[SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement

[skycoin]

dev can you give a roughly time when ipo start?

thanks

Not sure. White papers are taking forever.

I have five whitepapers to write and whitepaper four is only half done and its 16 pages. Writing the whitepapers is taking longer than implementing the consensus algorithm.

It would be unfair to do the IPO before people can read the white papers about what we are doing and before the client works on everyone's computer.

Skycoin does not have signature mutability, does not have transaction mutability, does not have duplicate coinbase outputs and dozens of other changes and improvements from Bitcoin. Skycoin makes dozens of changes from Bitcoin and each change has to be described. Most of the whitepaper for the blockchain design, is about flaws in Bitcoin and then how Skycoin addresses them.

Investors hear about "signature mutability" in the news and its bad, but they do not know what it is or what the difference between signature mutability and transaction mutability is. The white paper has to explain this.

[1714843107]

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[1714843107]

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[1714843107]

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[skycoin]

Development Update:

White Paper #4 is out! Half finished, but still pretty good.

https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/raw/master/whitepaper_04_survey_of_systems_for_distributed_consensus.pdf

[provenceday]

Development Update:

White Paper #4 is out! Half finished, but still pretty good.

https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/blob/master/whitepaper_04_survey_of_systems_for_distributed_consensus.pdf

that's great!

thanks for the update.

[michael8888]

China thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=595009.0

SKYCOIN天空币QQ交流群:286238586

群里有最新白皮书下载.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Development Update:

White Paper #4 is out! Half finished, but still pretty good.

https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/blob/master/whitepaper_04_survey_of_systems_for_distributed_consensus.pdf

Still waiting for the paper that explains how skycoin works.

[skycoin]

Update:

The Skywire Aether Whitepaper draft is done:
https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/raw/master/whitepaper_05_Aether.pdf

This is one of the core libraries in Skywire and what implements personal blockchains for Obelisk nodes.

[kandp_sam]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

[Tobo]

Update:

The Skywire Aether Whitepaper draft is done:
https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/blob/master/whitepaper_05_Aether.pdf

This is one of the core libraries in Skywire and what implements personal blockchains for Obelisk nodes.

I noticed that you previously used the name of ether which was used by Ethereum. Now you changed it to aether which has been used by some other people at this forum. Why did you like these two names so much?

[Macseem]

dev can you give a roughly time when ipo start?

thanks

It would be unfair to do the IPO before people can read the white papers about what we are doing and before the client works on everyone's computer.

Do you think anybody gonna read it?  I mean most people won't understand a word anyway.

[cryptrol]

dev can you give a roughly time when ipo start?

thanks

It would be unfair to do the IPO before people can read the white papers about what we are doing and before the client works on everyone's computer.

Do you think anybody gonna read it?  I mean most people won't understand a word anyway.

You should, a remarkable amount of effort has been put there to make very complex problems understandable to the vast majority.
Congratulations to the author.

Is there a valid communications channel (other than Bitmessage and this forum) to stay up to date on the project ? I am willing to contribute some time to it.

[FrictionlessCoin]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

2nd?  What's the first?

[skycoin]

Update:

The Skywire Aether Whitepaper draft is done:
https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/blob/master/whitepaper_05_Aether.pdf

This is one of the core libraries in Skywire and what implements personal blockchains for Obelisk nodes.

I noticed that you previously used the name of ether which was used by Ethereum. Now you changed it to aether which has been used by some other people at this forum. Why did you like these two names so much?

Ether permutes space. Then we found out ether is alcohol that people snuff to get high and aether is the mystical substance that permutes space.

Its called Aether because the data does not exist on a server. It exists collectively throughout the internet (or atleast the subscribers). Once published, it cannot be destroyed. There is no central point, there is no server that can be seized. The publisher cannot be located or tracked because once the data is published, they are just a peer.

Its a perfect system. There is one type of Skycoin address and its is an endpoint for a datastore or a pubsub system. There is another type of Skycoin address and it holds coins. There is another type of Skycoin address and it is a node you can communicate with and send messages to.

You generate a pubkey hashes to an address and that is an ID. The address replaces IP addresses for identifying a device or computer if its used for communication. It names a datastore (just like a magnetic link is a hash of a torrent file and name the torrent) if its used for a datastore. If the datastore contains a filelist and a hash list for chunks in the files, then its just a torrent that people can update. If it names a Skywire node if its used for communication, like an IP address names a computer.

So if you wanted a create a distributed twitter with Aether, you create a pubkey. You publish updates to your key value store and sign them with your private key. Each key in the keyvalue store is a number incremented each tweet and the body is json for the tweet.

You give someone your pubkey hash (an address) and now they can download and replicate your feed. They can pull in the feeds of everyone they are following. They can run their own filtering algorithms locally for ranking things in the feeds they are subscribed to and choose their gui. Its a website, but its a website running on your computer  and its running from data you have a copy of.

You are not downloading the feeds you subscribed to from a server, you are downloading them from other people who are subscribed to them. Its completely decentralized. Its pubsub, its a communication channel, its a key-value store, its an RSS feed, its a document oriented database (if you are storing JSON), its an updatable torrent if you are storing file lists and chunk lists.

This innovation, this data structure is as powerful as the blockchain. Its as powerful as DHT. It is a core component for the next generation of decentralized systems.

Aether is a mystical element that permutes all of space and I think its appropriate.

In Tor, you can identify the path to a service through traffic analysis by looking at variation in latency for traffic and correlating them to latency of other traffic passing through the nodes. Requesting pages is slow because you have to go through multiple hops. Here the replication is peer to peer. There is no "center", there is no "server". The webpages are instant, because you are not requesting the data but have a full copy of the data locally. You are generating the webpage from the database.

In the internet of things, you have an LED lightbulb. You want to set the lightbulb to red. The lightbulb has an IP address and its connected wirelessly to your house. You move the light bulb and it has a new IP address, so you cant find it or send it messages. IP addresses are not "ids" for devices, they change as the object moves and accesses the network over different endpoints. Skycoin gives devices or applications "names" that are network independent. This is the function of DNS, to take a name and resolve a server or IP.

The lightbulb has a Skycoin address and you can send messages to the address. You can say "turn red" or upload a new program to the programmable LED lightbulb. Skywire automatically figures out how to find a route to the device.

Additionally, when you running a Skywire Mesh node, the node may be connected to four wireless networks and a router. The wifi node has five different IP addresses. An IP address no longer uniquely identifies the node. An IP address is merely a path to the node. The IP addresses on the router are often not even public addresses because of NAT.

The set of computers you control, your desktop, your tablet, your two laptops. They form a personal cloud. Each device has a Skywire daemon and a node address it can receive communication to. You have application servers running on your cloud. For instance you may have several storage application servers (which expose a volume of a drive as a network file system, like Dropbox). You might have application servers such as web servers or email servers.

So the idea of the mythological "Aether" reflects the vision with what we are trying to accomplish.

[-Greed-]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

2nd?  What's the first?

+1 for skycoin being truly 2nd-gen coin. Bitcoin and all its forks are first-gen IMO.

[skycoin]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

2nd?  What's the first?

+1 for skycoin being truly 2nd-gen coin. Bitcoin and all its forks are first-gen IMO.

Some of the things we are laying the foundations for are third gen. A working, usable coin, with a clean code base and good security, no mining, no 51% attack and a reason to use the coin is just second gen.

Digital contracts, communication and identity infrastructure lay the foundation for the third gen. We do not know what the third gen will look like, but believe that it will involve platforms and 3rd party applications.

A first gen coin is extremely easy to fork. You just change the hash function or the name and logo and then release it. The first generation was about marketing. Bitcoin and then Dogecoin were the most successful coins in the first gen. Bitcoin has a strong community, the strongest merchant adaption and ecosystem. Dogecoin has the best community, the best marketing and wide adaption among younger users.

Between the second and third gen, we are seeing features like messaging for communication between addresses and other extensions. You cant fork the coin because your fork is no longer compatible with the ecosystem of the original.

At the same time, between the second and third generation the new platforms increase interoperability between first generation coins. Any two coins become automatically convertible between each other at the spot price. You dont care if they accept Bitcoin or which basket of currencies they accept, because it is the same for the end user. They just go to their wallet and hit "pay" and select the currency to pay in and which wallet they want to pay out of.

The third gen will have more community currencies or companies issuing their own currencies as gift cards ("small tent" special purpose currencies). In the second generation, we are seeing wallstreet exchanges and banks integrating Bitcoin as a commodity, like Gold. They are trading Bitcoin as a commodity, but have not adapted to run their infrastructure on Bitcoin type systems.

In the third generation, we might see new banks and exchanges which build their whole transaction infrastructure from cryptographic primitives, receipts and contracts. A user of an offshore bank has a receipt and counter-receipts from each transaction and the counterparties. The bank cannot steal his money or change his balance. The bank cannot authorize or forge a receipt for sending money to a third party without the users cryptographic signature. All banks expose a common API.

The things in the account no longer have to be currency pairs but can be other assets. All fiat is the same. You do not have separate systems and separate database table for different types of fiat. The system handles all fiat transactions in a consistent way.

In the third generation, anyone can issue bonds and options. Previously, there was counterparty risk for options. Only large financial players could issue options on equities. A large company is less likely to default from a bad options position. In the third generation, anyone can issue options. Options are digital contracts and the performance of the option contract is guaranteed by assets in third party escrow.  Crypto-assets become accounting mechanisms for legacy assets.

Many coins such as Mastercoin, Ethereum and colored coins are trying to jump to gen three. However, we believe that gen three will emerge organically on top of infrastructure developed for gen two coins.

Bitcoin has extremely poor extensibility for standards, so you have three wallets and three different wallet implementations and no interoperability, no interoperability between exchange APIs and no roadmap which allows third party developers to drive protocol evolution. Personal blockchains in Skycoin are designed be generic and allow users to individually upgrade their nodes to support new scripting languages, types of contracts and put control of the protocol in the hands of users and third party devs. The wire protocol is extensible and allows association of new applications with the Skycoin daemon.

We had to invent personal blockchains, so that individual users and developers could experiment and extend the protocol without threatening the mainchain. Colorcoin and other coins embedded on the blockchain will never be able to achieve the functionality required for practical use, because the Bitcoin developers have been forced to disable op codes for security,  there is no mechanism in the blockchain for pulling in the required data for a practical system of financial contracts and any experimentation with new protocols requires a blockchain fork.

If the evolution of the ecosystem stops at where Bitcoin is today, the full potential of crypto currencies will never be realized.

[FrictionlessCoin]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

2nd?  What's the first?

+1 for skycoin being truly 2nd-gen coin. Bitcoin and all its forks are first-gen IMO.

Some of the things we are laying the foundations for are third gen. A working, usable coin, with a clean code base and good security, no mining, no 51% attack and a reason to use the coin is just second gen.

Digital contracts, communication and identity infrastructure lay the foundation for the third gen. We do not know what the third gen will look like, but believe that it will involve platforms and 3rd party applications.

A first gen coin is extremely easy to fork. You just change the hash function or the name and logo and then release it. The first generation was about marketing. Bitcoin and then Dogecoin were the most successful coins in the first gen. Bitcoin has a strong community, the strongest merchant adaption and ecosystem. Dogecoin has the best community, the best marketing and wide adaption among younger users.

Between the second and third gen, we are seeing features like messaging for communication between addresses and other extensions. You cant fork the coin because your fork is no longer compatible with the ecosystem of the original.

At the same time, between the second and third generation the new platforms increase interoperability between first generation coins. Any two coins become automatically convertible between each other at the spot price. You dont care if they accept Bitcoin or which basket of currencies they accept, because it is the same for the end user. They just go to their wallet and hit "pay" and select the currency to pay in and which wallet they want to pay out of.

The third gen will have more community currencies or companies issuing their own currencies as gift cards ("small tent" special purpose currencies). In the second generation, we are seeing wallstreet exchanges and banks integrating Bitcoin as a commodity, like Gold. They are trading Bitcoin as a commodity, but have not adapted to run their infrastructure on Bitcoin type systems.

In the third generation, we might see new banks and exchanges which build their whole transaction infrastructure from cryptographic primitives, receipts and contracts. A user of an offshore bank has a receipt and counter-receipts from each transaction and the counterparties. The bank cannot steal his money or change his balance. The bank cannot authorize or forge a receipt for sending money to a third party without the users cryptographic signature. All banks expose a common API.

The things in the account no longer have to be currency pairs but can be other assets. All fiat is the same. You do not have separate systems and separate database table for different types of fiat. The system handles all fiat transactions in a consistent way.

In the third generation, anyone can issue bonds and options. Previously, there was counterparty risk for options. Only large financial players could issue options on equities. A large company is less likely to default from a bad options position. In the third generation, anyone can issue options. Options are digital contracts and the performance of the option contract is guaranteed by assets in third party escrow.  Crypto-assets become accounting mechanisms for legacy assets.

Many coins such as Mastercoin, Ethereum and colored coins are trying to jump to gen three. However, we believe that gen three will emerge organically on top of infrastructure developed for gen two coins.

Bitcoin has extremely poor extensibility for standards, so you have three wallets and three different wallet implementations and no interoperability, no interoperability between exchange APIs and no roadmap which allows third party developers to drive protocol evolution. Personal blockchains in Skycoin are designed be generic and allow users to individually upgrade their nodes to support new scripting languages, types of contracts and put control of the protocol in the hands of users and third party devs. The wire protocol is extensible and allows association of new applications with the Skycoin daemon.

We had to invent personal blockchains, so that individual users and developers could experiment and extend the protocol without threatening the mainchain. Colorcoin and other coins embedded on the blockchain will never be able to achieve the functionality required for practical use, because the Bitcoin developers have been forced to disable op codes for security,  there is no mechanism in the blockchain for pulling in the required data for a practical system of financial contracts and any experimentation with new protocols requires a blockchain fork.

If the evolution of the ecosystem stops at where Bitcoin is today, the full potential of crypto currencies will never be realized.

Nice write up.  Very nice insight.

I still however am have trouble understanding how the protocol works and this notion of 'personal blockchains'.  Can you point me to the documentation that describes this better?

[skycoin]

this will be the real 2nd gen coin

2nd?  What's the first?

+1 for skycoin being truly 2nd-gen coin. Bitcoin and all its forks are first-gen IMO.

Some of the things we are laying the foundations for are third gen. A working, usable coin, with a clean code base and good security, no mining, no 51% attack and a reason to use the coin is just second gen.

Digital contracts, communication and identity infrastructure lay the foundation for the third gen. We do not know what the third gen will look like, but believe that it will involve platforms and 3rd party applications.

A first gen coin is extremely easy to fork. You just change the hash function or the name and logo and then release it. The first generation was about marketing. Bitcoin and then Dogecoin were the most successful coins in the first gen. Bitcoin has a strong community, the strongest merchant adaption and ecosystem. Dogecoin has the best community, the best marketing and wide adaption among younger users.

Between the second and third gen, we are seeing features like messaging for communication between addresses and other extensions. You cant fork the coin because your fork is no longer compatible with the ecosystem of the original.

At the same time, between the second and third generation the new platforms increase interoperability between first generation coins. Any two coins become automatically convertible between each other at the spot price. You dont care if they accept Bitcoin or which basket of currencies they accept, because it is the same for the end user. They just go to their wallet and hit "pay" and select the currency to pay in and which wallet they want to pay out of.

The third gen will have more community currencies or companies issuing their own currencies as gift cards ("small tent" special purpose currencies). In the second generation, we are seeing wallstreet exchanges and banks integrating Bitcoin as a commodity, like Gold. They are trading Bitcoin as a commodity, but have not adapted to run their infrastructure on Bitcoin type systems.

In the third generation, we might see new banks and exchanges which build their whole transaction infrastructure from cryptographic primitives, receipts and contracts. A user of an offshore bank has a receipt and counter-receipts from each transaction and the counterparties. The bank cannot steal his money or change his balance. The bank cannot authorize or forge a receipt for sending money to a third party without the users cryptographic signature. All banks expose a common API.

The things in the account no longer have to be currency pairs but can be other assets. All fiat is the same. You do not have separate systems and separate database table for different types of fiat. The system handles all fiat transactions in a consistent way.

In the third generation, anyone can issue bonds and options. Previously, there was counterparty risk for options. Only large financial players could issue options on equities. A large company is less likely to default from a bad options position. In the third generation, anyone can issue options. Options are digital contracts and the performance of the option contract is guaranteed by assets in third party escrow.  Crypto-assets become accounting mechanisms for legacy assets.

Many coins such as Mastercoin, Ethereum and colored coins are trying to jump to gen three. However, we believe that gen three will emerge organically on top of infrastructure developed for gen two coins.

Bitcoin has extremely poor extensibility for standards, so you have three wallets and three different wallet implementations and no interoperability, no interoperability between exchange APIs and no roadmap which allows third party developers to drive protocol evolution. Personal blockchains in Skycoin are designed be generic and allow users to individually upgrade their nodes to support new scripting languages, types of contracts and put control of the protocol in the hands of users and third party devs. The wire protocol is extensible and allows association of new applications with the Skycoin daemon.

We had to invent personal blockchains, so that individual users and developers could experiment and extend the protocol without threatening the mainchain. Colorcoin and other coins embedded on the blockchain will never be able to achieve the functionality required for practical use, because the Bitcoin developers have been forced to disable op codes for security,  there is no mechanism in the blockchain for pulling in the required data for a practical system of financial contracts and any experimentation with new protocols requires a blockchain fork.

If the evolution of the ecosystem stops at where Bitcoin is today, the full potential of crypto currencies will never be realized.

Nice write up.  Very nice insight.

I still however am have trouble understanding how the protocol works and this notion of 'personal blockchains'.  Can you point me to the documentation that describes this better?

For a person blockchain, you generate a public key. To be valid you have to sign each block with your private key.

The details of the replication protocol are in the first two pages of the Aether whitepaper. Personal blockchains are replicated peer-to-peer, so as long as someone has subscribers, you can always get a copy of their blocks, even if they are offline.

https://github.com/skycoin/whitepapers/raw/master/whitepaper_05_Aether.pdf

There are no coins on the personal blockchains and a personal blockchain cannot trigger a transaction. So if you enter into a contract on a personal blockchain its just an agreement, you still have to execute or perform under the contract. However, if you dont perform, then its public. Or if only the contract hash was published, no one knows what the contract is, but you can publish the contract if they dont perform and everyone can see that.

The Bitcoin wire protocol only has one blockchain. The Skycoin wire protocol has to support multiple blockchains. There is the main chain that has the coin transactions for Skycoin. Then there are a number of personal blockchains you are subscribed to. The way we handle this, is that there is a Skycoin Daemon in Skywire. You create a "service" and associate it with the daemon. A particular service instance might, replicate a blockchain for a given public key. You create the service, configure it and then associate it with the Daemon. This allows multiple blockchains to be synced using a single program instance.

The Skywire daemon node has its own public key. The public key hashes to an address that identifies the node. If you know the address, you will be able to find the node, connect to it and send it messages. So there will be a bitmessage sort of functionality built in.  There will be a very simple API where you say SEND(Addr, "Hello, wuts up") and it handles finding the node and sending the message.

Inter-node messaging is very useful, because if nodes can communicate, they can generate new receiving addresses for each transaction. Merchants can send invoices and receipts and applications can communicate securely.

So basicly, Skycoin has transaction addresses where you can send coins and it has communication addresses, where you can send messages to.

This is all aimed at developers. The users wont see it until someone builds a chat or email application on top of it. Many of the initial Skycoin bounties will be for designing and developing these applications on top of the infrastructure.

[skycoin]

Project Update:

1. We are getting a Trello for organizing developers.
2. We are moving white papers to a wiki. Its better if the community can organize and modify them. Each wiki page can be more focused on a single topic than the white papers.
- overviews for general public
- tutorials for software developers, with code samples
- marketing documentation
- engineering documentation that describes systems at level required for implementation
3. We will launch code in a personal blockchain so it can trade while Obelisk is under development
4. The public DOES NOT CARE about the technology.  Only developers understand the implications of what we are doing. The public only cares about the coin for ideological reasons (the meshnet) and what it does for them. Public adaption will require a working meshnet and good marketing explaining it.
5. The public does not know how Bitcoin works and they probably dont care. "Its digital money". Anything that is like Bitcoin but is not Bitcoin, is "Bitcoin 2.0" to the public. 99% of the users will not become educated about the differences between the coins. We need to have very simple marketing messages.  In contrast, the document outlying the differences between Skycoin and Bitcoin is currently 40 pages long and deal with transaction malleability, signature malleability, duplicate coinbase outputs, hash collisions and the treatment of unspent outputs. We have no realistic hope of educating the public about these differences.
6. We need to build communication infrastructure for the developers to communicate.
- message board for discussion
- wiki for documentation
- wiki for organizing marketing materials to public
- code tutorials
- issue tracker/Trello for tracking immediate project objectives
- IRC for discussion and technical support
7. The foundation of any coin is the community and we need to focus on tools for building out the community. Communication tools are very important for the community development.
8. We want someone to write a wiki in  golang on top of Aether. With each page as a value in a key value store.
9. We need a Skywire Daemon service that takes an address, finds the node and sends it a message. Just has to work and will improve or swap out implementation later. This will be for submitting update requests to the wiki at first.

[qhong]

China thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=595009.0

SKYCOIN天空币QQ交流群:286238586

群里有最新白皮书下载.

the coin is chinese or foreigner??? who knows??

[pigheadbig]

dev can you give a roughly time when ipo start?

thanks

Not sure. White papers are taking forever.

I have five whitepapers to write and whitepaper four is only half done and its 16 pages. Writing the whitepapers is taking longer than implementing the consensus algorithm.

It would be unfair to do the IPO before people can read the white papers about what we are doing and before the client works on everyone's computer.

Skycoin does not have signature mutability, does not have transaction mutability, does not have duplicate coinbase outputs and dozens of other changes and improvements from Bitcoin. Skycoin makes dozens of changes from Bitcoin and each change has to be described. Most of the whitepaper for the blockchain design, is about flaws in Bitcoin and then how Skycoin addresses them.

Investors hear about "signature mutability" in the news and its bad, but they do not know what it is or what the difference between signature mutability and transaction mutability is. The white paper has to explain this.

[toowronged]

nice coin!
beautiful name!