about alternate chains vs using bitcoin blockchain

[genjix]

re: twister and other protocol layers.

the argument to use the bitcoin blockchain is that it offers absolute security. by using a new chain, some portion of that power can peel off and attack you. this means that alt chains will always have trouble getting through that initial hump where they are vulnerable to mining attacks.

however alt chains increasingly serve a variety of market purposes (such as twister). there's varying degrees of risk on how much X mining power is likely to be used (like when pools attack some altcoins in the past to prove a point), but if the market incentive is greater and grows quickly enough it can get past this hump.

especially now since the bitcoin blockchain is associated with money and has a high level of security (money demands high level of security), it's difficult to design a successful altcoin. but there are chains providing other purposes and can tolerate more risk. they are also optimised for their use case and so more efficient than simply relying on bitcoin blockchain, and hence far cheaper.

twister is the best example of this. i've been thinking and they've made the right decision making an altchain. it's the future, and i think beats bitmessage. i'm making some notes here:

https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/Twister

edit: changed my mind about twister. It's more nuanced than that. we can use a combination. see this discussion here:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/twister-users/cgxyB2oOQkk/Ov-MUUv3uG4J
This is a good project using an altchain: http://ethereum.org/ethereum.html

[FrictionlessCoin]

Let's take namecoin as one example,  namecoin is merged mine, so it has at this time around 80% of the hash rate of Bitcoin.  Namecoin performs a naming registry function that may be outside the scope of the current bitcoin functionality.

Now what about iXcoin (internet exchange coin),  like namecoin, this is merged mined with around 40% of the hash rate of Bitcoin  (in the 5 peta hash range).  iXcoin can be specialized to handled 'colored coins'.   It doesn't make sense to handle colored coins in the bitcoin blockchain.   It may make more sense to do it in iXcoin where in fact you could add 'colored coin' support natively so you don't have to build a layer on top like the current implementation.

[simondlr]

At the rate altcoins are launching, I think coins specifically built for use as currency should be added onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Small alts have way too weak security. I've conceptually devised a way to do mint decentralized colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that's nice to miners and keeps the small alts' hashing power dedicated to them (you won't have to compete with Bitcoin miners to mine Dogecoin for example).

I'm copy pasting my idea from the colored coins google groups (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/mUb86IOeXdU).

---

"Colored altcoins can be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain in a decentralized manner through the donation (or 'sacrifice') of Bitcoin to miners: turning those Bitcoin into a new colored altcoin at pre-determined rate."


In the past 2 years, plenty of new alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) have been created (namecoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc), resulting in separate blockchains, and a distribution of hashing power. As we are heading towards a future where each idea, theme, and person will have their own currency, there are some problems with having the value locked up in different altchains. The problem is mainly due to the fact there will be a long-tail of chains with small hashing powers that will be extremely vulnerable to attack.

Why?

Currently, private or personal currencies can be minted through colored coins. These coins are unfortunately centralised. If I mint 1million Simoncoin, it will invariably be in my control. If other people want them, they will have to pay me Bitcoin in exchange for the Simoncoins. In some cases, this is what is wanted, but it brings about trust in me to maintain it. The beauty of the traditional mining process is that it is freer, and more democratic. It gives people 2 ways to get involved with the currency: through contributing processing power to it OR buying it from someone who has already contributed processing power to it. The pre-determined rate at which it is minted AND the fact that it is not to the benefit of a centralised entity allows trust (and invariably value) to more easily flow into it. What if the 21 million Bitcoin were minted instantly in the beginning? It also means that the entity/theme behind it (be it Simoncoin, a meme, a band, etc) have more incentive to make their currency work as they have to keep its network effect growing. Admittedly I'm trying to articulate a difficult concept. If some currency (or stock) only 'represented' an entity (decentralized), instead of being 'backed' by the entity (centralized), its value will be more. The psychological barriers to entry feels lower: because people are taking part collectively in the concept.

So, a future where colored coins can be minted in a decentralized manner, whilst simultaneously keeping the hashing power on one chain, solves the problem where the myriad of new altcoins will have to worry about keeping their chain secure and running smoothly. It should also be beneficial to the network.

How?

This scheme works by looking at Bitcoin (the currency) as a proxy for hashing power. By donating to Bitcoin to miners, you are contributing hashing power as a proxy for a new colored alt. For each block, depending on how many people donated to a specific colored alt (say Simoncoin), you are rewarded proportionally at a pre-determined rate.

As the idea is in a conceptual phase, I have not delved too deeply into the technical aspects of it, so I'm going to be using some 'psuedo-txes' to explain some parts of the technical implementation.

Let's create Simoncoin. In block 400000, there is a genesis tx that specifies a standard monetary policy: 50 initial coins, 210k halving: something like "OP_RETURN gsimoncoin50210000".

From the next block, Bitcoin donations can be transmogrified into Simoncoin. If only I am mining it, and I donate 0.00001 BTC to the block, I will receive all of the 50 Simoncoin. If 2 people donated 2 BTC each, it will be split 25, 25. As you can see, altcoins which are popular will have more competition in terms "proxy hashing power", meaning more Bitcoin is donated per block. Once the halving block is reached, less Simoncoin will be available to split up between the miners.

The donation tx should (probably) specify for what colored alt it is for, and which address the reward should go to (thinking quickly in terms of technical specification).

What about miners, mining their own donations?

If a miner donates 5 btc for Simoncoin, and he mines the block, he will get the 5BTC AND a large portion of Simoncoin, not really 'donating' or 'sacrificing' the Bitcoin.

I need some help thinking about this, but I don't see it as a big issue. Miners will have incentive to include all the colored alt minting donations as it will collectively be a bigger reward than keeping out other donations for a specific alt reward. In other words, all the transaction fees will be greater than the value of the colored alt rewards (that's what I'm thinking at least). Using Bitcoin as proxy hashing power also means that unlike traditional mining, ALL participants get their fair share. It's as if all Bitcoin miners (or miners part of a pool) got their fair share, even if they did not solve the block.

There are thus cases where a miner will donate some BTC and re-earn it as reward, but that won't be the intent. They were just lucky. If they want to continue minting the colored alt they'll have to respend the Bitcoin as donation anyway, potentially losing it to other miners.

There should also be a time-based incentives as well, mainly that IF no one contributed Bitcoin to Simoncoin for that block, the 50 Simoncoin is lost. This means miners won't just wait for a next block to win the reward.

Alternatively, similarly to proof-of-stake, "coin-age" could be used in some way. But you don't want to detriment users who buy bitcoin to mint quickly to alts.

Security

This process is beneficial to Bitcoin. It means hashing power don't have to distributed across alt-chains. One of the reasons why some miners turn to other altcoins are due to profitability. ie the altcoins are worth more than the hashing power when turned back into BTC or Fiat, compared to the hashing power being spent on Bitcoin itself. This process solves this. Miners will contribute to Bitcoin's success, but ALSO be able to rake in with the profitability of colored alts. If my small FPGA is earning 0.0001 Bitcoin per block, and I'm the only one mining Simoncoin, I will receive my full reward as IF I was the only one mining Simoncoin (ie taking the 0.0001 and donating it). It means like any altcoin, you are competing with the people hashing with you on that altcoin, but that hashing power now ALSO contributes to keeping the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrencies secure.

Strain on the network?

If this starts working, there will be a lot more donations per block, for each colored alt that exists. Miners will be happy as it is a lot more money, but it could push the transactions per second quite a lot higher, as for someone that is mining a coin will have to donate BTC for EACH block to be able to receive the reward.

A purer version could be where the mining rewards go straight as donations for the next block, paying/minting new colored alt addresses. In other words, miners also turn into minting pools. Your payout address is a donation directly to the next block, whilst simultaneously generating colored alts. I don't know if this is even possible.

SPV?

Personal currencies need to be used as easily as Bitcoin. Thanks to SPV, you don't need the whole blockchain to transact. It's unclear whether this scheme will work.

Bitcoins are being re-used again and again to create new currencies?

Yes. Value is subjective. Bitcoin acts here as the token for the security of the public ledger it moves upon. It's turning the hashing power into the system of the cryptographic shared ledger into support for additional currencies. It's like blood, keeping the system pumping.

So. A request for comments: please. I have to do my own research into colored coins first to think up technical implementations. If anyone wants to help design this scheme in a feasible manner, I would love your help!

Any questions are also welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Anything.

[coinrevo]

seems like no one has the answers yet how this will play out. simon - interesting, but what's the difference to merged mining?

I don't see how you can mine independent of hashing power of the network. so even a small alt-coin with a different hashing algorithm can be quickly overpowered. the network isn't worth much if attackers have an incentive to destroy it and the miners don't have enough incentive to prevent the attack.

IMHO the best path forward is to think of proof of work as one CPU = one vote (as mentioned in the bitcoin paper). PoW is just a work around to that goal (more or less, as cycles are needed for verification). I'm not sure anyone regards PoS as serious, as money supply is unlimited. Key would be to fix certain properties while allow others to float freely.

[FrictionlessCoin]

At the rate altcoins are launching, I think coins specifically built for use as currency should be added onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Small alts have way too weak security. I've conceptually devised a way to do mint decentralized colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that's nice to miners and keeps the small alts' hashing power dedicated to them (you won't have to compete with Bitcoin miners to mine Dogecoin for example).

I'm copy pasting my idea from the colored coins google groups (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/mUb86IOeXdU).

---

"Colored altcoins can be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain in a decentralized manner through the donation (or 'sacrifice') of Bitcoin to miners: turning those Bitcoin into a new colored altcoin at pre-determined rate."


In the past 2 years, plenty of new alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) have been created (namecoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc), resulting in separate blockchains, and a distribution of hashing power. As we are heading towards a future where each idea, theme, and person will have their own currency, there are some problems with having the value locked up in different altchains. The problem is mainly due to the fact there will be a long-tail of chains with small hashing powers that will be extremely vulnerable to attack.

Why?

Currently, private or personal currencies can be minted through colored coins. These coins are unfortunately centralised. If I mint 1million Simoncoin, it will invariably be in my control. If other people want them, they will have to pay me Bitcoin in exchange for the Simoncoins. In some cases, this is what is wanted, but it brings about trust in me to maintain it. The beauty of the traditional mining process is that it is freer, and more democratic. It gives people 2 ways to get involved with the currency: through contributing processing power to it OR buying it from someone who has already contributed processing power to it. The pre-determined rate at which it is minted AND the fact that it is not to the benefit of a centralised entity allows trust (and invariably value) to more easily flow into it. What if the 21 million Bitcoin were minted instantly in the beginning? It also means that the entity/theme behind it (be it Simoncoin, a meme, a band, etc) have more incentive to make their currency work as they have to keep its network effect growing. Admittedly I'm trying to articulate a difficult concept. If some currency (or stock) only 'represented' an entity (decentralized), instead of being 'backed' by the entity (centralized), its value will be more. The psychological barriers to entry feels lower: because people are taking part collectively in the concept.

So, a future where colored coins can be minted in a decentralized manner, whilst simultaneously keeping the hashing power on one chain, solves the problem where the myriad of new altcoins will have to worry about keeping their chain secure and running smoothly. It should also be beneficial to the network.

How?

This scheme works by looking at Bitcoin (the currency) as a proxy for hashing power. By donating to Bitcoin to miners, you are contributing hashing power as a proxy for a new colored alt. For each block, depending on how many people donated to a specific colored alt (say Simoncoin), you are rewarded proportionally at a pre-determined rate.

As the idea is in a conceptual phase, I have not delved too deeply into the technical aspects of it, so I'm going to be using some 'psuedo-txes' to explain some parts of the technical implementation.

Let's create Simoncoin. In block 400000, there is a genesis tx that specifies a standard monetary policy: 50 initial coins, 210k halving: something like "OP_RETURN gsimoncoin50210000".

From the next block, Bitcoin donations can be transmogrified into Simoncoin. If only I am mining it, and I donate 0.00001 BTC to the block, I will receive all of the 50 Simoncoin. If 2 people donated 2 BTC each, it will be split 25, 25. As you can see, altcoins which are popular will have more competition in terms "proxy hashing power", meaning more Bitcoin is donated per block. Once the halving block is reached, less Simoncoin will be available to split up between the miners.

The donation tx should (probably) specify for what colored alt it is for, and which address the reward should go to (thinking quickly in terms of technical specification).

What about miners, mining their own donations?

If a miner donates 5 btc for Simoncoin, and he mines the block, he will get the 5BTC AND a large portion of Simoncoin, not really 'donating' or 'sacrificing' the Bitcoin.

I need some help thinking about this, but I don't see it as a big issue. Miners will have incentive to include all the colored alt minting donations as it will collectively be a bigger reward than keeping out other donations for a specific alt reward. In other words, all the transaction fees will be greater than the value of the colored alt rewards (that's what I'm thinking at least). Using Bitcoin as proxy hashing power also means that unlike traditional mining, ALL participants get their fair share. It's as if all Bitcoin miners (or miners part of a pool) got their fair share, even if they did not solve the block.

There are thus cases where a miner will donate some BTC and re-earn it as reward, but that won't be the intent. They were just lucky. If they want to continue minting the colored alt they'll have to respend the Bitcoin as donation anyway, potentially losing it to other miners.

There should also be a time-based incentives as well, mainly that IF no one contributed Bitcoin to Simoncoin for that block, the 50 Simoncoin is lost. This means miners won't just wait for a next block to win the reward.

Alternatively, similarly to proof-of-stake, "coin-age" could be used in some way. But you don't want to detriment users who buy bitcoin to mint quickly to alts.

Security

This process is beneficial to Bitcoin. It means hashing power don't have to distributed across alt-chains. One of the reasons why some miners turn to other altcoins are due to profitability. ie the altcoins are worth more than the hashing power when turned back into BTC or Fiat, compared to the hashing power being spent on Bitcoin itself. This process solves this. Miners will contribute to Bitcoin's success, but ALSO be able to rake in with the profitability of colored alts. If my small FPGA is earning 0.0001 Bitcoin per block, and I'm the only one mining Simoncoin, I will receive my full reward as IF I was the only one mining Simoncoin (ie taking the 0.0001 and donating it). It means like any altcoin, you are competing with the people hashing with you on that altcoin, but that hashing power now ALSO contributes to keeping the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrencies secure.

Strain on the network?

If this starts working, there will be a lot more donations per block, for each colored alt that exists. Miners will be happy as it is a lot more money, but it could push the transactions per second quite a lot higher, as for someone that is mining a coin will have to donate BTC for EACH block to be able to receive the reward.

A purer version could be where the mining rewards go straight as donations for the next block, paying/minting new colored alt addresses. In other words, miners also turn into minting pools. Your payout address is a donation directly to the next block, whilst simultaneously generating colored alts. I don't know if this is even possible.

SPV?

Personal currencies need to be used as easily as Bitcoin. Thanks to SPV, you don't need the whole blockchain to transact. It's unclear whether this scheme will work.

Bitcoins are being re-used again and again to create new currencies?

Yes. Value is subjective. Bitcoin acts here as the token for the security of the public ledger it moves upon. It's turning the hashing power into the system of the cryptographic shared ledger into support for additional currencies. It's like blood, keeping the system pumping.

So. A request for comments: please. I have to do my own research into colored coins first to think up technical implementations. If anyone wants to help design this scheme in a feasible manner, I would love your help!

Any questions are also welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Anything.

The idea behind user defined currencies are quite different from an alt-currency that is mined.  There really is no mining involved.  A fixed amount is issued.  Think about stocks,  there isn't any mining,  the company can issue as many shares at will.  Think about a precious metal currency, the issuer will only issue an amount equal to what they have in stock.

Can an alt-coin be implemented using colored coins?  yes, but the mining will be peformed by alternate protocol and has no purpose but to distribute coins and not to secure the network.  Securing the network is already handled by the based coin (i.e. Bitcoin or iXcoin)

[amincd]

It doesn't make sense to handle colored coins in the bitcoin blockchain.   It may make more sense to do it in iXcoin where in fact you could add 'colored coin' support natively so you don't have to build a layer on top like the current implementation.

It makes perfect sense to use the Bitcoin blockchain for colored coins. The infrastructure for Bitcoin is already in place, making colored coins on its blockchain much more accessible than on a new blockchain. Also, Bitcoin has the most secure blockchain in the world, which any protocol built on top of it will benefit from. A merged mine blockchain is not as secure as Bitcoin because miners don't have the economic incentive to act honestly like they do with Bitcoin. In fact, a large Bitcoin mining pool could quite easily do a double spend attack on an alternate blockchain that is merge-mined with Bitcoin at little financial cost.

[simondlr]

seems like no one has the answers yet how this will play out. simon - interesting, but what's the difference to merged mining?

I don't see how you can mine independent of hashing power of the network. so even a small alt-coin with a different hashing algorithm can be quickly overpowered. the network isn't worth much if attackers have an incentive to destroy it and the miners don't have enough incentive to prevent the attack.

IMHO the best path forward is to think of proof of work as one CPU = one vote (as mentioned in the bitcoin paper). PoW is just a work around to that goal (more or less, as cycles are needed for verification). I'm not sure anyone regards PoS as serious, as money supply is unlimited. Key would be to fix certain properties while allow others to float freely.

There's no concept of 'overpowering' with this method. The ACTUAL hashing power goes to Bitcoin's network. Bitcoin as currency is used as "proxy" hashing power towards alt-coins. And it is always proportional to the amount of BTC donated per block. Hashing power in this case is only used for the minting process, not the security of the network.

Regarding PoS. This method is kind of similar to this, but now you can take out the inherent inflation that happens with PoS. Instead of using coins to generate NEW coins of the same type, you are generating NEW alts.

But yes. I'm going to sit down and design the technical aspects fully once I kick this last thesis revision I'm busy with to the curb.

Can an alt-coin be implemented using colored coins?  yes, but the mining will be peformed by alternate protocol and has no purpose but to distribute coins and not to secure the network.  Securing the network is already handled by the based coin (i.e. Bitcoin or iXcoin)

This is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve. A protocol to mint decentralized colored coins.

[FrictionlessCoin]

This is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve. A protocol to mint decentralized colored coins.

What I'm trying to say is that the protocol to mint decentralized colored coins all depends on the domain.

The only purpose of minting coins in a decentralized manner is to provide some kind of fair distribution.

So if your coin represents gold bullion,  then you aren't going to perform any decentralized minting.  You would just issue coins from a central point.   This in fact is the majority of use cases for colored coins.

Now,  there are plenty of ways to distribute a coin,  proof of work, proof of stake, proof of burn, random distribution, game playing etc.  That of course will all depend on exactly what the coin is for.

[bluemeanie1]

Let's take namecoin as one example,  namecoin is merged mine, so it has at this time around 80% of the hash rate of Bitcoin.  Namecoin performs a naming registry function that may be outside the scope of the current bitcoin functionality.

Now what about iXcoin (internet exchange coin),  like namecoin, this is merged mined with around 40% of the hash rate of Bitcoin  (in the 5 peta hash range).  iXcoin can be specialized to handled 'colored coins'.   It doesn't make sense to handle colored coins in the bitcoin blockchain.

if you do this, then you lose the 'atomic swap' functionality, which was a key sell of the whole color coins platform.

The Color Coins project seems to be in a perpetual state of disrepair and revision.  I've found many unreliable claims come out of that project.

[bluemeanie1]

At the rate altcoins are launching, I think coins specifically built for use as currency should be added onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Small alts have way too weak security. I've conceptually devised a way to do mint decentralized colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that's nice to miners and keeps the small alts' hashing power dedicated to them (you won't have to compete with Bitcoin miners to mine Dogecoin for example).

I'm copy pasting my idea from the colored coins google groups (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/mUb86IOeXdU).

---

"Colored altcoins can be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain in a decentralized manner through the donation (or 'sacrifice') of Bitcoin to miners: turning those Bitcoin into a new colored altcoin at pre-determined rate."


In the past 2 years, plenty of new alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) have been created (namecoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc), resulting in separate blockchains, and a distribution of hashing power. As we are heading towards a future where each idea, theme, and person will have their own currency, there are some problems with having the value locked up in different altchains. The problem is mainly due to the fact there will be a long-tail of chains with small hashing powers that will be extremely vulnerable to attack.

Why?

Currently, private or personal currencies can be minted through colored coins. These coins are unfortunately centralised. If I mint 1million Simoncoin, it will invariably be in my control. If other people want them, they will have to pay me Bitcoin in exchange for the Simoncoins. In some cases, this is what is wanted, but it brings about trust in me to maintain it. The beauty of the traditional mining process is that it is freer, and more democratic. It gives people 2 ways to get involved with the currency: through contributing processing power to it OR buying it from someone who has already contributed processing power to it. The pre-determined rate at which it is minted AND the fact that it is not to the benefit of a centralised entity allows trust (and invariably value) to more easily flow into it. What if the 21 million Bitcoin were minted instantly in the beginning? It also means that the entity/theme behind it (be it Simoncoin, a meme, a band, etc) have more incentive to make their currency work as they have to keep its network effect growing. Admittedly I'm trying to articulate a difficult concept. If some currency (or stock) only 'represented' an entity (decentralized), instead of being 'backed' by the entity (centralized), its value will be more. The psychological barriers to entry feels lower: because people are taking part collectively in the concept.

So, a future where colored coins can be minted in a decentralized manner, whilst simultaneously keeping the hashing power on one chain, solves the problem where the myriad of new altcoins will have to worry about keeping their chain secure and running smoothly. It should also be beneficial to the network.

How?

This scheme works by looking at Bitcoin (the currency) as a proxy for hashing power. By donating to Bitcoin to miners, you are contributing hashing power as a proxy for a new colored alt. For each block, depending on how many people donated to a specific colored alt (say Simoncoin), you are rewarded proportionally at a pre-determined rate.

As the idea is in a conceptual phase, I have not delved too deeply into the technical aspects of it, so I'm going to be using some 'psuedo-txes' to explain some parts of the technical implementation.

Let's create Simoncoin. In block 400000, there is a genesis tx that specifies a standard monetary policy: 50 initial coins, 210k halving: something like "OP_RETURN gsimoncoin50210000".

From the next block, Bitcoin donations can be transmogrified into Simoncoin. If only I am mining it, and I donate 0.00001 BTC to the block, I will receive all of the 50 Simoncoin. If 2 people donated 2 BTC each, it will be split 25, 25. As you can see, altcoins which are popular will have more competition in terms "proxy hashing power", meaning more Bitcoin is donated per block. Once the halving block is reached, less Simoncoin will be available to split up between the miners.

The donation tx should (probably) specify for what colored alt it is for, and which address the reward should go to (thinking quickly in terms of technical specification).

What about miners, mining their own donations?

If a miner donates 5 btc for Simoncoin, and he mines the block, he will get the 5BTC AND a large portion of Simoncoin, not really 'donating' or 'sacrificing' the Bitcoin.

I need some help thinking about this, but I don't see it as a big issue. Miners will have incentive to include all the colored alt minting donations as it will collectively be a bigger reward than keeping out other donations for a specific alt reward. In other words, all the transaction fees will be greater than the value of the colored alt rewards (that's what I'm thinking at least). Using Bitcoin as proxy hashing power also means that unlike traditional mining, ALL participants get their fair share. It's as if all Bitcoin miners (or miners part of a pool) got their fair share, even if they did not solve the block.

There are thus cases where a miner will donate some BTC and re-earn it as reward, but that won't be the intent. They were just lucky. If they want to continue minting the colored alt they'll have to respend the Bitcoin as donation anyway, potentially losing it to other miners.

There should also be a time-based incentives as well, mainly that IF no one contributed Bitcoin to Simoncoin for that block, the 50 Simoncoin is lost. This means miners won't just wait for a next block to win the reward.

Alternatively, similarly to proof-of-stake, "coin-age" could be used in some way. But you don't want to detriment users who buy bitcoin to mint quickly to alts.

Security

This process is beneficial to Bitcoin. It means hashing power don't have to distributed across alt-chains. One of the reasons why some miners turn to other altcoins are due to profitability. ie the altcoins are worth more than the hashing power when turned back into BTC or Fiat, compared to the hashing power being spent on Bitcoin itself. This process solves this. Miners will contribute to Bitcoin's success, but ALSO be able to rake in with the profitability of colored alts. If my small FPGA is earning 0.0001 Bitcoin per block, and I'm the only one mining Simoncoin, I will receive my full reward as IF I was the only one mining Simoncoin (ie taking the 0.0001 and donating it). It means like any altcoin, you are competing with the people hashing with you on that altcoin, but that hashing power now ALSO contributes to keeping the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrencies secure.

Strain on the network?

If this starts working, there will be a lot more donations per block, for each colored alt that exists. Miners will be happy as it is a lot more money, but it could push the transactions per second quite a lot higher, as for someone that is mining a coin will have to donate BTC for EACH block to be able to receive the reward.

A purer version could be where the mining rewards go straight as donations for the next block, paying/minting new colored alt addresses. In other words, miners also turn into minting pools. Your payout address is a donation directly to the next block, whilst simultaneously generating colored alts. I don't know if this is even possible.

SPV?

Personal currencies need to be used as easily as Bitcoin. Thanks to SPV, you don't need the whole blockchain to transact. It's unclear whether this scheme will work.

Bitcoins are being re-used again and again to create new currencies?

Yes. Value is subjective. Bitcoin acts here as the token for the security of the public ledger it moves upon. It's turning the hashing power into the system of the cryptographic shared ledger into support for additional currencies. It's like blood, keeping the system pumping.

So. A request for comments: please. I have to do my own research into colored coins first to think up technical implementations. If anyone wants to help design this scheme in a feasible manner, I would love your help!

Any questions are also welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Anything.

The idea behind user defined currencies are quite different from an alt-currency that is mined.  There really is no mining involved.  A fixed amount is issued.  Think about stocks,  there isn't any mining,  the company can issue as many shares at will.  Think about a precious metal currency, the issuer will only issue an amount equal to what they have in stock.

Can an alt-coin be implemented using colored coins?  yes, but the mining will be peformed by alternate protocol and has no purpose but to distribute coins and not to secure the network.  Securing the network is already handled by the based coin (i.e. Bitcoin or iXcoin)

and the fact is you're PAYING to make transactions in the 'based coin' (BTC or what have you).  The miners need some kind of compensation or they wont do it.  Color Coins is not a good idea.  I saw Simon's post on the BitcoinX list some time ago.  If your experience is anything like mine, you wont get answers or acknowledgement on that list for any criticisms you have of Color Coins.  A few people have spent money on it's development as a supporting technology for their business, so there are agendas there.

Simon, it works like this- Color Coins ARENT ZERO TRUST.  You must trust the Issuer.  The moment you've done that, you not only lose this quality of zero trust, but you make the whole operation of mining pointless.  You can move the equation around in several ways, but in all cases you don't need mining, you don't need hash power- it's a waste.  They could try and move it in any number of different directions:

 1) they try and put it on the main BTC block chain, and you will have transaction overload.  You might get the miners to comply, but they aren't going to do so for free.  So now we have this 'zero trust' but we have to pay for it.  I can get the same thing from many other services.

 2) they make an altchain, in this case they lose atomic swapping and don't have access to the hashing power in the main chain.  Why do it?  Why even use coin coloring at all in this case, you can just redesign the tx formats.

In my view the people working on Color Coins lack vision and only see things in terms of the few things they know about Bitcoin.  They don't have much understanding of how the greater world of money works at all.  There is even a related project to Color Coins that as far as I can tell is some cheap pump and dump scam.

these shortcomings I recognized a while ago and this is why I developed Confidence Chains http://altchain.org

I factor out a few things here and there, and you get something quite different.  You get a chain of confidence, with nodes you must trust.  The advantage to this architecture is many things, one of them is that you cannot disable it without disabling all the nodes.  You can look at the whitepapers on the site, its all explained clearly and I haven't revised any of my claims BECAUSE THEY ARE BASED IN WELL UNDERSTOOD PRINCIPLES.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Let's take namecoin as one example,  namecoin is merged mine, so it has at this time around 80% of the hash rate of Bitcoin.  Namecoin performs a naming registry function that may be outside the scope of the current bitcoin functionality.

Now what about iXcoin (internet exchange coin),  like namecoin, this is merged mined with around 40% of the hash rate of Bitcoin  (in the 5 peta hash range).  iXcoin can be specialized to handled 'colored coins'.   It doesn't make sense to handle colored coins in the bitcoin blockchain.

if you do this, then you lose the 'atomic swap' functionality, which was a key sell of the whole color coins platform.

The Color Coins project seems to be in a perpetual state of disrepair and revision.  I've found many unreliable claims come out of that project.

'Atomic swap' is over rated.  We already have crypto-coin exchanges that already swap between multiple block chains.  

From the perspective of the user,  they would care less if their currency rides on top of the bitcoin block chain or not.  All they care is that it is relatively secure,  with merged mine coins like iXcoin,  its 40% of the bitcoin has rate, so it is going to be good enough for almost all use cases.

In fact, I would argue that people will not feel to kindly about polluting the bitcoin block chain with alternative currencies.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Simon, it works like this- Color Coins ARENT ZERO TRUST.  You must trust the Issuer.  The moment you've done that, you not only lose this quality of zero trust, but you make the whole operation of mining pointless.  You can move the equation around in several ways, but in all cases you don't need mining, you don't need hash power- it's a waste.  They could try and move it in any number of different directions:

 1) they try and put it on the main BTC block chain, and you will have transaction overload.  You might get the miners to comply, but they aren't going to do so for free.  So now we have this 'zero trust' but we have to pay for it.  I can get the same thing from many other services.

 2) they make an altchain, in this case they lose atomic swapping and don't have access to the hashing power in the main chain.  Why do it?  Why even use coin coloring at all in this case, you can just redesign the tx formats.

In my view the people working on Color Coins lack vision and only see things in terms of the few things they know about Bitcoin.  They don't have much understanding of how the greater world of money works at all.  There is even a related project to Color Coins that as far as I can tell is some cheap pump and dump scam.

these shortcomings I recognized a while ago and this is why I developed Confidence Chains http://altchain.org

I factor out a few things here and there, and you get something quite different.  You get a chain of confidence, with nodes you must trust.  The advantage to this architecture is many things, one of them is that you cannot disable it without disabling all the nodes.  You can look at the whitepapers on the site, its all explained clearly and I haven't revised any of my claims BECAUSE THEY ARE BASED IN WELL UNDERSTOOD PRINCIPLES.

Of course most all colored coins require trusting the issuer!    The main advantage of using a decentralized block chain as opposed to the conventional way is that the colored coins can be exchanged in multiple exchanges and everyone can be assured that what I exchange in one is the same as the one exchange in another.  That is a very powerful use case!

Mining has almost nothing to do with colored coins.  Sure you can devise some kind of mining scheme,  but for what purpose?  To create another kind of trust free coin on top of the already trust free network?

Are you referring to Mastercoin? well that is a completely pointless exercise.   

I can see where you are going with the confidence chains and I do agree that a decentralized exchange would be better served on a network and protocol different from bitcoin.   However, can you explain to me how your proposal compares to Ripple and Open Transactions?

[simondlr]

Thanks for the comments guys.

@bluemeanie1

Yes, you make a good point regarding colored coins, you still have to trust the issuer. I haven't looked into confidence chains, will have a read!

@frictionlesscoin

Yep, people won't bother, as long the coin is secure. If alt-coins are beneficial to the maintainers of the network: ie, the miners then they'll be on board (or at least I think so). The donated based coin, creates much larger blocks in the future.

The problem that I want to solve is the creation of fairly distributed currencies with better security than the current alternative blockchain approach. If we have a million altcoins in the future with millions of blockchains, there's going to a very large long-tail of poorly secured coins. This is one such proposal. I'll think about it some more.

[bluemeanie1]

Simon, it works like this- Color Coins ARENT ZERO TRUST.  You must trust the Issuer.  The moment you've done that, you not only lose this quality of zero trust, but you make the whole operation of mining pointless.  You can move the equation around in several ways, but in all cases you don't need mining, you don't need hash power- it's a waste.  They could try and move it in any number of different directions:

 1) they try and put it on the main BTC block chain, and you will have transaction overload.  You might get the miners to comply, but they aren't going to do so for free.  So now we have this 'zero trust' but we have to pay for it.  I can get the same thing from many other services.

 2) they make an altchain, in this case they lose atomic swapping and don't have access to the hashing power in the main chain.  Why do it?  Why even use coin coloring at all in this case, you can just redesign the tx formats.

In my view the people working on Color Coins lack vision and only see things in terms of the few things they know about Bitcoin.  They don't have much understanding of how the greater world of money works at all.  There is even a related project to Color Coins that as far as I can tell is some cheap pump and dump scam.

these shortcomings I recognized a while ago and this is why I developed Confidence Chains http://altchain.org

I factor out a few things here and there, and you get something quite different.  You get a chain of confidence, with nodes you must trust.  The advantage to this architecture is many things, one of them is that you cannot disable it without disabling all the nodes.  You can look at the whitepapers on the site, its all explained clearly and I haven't revised any of my claims BECAUSE THEY ARE BASED IN WELL UNDERSTOOD PRINCIPLES.

Of course most all colored coins require trusting the issuer!    The main advantage of using a decentralized block chain as opposed to the conventional way is that the colored coins can be exchanged in multiple exchanges and everyone can be assured that what I exchange in one is the same as the one exchange in another.  That is a very powerful use case!

Mining has almost nothing to do with colored coins.  Sure you can devise some kind of mining scheme,  but for what purpose?  To create another kind of trust free coin on top of the already trust free network?

Are you referring to Mastercoin? well that is a completely pointless exercise.   

I can see where you are going with the confidence chains and I do agree that a decentralized exchange would be better served on a network and protocol different from bitcoin.   However, can you explain to me how your proposal compares to Ripple and Open Transactions?

The main advantage of using a decentralized block chain as opposed to the conventional way is that the colored coins can be exchanged in multiple exchanges and everyone can be assured that what I exchange in one is the same as the one exchange in another.  That is a very powerful use case!

I will grant that there may be some perceived advantages to this.  But what this trust model ignores are the risks and long term costs of PoW systems.  I've already explained the drawbacks many times, they are in the record.  No one will be convinced of anything until they observe the effects themselves, so it's not very much worth spending time establishing these theoretical concepts over and over again.  I was supportive of Color Coins in the beginning, and I still like the basic concept- but the people involved with the project currently I dont associate with.  They've repeatedly made unreliable and false claims and there is no attempts to rectify this or even acknowledge it.  Thus you really have no idea what you're listening to with these people.  Note also that IBM is involved with the Color Coins model.  I think they see the potential to sell more hardware, but that isn't based on their own official statements.
 
just keep in mind that last time I explained why Open Transactions doesn't live up to it's claims I was attacked by Chris Odom.  I spend several months working with this character along with a number of other people.  I have the records to prove this.  AMOF, he *stole* the monetas.net domain from me.  This board just isn't an environment where you can get facts easily.

Given that, statements made about Open Transactions are largely untrue.  It is not decentralized.  It is a client-server system that uses crypto in a fairly straightforward way.  It also has an unintegrated Chaumian E-cash component that was added by way of Ben Lauries Lucre library.  This component does not work with the other parts of Open Transactions.  Mind you, OT has NO REAL WORLD USERS.  I don't take this project or Chris seriously.  Also Chaumian cash, while theoretically sound I don't feel is very relevant today.  The problem with it is that it's not decentralized, thus can be shut down.  OT exhumed Chaumian cash, made the suggestion that they changed or improved it in some way(he didnt), and presented it as a novel new idea.  I also sometimes wonder if David Chaum was involved with the creation of Bitcoin, but we can't know for sure.

Regarding Ripple,  It's also somewhat deceptive.  They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status.  It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin).  At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs?  XRP2.0?  Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence.  Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name.  It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'.  Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do).

Confidence Chains does a lot of things.  Turns out that to support a decentralized ledger you need to build a few things that let you do lots of other fun stuff.  It supports many financial functions, have look at the link in my sig.  If you have an questions you can post them to the forum.  I'll answer them personally.  thx, -bm

[Sukrim]

Regarding Ripple,  It's also somewhat deceptive.  They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status.  It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin).  At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs?  XRP2.0?  Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence.  Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name.  It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'.  Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do).

You can just fire up rippled and will immediately have 100 billion XRP at your disposal. Just like running bitcoind with a non-Satoshi block chain/genesis block however, no other server will accept these.

You are free to fork Ripple, the only requisite (similar to Bitcoin) is that you change the name and logo.

[bluemeanie1]

Regarding Ripple,  It's also somewhat deceptive.  They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status.  It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin).  At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs?  XRP2.0?  Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence.  Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name.  It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'.  Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do).

You can just fire up rippled and will immediately have 100 billion XRP at your disposal. Just like running bitcoind with a non-Satoshi block chain/genesis block however, no other server will accept these.

You are free to fork Ripple, the only requisite (similar to Bitcoin) is that you change the name and logo.

unless something has changed, you are only free to fork the CLIENT.  Secondly it is unclear what sorts of patent protections there are surrounding Ripple.

It's not a community project, it's a commercial project.

[FrictionlessCoin]

I will grant that there may be some perceived advantages to this.  But what this trust model ignores are the risks and long term costs of PoW systems.  I've already explained the drawbacks many times, they are in the record.  No one will be convinced of anything until they observe the effects themselves, so it's not very much worth spending time establishing these theoretical concepts over and over again.  I was supportive of Color Coins in the beginning, and I still like the basic concept- but the people involved with the project currently I dont associate with.  They've repeatedly made unreliable and false claims and there is no attempts to rectify this or even acknowledge it.  Thus you really have no idea what you're listening to with these people.  Note also that IBM is involved with the Color Coins model.  I think they see the potential to sell more hardware, but that isn't based on their own official statements.
 
just keep in mind that last time I explained why Open Transactions doesn't live up to it's claims I was attacked by Chris Odom.  I spend several months working with this character along with a number of other people.  I have the records to prove this.  AMOF, he *stole* the monetas.net domain from me.  This board just isn't an environment where you can get facts easily.

Given that, statements made about Open Transactions are largely untrue.  It is not decentralized.  It is a client-server system that uses crypto in a fairly straightforward way.  It also has an unintegrated Chaumian E-cash component that was added by way of Ben Lauries Lucre library.  This component does not work with the other parts of Open Transactions.  Mind you, OT has NO REAL WORLD USERS.  I don't take this project or Chris seriously.  Also Chaumian cash, while theoretically sound I don't feel is very relevant today.  The problem with it is that it's not decentralized, thus can be shut down.  OT exhumed Chaumian cash, made the suggestion that they changed or improved it in some way(he didnt), and presented it as a novel new idea.  I also sometimes wonder if David Chaum was involved with the creation of Bitcoin, but we can't know for sure.

Regarding Ripple,  It's also somewhat deceptive.  They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status.  It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin).  At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs?  XRP2.0?  Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence.  Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name.  It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'.  Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do).

Confidence Chains does a lot of things.  Turns out that to support a decentralized ledger you need to build a few things that let you do lots of other fun stuff.  It supports many financial functions, have look at the link in my sig.  If you have an questions you can post them to the forum.  I'll answer them personally.  thx, -bm

Thanks a lot for the long explanation.  Can you refer to me what 'false claims' were made by the Colored Coin folks?

Also thanks for the 2nd opinion on OT.   I was about to invest some time on it,  but I am going to take a leap of faithhere and believe what you say.

I reviewed your confidence chain stuff and the decentralized exchange.  Looks sound, but I still have a few open questions.

However,  what is your ETA on this?  Is this open source?  I've been waiting on the Buttercoin stuff for 6 months with nothing to show. 

[bluemeanie1]

I will grant that there may be some perceived advantages to this.  But what this trust model ignores are the risks and long term costs of PoW systems.  I've already explained the drawbacks many times, they are in the record.  No one will be convinced of anything until they observe the effects themselves, so it's not very much worth spending time establishing these theoretical concepts over and over again.  I was supportive of Color Coins in the beginning, and I still like the basic concept- but the people involved with the project currently I dont associate with.  They've repeatedly made unreliable and false claims and there is no attempts to rectify this or even acknowledge it.  Thus you really have no idea what you're listening to with these people.  Note also that IBM is involved with the Color Coins model.  I think they see the potential to sell more hardware, but that isn't based on their own official statements.
 
just keep in mind that last time I explained why Open Transactions doesn't live up to it's claims I was attacked by Chris Odom.  I spend several months working with this character along with a number of other people.  I have the records to prove this.  AMOF, he *stole* the monetas.net domain from me.  This board just isn't an environment where you can get facts easily.

Given that, statements made about Open Transactions are largely untrue.  It is not decentralized.  It is a client-server system that uses crypto in a fairly straightforward way.  It also has an unintegrated Chaumian E-cash component that was added by way of Ben Lauries Lucre library.  This component does not work with the other parts of Open Transactions.  Mind you, OT has NO REAL WORLD USERS.  I don't take this project or Chris seriously.  Also Chaumian cash, while theoretically sound I don't feel is very relevant today.  The problem with it is that it's not decentralized, thus can be shut down.  OT exhumed Chaumian cash, made the suggestion that they changed or improved it in some way(he didnt), and presented it as a novel new idea.  I also sometimes wonder if David Chaum was involved with the creation of Bitcoin, but we can't know for sure.

Regarding Ripple,  It's also somewhat deceptive.  They made a few tricky moves regarding their open source status.  It's a commercial product and their business model was to sell and market XRPs(similar to Mastercoin).  At one point I asked: If Ripple is open source, why can't I just issue a new set of XRPs?  XRP2.0?  Soon afterwards the project seemed to have faded out of existence.  Ripple also has virtually NOTHING to do with the original ideas associated with this name.  It's all part of the Googleplex mega-complex, which I will never(and probably can never) be a part of due to my outspoken opinions on the surveillance machine they are running under the guise of 'entrepreneurship' and 'startups'.  Thanks to St. Snowden I can now say these things without being branded a mentally insane schizophrenic(which some people in these circles have already tried to do).

Confidence Chains does a lot of things.  Turns out that to support a decentralized ledger you need to build a few things that let you do lots of other fun stuff.  It supports many financial functions, have look at the link in my sig.  If you have an questions you can post them to the forum.  I'll answer them personally.  thx, -bm

Thanks a lot for the long explanation.  Can you refer to me what 'false claims' were made by the Colored Coin folks?

Also thanks for the 2nd opinion on OT.   I was about to invest some time on it,  but I am going to take a leap of faithhere and believe what you say.

I reviewed your confidence chain stuff and the decentralized exchange.  Looks sound, but I still have a few open questions.

However,  what is your ETA on this?  Is this open source?  I've been waiting on the Buttercoin stuff for 6 months with nothing to show. 

re. Color Coins, there is an not exactly an atmosphere of information accuracy on that list.  There's a clear tendency to misname things, make claims then retract them etc.  That's all I'll say officially because basically I don't have the resources to 'go to court' on this, I'm just working as an open source developer.

the ETA is very soon.  I have most of the basic stuff finished, just need to complete the Kernel which is the code that decides which blocks go where given the transactions the node knows about.  There is definitely more than one way to do this, and there are strategies for optimizing, perhaps even strategies for exploitation(not unlike Bitcoin).  When this is done we will have a Distributed Exchange.

What do I mean by Distributed Exchange?

here we mean a way to exchange assets that has no specific center.  It is comprised of N nodes, and if any given node is disabled(either by legal or technical means) the exchange is not shut down and users access to the ledger(their account) remains intact - similar but not identical to Bitcoin.  Secondly the ORDER of the transactions(such as POST and ACCEPT exchanges) is determined by this congress of nodes.  This sort of functionality is impossible with PoW systems.

Thanks for looking it over, I will announce when it's at point for early adopters ie. technical people.

-bm

[FrictionlessCoin]

re. Color Coins, there is an not exactly an atmosphere of information accuracy on that list.  There's a clear tendency to misname things, make claims then retract them etc.  That's all I'll say officially because basically I don't have the resources to 'go to court' on this, I'm just working as an open source developer.

the ETA is very soon.  I have most of the basic stuff finished, just need to complete the Kernel which is the code that decides which blocks go where given the transactions the node knows about.  There is definitely more than one way to do this, and there are strategies for optimizing, perhaps even strategies for exploitation(not unlike Bitcoin).  When this is done we will have a Distributed Exchange.

What do I mean by Distributed Exchange?

here we mean a way to exchange assets that has no specific center.  It is comprised of N nodes, and if any given node is disabled(either by legal or technical means) the exchange is not shut down and users access to the ledger(their account) remains intact - similar but not identical to Bitcoin.  Secondly the ORDER of the transactions(such as POST and ACCEPT exchanges) is determined by this congress of nodes.  This sort of functionality is impossible with PoW systems.Thanks for looking it over, I will announce when it's at point for early adopters ie. technical people.

-bm

Can you explain this statement?   Doesn't Bitcoin already preserve the order of spending by making sure that there is a chain of transactions?   How does the congress of nodes enforce order in transactions?

Also, exchanges need to be lightning quick.  How do you do this on a peer 2 peer network where different peers see different transactions occurring?

Is this open source?

[bluemeanie1]

re. Color Coins, there is an not exactly an atmosphere of information accuracy on that list.  There's a clear tendency to misname things, make claims then retract them etc.  That's all I'll say officially because basically I don't have the resources to 'go to court' on this, I'm just working as an open source developer.

the ETA is very soon.  I have most of the basic stuff finished, just need to complete the Kernel which is the code that decides which blocks go where given the transactions the node knows about.  There is definitely more than one way to do this, and there are strategies for optimizing, perhaps even strategies for exploitation(not unlike Bitcoin).  When this is done we will have a Distributed Exchange.

What do I mean by Distributed Exchange?

here we mean a way to exchange assets that has no specific center.  It is comprised of N nodes, and if any given node is disabled(either by legal or technical means) the exchange is not shut down and users access to the ledger(their account) remains intact - similar but not identical to Bitcoin. Secondly the ORDER of the transactions(such as POST and ACCEPT exchanges) is determined by this congress of nodes.  This sort of functionality is impossible with PoW systems.Thanks for looking it over, I will announce when it's at point for early adopters ie. technical people.

-bm

Can you explain this statement?   Doesn't Bitcoin already preserve the order of spending by making sure that there is a chain of transactions?   How does the congress of nodes enforce order in transactions?

Also, exchanges need to be lightning quick.  How do you do this on a peer 2 peer network where different peers see different transactions occurring?

Is this open source?

there's a fairly detailed discussion on it here: http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=95845&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE=&STARTPAGE=4

Confidence Chains is much faster than bitcoin because there is no hashing.  The exchanges should run very fast in most cases, but latency characteristics depend on a number of factors(how the nodes live in the network, number of assets and transactions on the chain etc.).

yes, it will be open source.


ADDED: it's written in Java.  Crypto uses JCE so it's possible to swap in whatever crypto you want(bouncy/spongy castle).  Also possible to set your own EC curve, or even swap out ECC altogether(in favor of some other kind of DSA).  There seems to be much discussion about the security of NIST curves, and in order to avoid any liability regarding use of strong crypto, I leave that up to users.  for now I'm conforming to bitcoin crypto standards.  Also I use the base58 encoding for addresses. 

at one point exporting software in the USA with an EC curve that exceeded some parameter was actually illegal and considered arms export.