*serious* proposal for a new Altcoin. Input welcome.

[Nullu]

Before everyone starts pitching in with "reserved" and starts twitching to get pools set up, I am categorically saying now that I have no intentions of releasing this coin myself. This is just an idea for the rational users of this forum who have an interest in cryptocurrency and would like to discuss a concept for a coin that I would hope could stand above the endless garbage pump and dump coins that are littering the forum and increasing exponentially.

What I would like to suggest is that a number of regular users of the forum get together on a single concept for an altcoin, discuss how the coin should work, and SLOWLY come out with an altcoin based on these concepts. That means no mad dash to get the coin released, no mad dash to get it onto the exchanges to be pumped and dumped, but to come up with a coin in a genuine effort to develop a coin that would be able to survive long-term and escape the altcoin bubble we're currently in.

These are my (rough) ideas for the coin;

Firstly, the coin shouldn't be instamined at launch. This is a must. It creates too much instability and just pumps the coin up ready for dumping. This kind of instability is not desired and therefore must be addressed. My idea would be for the coin to actually begin with a much higher difficulty level, but a small proof of stake. This proof is stake would take a long time to mature, but when the coin difficulty finally does come down, the proof of stake would mature and it would reward the genuine early adopters and investors, while at the same time dissuading pumpers and dumpers from instamining the coin from launch. One way would be for a large difficulty readjustment time, but that brings its own problems to the table, so perhaps the coin would need a higher overall volume to compensate. The small proof of stake would also make it worthwhile to hold onto longterm for early miners, and rather pointless to dump. A coin designed to mature in the future. Not the short term.

Secondly, anyone who genuinely wants to "invest" in the coin should donate directly towards advertising campaigns for the coin. Something we could "see" being done. Not empty investment promises. Because the coin will not be popular with coin jumpers and those with the big hashpower who profit from early mining and dumping coins, awareness of the coin would have to be higher than other coins in order to gain a small but strong community of serious investors in the currency. Also, because the coin's value would not become realised for some time, donations would have to be in currencies that are tradable and directly or indirectly able to fund advertising.

Thirdly, the project should be lead by a small group of people the community can actually trust. None of these people would on their own be able to influence the coin's direction or otherwise spend any of the donated funds without the consent of the entire project group. This minimises the chance of someone attempting to profiteer from any notions of get-rich-quick sentiments that plague the altcoin community. People with influence and a reputation. There's no point running a project like by newbies (which unfortunately I would be considered to be), because there's no strong foundation of trust upon to build the coin.


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These are just a rough outline of the principles I think would be necessary to create the foundations of a good altcoin. The type of coin it should be, what sort of services it would cater to and what other purpose it has would naturally be up for debate, as would be the points I have raised which would have to be fleshed out into sound principles (if they are sound ideas) that would have to be agreed upon by the members of this project after due consideration and time spent considering the pros and cons of any ideas or proposals raised. Broad changes could be put to vote if the project ever took off.

This is not a "cobble something clever sound together and release it to be dumped" proposal. We have plenty of those already. I'm sure this community has plenty of users who would be seriously interested in developing a coin that was unique, and at the very list would be great learning experience first, and profitable second, rather than the other way around.

At the moment these are just discussion points. Maybe it's a terrible idea. Maybe it isn't. It would just be nice for once, at least, to have an intelligent debate about cryptocurrency, and what a good altcoin would look like that could be developed from the ground up. Maybe I'm fighting against the current here, but it would be a breath of fresh air compared to all the other coins we have right now. Who knows where cyptocurrency will be in six months time? I certainly don't.

What a lot of altcoins lack is any sort of group effort and management. It all seems rather "make it up as you go along" and hope it all works out along the way. I think a good idea in a sea of copycat coins and shortterm ventures is probably worth a lot more in the future of cryptocurrency than ctrl-c, ctrl, v.

If this ever became an actuality, I would of course contribute. However as the concept requires confidence in its leadership, and due to my relative short time here, I do not feel, unless there was strong support, that I would be the right person to be involved in developing this. I'm happy to throw ideas around, though.

[techguy]

See my criteria list here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396797.0

[Nullu]

See my criteria list here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=396797.0

I believe I've addressed point 4 in your points raised by the proof of stake that would mature for early adopters of the coin, providing a greater return and an indirect incentive to mining in the long term. Premine is not required if investment is made into the coin via donation. A very small premine may be required to get the ball rolling, but as this coin would not mature for some time it would be an investment however you look at it. Point 7 is also minimised by the proof of stake, and while impossible to prevent pump and dumping, investors would see a safer investment from their proof of stake on the coins they purchased than to keep buying and selling in the short term.

[markm]

Your entire basic premise though - that of spawning yet another coin when we cannot even maintain and surround with services and so on the coins we already have - seems to me to be part and parcel of the whole movement you purport to be objecting to.

We have more coins already than we have enough people to fully support and test and do unit tests for and secure build setups for and a full panoply of services for and advertising for and so on and so on and so on.

Moving on to create yet another just seems part of the whole slash and burn lets make a fast buck no matter how destructive that is kind of mentality.

So how about take it that a coin has already been created, that part is more than amply taken care of, heck maybe even too many have been created, now lets settle down to the real work of secure build process, full set of unit tests, market-makers on exchanges committed to making a market for the coin, miners full time dedicated to ensuring the coin has over half of the CPU power or GPU/FPGA power or the specific ASICs designed for that coin, payment processors exist for it, block explorers, the whole panoply of services.

You strike me as just another of those "oh lets not work. lets get rich quick by spawning yet another coin when we haven't even done the work needed to support all the coins we already created" people really. We have coins. What we need is all the infrastructure around them.

I even run into comments sometimes on here that amount to "I cannot be bothered to support such and such a coin so I shall write it off as dead and make a new one".

Such crap, as if they will support the next one either. Its just serial slash-and-burn.

What they are really writing off as dead is actual work, actual providing of value. They write all that off in favour of suckering more suckers with more scams. Including your proposal that amounts to lets make a less scammy-looking scam...

Actually it sounds like you want to drag serious developers / software support staff / eetc away from supporting what already exists to lend their reputations to your proposed less scammy looking scam.

The reason already long established coins sometimes seem to have no developers / support staff is because there are already too many such coins for them to keep up with supporting them all. Adding yet more to their workload does not seem helpful at all. How about rolling up your sleeves and helping support the coins we already have?

Look at the merged mined family of coins. for example. It has been taking forever to even just simply propagate to all of them the RAM-hogging fix that was initially tested in I0Coin. Adding yet another coin to the list of coins that need support, work, services, devs etc etc etc attention seems very counter-productive.

-MarkM-