[Update] Root (4-Week Altcoin Announcement)

[Vorksholk]

A little over two weeks ago, I posted an announcement for what I am now dubbing "Root" (Name subject to change, will put up community vote).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193948.0



Quick summary:
Currency with block reward based on the square root of the difficulty times a modifier, likely rounded to two decimal places:
Difficulty: Reward:
1----------->1
2----------->1.41
4----------->2
8----------->2.83
10---------->3.16
50---------->7.07
100--------->10
500--------->22.36
1000-------->31.62
10000------->100

Additionally, the coin would have a higher starting difficulty, and is well-announced. As I draw closer, I will announce the exact launch time. Finally, the coin will tie in a lot of community input. The square root reward allows the currency to have larger amounts to deal with increased demand (acting like a buffer) while still allowing early adopters to get their fair share and not causing the currency to hyperinflate or hyperdeflate due to markets.


Here is what I am planning, up for criticism from the community:

-2 minute block reward (People seem to think a shorter block reward means more confirms and so is therefore faster, and while confirming is faster, these confirms mean nothing, as the value in the confirm system is the amount of time that it takes up, as longer forking attacks are harder, more risky, and much more expensive. I feel 10-12 minutes is a secure time, and allows for reasonable transactions with one confirm within two minutes.).
-Starting difficulty of 0.125  (Maybe 0.0625?)
-No premine
-First 100 blocks have a very low reward, additional buffer against first-hour profits
-Difficulty retarget every 100 blocks
-Block reward retarget every 100 blocks
-"Dry" sourcecode (no genesis block) available one week prior to launch for additional criticism, and to ensure there is nothing scammy going on behind the scenes.
-Possibly a testnet launch at this time too, in order to allow everyone to prepare appropriately with pools and other critical services if they wish to provide them early.
-All decisions as to the direction of the coin made by the community after launch, no major changes.
-Windows binaries as well as final source code released at same time
-Instruction pamphlet released hours if not days before final announcement with everything you need to know about CPU and GPU mining, client interface, how to forward ports and what ports to forward, what your config file should look like, etc. etc.
-Active forum dedicated to coin
-No block halving, square root reward should buffer against new hardware enough
-Open source (creative commons?) license, all artwork I release related to it will be released this way as well.
-Full-resolution (<name> Accepted Here, logos, etc. available before launch for marketing, website design, etc.)


Any additional ideas? Any complaints about the above ones?

Release date set for late June (2013), no promises, not committing to any particular date yet. For sure 4 or MORE weeks from now, we want to do this right, not fast.

Please suggest names if you haven't already, I'm going to be taking my top 10-20 and doing a poll within the next week.

[crymo]

are you f**** kidding me ?

[Sondey10mg]

Looks good! Will keep an eye on this

Maybe the start diff is still too low?

[Nolo]

The post two posts above mine (by crymo), is why you have to make self-moderated threads these days.  You can delete the complete troll posts yourself that add absolutely nothing to the discussion.

On topic, I'm looking forward to it. Looks really well thought out.  

[crymo]

Yes Nolo, it's another innovative coin. Even 15y old kid can do better. I'm tired of 5 new coins every day. Just make something innovative or keep it for yourself.
Someone changes 3lines of code and call it a new coin.

[BazkieBumpercar]

i wish short transaction speeds would be easier to attain (as in, safer). i think if you want a new coin to really succeed, it should be an improvement over bitcoin, and i think the biggest downside to bitcoins are the transaction times.

also, good luck!

[Nolo]

Yes Nolo, it's another innovative coin. Even 15y old kid can do better. I'm tirred of 5 new coins every day. Just make something inovative or keep it for yourself.
Someone change 3lines of code and call it a new coin.

Can that same 15 year old child use proper grammar and spelling?

If you don't like the coin, don't mine it.  Vorksholk has been a long time member of this community and I'm anxious to see what he's able to produce.  

[btbrae]

Am I missing something. Is the block reward glued to the square root of the difficulty indefinately? That would create a situation where at difficulty 1M the block reward will be 1000, this is hyperinflationary to anyone who mined @ br 100, will likely cause everybody to sell mined coins immediately and very few people to want the devaluing coins. Please correct me.

[Vorksholk]

Yes Nolo, it's another innovative coin. Even 15y old kid can do better. I'm tirred of 5 new coins every day. Just make something inovative or keep it for yourself.
Someone change 3lines of code and call it a new coin.

It takes in new economic stability ideas, and promotes fairness, building on top of the foundation of acceptance, tolerance, demand, and ideology of Bitcoin to serve a purpose that no current altcoins have attempted.

The beauty of free market is that you don't have to use it, you don't have to mine it, and if you really wanted to, you could write a browser plugin to filter out anything that pertains to the coin.

[crymo]

Nolo: I'm not native speaker ! So fuck you and your notes about my grammar.

How many languages can you speak BTW ? Mr. Perfecto

[arjay45]

At first glance this looks good.

One problem is that the word Root is a swear word in at least one english speaking country. I as far as I know anyway. Maybe it's route that's the swear. An Australian will be able to correct me if I'm wrong. But from what I've been told it's worse than f*ck.

Otherwise I like the higher start difficulty and the fewer rewards for early adopters. That should stave off the normal pump and dump crew and might allow the coin to survive.

I would like to see something innovative though. Like maybe a way to have super fast, safe transactions without having any blockchain bloat. I can think of at least two ways that might just work for how to do that. One is having a mini-chain with a few second confirm time that gets reset every block of the main chain. Another is to have some consensus system like ripple. Both would take quite a bit of work to implement, but if they work it would make your coin much better than any other.

[Nolo]

At first glance this looks good.

One problem is that the word Root is a swear word in at least one english speaking country. I as far as I know anyway. Maybe it's route that's the swear. An Australian will be able to correct me if I'm wrong. But from what I've been told it's worse than f*ck.

Otherwise I like the higher start difficulty and the fewer rewards for early adopters. That should stave off the normal pump and dump crew and might allow the coin to survive.

I would like to see something innovative though. Like maybe a way to have super fast, safe transactions without having any blockchain bloat. I can think of at least two ways that might just work for how to do that. One is having a mini-chain with a few second confirm time that gets reset every block of the main chain. Another is to have some consensus system like ripple. Both would take quite a bit of work to implement, but if they work it would make your coin much better than any other.

Seems I've heard that before as well.  Glad I'm not a math teacher there.  "Today class, we're going to learn about how to do square fucks."  /giggle giggle giggle

[blastbob]

Would be nice to have p2pool code ready at launch for all the users. Should take you 5 minutes to make it
Or have it ready in narken´s altcoin p2pool code.

[zero3112]

Sounds like hard math.

[Vorksholk]

Am I missing something. Is the block reward glued to the square root of the difficulty indefinately? That would create a situation where at difficulty 1M the block reward will be 1000, this is hyperinflationary to anyone who mined @ br 100, will likely cause everybody to sell mined coins immediately and very few people to want the devaluing coins. Please correct me.

Currently, yes the block reward would be glued to the square root forever. While at difficulty 1,000,000 the reward would be 1,000, each coin would be much harder to mine (10x harder, as 1000 would be produced for each 1M block, and each 1M block is 100x harder to mine than a 10K block) and so the coins would enjoy a gain in value over time, without the hard explosion (and subsequent crashes) that other Cryptocurrencies have had to deal with.

Essentially, it is playing supply and demand economics with a twist. The more demand, the more supply, but supply doesn't scale in a linear fashion.

The non-linear scaling makes faster hardware not cause hyperinflation (as a 1:1 reward would, as more coins per $ would be made in the future), however the scaling does mean that early adopters won't be the only people to make a profit, and large market swings will be reduced.


It would take a 100x increase in the total mining hardware on the network to boost up the block reward by x10, and therefore the coins do become more valuable over time. However, people aren't as likely to dump them quickly (mined 1000 roots in 6 months, now that 6 months of time with the same hardware would only get 100 coins, let's say) as it would not be as sharp of an inflation that a fixed-difficulty coin (such as has been seen with Bitcoin) experiences.

Hopefully that clears it up? It's a bit hard to explain.

[ccplz]

I,for one,welcome new altcoins as long as they're innovative and well-designed.
It has a good name(would suggest RootCoin,because names like nibble,ripple and root tend to confuse some people) and excellent artwork.
It's also as innovative as it can be for a litecoin fork,I know that sometimes that's not enough and that tends to disappoint people,but in my point of view,the ideas are limited since it's a litecoin fork.
That said,I wish you good luck with your project,and if everything goes well until then,i'll be mining this.

[e521]

seems legit

[GSnak]

Off to a good start!

[TheSwede75]

Yes Nolo, it's another innovative coin. Even 15y old kid can do better. I'm tirred of 5 new coins every day. Just make something inovative or keep it for yourself.
Someone change 3lines of code and call it a new coin.

Can that same 15 year old child use proper grammar and spelling?

If you don't like the coin, don't mine it.  Vorksholk has been a long time member of this community and I'm anxious to see what he's able to produce.  

The fact that is IS an old time member is what makes this especially embarrassing. Another coin that brings nothing new to the table purely for profit with an arbitrary block reward and gimmicky name. No thx.

[Twerka]

The post two posts above mine (by crymo), is why you have to make self-moderated threads these days.  You can delete the complete troll posts yourself that add absolutely nothing to the discussion.

On topic, I'm looking forward to it. Looks really well thought out.  

Self moderated post can delete even messages warning about a trojan on the client. If I see a coin launches as "self moderate" I don't trust it.