[XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Prerelease Announcement - Introducing Prime Proof-of-Work

[jlspartz]

I would urge that if this project is to be scientifically significant, you do a payout per number tried starting in mainly mersenne prime territory (in the millions of digits). My reasoning is that searching numbers from the beginning would just be validation of currently known primes and if payout were per prime the gain in research will not exist since people won't continue when in takes many years to find one, unless the payout increases and divides among everyone involved, but then huge chunks of currency would be released all at once devaluing it. Therefore, for research it would be best starting where needed and paid out per number tried.

[calian]

I would urge that if this project is to be scientifically significant, you do a payout per number tried starting in mainly mersenne prime territory (in the millions of digits). My reasoning is that searching numbers from the beginning would just be validation of currently known primes and if payout were per prime the gain in research will not exist since people won't continue when in takes many years to find one, unless the payout increases and divides among everyone involved, but then huge chunks of currency would be released all at once devaluing it. Therefore, for research it would be best starting where needed and paid out per number tried.

He'll have to start in uncharted territory. Otherwise some smart aleck could just go look up all the known primes and generate a huge string of blocks for himself.

[calian]

Why do you people waste your time with stuff like that?

If you spend all your time on improving bitcoin, that would really help.
What does a different proof of work change?
- it does not change that transactions have to be collected in a block
- it does not change that you have to wait for x confirmations
- it does not change that blocks have to broadcasted
- it does not change .. anything

Traditional PoW methods are quite wasteful of our energy resources. We need a solution that either reduces energy consumption massively, or at least puts the energy to more use than just maintaining a blockchain.

If you hadn't heard, Sunny King developed a potential solution to this several months back.
http://ppcoin.org/
http://ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf

[dadaguo]

I will keep an eye on this~~

[Luckybit]

I am happy to announce that the primecoin project is now close to beta quality and will be released to public soon. Please keep in mind this is experimental technology and we reserve the rights to rollback or restart the blockchain should severe bug/vulnerability require such actions. However we would try our best to avoid such scenarios and further develop it into reliable public infrastructure.

Introducing primecoin

• First non-hashcash proof-of-work in cryptocurrency, pure prime number based proof-of-work
• Cpu mining at launch, gpu mining to be developed by market participants
• Pure proof-of-work, no proof-of-stake (unlike ppcoin), not energy efficient, but with additional potential scientific value derived from proof-of-work energy consumption (energy multiuse)
• Scarcity enforced by Moore's Law similar to ppcoin, mint rate gradually drops as difficulty rises, without sudden halving shock
• Security model similar to bitcoin
• Continuous difficulty adjustment like ppcoin
• Reasonably high starting difficulty to limit instamining
• 1 minute target block spacing
• Zero premine, zero tax

ppcoin + primecoin

• Sharing the same goal of real innovations, moving cryptocurrency technology forward and demonstrating our technical capabilities
• Sharing the same value, open source, no premine, no tax, advancing cryptocurrency technology for humanity
• Cpu mining initially for primecoin to cater to a larger mining community, now covering all mining hardwares with both ppcoin (gpu+fpga+asic) and primecoin (cpu)
• New innovations in primecoin catering to a wider audience including the mathematical and other scientific computing community, and users who prefer pure proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
• Sharing development resources and infrastructures
• Different innovative cryptocurrency designs provide cryptocurrency investors with diversified advanced technology portfolio
• Strategic positioning for the next 5 years in cryptocurrency market

ppcoin vs primecoin

• ppcoin is our first innovative cryptocurrency design to focus on energy efficiency. Almost a year after its release ppcoin's design remains the only proof-of-stake design on the market, with seven forks/clones (NVC, BTB, YAC, BTG, BOT, CGB, YAB). primecoin is our second innovative design to focus on alternative proof-of-work system producing additional scientific values. The two networks would work in synergy to achieve our long-term cryptocurrency strategy.
• Cryptocurrency market has now split into two sectors, energy intensive sector and energy efficient sector. In the longer term (5+ years) I believe the energy efficient sector would begin to challenge the energy intensive sector due to its cost advantage. In the shorter term though energy intensive market would likely remain dominant and we would like to have an innovative and competitive offering in this sector as well. The innovations in primecoin give us this opportunity, and would complement ppcoin to strengthen our strategic position in the market.
• The energy intensive sector currently has two major types of proof-of-work, both of the hashcash type, one is SHA-256, the other is scrypt. There have been some new variations of the hash functions recently, with modified scrypt and SHA-3 series hash functions as well, or even compositions of different hash functions. Though existing cryptocurrencies are all still based on hashcash proof-of-work. primecoin introduces the first non-hashcash proof-of-work in cryptocurrency, the first type of proof-of-work that not only secures the block chain, but also provides additional potential scientific value, paving the way for future proof-of-work types with more diverse scientific interests and uses.
• Both ppcoin and primecoin demonstrate our design prowess and capability in real innovations. We are fully dedicated to provide long term support and further development to both cryptocurrencies.
• For existing ppcoin users our dedication to the continued development of ppcoin and its market has not changed. ppcoin's advanced proof-of-stake technology has long-term advantage over pure proof-of-work designs, and is an innovative environmental-friendly solution to the escalating energy consumption on cryptocurrency. In my opinion the energy intensive sector will fragment into many different types of proof-of-work, a single type of proof-of-work is unlikely to maintain dominance. More fragmentation is likely even within a single type of proof-of-work. Meanwhile the energy efficient sector would rise to challege the energy intensive sector, and ppcoin is among the leading contenders in the energy efficient sector. So in terms of our long term strategy ppcoin is of more importance than primecoin.

Release Schedule

Primecoin release is tentatively scheduled for 2013 July 7th 18:00 UTC

When an exchange is made will someone allow me to purchase PPcoin with Primecoin?

I think this is critical so whoever is making the exchanges, we will need this ability to exchange back and forth between PPcoin and Primecoin because many of us are going to be mining one or the other but not both.

[Loktera]

Why do you people waste your time with stuff like that?

If you spend all your time on improving bitcoin, that would really help.
What does a different proof of work change?
- it does not change that transactions have to be collected in a block
- it does not change that you have to wait for x confirmations
- it does not change that blocks have to broadcasted
- it does not change .. anything

Traditional PoW methods are quite wasteful of our energy resources. We need a solution that either reduces energy consumption massively, or at least puts the energy to more use than just maintaining a blockchain.

If you hadn't heard, Sunny King developed a potential solution to this several months back.
http://ppcoin.org/
http://ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf

I'm aware; I was just answering his question about why people bother pursuing alternate proof of work/stake/etc methods.

[lishbtc]

Any updates on this Sunny?  Still planning to launch?  Really interested to see some detail on how the prime PoW functions...

[ripper234]

Release Schedule

Primecoin release is tentatively scheduled for 2013 July 7th 18:00 UTC

Why are we so close to the release date and still not enough details have been released yet?
They key missing ingredient right now is something that would convince us that Primecoin does indeed "do useful work", being the key feature.

BTW, I love your work at PPCoin, and am excited to see Primecoin launched. Just two days ago a friend asked me if there's a way to design a Bitcoin fork that does useful work, and I arrogantly gave him my standard answer that "there are strong theoretical reasons to believe it can't be done" ... and then 20 minutes later I found this thread. Glad to be proven wrong.

Why not follow a release schedule like coblee did with Litecoin, where the client was released ahead of time to let people install & test it, and the release itself consisted of simply releasing a config value?

P.S. I refer you to the alt-chain release RFC that I wrote almost 1.5 years ago.

I can't say that it was adopted in any way whatsoever by the authors of alt-coins, but perhaps it should.
(It's up for editing of course)

Anyway, good lunch with the launch. I'll be mining and am also interesting to purchase some.

[Sunny King]

Ron, it's an issue of innovators vs copycats. There is good reason your proposed release process is not followed by us, neither by any copycat altcoins.

As far as I am concerned, I don't mind other people copying our work, but the ethics in the altcoin development community is questionable, most copycats don't give credit to original authors, not even following basic things like displaying proper copyrights in the client, sometimes even touted the innovations as their own.

[ripper234]

Ron, it's an issue of innovators vs copycats. There is good reason your proposed release process is not followed by us, neither by any copycat altcoins.

As far as I am concerned, I don't mind other people copying our work, but the ethics in the altcoin development community is questionable, most copycats don't give credit to original authors, not even following basic things like displaying proper copyrights in the client, sometimes even touted the innovations as their own.

You replied only to my P.S

[Sunny King]

Update:

Release builds are being prepared.
Design paper would be available by tomorrow.

Release is still on schedule for tomorrow.

2013-07-07 18:00 UTC

[Lauda]

Update:

Release builds are being prepared.
Design paper would be available by tomorrow.

Release is still on schedule for tomorrow.

2013-07-07 18:00 UTC

Yes :me gusta:
CPU mining ftw.

[Buffer Overflow]

Why not follow a release schedule like coblee did with Litecoin, where the client was released ahead of time to let people install & test it, and the release itself consisted of simply releasing a config value?

I'm not sure if that system would work nowadays. Some twat would make their own genesis block and start the chain prematurely. The genuine chain would then start causing all sorts of confusion.

[ripper234]

Why not follow a release schedule like coblee did with Litecoin, where the client was released ahead of time to let people install & test it, and the release itself consisted of simply releasing a config value?

I'm not sure if that system would work nowadays. Some twat would make their own genesis block and start the chain prematurely. The genuine chain would then start causing all sorts of confusion.

There would still be an official chain. People will want to use the real one, and it's easy to recognize which is real and which is fake.

[Buffer Overflow]

Why not follow a release schedule like coblee did with Litecoin, where the client was released ahead of time to let people install & test it, and the release itself consisted of simply releasing a config value?

I'm not sure if that system would work nowadays. Some twat would make their own genesis block and start the chain prematurely. The genuine chain would then start causing all sorts of confusion.

There would still be an official chain. People will want to use the real one, and it's easy to recognize which is real and which is fake.

This is true. I am only guessing.

[eCoinomist]

Why do you people waste your time with stuff like that?

If you spend all your time on improving bitcoin, that would really help.
What does a different proof of work change?
- it does not change that transactions have to be collected in a block
- it does not change that you have to wait for x confirmations
- it does not change that blocks have to broadcasted
- it does not change .. anything

=> it makes some richer

[Vorksholk]

22 hours

[gatra]

B506CDC2768418A0E7ECBECB88A4BEEF0712010F7D4E4984E64BEC113BEF0A5928FCCD8F8DA4720 377A7D579C87D08F7206B8097ECF90DB0E443CC0DA8A03EDB

[mr_random]

Sunny will there be a windows client ready at launch?

Looking forward to this one.

[Sunny King]

Yes Windows and Linux builds will be available at release time, with Qt support, just like ppcoin v0.3.