A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin"

[markm]

There are many coins that have been around a long time, so that anyone who wanted some has had plenty of time to mine some.

Many of them are even merged-mine-able, so anyone wanting some has had plenty of time to get them almost free.

There are even some that various pools have given out too, just in case the ones pool users have been encouraged to also mine haven't been getting distributed among enough people yet.

Some have even been mined almost exclusively with CPUs, somehow managing not to attract GPU miners; they have thus been able to continue chugging along slowly but steadily, with various website visitors CPU-mining them and stuff like that.

Are you aware that bitcoin can only be the parent chain of a merge, it cannot be a child chain? Thus that coins like Terracoin, beingsimple clones of bitcoin, cannot be merged mined alongside bitcoin?

Let us remember too that mining is not the only method of distributing coins. Merged mined coins are almost free, so giving them away to players of online games is a very affordable way of distributing them; a more-interactive version of a faucet in a way.

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I don't think it makes much sense to complain about early adopters having a big advantage when that advantage is being forced upon them against their will by the hordes of miners who refuse to pick them up almost free.

Really what is going on is vast numbers of people are trying very hard to be late adopters, and I don't think that really gives them good grounds for complaining about early adopters. Many are basically against adoption entirely, early or late.

With bitcoin we only have a century or so before the early adopter phase is over and everyone has to settle for transaction fees. With GRouPcoin centuries from now people will still be getting a full 50 coins per block and the coins mined in the first few decades will possibly have spread out due to miners who have more than one beneficiary in their wills.

Most altcoins are so incredibly dirt-cheap right now that quite likely who holds huge numbers of them could change massively within the next order of magniture increase in price and they will still be dirt cheap then too. People seem so determined to always "miss the boat" that quite likely another order of magnitude increase will be needed to actually get even the 'non-conscientious objector" deliberately-late people to consider adopting them. People seem to want to wait until at least a hundredfolk increase in price has happened before considering getting involved, and also seem so fond of complaining that it is as if the whole point of that waiting is so they have something to complain about.

It should be recognised though that what they are really complaining about is their own idiotic stubborn-ness, their own determination to wait until the the train leaves the station before running after it screaming how unfair it is that it left without them.

A great variety of opporunities have been provided, many of them as optional extras even, not requiring diverting mining power away from "the mainstream" in order to mine them. Some of them are never going to stop minting coins, but maybe that just encourages people to wait even longer, to be even more late.

If you set up a coin that people mine for the first two to five years without minting, why even bother mining it at all until two to five years from now? If you don't mine it at all for a few years the deliberately-late masses will still wait until a few years after it does "launch" just so they can kick themselves (while crying/screaming at others) for missing the boat yet again.

Fill up your merged mining as much as is currently feasible first before going on about the unfairness of being denied fellow miners, being left a tiny, maybe even "fringe" community while people wait a few years building up more and more "oh you are so unfair not to have forced me against my will kicking and screaming to mine your coin" ammunition by sitting back still day after day after day, week after week after week failing to set up p2pool and merged-mine...

-MarkM-

[ElectricMucus]

@markm

Bitcoin already is fringe, Litecoin almost far-out fringe and everything else more in the realm totally-whack-another-universe fringe. You won't find the attitude, call it "Bitcoinism", that is the believe that Bitcoin will somehow take over a major part of the worlds economy anywhere outside Bitcointalk.

The sooner people realize that the better since the way to economical independence doesn't goes over cannibalism by self-perpetuating "early adoption" but over resilience and the acquiring  of resources which make a self-sustaining society possible. Bitcoin used to have that potential but has attracted the wrong participants who only want to get wealthy at the expense of others instead of working together on a purpose.

[markm]

Now you sound like the Martians, Brits, Canucks, the Galactic United Nations and so on...

They argued from the start that money issued by people who have no intention of "honouring" it probably would not work well in the long run.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html seems to be indicating their suggestions might have merit...

-MarkM-

[Etlase2]

Those silly, dishonorable martians!!

[pyromaniac]

deepceleron
It is not gpu- resistant, so miners with ASICs will earn much more money than owners of GPU.

[johnyj]

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I never know this, just checked this groupcoin, seems it is not working at the moment. It's biggest problem is that a mechanism to pay the core developer with half mined coin endlessly, and use a strange whitelist to achieve this

Actually from pure economy point of view, 50BTC/Block forever provide better chance for late commers at the early years of coin genertion, but after 10 years it still becomes insignificant for the total coin supply. While BTC is more aggresive in reducing the coin supply, makes it highly speculative

[cunicula]

You could just 'inflate away' the gains of early adopters.

To do this just make the block reward a function of difficulty.

(e.g. block reward = difficulty / exp (time in years * -0.3).

The expectation here is that difficulty halves about every two years due to Moore's Law. With this system you get the same USD from mining regardless of when you begin hoarding coins.

It doesn't matter when you adopt. Money printing prevents the price from rising.

A problem is that the price will fall after a decline in usage. To solve this you can charge a mandatory 0.1% txn fee on all sent inputs and destroy the txn fees.
Thus if you print too much, then you solve that by printing almost nothing and mopping up excess currency.

With both of these rules, price should be very stable over time. There is no longer any motivation to use the currency as an investment.

[Note: I am not advocating this coin. There is no motive for initial adoption. Fair or not, it would never get off the ground.]

It might be a good idea to do the following, however:

(e.g. block reward = difficulty^0.5 / exp (time in years * -0.3).

This would spread out the early adoption process over a longer time span. The early adopters still get bigger rewards, but the contrast is not as dramatic. More rewards are shared with later adopters.
This avoids the psychological problem: early adopters rich, would-be adopters poor -> would-be adopters have sour grapes -> would-be adopters reject bitcoin due to 'unfairness'

The coins of course have persistent inflation, but that is implicit in the idea of not rewarding early adopters heavily.
 

[ElectricMucus]

You could completely omit difficulty based on hashrate and simply make it follow moores law. Transaction times would be faster if more people mine as well as inflation.
Inflating away the currency in a hardcoded way wouldn't improve a thing however (I sense some slight concern trolling here... bad cunicula bad! ) especially if it should be in a exponential way.
One thing to keep in mind is that bitcoin is often said to follow the mining gold over the time periods which isn't strictly true since the overall gold production was less during early periods, has a peak sometime around now and is projected to decline from there on.  The big difference here is that improvement in technology results in a overall higher production rate.

Now you sound like the Martians, Brits, Canucks, the Galactic United Nations and so on...

They argued from the start that money issued by people who have no intention of "honouring" it probably would not work well in the long run.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html seems to be indicating their suggestions might have merit...

-Mark

Those silly, dishonorable martians!!

Yeah, yeah I know.... that was meant serious though.

[paraipan]

You could just 'inflate away' the gains of early adopters.

To do this just make the block reward a function of difficulty.

(e.g. block reward = difficulty / exp (time in years * -0.3).

The expectation here is that difficulty halves about every two years due to Moore's Law. With this system you get the same USD from mining regardless of when you begin hoarding coins.

It doesn't matter when you adopt. Money printing prevents the price from rising.

A problem is that the price will fall after a decline in usage. To solve this you can charge a mandatory 0.1% txn fee on all sent inputs and destroy the txn fees.
Thus if you print too much, then you solve that by printing almost nothing and mopping up excess currency.

With both of these rules, price should be very stable over time. There is no longer any motivation to use the currency as an investment.

[Note: I am not advocating this coin. There is no motive for initial adoption. Fair or not, it would never get off the ground.]

It might be a good idea to do the following, however:

(e.g. block reward = difficulty^0.5 / exp (time in years * -0.3).

This would spread out the early adoption process over a longer time span. The early adopters still get bigger rewards, but the contrast is not as dramatic. More rewards are shared with later adopters.
This avoids the psychological problem: early adopters rich, would-be adopters poor -> would-be adopters have sour grapes -> would-be adopters reject bitcoin due to 'unfairness'

The coins of course have persistent inflation, but that is implicit in the idea of not rewarding early adopters heavily.
 

Would-be adopters could have opened their ears a little more when early adopters "preached" the bitcoin to them. Now they can have some bits at a fair price, or go elsewhere and start Inflatacoin.

[ElectricMucus]

paraipan please leave, you are clearly trying to distract people from seeing the solutions already there.

We are not trying to copy exponential inflation but find a more fair (or call it natural) initial distribution of currency. The one gold really follows that is.

[cunicula]

You could completely omit difficulty based on hashrate and simply make it follow moores law. Transaction times would be faster if more people mine as well as inflation.

I said nothing about the timing of coin generation. I see no reason to modify it. Difficulty is increased or decreased so that one block arrives every 10 minutes on average.
I only discussed the block reward.

[ElectricMucus]

You could completely omit difficulty based on hashrate and simply make it follow moores law. Transaction times would be faster if more people mine as well as inflation.

I said nothing about the timing of coin generation. I see no reason to modify it. Difficulty is increased or decreased so that one block arrives every 10 minutes on average.
I only discussed the block reward.

But I did
What it meant is that it would have a similar effect, block times could either be variable thus transaction times would be less reliable or it could be based on the soft difficulty model I mentioned earlier.

[crazy_rabbit]

Another (not-at-all-recommended) wild idea completely different from anything I've seen put out there yet - an inflationary coin, where the number of satoshis mined in a block = block difficulty, with no limit to number of coins that will exist. This lets the currency base grow with the adoption rate (measured by mining), however a divergent series as naively implemented as this could quickly "inflation" the value to zero over time.

Oh this idea has been proposed in the past. It is not a good one though because tying coin reward directly with difficulty means that as computing hardware gets better, people make more coins. It is a very big disincentive to use the currency when inflation is a factor of computing power. That is why with the Encoin and Decrits proposals I've made, mining is separate from network security and is based around a per-user approach rather than the lottery approach of bitcoin.

Probably a good median is a permanent 50 BTC reward (to counter "lost coin" and also address the "fees must replace reward" problem), but that doesn't address this fair launch of a new coin, which is my primary focus here.

This is also addressed with Decrits. Early mining is rewarded in several multiples of the regular award, reducing over time until it reaches the regular award. Early adopters are still well rewarded, but they will not be able to purchase a mercedes from a couple dollars of electricity.

I think you still have failed to describe why the early adopters of Bitcoin making it rich is a bad thing. They made money, got motivated to make more money, got the word out, built services, etc....

I think he stated it somewhat clearly:

They can crash the currency value if they want

This is a significant detriment to business and trade.

That last part isn't more dangerous then all the small people freaking out and dumping their coins. You can't really prevent people from selling unless the exchanges agree to close to halt trading (done in the real world). You're talking about creating a coin that is somewhat insulated from the realities of supply and demand. I venture that the largest holders of coins in any of these currencies are not early miners: they are early hoarders. People who buy up the coin immediately and then dump. There is no protocol change that can avoid this.

[cunicula]

You could completely omit difficulty based on hashrate and simply make it follow moores law. Transaction times would be faster if more people mine as well as inflation.

I said nothing about the timing of coin generation. I see no reason to modify it. Difficulty is increased or decreased so that one block arrives every 10 minutes on average.
I only discussed the block reward.

But I did
What it meant is that it would have a similar effect, block times could either be variable thus transaction times would be less reliable or it could be based on the soft difficulty model I mentioned earlier.

Oh okay. Didn't read the thread carefully at all. Sorry.

[crazy_rabbit]

You know, an easier solution might just be to reduce the coins in the reward. One should not underestimate the power of people's psychological reaction to big numbers. The idea that some PPC holders have hundreds of thousands if not millions of coins is quite silly and psychologically people will over estimate the value or underestimate the value based on how many zeros there are and where the decimal point it. Terracoin seems interesting because early adopters will have a tough time accumulating millions of coins. The difficulty adjusts fast to compensate for huge miners that might jump on board, and the pay out is 20TRC per block, which is less then bitcoin.

Someone dumping 1000 coins makes a far less dramatic impression psychologically on the members of the market then dumping 100000000 coins does.

[steelhouse]

1. Why? Bitcoin isn't fair; unknown early adopters (not you) mined with little competition for the first half of it's existence. They can crash the currency value if they want or cash out for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Deflation: A 10,000 BTC pizza is now a 10,000 BTC Mercedes. Other alternate coins have had launch problems: selfish premining, monopolizing landrush on low difficulty launch, easy denial attacks.

2. How do we launch a new currency that otherwise is identical to Bitcoin? Delayed mining!:
-The first N blocks have no reward,
-The genesis difficulty is high (~100,000 vs Bitcoin's current 3.3M),
-Insertion of full coinbase block reward into generated block only becomes valid if the previous difficulty period was > 1 million
-"pre-launch" blocks may either have only this 0 generate value, or optionally a maximum testing value of 0.01 if deemed necessary.

1. Bitcoin is fair.  Somebody had to make that pizza risk it on bitcoin.  Over 1,000,000 of BTC are traded monthly on MTGOX.  Most of the early adopters have sold their bitcoin.  People have bought them.  People have advertised them, billboards have been put up, commercials paid for.  It has been on t.v. shows.   There once was a coin you propose fairbrix. 

2. The fairest way to make a coin is to pre-mine them all.   That way the economy grows on its own.  The supply is limited with no inflation and things can really grow as people adopt the medium of exchange.  Mining is no different than Ben Bernanke printing money to give to his banking buddies.   The system should survive on transaction fees.

[ElectricMucus]

You know, an easier solution might just be to reduce the coins in the reward. One should not underestimate the power of people's psychological reaction to big numbers. The idea that some PPC holders have hundreds of thousands if not millions of coins is quite silly and psychologically people will over estimate the value or underestimate the value based on how many zeros there are and where the decimal point it. Terracoin seems interesting because early adopters will have a tough time accumulating millions of coins. The difficulty adjusts fast to compensate for huge miners that might jump on board, and the pay out is 20TRC per block, which is less then bitcoin.

Someone dumping 1000 coins makes a far less dramatic impression psychologically on the members of the market then dumping 100000000 coins does.

That's just silly.
Did you play Diablo3? There, items are traded for millions of gold and people are accustomed to it. In wow the situation is entire different with much smaller numbers. But the end result is the same.
We simply substitute the zeros in our heads and arrive at the same behaviour.

[creativex]

Mining is no different than Ben Bernanke printing money to give to his banking buddies.   The system should survive on transaction fees.

I agreed with most of what you said, until you got here. At this point you completely went off the rails for me. Mining differs from what the Bernanke does in several ways. Benji types some buttons and trillions appear, yet I'm a miner typing right now and where are my BTC? I have to invest in infrastructure and electricity to produce BTC. Also there are restrictions placed upon mining(difficulty, reward halving, power costs, hard coin limit, etc...) that the fed does not have.

...and the system will eventually be forced to survive on transaction fees when it's vibrant enough. It's really a brilliant setup.

[steelhouse]

...and the system will eventually be forced to survive on transaction fees when it's vibrant enough. It's really a brilliant setup.

You can eventually force a coin to survive on transaction fees today.  This is another reason you should not be so upset at early adopters, 1/2 the coins are still out there.  I would not call it brilliant, it is really a flaw.  However, it did get a lot of interest in the coin.  Someday the coin is going to have to survive on transaction fees.  Basically you guessing whether it can.

[markm]

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I never know this, just checked this groupcoin, seems it is not working at the moment. It's biggest problem is that a mechanism to pay the core developer with half mined coin endlessly, and use a strange whitelist to achieve this

Actually from pure economy point of view, 50BTC/Block forever provide better chance for late commers at the early years of coin genertion, but after 10 years it still becomes insignificant for the total coin supply. While BTC is more aggresive in reducing the coin supply, makes it highly speculative

You seem to be confusing GRouPcoin with DeVCoin.

DeVCoin gives 90% of the coins to people who work on free open source projects. GRouPcoin was initially used to prototype various things on the way to developing DeVCoin but once the method to be used in DeVCoin was decided GRouPcoin went back to being just a slightly modified BiTCoin, its modifications being a more-adaptive (and timetravel bug fixed) difficulty adjustment and a constant 50 coins per block mining of coins.

(DeVCoin mints 50,000 coins per block and also never lowers the number minted per block.)

You seem to be talking about DeVCoin when you say it does not work. Did you put its receiver_*.csv files where it can find them? They are provided because one of the early websites, used for the early receiver files, no longer exists thus clients can no longer get a majority consensus of websites as to which versions of those early files are the correct ones.

-MarkM-