is it possible to launch an independent bitcoin network ?

[kiba]

Ain't brucewagner working on getting local merchant to accept bitcoin?

[jgarzik]

In many ways, I hope that another block chain or two are started at least to compare different ways to be using cryptocurrencies.  If it is of any value at all, I'm sure that somebody will start to use it in exchanges.  Trading between Bitcoins and other similar currencies ought to be simple and straight forward.

I expect several bitcoin clones to arise eventually.  Both with the bitcoin codebase or with a totally new codebase and protocol.  Proof-of-work timestamp server is now "out there" on the Internet.  Derivatives are inevitable.

And probably 98% of these clones will either fail, or be worth nothing, compared to mainline bitcoin chain.

[Timo Y]

We would like to launch a peer2peer currency bounded to a specific community&region (i.e. central europe) and therefore we found it more practical to have our own network, parallel to the main bitcoin thread, independent from the speculations of GPU miners.

Good luck with that.

With a centralised currency  it is already difficult enough to exclude people who try to use it outside the intended community or region.

I am curious. How do you plan to enforce these restrictions in a p2p currency? Moreover, in a p2p cryptocurrency where a user can identify himself with nothing more than a set of cryptographic keys? 

How do you plan to prevent a GPU miner (or any other kind of "speculator") from joining your network?

And who is "we"? Are you part some kind of local currency initiative? In which case, the Bitcoin software is probably not the tool you are looking for. I would suggest looking into the Ripple monetary system.   

[Timo Y]

and since its getting more  and more difficult to mine some bitcoins nowadays

Sigh.

Please don't become fixated on mining. Mining is not the point of Bitcoin. Trading is.

Sometimes I feel as if the bicycle has just been invented and everybody has become obsessed with servicing their shiny new bicycle (which is required to keep the bicycle working, granted), but people have now become so obsessed with servicing that hardly anyone actually bothers to ride it.

[da2ce7]

Please don't become fixated on mining. Mining is not the point of Bitcoin. Trading is.

I agree that we shouldn't be focusing on generating, however it is important to note that bitcoin is very much under-generated atm. Generating bitcoins is way to profitable atm.

People are valuing bitcoin at about 10x the price that is supported by the current generation rate.

[hugolp]

We would like to launch a peer2peer currency bounded to a specific community&region (i.e. central europe) and therefore we found it more practical to have our own network, parallel to the main bitcoin thread, independent from the speculations of GPU miners.

Good luck with that.

With a centralised currency  it is already difficult enough to exclude people who try to use it outside the intended community or region.

I am curious. How do you plan to enforce these restrictions in a p2p currency? Moreover, in a p2p cryptocurrency where a user can identify himself with nothing more than a set of cryptographic keys? 

How do you plan to prevent a GPU miner (or any other kind of "speculator") from joining your network?

And who is "we"? Are you part some kind of local currency initiative? In which case, the Bitcoin software is probably not the tool you are looking for. I would suggest looking into the Ripple monetary system.   

I am very curious about this also.

I have been saying that there will be competing bitcoin networks and I think its healthy. But the way you want to do it I dont think its a viable solution.

[Timo Y]

I agree that we shouldn't be focusing on generating, however it is important to note that bitcoin is very much under-generated atm.

If you can find a profitable way of generating, go for it!

What I'm concerned about more is that a lot of newbies turn up here expecting that they should generate X amount of coins, and then become disappointed/disillusioned when their attemps yield meagre results. Or they feel that it's "unfair" that they mine so little compared to expert and early generators, because they feel entitled to X amount of coins, like our friend hromisko. And then they give up on Bitcoin for the wrong reasons.

Where did you get this 10x figure from by the way? The cost of generating is likely to vary hugely depending on individual circumstances, because it is likely to involve sunk costs that are not related to generating. Also, there are the non-monetary costs: Time invested in learning about short lived mining software, fan noise, etc.

[FatherMcGruder]

We would like to launch a peer2peer currency bounded to a specific community&region...

Unless your specific community and region has its own, isolated internet, I suspect that you'll find this task impractical, if not impossible. You could probably try to keep your currency secret, but you've already blown your cover.

(i.e. central europe) and therefore we found it more practical to have our own network, parallel to the main bitcoin thread, independent from the speculations of GPU miners.

What's to stop the speculations of GPU miners from affecting your currency?

Also please understand that by our tentatives to create a parallel currency (let's call it kybcoin for example) we do not want to, in any way, undermine the impact&value of the main bitcoin currency. On the contrary, we believe that an emergence of a new bitcoin-philosophy-based currency will add new spice in the game, since in the ideal case it would be possible to exchange bitcoins for kybcoins & vice versa...

Do you intend to incorporate significant modifications to the source code? If not, how will you impose your community's philosophies, to the extent that Bitcoin does not already?

which would be in the end, to the profit of all (we truly believe that bitcoin can lead to a nonzero-sum game economy)

Please elaborate.

[mestar]

Hello world,

We would like to launch a peer2peer currency bounded to a specific community&region (i.e. central europe) and therefore we found it more practical to have our own network, parallel to the main bitcoin thread, independent from the speculations of GPU miners.

So you want to be on the ground floor?    How long will you mine for yourself before going public?  

As others said, the day you go public will be the day people start GPU mining.  This is in fact a desirable, because the strength of your currency is basically the number of people that mine.  

Forking does make sense for the selfish reasons of the forker, but it is hard to market your new money, and nobody will use it.  You could as well start using bitcoins 'locally', what entity could stop you from doing that?

[RHorning]

Forking does make sense for the selfish reasons of the forker, but it is hard to market your new money, and nobody will use it.  You could as well start using bitcoins 'locally', what entity could stop you from doing that?

One advantage I can see with a "local" currency, at least initially, is that you could get the initial pool of coins distributed locally among the participants as a way to buy into the system.  If anything, I would suggest doing just that where the "mining" is not tied so much to the coin generation aspect but mainly the transaction processing (with fees).   Set the initial few blocks as a huge number of coins while you are getting the network up and running and then have a huge drop-off in the generation rate, distributing the coins locally in something like the Bitcoin faucet to jump-start the "local economy".  Putting 20 million coins in the genesis block and then 0.0001 coins generated for every block after would do the trick.

While you have the stack of coins, it is essentially monopoly money until you start to hand it out, so don't be stingy.  1000 coins per new user would be enough to get it started.  The point of doing it this way is to keep the coins local instead of being spread around the world by miners who aren't in the local economy.  If you meet people face to face or find some way to trust them, it would avoid a problem of trying to allocate coins this way with Bitcoin as they likely wouldn't come to you multiple times to keep collecting those thousand coins to "work the system".

If you do that, it would "keep the currency local", yet it could be exchanged for the main Bitcoins or traded with the government currency too.  None the less, it would be mostly an electronic version of something like Berkshares.  Don't peg it to any other currency, but simply let it develop organically.  If that is done, I think it could succeed for the purposes stated here.

[mirny]

Let bump this thread

[Monnt]

No doubt it is 100 percent possible to launch an independent bitcoin network. Because if there are so many network for almost everything why it would not be possible for bitcoin and it will also increase the value and benefits of bitcoin. The people will easily open and search for bitcoin. The independent network should contain all the economic characteristics of bitcoin, so it will be more helpful to the communities.

[whitemacna]

Yes, it's possible.  You need a different genesis block, and probably a different port number However, you wouldn't get far if you bounded your currency to a specific community. Specialization and interconnection of our global economy lead to greater prosperity and world peace.