[Announce] 6-Week Alt Announcement

[vindimy]

If you could somehow make fast(er) confirmations one of the improvements in your coin, I think it'd be great. 1-hour confirmation of Bitcoin and 15-minute of Litecoin is a problem for retail. It is a fine line to balance, number of confirmations vs. risk of double spends, but there's a need for it.

Ripple does achieve near-instantaneous confirmations, but only because they've put lots of time and effort in designing the protocol and running Ripple nodes that transmit trust.

[bnogal]

You want a commercial name

nutcoin with the walnut wallet

[peacefulmind]

Hello everyone. In order to avoid people calling the Alt coin I am going to release a premine scam, I am taking the initiative and giving a minimum six-week announcement before release. As I get closer, I will divulge exact time of launch, and will have example configs, and all the info you need to have to mine the early blocks (cgminer settings that work best, etc.)

The coin will be Scrypt-based, will have absolutely ZERO premine, and will attempt to counter one of the issues with cryptocurrencies today.

The coin itself will have a block reward that increases with hashing power. While this doesn't benefit early miners as much as current alt coins, it makes the coin have a more forseeable future. While the details are still sketchy, I plan to program the coin to award the square root of the current difficulty times some convenient constant. For example (subject to change a TON), a block when the total network hashrate is 1MH/s would be worth one coin, however a block when the network hashrate is 2MH/s would be worth around 1.41, and a block when the network hashrate is 10MH/s would be right around 3.3. When hash rate gets to 100MH/s, the block reward is 10 coins per block.

The idea is to make coins have some hope of keeping up with increased adoption. A one-to-one ratio of hash power would cause trouble with pump-n-dump, or hyperinflation of the coin. However, increasing block reward as difficulty increases in a non-linear fashion allows the coin to not be so hard for latecomers to adopt, while still giving early adopters their fair share of earnings.

I am completely open to suggestions, and have barely started on the code itself yet. I would be more than happy to have some suggestions for that "magic constant," as well.

Name suggestions. I need them. Thanks

Explanation as to why square root:
As computing gets faster, either with faster generations of Graphics Cards (per dollar, or per Watt), or with FPGA/ASIC mining devices, I don't want the supply to explode. It makes sense for the currency to get larger as more people adopt it, but not as hardware evolves to be faster (in my opinion). This leads me to the square root idea: while the coin reward would increase with higher hashing power, the square root acts as a sort of permanent buffer against some of the extreme hashing power that could join the network.

I also had another idea, not sure quite how the implementation would work, but the constant C would go down with increasing block number, in accordance to Moore's law. Basically, it would attempt to keep coins/$ of hardware relatively the same throughout its existence. It would run into a few problems though: ASICs break Moore's law (in the sense that a 2-year development is a 10x or more increase in hashing power), and Moore's law will end at some point, due to the inability of chip manufacturers to make smaller die sizes. It has to end somewhere, some people say 10 years, others say 15-20.

Respect for doing this the right way.

[wax]

Respect for doing this the right way.

Ditto. Feels way less scammy all around already.

[nwbitcoin]

This is brilliant - a coin that is addressing a real problem and a sensible solution to one of the big problems that makes it difficult to get a coin adopted once its in the wild.

As for the name, how about looking at the best source of computer names in the known world, Monty Python?

In the Life of Brian, there was a market scene where Brian had to haggle with a market trader, and their currency was the Shekel.

Why not have a Metashekel for this new currency?

Meta being data, and Shekel being currency.

A single unit would therefore be a Shekelbit, and Shekelbyte for a quarter of a Metashekel?

I've not bought the domain name yet, because that would be unethical, however, I do think its a good name - Any feedback?


Edit: just spotted that the Shekel is the current currency of Israel, which I guess is a problem for a bunch of people on here! Oh well, back to the drawing board!

[peacefulmind]

This is brilliant - a coin that is addressing a real problem and a sensible solution to one of the big problems that makes it difficult to get a coin adopted once its in the wild.

As for the name, how about looking at the best source of computer names in the known world, Monty Python?

In the Life of Brian, there was a market scene where Brian had to haggle with a market trader, and their currency was the Shekel.

Why not have a Metashekel for this new currency?

Meta being data, and Shekel being currency.

A single unit would therefore be a Shekelbit, and Shekelbyte for a quarter of a Metashekel?

I've not bought the domain name yet, because that would be unethical, however, I do think its a good name - Any feedback?

Since 1980, the shekel has been the currency of the modern state of Israel.

They might have an issue with using it for this project - although its a good idea.

Faircoin perhaps?

Fair implies equality, but in older usage it also means beautiful, like a "fair maiden..."

[empoweoqwj]

doestheworldneedyetanotheraltcoin

[JessicaMILFson]

What's the coin limit?

Luckybit brought up some excellent comments in another thread that is worth considering. If you can make it seem more valuable than the Bitcoin and given the negative press that they are getting, we can use this opportunity and seize the market

If you want my opinion, it should be less than Bitcoin but not significantly less. Bitcoin is 21 million? I keep coming up with 11 million. My theory is any new coin has to outpace Bitcoin in growth if it's going to ever catch up to Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is always the most valuable it's always going to be the main coin even if some other coin has far better technology. If Netcoin has 100 million coins then even if it is better its not going to be something people will be climbing over each other to get possession of. If people aren't excited like that about it then it will never be able to compete with Litecoin, Bitcoin, PPCoin or any other coin which already exists and which will already be more rare at the time.

11 million coins would mean a shorter early adopter phase but also significantly greater rewards for those early adopters and a significantly faster launch and development time which I think is essential if these alt-coins are to have a chance. If it takes 5+ years for each coin to mature and each coin has more and more coins and less scarcity then in my opinion this is bad for cryptocurrencies as I believe the future coins should be slightly more scarce than the last which means slightly more deflationary with each new alt-coin.

Do you think this is crazy? 11 million for Netcoin, the successor 5.5 million, and less and less?

[Vorksholk]

While the forward thinking is awesome, don't you think people would get kind of weirded out if they used to mine with 100 SQC (yes, I'm using my own name) rewards and suddenly everyone with a CPU is getting 1000 SQR a block?

If you used to get 100 per block and now its 1000 per block, that means 40 times more hashing power was added to the network. This doesn't seem to bad does it?
Remember 10 times hashing power will not get 1000 per block because its by the square root, so you need a lot more power to get to 1000 per block.

Let me rephrase that. It's not the changing reward that bothers me, it's the huge drop in the currency's buying power that would come with the application of this system beyond when it's unnecessary, aka the early stages. If 10x reductions in buying power kept happening, people would stop using the coin.

Basically, while the currency would be more common, the rise due to faster hardware would be somewhat minimal while the rise due to people investing more money in hardware would be the major thing bringing the reward "up", if you will. In essence, that means more time, effort, and money is backing the system, and so each coin would, in theory, be worth more.

[Vorksholk]

If you could somehow make fast(er) confirmations one of the improvements in your coin, I think it'd be great. 1-hour confirmation of Bitcoin and 15-minute of Litecoin is a problem for retail. It is a fine line to balance, number of confirmations vs. risk of double spends, but there's a need for it.

Ripple does achieve near-instantaneous confirmations, but only because they've put lots of time and effort in designing the protocol and running Ripple nodes that transmit trust.

All the variables of the currency are up in the air, as I get closer to launch I'll have some polls and see what the community wants as far as block time targets
I agree though, definitely under 10 minutes, probably under 2-3 tbh. One of the main things that one must balance with block reward time is how fast that block can propagate the network.  Since the internet has very low latency now adays (blocks get from US to Europe in a matter of seconds), having a coin with 1-2 minute block targets means that people solo mining will only be wasting around 3% at most of their hashing time on old blocks, assuming they have some reasonable level of internet.

[psybits]

Following this one. Interesting.

[codro]

If you truly want to make a long-term coin, I would suggest a few things:

• Changing the POW algorithm.
  
  Changing the POW algo gives the coin the ability to grab its own long term miner share. Make it minable only by CPUs.  Take a look at Hokkaido or MBound.
  
  
• Also, consider a Bell curve for generation so that after 5-6 years your generation rate starts dropping until there is a fixed inflation of 2-3% per year forever. This will actually make the coin useful in a future economy, and is on par with the inflation of the world population and even the mining of precious metals such as gold.
  
  
• I would also suggest having at most 2 decimals, if Bitcoin started at Satoshi levels instead of Bitcoin when pegged on exchanges, it would've been much more psychologically attractive to buyers. $1 for 980k ish Satoshi sounds better than $100 for 1 Bitcoin for the "terminally stupid.".
  
  Since value will obviously be small to begin with, you could take the example of Ripple, where things are traded for 100K Ripples for example, rather than the much more confusing .001 BTC or 1mBTC, with the added pressure of this having to change again to uBTC and Satoshi at a further point in time when the value becomes too great.
  
  Say you tried to mimic Bitcoin which has 2,100,000,000,000,000 total units, your block reward could start at 1 billion (equivalent of 1 in 21,000,000 units) and increase from there. Denominating trades in 1 billion currency units is not unheard of, obviously, and will lead to a lot less problems down the road.
  
  
• Not naming it -coin. 'Ripple' sounds much better than 'bitcoin' and is definitely more SciFi/futureish than -coin. It will also help differentiate the new currency among the plethora of alts.

[theblazehen]

Hello everyone. In order to avoid people calling the Alt coin I am going to release a premine scam, I am taking the initiative and giving a minimum six-week announcement before release. As I get closer, I will divulge exact time of launch, and will have example configs, and all the info you need to have to mine the early blocks (cgminer settings that work best, etc.)

The coin will be Scrypt-based, will have absolutely ZERO premine, and will attempt to counter one of the issues with cryptocurrencies today.

The coin itself will have a block reward that increases with hashing power. While this doesn't benefit early miners as much as current alt coins, it makes the coin have a more forseeable future. While the details are still sketchy, I plan to program the coin to award the square root of the current difficulty times some convenient constant. For example (subject to change a TON), a block when the total network hashrate is 1MH/s would be worth one coin, however a block when the network hashrate is 2MH/s would be worth around 1.41, and a block when the network hashrate is 10MH/s would be right around 3.3. When hash rate gets to 100MH/s, the block reward is 10 coins per block.

The idea is to make coins have some hope of keeping up with increased adoption. A one-to-one ratio of hash power would cause trouble with pump-n-dump, or hyperinflation of the coin. However, increasing block reward as difficulty increases in a non-linear fashion allows the coin to not be so hard for latecomers to adopt, while still giving early adopters their fair share of earnings.

I am completely open to suggestions, and have barely started on the code itself yet. I would be more than happy to have some suggestions for that "magic constant," as well.

Name suggestions. I need them. Thanks

Explanation as to why square root:
As computing gets faster, either with faster generations of Graphics Cards (per dollar, or per Watt), or with FPGA/ASIC mining devices, I don't want the supply to explode. It makes sense for the currency to get larger as more people adopt it, but not as hardware evolves to be faster (in my opinion). This leads me to the square root idea: while the coin reward would increase with higher hashing power, the square root acts as a sort of permanent buffer against some of the extreme hashing power that could join the network.

I also had another idea, not sure quite how the implementation would work, but the constant C would go down with increasing block number, in accordance to Moore's law. Basically, it would attempt to keep coins/$ of hardware relatively the same throughout its existence. It would run into a few problems though: ASICs break Moore's law (in the sense that a 2-year development is a 10x or more increase in hashing power), and Moore's law will end at some point, due to the inability of chip manufacturers to make smaller die sizes. It has to end somewhere, some people say 10 years, others say 15-20.

Legality: According to the United States of America Stamp Act, creating your own physical currency is illegal. This currency is digital. The United States has, to some extent, even embraced Bitcoin, in an attempt to tax it and prevent money laundering operations. Bitcoin has blazed a trail of legal and social acceptance. Therefore, the making or use of this coin will not be illegal in the United States. No idea about other countries, I'm not a law expert.

Will it be based off bitblock? That would be awesome.
IMHO it would be the best coin if it had a better starting difficulty and/or this

[Tobius]

While the forward thinking is awesome, don't you think people would get kind of weirded out if they used to mine with 100 SQC (yes, I'm using my own name) rewards and suddenly everyone with a CPU is getting 1000 SQR a block?

If you used to get 100 per block and now its 1000 per block, that means 40 times more hashing power was added to the network. This doesn't seem to bad does it?
Remember 10 times hashing power will not get 1000 per block because its by the square root, so you need a lot more power to get to 1000 per block.

Let me rephrase that. It's not the changing reward that bothers me, it's the huge drop in the currency's buying power that would come with the application of this system beyond when it's unnecessary, aka the early stages. If 10x reductions in buying power kept happening, people would stop using the coin.

Basically, while the currency would be more common, the rise due to faster hardware would be somewhat minimal while the rise due to people investing more money in hardware would be the major thing bringing the reward "up", if you will. In essence, that means more time, effort, and money is backing the system, and so each coin would, in theory, be worth more.

The reasoning say this is because, while the market will control it's value, I don't really think that the design of the currency should promote decimal shift level changes in value. I know that the value will scale, but I feel people will be psychologically phased if the value shifts like that, as some were with bitcoin.

Cordo makes a good point with the decimal place limit, there's a huge mental thing when you paying $50 for a faction of a bitcoin...

Although I'd say just having more, less value able coins would be better than a hard lock of decimal points

[Tobius]

had for a non coin name, how about Stratos?

[Praxis]

I like Rootcoin the most; maybe Rootcash, to break the "coin" paradigm?

[joele]

Nice, will follow this post

Faircoin?
Sixweekcoin?

[Tobius]

I like Rootcoin the most; maybe Rootcash, to break the "coin" paradigm?

Lol, I think when he said "no coin", he meant no suffix to it's name at all, but I do like rootcoin

[nuggets4all]

I like the sound of Squarecoin. It'd be an interesting contradiction of the common concept of a physical round coin. I imagine you could come up with a cool logo that looks like a classic coin... but square. It also alludes to the unique property of the coin, which anyone with basic math comprehension can understand and appreciate.

tl;dr +1 for the name Squarecoin

[Tobius]

I like the sound of Squarecoin. It'd be an interesting contradiction of the common concept of a physical round coin. I imagine you could come up with a cool logo that looks like a classic coin... but square. It also alludes to the unique property of the coin, which anyone with basic math comprehension can understand and appreciate.

tl;dr +1 for the name Squarecoin

Short, Simple, and doesn't have a silly feel to it. +1 from me