracts, smartproperty, pay-to-policy outputs & distributed bonds, I see the light as it shines down on issuing various types of securities. 

Any way that I've looked into it, the blockchain security issue is the most significant barrier to making many bitcoin clones. Massively merged mining is problematic, and without the level of security of the larger network(s) you're exposing yourself to the risk of a dishonest miner connecting to the altcoin chain, and attacking it.

Furthermore, if securities are traded p2p, via colored coins, they're, by definition, globally tradeable, by anyone with the client. The cloned coin solution requires a multi-coin client, that supports each different coin's alterations to the core bitcoin code. This simply doesn't scale. Look at this solution down the road, and imagine hundreds of thousands of public securities, each having their own altcoin, and consider the scaling issues on the client side, and the blockchain security side. Colored Coins/Contracts/Smartproperty has no different scaling issues than bitcoin itself.

[markm]

With coloured coins each client only has to remember the colours its user likes, and optionally treat all other colours as "coloured but my user doesn't care what colour they actually are" to prevent mistaking uncoloured coins for coloured coins thus "wasting" unfamiliar / unliked colours by treating them as uncoloured.

Periodically user could review how much of their coin is tied up in colours they don't care about, run a breakdown of that showing how many unfamiliar colours it consists of and eyeball whether he/she has enough of any one unknown colour to consider researching that colour to see if maybe that amount is enough to be worth recognising that colour in future, and think about whether to deliberately tell client one or more of the unfamiliar colours to treat, with deliberate aforethought, as uncoloured and thus have no qualms about mixing/melting back into uncolouredness.

With merged chains it is still not clear whether having more than a few will prove worthwhile. Those that moved all their balances back out of blockchain format onto an Open Transactions server seem to be doing far far better value-wise than those that stayed in blockchain form allowing anyone and their GPU to mine-and-dump them constantly undermining their value. (See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html even bitcoin itself seems to be suffering vastly from mine-and-dump syndrome so that some of the altcoins that moved to Open Transactions look like they might yet catch up with bitcoins in value...)

-MarkM-

[phelix]

[...]
With merged chains it is still not clear whether having more than a few will prove worthwhile. Those that moved all their balances back out of blockchain format onto an Open Transactions server seem to be doing far far better value-wise than those that stayed in blockchain form allowing anyone and their GPU to mine-and-dump them constantly undermining their value. (See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html even bitcoin itself seems to be suffering vastly from mine-and-dump syndrome so that some of the altcoins that moved to Open Transactions look like they might yet catch up with bitcoins in value...)
[...]

holy shit, there is a whole jungle of alternacoins and otcoins now. you think any of these is going somewhere?

[sron]

Is it technically possible to clone the bitcoin client and adjust the parameters so all the coins are mined within a very short timespan (hours or days) rather than decades?

[killerstorm]

It's even possible to give your coins to yourself (i.e. "issuer") from start.

[bitcool]

Right, just make the genesis block worth 21 million MC (MonopolyCoin) 

[markm]

Yes, basically it is very much like shares when you do that, except maybe with no dividends and maybe they are non-voting shares.

The value of the coins lies in the "reserves" (assets) the issuer owns, the "backing" they have available with which to "back" the coins.

This can actually work better than having coins issued by random "miners" since random "miners" often just "dump" the coins instead of "backing" them with their assets.

But, blockchains turned out to be too vulnerable. Coloured coins might be a better format to use for such things; others moved to Open Transactions for now though maybe they will end up moving on to become coloured coins instead of back to being actual blockchains once we see how coloured coins work out.

-MarkM-

[mobodick]

Right, just make the genesis block worth 21 million MC (MonopolyCoin) 

Fancy a game of Cryptopoly?
 

[sron]

Yes, basically it is very much like shares when you do that, except maybe with no dividends and maybe they are non-voting shares.

The value of the coins lies in the "reserves" (assets) the issuer owns, the "backing" they have available with which to "back" the coins.

This can actually work better than having coins issued by random "miners" since random "miners" often just "dump" the coins instead of "backing" them with their assets.

But, blockchains turned out to be too vulnerable. Coloured coins might be a better format to use for such things; others moved to Open Transactions for now though maybe they will end up moving on to become coloured coins instead of back to being actual blockchains once we see how coloured coins work out.

-MarkM-

I appreciate your advice. Yes, this is what I have in mind. No dividends but you could still stipulate in the contract that a percentage of the profits from whatever commercial project you are involved with will be used to buy back the coins/shares, in order to stabilize their underlying value and encourage trade.

When you say blockchains are too vulnerable, what exactly do you mean? Are they really vulnerable if all the coins/shares have already been mined?

[bitcool]

I suppose attacker can create fake transactions and steal all your 21M MCs

[sron]

I'm working on a project now and I would really need my own crypto currency to use as crypto shares.

If anyone could help me to develop my own crypto currency system I will offer 2.5 BTC + 1% of the shares.

Requirements:

-The units should be produced really quickly.
-I want to be able to decide the number of units produced.
-I want to be satisfied with the software you produce before paying.

[markm]

Okay so decide then, how many units?

They can all be issued to you in the first block.

How much are you going to pay miners to mine it?

It is because mining it (SECURING IT) is so expensive that UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF, UNS, NKL etc moved away from using blockchains, it is insanely expensive to secure a blockchain.

They moved to Open Transactions, maybe you should consider issuing under Open Transactions too?

Or, wait for coloured coins systems to mature and issue coloured coins.

-MarkM-

[sron]

1

Okay so decide then, how many units?

They can all be issued to you in the first block.

How much are you going to pay miners to mine it?

It is because mining it (SECURING IT) is so expensive that UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF, UNS, NKL etc moved away from using blockchains, it is insanely expensive to secure a blockchain.

They moved to Open Transactions, maybe you should consider issuing under Open Transactions too?

Or, wait for coloured coins systems to mature and issue coloured coins.

-MarkM-

1 million units. They would be dividable like BTC, right?

Haven't heard much about UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF, UNS, NKL. Do you have links to one or some of those projects? Are they crypto currencies too?

If I would want to issue under OT, how exactly would I do that?

I have a bad hunch about coloured coins, which is why I don't want to go in that direction. Feels wrong to colour the coins and sometimes I feel like the whole BTC software system is too clunky too and might be replaced by lighter solutions eventually.

[markm]

You should get an Open Transactions client installed and working, you will understand it much better once you actually run it.

-MarkM-

[phelix]

If you like I can issue a thousand namecoin shares for you.

[K1773R]

I like the colored coins idea (and the name) but pretty much the only advantage vs namecoin that I see is divisibility.

Namecoin has other advantages:
* it is available and running right now
* it can be used for many other things like: wot, newscast, aliases, ...

With a wot established it could be used for a truly decentralized but automatic exchange. You could just offer your shares by setting the value field to something like: "ask:42.0nmc". A buyer can then send the money to the name and will receive the name in return. of course you have to trust the person holding the name.

I have proposed an auxiliary transaction feature (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113615.0) with ppcoin to natively facilitate distributed storage of key-value. Auxiliary transactions/blocks are deleted after expiration thus addressing the block chain bloat issue with a namecoin/bitcoin solution.

I plan to start implementing this feature in a couple of months but I would love to hear comments as to what app writers would need (such as your proposed exchange). If I got time I might consider doing a simple web-of-trust app prototype to test out the auxiliary transaction feature as well.

i would exploit this to save my backups in it lol

[sron]

If you like I can issue a thousand namecoin shares for you.

Sounds nice. Could you please explain some things to me?

-Is it possible to tell one namecoin from another, i. e. can I give the namecoins a specific name which separates them from other namecoins?
-Are namecoins dividable?