At a very high level, I have an idea (which I'm about to describe) but am not sure how best to get started developing it. I'm not so concerned with marketing it: I'm sure it'll gain traction over time, if it's a good idea, because people will google it - or they will write their own version, if for some reason they cannot find it, or are unhappy with it. What I am concerned with is what any altcoin developer is concerned with, software-wise: developing the software as effectively as possible, so that people can start using it with minimal effort. Since this is a blockchain project, I would like to fork an existing coin so that I can inherit as much good stuff as possible from it, such as:
* Mining blocks with minimal modifications to mining code.
* Running nodes on multiple platforms with minimal effort by reusing multi-platform components.
* Generally having a bug-free application by benefiting from all of the developers of the existing blockchain code.
Without further ado, here's the idea:
A blockchain declaring what time it is. This could be useful in general, since time is relative, and any notion of the "current time" must be arrived at by consensus. The rules are:
* When you mine a new block, you declare the current UTC time.
* Blocks are small and rapid (maybe one per second, maybe one per ten seconds, people right next to the ISP building in New York should not have a significant advantage).
* Time moves forward; a block may declare the time to be earlier than a previous block, but the "current time" according to the chain is given by the longest strictly-increasing chain of block timestamps (excepting the top 6 blocks, or whatever number gives you the needed sigma for your application) (plus any other "sanity checks" you would like to have, such as ignoring any blocks giving a time >10 minutes compared with your machine (which does imply that you need to bring your machine into sync with the chain in order to use it)).
This sort of "clockchain" may be useful in any other blockchain problem where you need to prove that the difference in time between two events is at least X minutes, for some X. Bitcoin's timestamp rules, for example, are pretty lax; block timestamps are accepted even 2 hours into the future from the network-adjusted time[1], and do not even have to be in order.
To prove that two events happen a certain distance apart, any blockchain will need to implement similar code to this clockchain. I could be wrong, but I believe it would be useful to have a blockchain that simply declares the current time, taking that load off of the developers of any blockchain that want to have that capability.
So the question is, what existing cryptocoin would be most suitable to fork? I'm thinking Bitcoin.
Other question: Is anybody here interested in developing this? I myself expect to be able to do so only very slowly, since I'm working on various other projects at the same time.
1:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_timestamp
