The longest Coin in Pre-ANN phase, setting eMunie aside.
Skycoin development started two years after Bitcoin was released. The Skycoin Project is almost as old as Litecoin. I cant even remember if Bitcoin had hit a dollar yet or if there were even exchanges when project started.
The first version was in python and was completely working. Then codebase was moved to C++, then moved to Golang. So it has already gone through three language changes. The longest working Skycoin blockchain was running for four months.
As soon as we release it publicly, no more major changes to the blockchain format can be made. It would require a full blockchain reset. We did not want to do a full blockchain reset every week until every issue was address to perfection.
Bitcoin was a prototype cryptocurrency. It synthesized the components required and is the foundation for everything that came after it. Bitcoin is a tremendous technical achievement, but falls short of achieving the original vision of cryptocurrencies.
Originally, many people believed that there would be a proliferation of cryptosystems, with nation states, companies and communities issuing their own. There was to be a proliferation of instruments beyond cryptocurrencies and cryptoequities, bonds, options and other instruments would be developed. Eventually traditional assets such as real estate would be owned and transferred digitally.
Instead, Bitcoin became a global single currency, with a global ledger and was restricted to merely currency transactions. Instead of being in control of the community and stake holders, Bitcoin is in control of the miners and the foundation.
When Satoshi envisioned Bitcoin, he assumed that you would have 100,000 Bitcoin users and they would run a mining application and an attack on the network would require 50,000 people to collude. Satoshi did not intend or envision for power over the network to be so concentrated that the largest two mining pools control the network.
If a town in Argentina wanted to issue its own community currency to facilitate trade and stem off hyperinflation, they couldnt. Under the Bitcoin model, they would be 51% attacked within an hour of launch. Skycoin is building the foundational infrastructure to enable cryptocurrency proliferation at the community level.
Instead of having a single ledger, there is a proliferation of ledgers. A company may issue its equity on its own ledger or may outsource the ledger to a third party cryptoequity exchange. A bank with dozens of branches on different continents may create its own ledger for securely performing internal transfers between the bank branches. A community or country may have a ledger for its currency and assets.
Distributed exchange allows instant inter-conversion between all cryptoassets. If a merchant only accepts Bitcoin and a user has Dogecoin in their wallet, then conversion happens automaticly. A user can hold any currency pair and pay in any currency pair. Digital exchange, means that if a merchant accepts any cryptocurrency, they accept all cryptocurrencies.
Launch for Skycoin is something we have to get out of the way. However, it will be underwhelming. There is still years of work to do. We are still very early. We are not even at start of second wave yet. Bitcoin is only at ten or so billion dollars. Less than 0.001% of world assets has gone digital yet. The ecosystem is still focused on penny stock pump and dumps and marketing, rather than creating useful or valuable digital assets.
If you have a good design, its invisible. People take it for granted that using it is easy and that developing new things does not take much skill or effort. If you have a bad design, its painful and you end up with fragmentation (for instance, the lack of a thin client standard for Bitcoin. the difficulty of checking an address balance and making a payment without syncing the full blockchain on your phone).
Having 20 million dollars is not going to buy you a good design. Having fifty engineers will not buy you a good a design. Trying to do everything will not result in a good design. Its difficult, time consuming and frustrating work. It takes as much as eight times the effort to make a good library as a piece of code that merely works. We have written and thrown out over 180,000 lines of code so far. Refactoring, evaluating and cleaning up code to get a good design has definitely been the most frustrating part and more time consuming than getting the functionality merely working.
Satoshi never tried to approach the global optimal. He grabbed whatever tools were at hand to get the job done. Bitcoin works, but no one would call the implementation elegant and no one who has to use the codebase would say its easy to work with.
When we are done, creating a new cryptocurrency will be easier than running a web server. Within the first second, there will be a liquid market for the new coin. If anyone is willing to buy it, with distributed exchange you will be able to spend the new coin for Bitcoin. It will speed up the pump and dump cycles until new coins are being created, pumped, dumped and abandoned by the hour.
My favorite thing recently was when NXT sold ownership shares on a painting. Now you can own a millionth of the ownership shares in a painting through a blockchain. The painting is now publicly traded! How long will it be, before someone buys a house by crowd funding the mortgage by securitizing the mortgage payments and selling them on a blockchain?
How long will it be before someone buys a pizza with a collateralized debt obligation? We still have a lot of work before that is possible. In the long term, these technologies will fundamentally change the meaning of debt, credit and currency at the level of the individual.
This technology pushes debt and money, down to the level where if you buy a pizza with your cell phone and it is $20, you might have a credit line at 10% interest for $1000, but the computer will look at multiple lenders and see if anyone wants to buy the debt for the pizza and the cell phone might find someone willing to buy the $20 debt for the pizza at a 6% interest rate. The pizzeria's computer may even decide to sell the pizza for a $20 debt obligation at 6% interest directly. The transaction is between peers and there is no credit card company to extract a $0.60 + 1.4% toll on the business.
When the technology gets pushed down to that level, Banks, Stock Exchanges, Credit Card companies no longer exist as discrete entities. Money creation is happening at the individual level, instead of through banks and the nation state.
There are multiple ways that cryptocurrencies can evolve. There are multiple competing visions for what the future will look like. Different geographic areas may have different dominate visions for cryptocurrency proliferation. The Skycoin project is aimed at building the foundational infrastructure that is required for realizing those visions.
Realistically, we should be look at a five year horizon for achieving all project goals to perfection. Good ideas are worthless if implemented poorly. Ripple, Open Transactions and even Bitcoin have been handicapped by poor implementations. Bitcoin succeeded, in spite of, not because of how easy it was for developers to use as a platform.
