Designing a proper altcoin!

[mmihai1978]

I'm looking at all these altcoins. They are mainly stores of value not money. I think of all these coins like metals (gold is bitcoin, silver is ltc).

I'm thinking how to design proper money.

So, in my view, the ideal altcoin:

1 - should have a reasonable name / logo. Dogecoins are cute, but no.
2 - algo - scrypt, or whatever prevents massive abuse from an overinvestment of fiat.
3 - number of coins - irrelevant,  however, should not be too small, so that usual items would not cost 0.0000565 whatevercoin.

Mining

4 - premining - 30%. However, premined coins must be prepaid in USD / BTC or hard currency. Exchange rate is not relevant. Developer or issuer will do the prepayment.

The coins must be immediately available at an exchange, with a strong promise to always exchange the coins is USD / BTC. This will allow:
- liquid trading (using the prepaid USD / BTC as counterparty);
- no pump and dump schemes, since the pumper must deliver real-cash to support the increase in value.
- essentially, the new coin would have an initial hard peg to usd / btc. The peg will slowly be retired when trading reaches higher level that would self-support the altcoin.

Reason for this - to prevent pump and dump and to allow immediate use of the coin to buy services and goods.

5 - mining - should be expected that mined amounts will go 70% to store of value and 30% will circulate. Mining should be difficult and coins should be released as long as there are miners, however, not exponentially at the beginning.

6 - the exchange should allow short sales. These are called loans .

[1714981515]

1714981515

[Thylacine]

Probably wrong sub-forum, but whatever mate, it's Christmas.

I think logo is less relevant to the underlying computing conditions of the network and so on. You can always update a crappy logo later on. Most big companies do a modernization of their branding every so often and no one cares.

Also, saddened to see nothing about environmental sustainability in there. Also, if you invest a lot of money you can get still get ahead of the hobbyist miner with scrypt right? Not all machines are created equal.

I wonder whether naked shorting kills some of the designed benefits of cryptocoins. We don't want a centralized exchange / business holding liabilities do we? Don't we want real, non reversable peer-to-peer value exchange?

Also - why these specific numbers? 30% etc? What reasoning or projections behind it?

[NUFCrichard]

No one will mine your scam 30% premined coin. You can explain it to yourself however you like, premining is not fair and is scamming the community. Just mine from the start and amass coins to give away like everyone else.. or is that not get rich quick enough?

[WompRat]

No premine, unless it is held by a trustworthy organisation for the purposes of volatility reduction or to distribute to newcomers.  

As an investor the most important thing to me is trust and the second is probably brand.  The coin with the biggest advertising budget and cleverest marketing is eventually going to destroy all the others.  I would try to get it into as many hands as possible with as much humour and goodwill as possible, possibly starting with a small niche subset such as students, but it has to be used for transactions or it will die.  

If I had a coin I would be giving 1000s of coins to everyone who downloaded the client and including some kind of web store front along with it for people to spend their coins.  Bitcoin appears to be massive, but step away from this forum and you will see how small it is. Design a coin that people are not afraid to use or buy into and you may succeed.  

I would also add that keeping a coins value low and stable for the longest time along with increasing the transactions count should be the overriding goal, not making a quick buck through glorious pump and dumps.

[cdog]

The reason why only a handful of altcoins are even worth the effort to purchase, is that most developers think like OP.

Think about how many types of metal there are. Yet we only really use gold and silver as stores of value - everything else is dwarfed by those titans.

For me, those titans in the digital world are Bitcoin and Litecoin.

While coins like Primecoin, Peercoin, Namecoin, and others are interesting, Im not buying quite yet although I am trying to mine some Primecoin on my CPU (advice: dont bother, lol). In general I just prefer to buy if I see great value. Right now I see the most value in Litecoin, but Im still a believer that Bitcoin has to lead the way and be #1 for any other coin to ever succeed. So when I meet people new to crypto, I just act like Bitcoin is the only game in town. While thats not factually accurate, I think for all practical purposes for the general population, its best to leave altcoin discussions to the true hardcore cryptofreaks.  

Tacotime is trying to manage the development of a new alt, but its hard finding great talent so its been delayed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169204.0

It will be interesting to see if they are able to implement all those innovations. The launch will set a new definition for fairness and transparency.

[greyman]

> 4 - premining - 30%.

Why?!

> The coins must be immediately available at an exchange, with a strong promise to always exchange the coins is USD / BTC.

This is probably not possible. I remember when DOGE wanted to go to exchange (I think it was cryptsy), and the admins said that the network will need to reach certain Hashrate first, so the possibility of 51% attack can be reasonably ruled out. Let's imagine the attack or other coin forgery would be possible, you could steal money from the exchange.

What's missing IMHO:

7) PR plan

You need to figure out how you will promote the thing to the public, why they would at least to give it a try, what story you are going to sell to mainstream media about your coin, etc.

[wobber]

Romanians trying to earn free money.

[hilariousandco]

Since when do pre-mines bother most of alt coins early adopters?  

[mmihai1978]

Good replies. First of all, to make something clear: this is only brainstorming / wishful thinking.

My thinking is: bitcoin is gold; litecoin is silver. Their success cannot be cloned so it is useless to devise new variations of bitcoin / litecoin with no new innovations. A new coin could be pegged to bitcoin just like dollar was linked to gold.

A new succesul altcoin:

- must have all the advantages of a cryptocoin (no centralized issuer, fast anonymous transactions);
- must be liquid in USD and BTC. This is crucial!
- must be acccepted as means of payment
- must not have as purpose to make developer and early adopters rich.
- essentially, a dollar clone, but not issued by the Federal Reserve

Premine

- my proposal is for _prepaid premine_..  It works quite simple: for 100 new coins premined, the preminer must pay (to the exchange) 1 BTC.
- the premine would be M1 money supply, very liquid.
- The premine must have real BTC behind it. The preminer must pay real BTC or USD for the premined amounts.
- The premined amounts and the corresponding BTC must be immediately floated on an exchange to provide day 1 liquidity.
- 30% is a rule thumb of M1 money supply vs M3 money supply. It is not relevant whether premine is 0.1% or 30%, as long as there is adequate liquidity for normal transactions.

@Thylacine - indeed, environmental concerns are legit. However, I am not sure I understand completely how PoS works.
The naked shorts must post margin; the exchange does not need to be centralized. There can be as many exchanges as clients / holders wish.

@Womprat / NuffRichard / greyman - premine is only to ensure liquidity and premined coins must be prepaid by BTC / USD, to prevent abuse.

[zavtra]

Of course I am very biased, but I am keeping my eyes on StableCoin.

It has a decentralized mixing service for anonymous transactions, which is a huge boon and is what gave BTC is original popularity.

I think anonymity is important, but also a very high quantity, for every person in the world.

Say, like 1 trillion coins, so each person can have several hundred, at least.

There are some other features which will be important as well, but we'll see as these coins develop in the time to come.

[hilariousandco]

Good replies. First of all, to make something clear: this is only brainstorming / wishful thinking.

My thinking is: bitcoin is gold; litecoin is silver. These cannot be cloned

What do you mean they can't be cloned?

[mmihai1978]

@hilariousandco: I mean one cannot replicate the success of bitcoin simply creating bitcoin 2 or litecoin 2. I have edited the original message for clarity.

[hilariousandco]

@hilariousandco: I mean one cannot replicate the success of bitcoin simply creating bitcoin 2 or litecoin 2. I have edited the original message for clarity.

Ah, ok. I think Litecoin could be dethroned, even though it's still ahead of the pack, but only because it was one of the first altcoins to come out. If it can't get many merchants behind it I could see it lagging behind and being overtaken quite easily.