[ANN] [MARKS] Incentivize Content Creators & Build a Reputation Value Framework

[82ndabnmedic]

I understand that those who now manage a coin want to stop the coin's depreciation. for this they want to use centralized methods. and the original developer does not agree to a centralized solution. correct if I do not correctly understood the situation

Correction, He was never our original Developer, he was initially an employee which we assumed may chose to become a full member of the team. -  (this is no longer an option)

So Lead Dev = No

Our Lead Developer is and has been Melvin Carvalho

https://melvincarvalho.com/#me

Melvin is an amazing developer and his needs no introduction.

[1714021279]

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[82ndabnmedic]

Allow me to be as clear and concise as possible....@onelineproof did great work while he was employed by us, however his unwillingness to adopt a change that was voted on and widely accepted by the community (not to mention his attempt to hijack), has placed him outside our circle of trust. We will move as a unit toward what is in the best interest of the project & community. Sadly, since he cannot accept what we agree on as a team, then he can not work with us (or anyone of that matter "by his own admission")...who want a dev that only drives his unsubstantiated view and not the views or options of the team/project...??[/color][/size][/b]

TeamBitmark is a puppet account of 82ndabnmedic I assume, since the writing style is the same. What vote? Where did it take place? On slack where people get banned for disagreeing with the fork. How can you not get 100% support in such an environment?

I actually have a significant stake in Bitmark, it's not just peanuts. If I were to lose all my marks, that would be a very significant setback financially. I do have skin in the game, but for sure I would sell what I have on dbkeys' fork. The price of Bitmark never surpassed $1 except for a short time last winter when Bitcoin peaked, and the market cap never surpassed $7 million, except for that short burst. The BTC value of marks in 2014 is a useless measure since there was much less altcoins at the time, bitcoin value was lower, and there was much less marks in circulation. Same with any other BTC price / market cap. The only meaningful marketcap is USD since that's the dominant world currency right now. From 1.2 million to 7 million market cap is quite easy (we just saw a rise this month from 1 million to 1.2 million). Reducing the emission rate will not magically increase the price, it will reduce selling pressure so investors can more easily dump. Any gains will likely be temporary and unstable.

The email I listed previously in my signature seems to have problems so I am changing it back to my previous email:
<my username>@gmail.com
Like I said, this is the last chance if you support the uncorrupted version of Bitmark. Block reward changes that favor special interests will be visible on the blockchain forever. You cannot hide it.

I apologize to the Bitmark [MARKS] Community for the distorted and disrespect @onelineproof has shown to the community....Yes We announced that the TeamBitmark account would be used as our official means of communication for updates and coordination....so to say it is a puppet account (for me or the team) is utterly out off touch & offensive.

@onelineproof  I wish you the best of luck, I can rest easy knowing that I attempted to reach out and collaborate with you...in search of some mutually beneficial resolution....But working with you is all or nothing (and the sad this is that the part your "all in on" is flat out wrong/and based on distorted views of the market/blockchain dynamics)...

[dbkeys]

Reading everything posted reinforces my impression that @onlineproof is a bit too rigid and does not know nor understand the history of Bitmark, even after I went through the trouble of generating and posting the emission graphs of the coin.

His fervor for adhering to an emission schedule that never was is... just silly. Especially in light of the long history of discussions about Coin Emission Modulation and its entire reason for being, which finally came to bear fruit in Fork#1: To reduce emission to match market demand. Try as he might to say this is not important, and "not the reason for it", it is exactly the reason for its existence; the record is out there on Bitmark's Github, and on extensive discussions in the Slack archives as well.

While it is true that the theoretical emission schedule could be adhered to, even while reducing rewards for merge-mining, it would mean that native rewards would have to be higher than the epoch's max reward.  It would no longer be a "max" reward.   There is no point and nothing to be gained by this.  _That_ would be disorderly and senseless. This goes against logic, and this viewpoint can easily be demolished with recourse to reductio ad absurdum.  If it was a good thing to issue coins faster, then why not issue them all quickly, in short spurt, insta-minining style ? Yes, in fact, why not just issue them all at once, ya, the entire remaining emission, some 17 million coins, to the lucky miner of some soon-to-be-issued block ? It would be just like winning the lottery !  Whopeee !   That would certainly accelerate the emission...
 But of course not:    ¡ Because it would be absurd !  The mindless, rigid insistence on adhering to a schedule which
   #1) Has never been adhered to in reality anyway (due to the rigidity and ineffectivenss of the original diffalgo), and
   #2) Because CEM v0.1 already throttles emission and stretches that schedule anyway,  (and not a single person before @onelineproof complained) exposes the insistence on blindly following a theoretical emission rate for no good reason as some kind of unreasonable religious fundamentalism.  
(It bears repeating that the total emission of some 27 million MARKS has never been in question or proposed to be altered. That emission is an absolute cap, and will eventually be reached.)

From the outset, Bitmark was designed to have not only block reward halvings, like bitcoin, but also intermediate quarterings, in order to reduce the importance of mining early-on versus later in the lifetime of the coin.  This is was established in the early days, the midSummer of 2014. The guiding philosophy is clear: let's make it equally attractive to mine this coin in the beginning, or later on, even years later on. By dynamically throttling the emission rate when the market calls for it, price stability is fostered and mining viability is ensured far into the future.  By throttling it further, when it is warranted for good reason (the principle of remuneration of work according to effort) this guiding idea is respected and strengthened.

CEM v0.1 already started the path in this direction, by moderately slowing the emission when hashrate is below recent peak performance.  CEM v0.2 strengthens this authority even more.

As far a the issue of merge mining goes, it is clear that it is desirable in certain measure, but not as the only kind of mining for  our blockchain, and must not dominate to the detriment of all native mining.  Perhaps a more dynamic adjustment of merge-mine rewards vs native mining can be achieved in the future, but for now, a simple scaling will do. It is honest and correct to reward work according to effort. Merge mined blocks are achieved with much less effort than native mined blocks. This simple fact has unfortunately been denied entry into @onelineproof's understanding, apparently.

 Because a large number of our blocks are now merge mined,  emission rate will be reduced, but as far as price goes, this would hardly create a pump. The current price of Bitmark is well below historical levels, in large measure because Fork #1, (while solving a number of difficult problems the coin faced), also opened a fire hose of emission, flooding the market with coins. If anything, fairly adjusting reward for merge-mined block may restore or help bring up the price to the levels it was at before, but to characterize that negatively shows a remarkable ignorance of the situation we are experiencing; a distorted perception of the true picture.

The dark accusations remind me that of a saying, sometimes involving leopards, sometimes lions,  (and sometime thieves !)  which goes something like this: 'The leopard thinks everyone has the same "spotted skin, as he does'.    In Spain, the  saying, ("el león cree que todos son de su condición"),    roughly translated: "The Lion thinks everyone is of his same condition"   leads me to suspect that perhaps he has ( or had ) some deal to exploit merge mining of the coin and now sees this plan threatened. Perhaps it is for personal reasons that he is so strongly opposed to what should be a relatively minor change in the big picture, bringing some balance to the ratio of merge-mined and native blocks. For the first 4 1/2 years, all Bitmark mining was native mining. Now we are unwittingly dominated by merge-mining.   Fork #2 simply seeks to restore balance to this situation.

In fact, we plan to make a two algos native-only again, and perhaps introduce an additional native-only algo. This would mean that at least 1/3 of the algos are native algos. This will, in fact, increase the rate of emission, since native blocks are not subject to the merge-mining reduction factor... and, all miners are welcome to be Bitmark native miners and earn the full native rewards.

About the only thing I agree with in the criticism leveled is that reducing the CEM window from 365 days (1 year) to 30 days (1 month) might be too drastic, therefore I will suggest that we only reduce the CEM look back time frame to 1/4 of its previous reachback, to 90 days (3 monts).


A couple more points:

The false analogy made to the arbitrary manipulations of fiat central bankers simply does not apply.
 First of all, because Coin Emission Modulation is not based on whimsy or human capriciouness. It is an algorithm, just like DGW is an algorithm, as are all block reward epoch reduction algorithms, they are algos written into program code. Of course program code _can_ be changed, (and should be) for good reasons, but this is done sparingly, and these changes are published and open sourced for public inspection.

CEM is an algorithm which attempts to track demand by equating hashrate to demand, and adjusts emission according to demand. Thus, it is not humans attempting to manipulate anything  (as the Chair of the Federal Reserve does by deciding to "Quantitatively Ease" the value out of your fiat savings) but  a coded algorithm, much like DGWv3 is an algorithm that regulates the timeliness of block production and ensures that transactions are processed promptly, CEM v0.1 and CEM v0.2 regulate emission to match market demand as best as possible, based on the only blockchain-instrinsic analog metric of demand available: mining hashrate.  The total eventual money supply of Bitmarks has never been changed, and more importantly, is limited to less than 28 million coins, (similarly as Bitcoin is limited to less than 22 million coins), as are most other reputable cryptos.

Also, addressing the question of tickers. Our original ticker BTM, while still in use in different venues, including Poloniex.com,  is also in conflicting use by a latecomer coin, Bytom. The Bitmark Project decided to change to and use MARKS as our main ticker symbol, both to avoid conflict and because it better represents the ultimate purpose of our blockchain. We lay claim to MARKS and hope others respect this.

[onelineproof]

82ndabnmedic: I never said there was something wrong with you controlling another account. I am just clearing it up that's all. And to say I was ever disrespectful is nonsense. I always gave everyone a chance to make their case. In fact the current lead developer who replaced me (jarr0s) was disrespectful as you can see he called me "a rookie" and "retarded" on the github thread https://github.com/project-bitmark/bitmark/issues/68. All I did was say the truth by calling what I see as a scam a scam. Giving honest opinions is disrespect? I guess in their view it is because I got banned from slack, and jarr0s remained.

If you look at the website of Melvin Carvalho that @82ndabnmedic linked https://melvincarvalho.com/#me you can see a site where a guy claims to be this big mathematician and computer scientist who worked with these high-profile people. But can someone find me actual work he did or any papers he published? Also on the project-bitmark github you can see that his contributions are extremely minimal. On his github (melvincarvalho) it seems he is working on some repositories related to a "solid-server", it's unclear. My contributions to the project-bitmark repo are actually hidden because I didn't use my official username, so you will see many commits with "AK" or "Andrew K" in them, but I think I would have the top commits for that repository, even more than the original developer Mark Pfennig.

And now more invalid arguments coming from dbkeys. So let me clear up what CEM is. CEM means "coin emission modulation". It reduces the reward from 100% down to a maximum reduction of 50% according to the current hashrate (in the last 90 blocks / 1 day for an algo) compared with the peak hashrate for 365 periods of these 90 blocks. It was his idea actually. It is a good security feature actually. It incentivizes miners to work at peak hashrate. Without it, miners would be incentivized to collude so that they can work less for the same reward, which is basically how selfish mining works. An individual miner or a group of colluding miners mines in secret and then releases the blocks all at once, and it only requires about 30% of the hashpower as psycodad pointed out, so it lets them get the same rewards for less hashpower, and drives other hard working non-colluding miners out. With CEM, the selfish miners may get the first 90 blocks for cheap, but then with the lower hashrate, their reward would decrease, defeating the purpose (or at least diminishing the use) of their attack. We actually had a form of CEM before fork 1. We had a slow difficulty adjustment algorithm that would cause blocks to come at a slower rate when hashrate is low, thus reducing the emission rate in terms of real time (rather than block time). Now with the fast difficulty adjustment algo (DGW + resurrector), block time matches real time, so this keeps the same effect without delaying blocks for users. As long as miners are working at peak (providing peak security), the emission rate matches the target rate. It has always been like that. Further, the actual CEM reduction value is dependent on market forces and cannot be easily predicted or manipulated by insiders, especially with merge mining where the market forces depend on the value of other chains.

What dbkeys' fork does is completely cut off 80% of the maximum reward for merge miners, making it completely unavailable even if the miners are working at peak performance. Without paying bonuses to native miners, the emission rate will no longer be at target even if all miners are working at peak, except for the almost impossible scenario that all miners switch to native (sure lets leave that to luck!) (it's likely merge miners will take about 60+% of the blocks as they are now). Whether a miner native or merge mines depends on market values of other coins compared to Bitmark, and cannot be just set with an arbitrary fixed parameter for the differences in merged to native rewards. A bonus paid to native miners would also be needed to create a balance of merged and native miners, with a target ratio of merged to native blocks given by a parameter that I think should be dynamically voted on by users in order to be a completely honest protocol. I supported even a ratio of 99 native blocks to 1 merged block, as long as it was decided by dynamic user voting as you can see in the github thread. Whatever you do, you need to make sure the target emission rate remains the same when mining is at peak, that's just obvious if you want to continue claiming it's a decentralized currency.

Oh and for the insta-mining / faster issuance rant, of course I would never agree with increasing the emission rate, so what is his point? The point is that the rate is pre-determined and not changed (up or down) after that, because both upward and downward changes can benefit special interests.

And yes it's wrong to consider the hardship of a group of investors when making protocol changes. The genesis block of Bitcoin has the following data imbedded: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". No bailouts! Dbkeys now is suggesting that I'm a scammer because I can imagine that someone is a scammer. He's going much lower than I would expect...Sure call me a scammer, it's your free speech and I will defend my position. I have met many people in my life who seem nice, who seem reliable, but then it turns out they're not that nice and not so reliable. It is not hard at all for me to imagine that someone would be a scammer, and the point of P2P currencies to create a trustless system for transacting, without having to trust any one person, without having to trust any miners to be honest, because like it or not, people cheat and people are dishonest!

@Matiel says:

if you two are right, what truth should I believe?

That's a very good question actually and related with what I just said. I am likely spewing a bunch of technical stuff that people may find hard to follow. Dbkeys seems to be throwing around sophisticated English language words (to appear educated, well-read, have a high social status, and thus unlikely to be a scammer). Ideally, you shouldn't trust anyone and just verify the logic and evidence presented. Also you should validate the code if you can (trust just the code and not the developer of the code). I think I made my argument clear. I don't want to repeat everything. If you have a particular quote of mine that you think needs clarification, then ask me, and I will clarify. This problem of "what is the truth" is also the problem that can be efficiently solved by Bitmark if it truly becomes a decentralized reputation system. We are constantly fed loads of information, and it is hard to know in what order information should be prioritized for further analysis and judgement on the conclusions. With a reputation system, we can more efficiently prioritize information so that we can quickly come to accurate conclusions based on who we value as accurate, for what category, and what fundamental assumptions we make. Different people may have different fundamental assumptions, so I hope such a system could allow for flexibility in that.

Anyway, a simple way to know, without much analysis is look at the block explorer (explorer.bitmark.cc or explorer.bitmark.co). Do you see any problems with Bitmark? Are blocks getting delayed? Are miners attacking? Is Poloniex blocking withdrawals because of some attack? No. All you see is a group of people called "Team Bitmark" who are rushing to put a new fork, without carefully analyzing what they're doing, and talking a lot about price and investors. Price is actually quite stable now after the adjustment of fork 1 to a fairer market value. Maybe it's "low", but it's stable. So you can judge based on that what the truth is.

If I do become a lead software maintainer for a cryptocurrency, and then if someone puts a gun to my head and makes me tell people to support a corrupt fork, then I sure hope people do revolt against me, because otherwise it means the project is dead. In this case, I think it is more likely that we have a group of investors who are under financial pressure due to poor decisions they made, and instead of putting in the hard work necessary to improve the situation, they want to take the "easy" way out.

If people don't support my vision for Bitmark, then I will create another chain (possibly with a new currency or simply with Bitcoin transferred into a sidechain). Decentralized reputation is far too important to be left to lazy scam-rationalizing clowns.

I had one email about listing a coin on an exchange for 0.5 BTC. $3000 for a listing? No thanks, but I can get you some good volume if you list it!

[dbkeys]

Whatever you do, you need to make sure the target emission rate remains the same when mining is at peak, that's just obvious if you want to continue claiming it's a decentralized currency.

Why ? This is not obvious at all. Proving this kind of baseless assertion, (if that were possible), would certainly require a proof spanning more than one line (pun intended). There is no way to prove this. This is just more embarrassing mental confusion, opinion and FUD from our erstwhile coder. (Yes, another high-brow word. Look it up. LOL)

A decentralized currency can follow the emission policies being set by CEM and the mergeReduction factor and still be decentralized. All that is required is that users and miners adopt these rules and follow them in a P2P decentralized fashion.

We had a slow difficulty adjustment algorithm that would cause blocks to come at a slower rate when hashrate is low, thus reducing the emission rate in terms of real time (rather than block time).

Correct. And this was a very serious problem for users, who just want their transactions to go through quickly. Therefore, the idea of CEM was born: Decouple the coin emission rate from the rate of block production. Now block production rate does not equal coin emission rate. Block production rate is stable, (averaging 2 minutes between blocks) and equates primarily to expediency of transaction processing.

Regarding the selfish mining issue, I believe Andrew K's understanding is again lacking. Selfish Mining is primarily about being able to tinker and abuse the timing and time-stamping, and abusing some measure of superior hashrate. Not directly related to block rewards at all. Please read and understand Bitcoin Core contributor David A. Harding's explanation on StackExchange.

I truly find it surprising that @onelineproof is so married to the idea of merge-mining.
<sarcasm> He almost seems like the prophet of a merge-mining religion and the one true emission rate </sarcasm>.... That is the only reason I speculate  about his motives. (And I acknowledge these possible motives are speculative, and by no mean hard accusations.)  
Talk about nice & reliable. Employ a guy for over a year, and then have him call the team's development direction and ideas a "scam" just because he doesn't understand, or they don't fit his erroneous notions or finds them unpalatable for whatever reason. That kind of baseless hyperbole and hysterical name calling has no place in a professional team; you may be free to disagree,  to express strong reservations, to try to prove your point of view etc. But to go so low as to imply fraud and ill intent, well, frankly that is just unacceptable. People who have followed Bitmark from the start will realize how far from the truth these accusations are. It is with real chagrin that we have to stop working with him.  

These ongoing accusations of "scams" which imply criminal fraud and intent, are simply unacceptable when the reasons to reduce merge-mine rewards are clear and founded on principle; they are not capricious nor random. Further, they are called for by the majority of the Bitmark community.

 Again, at risk of being repetitive,  despite being spelled out for him numerous times, let's say it again: It is honest and correct to reward work according to effort. Merge mined blocks are achieved with much less effort than native mined blocks. They should be rewarded proportionately This undisputed fact has unfortunately not yet permeated into @onelineproof's understanding. If this happens to lower emission rate, ¿so what? There is no rule that says a certain emission rate has to be maintained. That is just baseless dogma.

[Jeff_gi]

the team of this idea is very experienced I think, because there are some advisors from famous technology companies, such as dell, google ... this concept is interesting mix between paypal and cryptocurency .. Good luck guys.

[dbkeys]

Ideally, you shouldn't trust anyone and just verify the logic and evidence presented. Also you should validate the code if you can (trust just the code and not the developer of the code).

 
This is good advice.

[Jeff_gi]

Good Project.. But How we can check that How many tokens have already been sold? Good luck guys!

[dbkeys]

Good Project.. But How we can check that How many tokens have already been sold? Good luck guys!

In short: 9509391.96671310 (MARKS)
 

For a more detailed answer ....  

It is easy to determine how many Bitmarks have been mined to date; this is the "money supply" figure given by the "getinfo" (or "gi" command) :

Code:

~/.bitmark$ marks gi; d
{
    "version" : 90803,
    "protocolversion" : 70004,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 12120.20856989,
    "blocks" : 509415,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "pow_algo_id" : 2,
    "pow_algo" : "YESCRYPT",
    "difficulty" : 625207.19796797,
    "difficulty SCRYPT" : 3683745378.32694530,
    "difficulty SHA256D" : 3979171592.16466856,
    "difficulty YESCRYPT" : 625207.19796797,
    "difficulty ARGON2" : 54793.28359004,
    "difficulty X17" : 48717125.22686026,
    "difficulty LYRA2REv2" : 338651219.50738722,
    "difficulty EQUIHASH" : 146523.83192184,
    "difficulty CRYPTONIGHT" : 40324.66477642,
    "moneysupply" : 9509391.96671310,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1514664007,
    "keypoolsize" : 4097,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "relayfee" : 0.00001000,
    "errors" : ""
}
1535397408 Mon Aug 27 19:16:48 UTC 2018

"moneysupply" : 9509391.96671310
so the answer is, a little bit over 9.5 million MARKS       (9509391.96671310  MARKS, to be exact)    
That is the total number of Bitmarks in existence at the moment.

Every day, no more than about 720 * 15 = 10800 MARKS are added to this number.  Usually less, because CEM v0.1 is already on the job, modulating the block reward down for algorithms where the hashrate is not at peak.

There never was an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Bitmark. It has always been generated by mining exclusively.

The exchanges that trade Bitmark (Poloniex.com, Cryptopia.co.nz, qTrade.io and TradeSatoshi.com among other) may have all-time volume figures on Bitmarks traded inside their platforms, but these numbers would only indicate how many Bitmarks have changed hands on those exchanges... Understand that one Bitmark (or any fraction of it) may have changed ownership many, many times, so those volume figures may be quite a bit larger than the absolute number in circulation.


With the proposed enhancements in Bitmark v0.9.8.3 (Fork #2) it is almost certain that the daily emission of MARKS would be less than the present theoretical maximum of 10800 MARKS. How much less would depend on factors beyond anyone's control. How many miners kept on mining through the merge-mining enabling AuxPoW feature, whether a steady hashrate was maintained or high peaks observed, etc.

[Fannin_Ase]

Hello to everyone! A question to you: are you going to use token sale platform provided by TokenGet which is one of the most advanced ICO platform in the world???

[82ndabnmedic]

Good Project.. But How we can check that How many tokens have already been sold? Good luck guys!

In short: 9509391.96671310 (MARKS)
 

For a more detailed answer ....  

It is easy to determine how many Bitmarks have been mined to date; this is the "money supply" figure given by the "getinfo" (or "gi" command) :

Code:

~/.bitmark$ marks gi; d
{
    "version" : 90803,
    "protocolversion" : 70004,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 12120.20856989,
    "blocks" : 509415,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "pow_algo_id" : 2,
    "pow_algo" : "YESCRYPT",
    "difficulty" : 625207.19796797,
    "difficulty SCRYPT" : 3683745378.32694530,
    "difficulty SHA256D" : 3979171592.16466856,
    "difficulty YESCRYPT" : 625207.19796797,
    "difficulty ARGON2" : 54793.28359004,
    "difficulty X17" : 48717125.22686026,
    "difficulty LYRA2REv2" : 338651219.50738722,
    "difficulty EQUIHASH" : 146523.83192184,
    "difficulty CRYPTONIGHT" : 40324.66477642,
    "moneysupply" : 9509391.96671310,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1514664007,
    "keypoolsize" : 4097,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "relayfee" : 0.00001000,
    "errors" : ""
}
1535397408 Mon Aug 27 19:16:48 UTC 2018

"moneysupply" : 9509391.96671310
so the answer is, a little bit over 9.5 million MARKS       (9509391.96671310  MARKS, to be exact)    
That is the total number of Bitmarks in existence at the moment.

Every day, no more than about 720 * 15 = 10800 MARKS are added to this number.  Usually less, because CEM v0.1 is already on the job, modulating the block reward down for algorithms where the hashrate is not at peak.

There never was an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Bitmark. It has always been generated by mining exclusively.

The exchanges that trade Bitmark (Poloniex.com, Cryptopia.co.nz, qTrade.io and TradeSatoshi.com among other) may have all-time volume figures on Bitmarks traded inside their platforms, but these numbers would only indicate how many Bitmarks have changed hands on those exchanges... Understand that one Bitmark (or any fraction of it) may have changed ownership many, many times, so those volume figures may be quite a bit larger than the absolute number in circulation.


With the proposed enhancements in Bitmark v0.9.8.3 (Fork #2) it is almost certain that the daily emission of MARKS would be less than the present theoretical maximum of 10800 MARKS. How much less would depend on factors beyond anyone's control. How many miners kept on mining through the merge-mining enabling AuxPoW feature, whether a steady hashrate was maintained or high peaks observed, etc.

Glad you clarified for all the new community members....no ICO EVER, Never a Premine & never investor driven...solely a community driven approach that seeks to imperilment our vision and them likely market quite a bit more than we have

[onelineproof]

Is anyone actually starving to death or are your children starving because of the Bitmark price? Send me a receipt for food purchased and your Bitmark address and I'll reimburse you. It is in my interest to have bitmarkers alive and healthy and I hope others can pitch in because I may not be able to feed everyone.

But I definitely have no sympathy for those who are worried that their purchase of Apple computers, Google self driving cars, or other such centralized malware is delayed. I am a user and investor of Bitmark and it is my full right to protest the reduction of security and corruption being placed on the blockchain I use.

Working with dbkeys was fine until around the time of the June fork, where he started telling me he wants to make the Bitmark protocol send a certain percentage of miner rewards into a hardcoded developer fund controlled by the "official team". I told him straight up then that I will continue to work on Bitmark (even for free whenever I have time), but if it includes centralized elements like that, I will promptly create my own fork that continues the current smoothly functioning and uncorrupted protocol.

I have worked with other clients who wanted premined coins, and I had no problem doing it for them as it was a good way to learn the Bitcoin code while making some money to cover my cost of living. I didn't say anything bad about them because it is clear what they are (premined ICO type coins), and I have no investment or interest in them.

I actually had a lot of hope for Bitmark and that's why I am trying my best to wake up whoever is left in the community. Of course I have to call dbkeys' fork a scam because that is how I see it, and I want potential investors to be well informed of the difference between my fork (the current protocol) and his (the corrupt one). And I will continue to call it a scam even after his fork is activated. As long as I am working on a decentralized reputation system, I will inform people of any other fake reputation systems that exist.

He keeps trying to paint me as obsessed with merge mining, while it's not true. As I said, I was always willing to accept a mix of native and merge mining. I talked about the economics and opportunity cost involved in merge mining as well (page 11). Then he asks me questions which I am very sure he knows the answer to and is just acting to not know as I have explained these things to him an enormous number of times, so I will only answer them if someone else echoes these questions. He is also mixing selfish mining with timestamp attacks, and timestamp attacks have been well taken care of already. (not to mention Harding is Bitcoin Cash/ Bcash proponent)

This kind of dishonesty presented by dbkeys makes me want to look deeper into the history of Bitmark and do a full audit of the modifications to Bitcoin that Mark Pfennig did. I did find a bug with signatures earlier, but it turned out to not be that significant and not relevant in a post-quantum-cryptography world. One question that should be answered is: How did Melvin Carvalho become the administrator of the project-bitmark github repository after Mark Pfennig disappeared?

Edit: Here are some interesting claims about Melvin Carvalho: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg18731714#msg18731714. Needs confirmation.

[dbkeys]

where he started telling me he wants to make the Bitmark protocol send a certain percentage of miner rewards into a hardcoded developer fund controlled by the "official team".

This was discussed as an idea once , as many things are, promptly nixed by Melvin and never brought up again. As were other things you keep trying to mischaracterize. I've said Proof of Stake has interesting aspects, but can be implemented many different ways. I have not advocated for Bitmark to implement any particular form of Proof of Stake. I have only said that voting, and weighting votes according to stake held, to decide different issues, might be an interesting feature. You said you would code up a system to allow the kind of voting, which you proposed for the dynamic ratio of merged:native. Still waiting.

And again with the name calling and insinuations of fraud and crime. If you were willing to :

As I said, I was always willing to accept a mix of native and merge mining.

then, in your definition of things, you are willing to accept a mix of "uncorrupted" and "scam" mining ?  How odd. So stop pretending to be oh so very honest and better than anyone.

I told you many times that if you didn't agree with reducing merge-miners rewards as much, we should engage in a dialog and come up with a reasonable compromise number. But oh,  rejoice, believers of the one true emission rate and its defender, (PBUH !), he would have none of it !  
  LOL  

 AK, of course you must follow your conscience and principles, I do commend you for that. So you've issued your dire, paranoid, pious warnings, you've done what you could.
Now,  if you can't compromise, just fork already, announce your new ANN thread, follow your beliefs and take your faithful to the promised land, of perfect incorruptibility,  and let those of us who live in the real world and have to make decisions and balance issues do our work.   I believe you'll learn a few lessons soon enough.

But, if by chance instead, you were to accept the premise that  a reduced emission rate is not sinful per se, and and may happen for good reason, such as:
A)  Work should be rewarded according to effort
       [and *not* according to "need", a là communist style, or what was written in some holy book long ago, a là religious dogma style] and
B) Merged mined blocks require orders of magnitude less effort than native-mined blocks to produce  

     and that
C)  A reduced emission rate may even have positive side effects
      (and no, I don't mean an easy exit for some theoretical investors you keep being paranoid about),   such as:
       1)  Mining viability much longer into the future
       2)  Part of the emission still available to mine, should new & more democratic mining algos be developed in the future
       3)  Possible a rise in MARKS/BTC rate, which should make for happier native-miners, even happier merge-miners and  investors and holders of the coin. ¿ What could possibly be wrong with that ?  
           (Yes, yes I know, the central bankers, the bitcoin people would never reduce their reward (but they don't have merge-mining by the way) blah blah blah.    Did you ever stop to think that the bitcoin protocol was thought of, and developed, in one central point ? Heresy ! Oh yes, it was !! the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto, yes, one central point: that one brilliant mind, whoever he / she / they are.)  

   It's not like there are too few coins out there, already emitted. With nearly 10 million MARKS emitted ( Thats nearly a BILLION Bitmark "satoshis"   [should we call them "markoshis" ?] emitted ) There are plenty to use for all sorts of Marking and Reputation uses already.

 So what do you say, ¿ can we reach a compromise mergeReduction percentage figure you can live with ? (currently Jarr0s' code maps full CEM value for merge-mined rewards to the range 10%-20%)    
     I realize that merge-mined blocks have security value far above their producer's production cost, and that's why I to agree to reward them at what I consider a very healthy 10% to 20%, far above their real production cost, instead of the basis-points ranges ...      

 The only other blockchain basics that I think Bitmark needs is to remove AuxPow from 2 algos, add a third native-only (for a total of 6 merge-mineable, 3 native-only)  and then.... we can finally be done with the blockchain mechanics / blockchain dynamics part and move on to the Marking / Reputation aspects of the project, which I believe you will agree, are much more interesting.



Kindest Regards !

dbKeys

[onelineproof]

then, in your definition of things, you are willing to accept a mix of "uncorrupted" and "scam" mining ?

I never said native mining is a scam. I recommended to let users vote with fees (not stake) to determine the ratio. So please try to be more accurate as anyone can verify your errors.

Now,  if you can't compromise, just fork already, announce your new ANN thread, follow your beliefs and take your faithful to the promised land, of perfect incorruptibility,  and let those of us who live in the real world and have to make decisions and balance issues do our work.   I believe you'll learn a few lessons soon enough.

And now rationalizing your scam as "real-world"...Ya I know in the real world idiots get fooled by scammers and scammers make money. Doesn't mean I will support it, especially when it interferes with my vision, which I believe others would like as well.

There is still the questionable nature of Melvin Carvalho. According to the claim in my link, he is just auto importing commits from other repos to make it look like he is actually active on Github? I did notice that there was a lot of commits that don't make sense together, and a lot of the things he writes on slack don't make sense as well. And this is the "lead developer" and official contact for the project?

[dbkeys]

then, in your definition of things, you are willing to accept a mix of "uncorrupted" and "scam" mining ?

I never said native mining is a scam. I recommended to let users vote with fees (not stake) to determine the ratio. So please try to be more accurate as anyone can verify your errors.

And now rationalizing your scam as "real-world"...Ya I know in the real world idiots get fooled by scammers and scammers make money. Doesn't mean I will support it, especially when it interferes with my vision, which I believe others would like as well.

There is still the questionable nature of Melvin Carvalho. According to the claim in my link, he is just auto importing commits from other repos to make it look like he is actually active on Github? I did notice that there was a lot of commits that don't make sense together, and a lot of the things he writes on slack don't make sense as well. And this is the "lead developer" and official contact for the project?

Alright, so you still want to characterize rewarding merge-miners honestly as a "scam". You and I clearly have different definitions of this word. Fine. Then just fork already. Go in Peace.

[dbkeys]

I recommended to let users vote with fees (not stake) to determine the ratio. So please try to be more accurate as anyone can verify your errors.

OK, so maybe there could be a bi-cameral system whereby users could vote with fees and stakeholder with signed messages.
But, I think voting with fees could be gamed by stakeholders bouncing coins around to themselves anyway, so in my mind at least, it's back to stakeholders. If you have "skin in the game" you hold coins, you have stake, then your vote should be proportional to that stake. Simple.

[dbkeys]

@1LineProof:
Why are you so concerned with Melvin ?  Let him do his work.

I have been focused for a long time on ensuring the fundamentals of the Bitmark blockchain, that its dynamics and functioning are solid platforms on which to build Marking. (Long before we employed you; before you knew about Bitmark.)
I think we are close to this goal, finally (yes, thanks in some part to your coding skill & effort).  

Once that is done,  then it will be time to move on to the actual marking and reputation systems, and interact more actively with Melvin and others in that area.

[Dyonis]

An original idea. The project aroused interest. I will follow the development of the project. Plus that the passport of this kind is more truthful and it can not be faked.

[onelineproof]

@dkeys says:

Alright, so you still want to characterize rewarding merge-miners honestly as a "scam". You and I clearly have different definitions of this word. Fine. Then just fork already. Go in Peace.

Again putting words in my mouth and like I said I talked about the economics of merge mining on page 11. Here are 2 links: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3169983.msg43367362#msg43367362 and https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3169983.msg43421409#msg43421409.

@dbkeys says:

OK, so maybe there could be a bi-cameral system whereby users could vote with fees and stakeholder with signed messages.
But, I think voting with fees could be gamed by stakeholders bouncing coins around to themselves anyway, so in my mind at least, it's back to stakeholders. If you have "skin in the game" you hold coins, you have stake, then your vote should be proportional to that stake. Simple.

Fees go to miners. To mine costs energy. No cheating the system this way. With stake you cheat the system as you can keep throwing your stake around and the vote will just favour the rich investors, not those who actually use the system (i.e. make transactions).

@dbkeys says:

Why are you so concerned with Melvin ?  Let him do his work.
I have been focused for a long time on ensuring the fundamentals of the Bitmark blockchain, that its dynamics and functioning are solid platforms on which to build Marking. I think we are close to this goal, finally (yes, thanks in part to you & your coding efforts).  
Once that is done,  then it will be time to move on to the actual marking and reputation systems, and interact more actively with Melvin and others in that area.

Melvin is the owner of the github repository. These questions need to be answered. How did he become the owner? What is he working on? Why can't he come here to explain himself?

@dbkeys says:

3)  Possible a rise in MARKS/BTC rate, which should make for happier native-miners, even happier merge-miners and  investors and holders of the coin. ¿ What could possibly be wrong with that ?

I like this new excuse. Native miners will remain with the same reward, not really happier. Merge miners less happy since a 5 times decrease in their reward does not translate to a 5 x increase in price. Yes old investors may be happy, but not the new ones. The new investors and users will have to buy at an inflated price because the old ones wanted to change the rules for their advantage. What it does is effectively create a pre-mine for the old investors and miners, since before the fork there was a much higher (5 times higher) reward per unit peak hashrate, and then after the fork it suddenly drops. That's how an instamine / premine works. And of course the 5 times drop is just for merge miners, but most miners will still be merge miners, so it's still a close to 5 times drop. My other explanations on the subject of modifying the emission rate still stand as well, and I encourage others (except for dbkeys) to ask me for clarification.

So if you want a blockchain where a certain group of investors is placed ahead of users, then why would users want to use Bitmark instead of a blockchain that strictly adheres to the interest of users? What gives Bitmark value? Maybe you can get some gamblers buying, or people just relying on the network effect of Bitmark, since it is already established for a few years. But that won't last long. Or maybe people will buy because they will have faith in king dbkeys (and perhaps new followers) to steer their investments to the moon as he has steered the investments of the old investors. Remind you of a pyramid scheme?

Adhering to the emission rate is not a hard thing to do. It doesn't require the stars of the galaxy to align. Bitcoin has done it, Litecoin has done it, Namecoin (merge mined) has done it, all during their lifetimes, which are longer than that of Bitmark. So not adhering to it shows that Bitmark is not the cream of the crop, and rather far from it. I think the stars are quite well aligned for Bitmark. The protocol until now (to my best knowledge) is completely honest. With the June fork, the protocol is very secure against many attacks (even more secure than Bitcoin I would say). Distribution is not that bad (Bitcoin had 1 million coins mined by Satoshi). The community is quite organically grown and leaderless, and last but not least: marking - a powerful new idea that can be very valueable (at the same level as Bitcoin). But with dbkeys' fork, this could all be ruined.

If exchanges (like Poloniex) accept the addition of the centralization elements dbkeys' fork adds, then they must also establish who is the centralized group that controls these elements, and why do they get to control it and be listed on their exchange. After the original owner Mark Pfennig (Nathan Rixham) disappeared, I do not know the exact history of events, but it seems Melvin Carvalho (of questionable credibility) took control of the code repository (somehow) and then passed on ownership rights to dbkeys (so they both have ownership rights). 82ndabnmedic also has some leadership involvement as he was able to ban me on the projectbitmark slack channel, and I think he is an official contact for exchanges as well. So what gives these people the right to control what version of Bitmark will be running on exchanges? 82ndabnmedic said there was some kind of vote, which I've never seen, and then that warrants some evidence that the vote actually happened, what security measures were put in place (possibility of ballot stuffing?), who voted, how many people, what gives them the right to vote on this...There are many questions and they really need to be clarified.

[dbkeys]

More FUD @onelineproof, proving nothing, just opinion & a lot of unfounded accusations. Tired of this. Andrew K, oh defender of the one true emission rate !  You won't be a team player, so why don' t ya... focus on your Fork or sidechain or whatever you want to call it, and prove that your strategies and policies are so  much better, secure, uncorrupted, honest, glorious, blah blah blah.  All the best.