MC2: A cryptocurrency based on a hybrid PoW/PoS system

[chriswen]

Can the draft doc be hosted somewhere else, this current 'mega' site is asking me to agree to terms-of-use and download flash just to download a simple file which is absurd.  Please use a host that dose not shaft people.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?sgqjglhmz3mg30s

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[tacotime]

Can the draft doc be hosted somewhere else, this current 'mega' site is asking me to agree to terms-of-use and download flash just to download a simple file which is absurd.  Please use a host that dose not shaft people.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?sgqjglhmz3mg30s

Thanks

[tacotime]

Hmm, will a CPU miner be released when the coin is released?

Yes.  It will probably be a little bit before a GPU miner is released.

[tacotime]

Are you sure you want to enforce it like that?

Because all other crypto-currencies don't have a hard limit.  Bitcoin blocks could be found 1-2 minutes away from each other and  that's allowed.  You should control stake blocks off of the difficulty it is too mine them.

It's based off of hashing right?  It's luck and the difficulty factor determines when the blocks are found.  Having Pow, PoS, one after another would be very unlikely.

Well, it's the easiest method when blocks are all the same difficulty and people may all have them at the same time (very unlikely, but possible).  Bitcoin blocks are fine being found close to one another because they actually represent some large amount of work -- all stake coins have is stake to back them.  Regardless of the speed PoS blocks function at, PoW at 15 blocks per hour would be steady.

If you had (12/129600) of the current total number of coins in the network and a merchant who accepted funds after 6 confirmations, you could spam 6-12 blocks quickly after waiting three months and try to attempt to double spend like this.  The probability of such an attack succeeding is extremely high, and the cost to the attacker is virtually nothing.  I'm not sure 100% how PPC deals with this.

So, you need some means of mitigating this.  In the Bitcoin network, the likelihood of getting enough hash power to perform such an attack (one hour of forked blocks) was extremely difficult, but it's very easy with stake blocks.

You also can not protect the network the same way you would with BTC/LTC for stake coins (by difficulty) because someone could simply hoard many coins, wait for the right moment, and engage in the attack.  There's no guarantee stake blocks will be claimed at any particular time under the current system, and I'm not sure how you'd implement them to do so other than restrict the rate at which the network allows them to be generated.

Edit: Another option would be to force stake miners to wait until after a PoW block is mined before sending out a PoS block, so that PoW and PoS blocks are all mined back to back.

2nd edit: If you put PoS blocks back to back with PoW blocks, you can actually more easily attack the network because you now only need half the magnitude of your PoW attack vector.  So, PoS in one sense protects the network, but in another sense destabilizes it with a small percentage PoS, small percentage PoW attack vulnerability.  I haven't really seen this addressed anywhere by PPC, but thinking about it now makes perfect sense.

[Impaler]

Thankyou chriswen 

[tacotime]

Democracy per head or democracy per coin?

Democracy per coin already has a (somewhat) proven real world method in voting shares for public corporations.  

Democracy is based on PoW blocks and PoS blocks.  So, hashing power and also, and stake power is used for votes (it's in the whitepaper).
Each block contains a vote.

Okay, for PoS.  So unlike PPC, your shares only gain value if you find a block.  (right?).  With PPC your coinstake accrues.

And the voting system sounds really cool.  But, we won't be able to see it implemented for 30 years.

Right, but finding a block is exceedingly easy (there are very few restrictions) so long as you have a sufficient number of coins with an old enough coin age.

The voting system is there so that the chain stays inflationary well into the future in addition to the option of fees (which has been academically debated as to whether or not it will function correctly).  Of course, anyone can make their own for and implement voting easily in the way I have specified -- just need to add a couple extra bits to the block header.  Pools could also allow voting by running a few instances of the daemon that sent out work based on variations of these bits in the header.

[Benny1985]

The more I hear, the more I like. I'd love to mine this once its released.

Can you give an ETA on the initial release?

[tacotime]

The more I hear, the more I like. I'd love to mine this once its released.

Can you give an ETA on the initial release?

Depends if I can find people to help develop it.  I'm heavily employed so the implementation of everything in here will basically be impossible in the next few months (this is my weekend/late night hobby).

Edit: I can assure you that a non-botched release will happen when it does, though.  I'll create the genesis block string and make binaries of the miner and qt wallet before release on an offline computer, then upload here encrypted with AES256 and a very long, strong password.  Then after a few weeks has past and it's been well distributed, the password will be revealed and everyone can begin mining at the same time.

[bob777fred]

Loving what you are saying so far! I would certainly be interested in helping out on the web-side of things if needed (web site-related stuffs), can't be much help on core dev, out of software dev for too long now.

[Impaler]

Thought:  What if coins from PoS were in some way segregated and usable only to pay transaction fees, these fees are collected by miners as normal but because they are segregated in users wallets and generated in proportion to their normal wallet balance they effectivly create a "free transaction quota" for every wallet allowing them a certain velocity of money without cost, if users wish to exceed that velocity then can begin spending normal coins for the transaction fee and go as high as they like.

This solves the 'transaction-only' problem that PoW is believed to suffer from when all coins are mined, now PoW miners can receive a continual flow of transaction fees without these fee's being a burden on the wallet holder.  It dose require that their be never-ending PoS coin production though which implies having no cap to ultimate coins unless a 'drain' can be found.

[RauBan]

Looks promising, looking forward following its development.

[Bytas]

Looks very good!
Just one thing: change the name to something usable and new while you can.
Memcoin2 sounds like this is just a second copy of something else, and doesn't sound appealing at all
Don't make the same mistake peepeecoin made :p

[chriswen]

The more I hear, the more I like. I'd love to mine this once its released.

Can you give an ETA on the initial release?

Depends if I can find people to help develop it.  I'm heavily employed so the implementation of everything in here will basically be impossible in the next few months (this is my weekend/late night hobby).

Edit: I can assure you that a non-botched release will happen when it does, though.  I'll create the genesis block string and make binaries of the miner and qt wallet before release on an offline computer, then upload here encrypted with AES256 and a very long, strong password.  Then after a few weeks has past and it's been well distributed, the password will be revealed and everyone can begin mining at the same time.

Awesome, I don't think they usually come with a -qt preinstalled.

[wizzardTim]

The more I hear, the more I like. I'd love to mine this once its released.

Can you give an ETA on the initial release?

I am interested too. Glad to hear fresh ideas

[mr_random]

Depends if I can find people to help develop it.  I'm heavily employed so the implementation of everything in here will basically be impossible in the next few months (this is my weekend/late night hobby).

Edit: I can assure you that a non-botched release will happen when it does, though.  I'll create the genesis block string and make binaries of the miner and qt wallet before release on an offline computer, then upload here encrypted with AES256 and a very long, strong password.  Then after a few weeks has past and it's been well distributed, the password will be revealed and everyone can begin mining at the same time.

That would be the fairest launch of a coin ever. Nice one.

Edit: reading more about it, this is a v nice coin. Hope it comes out sooner rather than later.

[BBQKorv]

Depends if I can find people to help develop it.  I'm heavily employed so the implementation of everything in here will basically be impossible in the next few months (this is my weekend/late night hobby).

Edit: I can assure you that a non-botched release will happen when it does, though.  I'll create the genesis block string and make binaries of the miner and qt wallet before release on an offline computer, then upload here encrypted with AES256 and a very long, strong password.  Then after a few weeks has past and it's been well distributed, the password will be revealed and everyone can begin mining at the same time.

That would be the fairest launch of a coin ever. Nice one.

Edit: reading more about it, this is a v nice coin. Hope it comes out sooner rather than later.

This is how to do it. +1

[tacotime]

Thought:  What if coins from PoS were in some way segregated and usable only to pay transaction fees, these fees are collected by miners as normal but because they are segregated in users wallets and generated in proportion to their normal wallet balance they effectivly create a "free transaction quota" for every wallet allowing them a certain velocity of money without cost, if users wish to exceed that velocity then can begin spending normal coins for the transaction fee and go as high as they like.

This solves the 'transaction-only' problem that PoW is believed to suffer from when all coins are mined, now PoW miners can receive a continual flow of transaction fees without these fee's being a burden on the wallet holder.  It dose require that their be never-ending PoS coin production though which implies having no cap to ultimate coins unless a 'drain' can be found.

I'm not sure this would be the best way to go about things.  The system describe already has a method to promote PoS generation through fees because the 256 inputs in the stakebase transaction are allowed feeless and then become condensed into a single output, avoiding fees later for the user.  The fees included in any PoS blocks are also destroyed, preventing fee competition among easily generated stake blocks and also creating competition with PoW blocks (who desperately want fees).

[tacotime]

Looks very good!
Just one thing: change the name to something usable and new while you can.
Memcoin2 sounds like this is just a second copy of something else, and doesn't sound appealing at all
Don't make the same mistake peepeecoin made :p

It's a working title, I'm open to suggestions.

[tacotime]

I've been thinking about the PoS system a lot, and this is what I'm concluding as the most simple mechanism to use for their general generation:

1) Require that every single PoS block be followed by a PoW block and succeeded by a PoW block, limiting the maximum block rate of the network to PoW and preventing PoS blocks from easily making forks so they can double spend.
2) For confirmations, six blocks of any type should be used.  Because of 1), this makes a maximum of 3 stake blocks for any six confirmations (which I think should be safe; PoW durations are twice that of Litecoin and most vendors are okay accepting 6 LTC blocks).
3) Stake blocks will be accepted based on their cumulative coin age as calculated by the sum of the products of (coin quantity from input transaction * coin age aka transaction age).  When faced with two or more PoS blocks at nearly the same time, all will be orphaned except the one with the largest cumulative coin age.

I will work this into the next draft of the whitepaper unless someone thinks it's a terrible idea for whatever reason.

I'm also happy this is garnering so much interest.  I'll create BTC and LTC donation addresses tomorrow, and I'll report what people have given.  I don't really want any money for it myself, so I'll hold it in reserve here and distribute it to any developers who hop onto the project.  What I really need are programmers at this point.

[twelph]

Looks very good!
Just one thing: change the name to something usable and new while you can.
Memcoin2 sounds like this is just a second copy of something else, and doesn't sound appealing at all
Don't make the same mistake peepeecoin made :p

It's a working title, I'm open to suggestions.

Megacoin (MGC)
Perfectcoin (PTN) (PTC)
Metacoin (MTC)
TheCoin (TCN)