[PRE-ANN] {Name TBD}: Let's skip the pump n dump phase completely, okay?

[Cryddit]

I've been working on a new cryptocurrency.  I call it Crypto-Credits, or 'Cryddits'  -- That's why I decided to use this name on the forum.  It is my goal to completely avoid the pump'n'dump that most get involved in, avoid becoming (much of) a speculative vehicle, and skip straight to the phase of actually being useful as a digital currency that people can use without kicking themselves later due to enormous changes in price.

Right now the CLI client and the daemon are ready.  The release will happen sometime after I figure out QT enough to get the wallet working.   Personally I don't give a crap about graphic user interfaces, and will probably just use the CLI client.  But I'm learning QT because normal people want GUI applications and will not use a digital currency that requires hard skills like literacy and typing.  In terms of graphics I have the graphic design sense of a blind person, and will most likely make a GUI that most people find ugly or boring. It could be a week, it could be three.  I hope it won't be a couple of months, but that's a possibility because as yet I don't even know how "deep" QT is.  

I'm willing to take instruction and help, and expend personal effort, in making the client prettier or easier to use.  Aside from having the design sense of a blind person I *know* that I have the design sense of a blind person, and will cheerfully assume that virtually every normal human being has a better sense of graphics and GUI usability than I do.  So I'm very receptive to any usability or graphics problems that people bring up.  

Once I have a working QT wallet, I'd like someone to test it on Windows and help me work out the inevitable kinks before I go to actual release.  I personally do not own any Windows machines and therefore have no means to test it.

I will neither pump nor dump.  Ever.  I don't use social media, because I'm barely social in the first place.  So it will be very easy for me to completely avoid Tweeting about it, put up a Reddit page, mention it on Facebook, etc.  I don't use any of those sites in the first place.  So, as developer, I'm making a perfectly serious promise never to "pump" the coin or whore for publicity.  I also will never 'dump' the coin in the sense of selling more than about five percent of any I come to own in any single month.  And I'm going to include features actively repulsive to those whose main interest is in doing exactly that.

Here are some interesting features:  

1)  There will be an initial giveaway because it is mainly a proof-of-stake coin and you have to have an initial giveaway to get one going.  The giveaway will be exactly one million cryddits, divided in equal tranches among at least tens of thousands of public keys.  Most of you reading in this forum will discover that you already own at least one of the corresponding private keys because I'm going to blatantly steal the public keys from existing blockchains, including but not limited to the Bitcoin blockchain.  A viable currency needs an initial wide distribution.  Having an early giveaway exclusively going to people who respond to an initial thread is not nearly wide enough a distribution, and could be interpreted as a "pump" which, if you remember, I promised to not do. So I'm going for a distribution much wider than any initial thread could muster.  

2)  Because a lot of these addresses represent lost private keys or will wind up in the hands of nonparticipants, each of the initial tranches will become spendable by one of the other keys at random intervals about four weeks to four months apart, until either someone claims them, or until they have become spendable by any of seven addresses and still have not been claimed.  Each key, therefore, has a potential claim on seven different tranches of coins - but only if none of the other qualified keys takes them first.  The last (eighth) address is mine.  

That means that, If we assume that 40% of the addresses in the distribution are "dead", then eventually -- over an interval starting about seven months after initial distribution and ending twenty-eight months after distributon, about 2.8 percent of the initial million coins will be claimed by me.  This is completely probabilistic, and represents the only special treatment I'm giving myself in terms of the initial distribution.  This is effectively my "premine."

As someone who promises never to pump the coin, nor spend large amounts of it in a given month, I will flatly refuse to spend that 2.8% (or whatever it actually turns out to be) on giveaways, prizes, or promotions.   I will use at least half of it for bounties, available for someone who contributes code enabling new features or otherwise facilitates the use of the coin as a currency.  There will be absolutely no bounties for anyone who facilitates the use of cryddits as a vehicle for currency speculation or anyone who organizes a mining pool.  In other words, I'd cheerfully pay bounties to someone who developed a nice web interface allowing merchants to easily take cryddits as payment and in turn spend them on things that the merchants actually need.   But anyone who puts it on an exchange where it can be used to buy and sell other cryptocurrencies will not be rewarded for doing so.  Like mining pools, It's inevitable.  But neither has anything to do with this coin's real purpose - to be a *useful and usable* currency as opposed to being a speculative vehicle.

3) In order to make it repugnant to mine-n-dump operations, we will start out with about 3% inflation, and only about 10% of that available for proof-of-work.  In concrete terms, it's seven blocks per hour, one half-coin per block, or 84 coins per day.  Only one block out of ten will be awarded for mining as opposed to proof-of-stake, so miners are looking at block times of about 1.43 hours, for half a coin each, totaling about 8.4 coins a day.  It is my sincere hope that by making the creation of new coins slow relative to the number of existing coins, and making it flatly impossible for miners to control the majority of coins created simply by proof-of-work mining, we can skip appealing to the "mine-n-dump" crowd altogether.  Hopefully they can be encouraged to hold in order to take advantage of proof-of-stake mining.  And if they don't, their antics will barely affect the rest of us except insofar as we have opportunities to buy coins from them.  

Tranches of cryddits to take advantage of proof-of-stake mining will most likely be cheaper than mining rigs anyway, so if they whine, screw 'em. (they probably need to be screwed, and often, by someone who knows how).  

4) We're going to do a radical thing -- we're going to *STICK* with 3 percent inflation.  Each successive year will see 3 percent more cryddits created than the previous year.  This completely avoids the early hyperinflation of the money supply characteristic of most cryptocoins, and fails to reward any attempt at pump-n-dump as much as it fails to reward any attempt at mine-n-dump.  It is my fervent wish that by failing to reward currency speculation, cryddits can instead be used simply as a medium of exchange.  

5)  I expect to start with an abysmally low valuation, due to a large initial dump of cryddits by those who decline to participate and due to lack of support by speculators and miners who just want to dump.  That's okay.  After that initial dump, there should be no motivation for another dump to happen.  As for the speculators and the mine-n-dump crowd, we're better off without that "support" anyway.

6)  It may not be operating in the first version, but the infrastructure to support a "tumbler" is already in place.  There are actually two types of "coins" in the system, although the tumbler coins are usually invisible.  "Tumbling" your cryddits means your client will spend them to buy tumbler coins, then spend the tumbler coins in a subsequent block to buy back cryddits.  This is an effort to preserve some financial privacy even though the block chain is a public record.

This works because the transaction where cryddits are exchanged for tumbler coins is a single transaction in each block with dozens to scores of inputs and outputs, exchanging at a single price.  And the client is instructed to exchange "standardized" amounts in each transaction - powers of two, to be exact - so it becomes impossible to distinguish all the people who exchanged the same standard amount from each other.  

The exchange price for tumbler coins floats with the market, but is constrained never to change by more than a tenth of a percent between blocks and never to allow anyone to be the only person who trades a particular "standard" amount - so the amount you have after a tumble should never be more than a tenth of a percent different than the amount you started with.  In theory, because all buyers and sellers get the same price in each tumbler transaction, you should break even in the long run.  In practice, because you want your coins tumbled more than the people with tumbler coins want to help you, they'll set their clients to attempt to profit from tumbling, meaning they'll sell only in rounds where the price is slightly higher, and buy back in rounds when the price is slightly lower.  So tumbling your coins will cost you slightly, and there is (slight) money to be made by holding and dealing in tumbler coins.  Also, there will be a transaction fee - but if you have an average amount of cryddits, you'll receive nearly as much in transaction fees (because of proof-of-stake blocks) as you spend on them.  

Finally, because the 'float' of cryddits vs. tumbler coins is constrained to never change prices by more than a tenth of a percent, there is likely to be more demand (or more supply) in most rounds than can actually trade in the very narrow allowed price range.  The net effect of this is that if you want to tumble a very large number of cryddits, it will take a very long time, during which the price of tumbler coins will go steadily up.  And that's fairly reasonable, because financial privacy really *should* be easier for pocket change than it is for very large transactions.  In the UI (when I figure out how to make a UI) you'll simply see the coins steadily disappearing from the account you've marked to tumble, and a few minutes later reappearing in the account you're tumbling to.  

Of course anyone can "game" this to tumble coins faster by splitting a large amount up among many wallets and instructing each wallet to tumble -- but in doing so they would risk becoming the only buyer or only seller (or the majority buyer or seller) in some of the tumbling transactions.  That would work against their own financial privacy because if they wind up exchanging for just their own coins from other wallets, they'd be getting back money that's traceable through the tumble to the transaction they wanted to keep private.

7)  Cryddits come in colored denominations.  "Black" cryddits are indivisible, equivalent to "satoshis" in Bitcoin parlance. A thousand of them make a "Red" cryddit, which in turn is one one-thousandth of an "Orange" cryddit, etc.  You can use metric prefixes if you like instead, based on the "Yellow" cryddit as a standard measure.  I'm guessing though, that it'll probably be easier for people to just accept that they have a hundred "Orange" cryddits rather than getting stuck on some conceptual bug about only having one-tenth of a "Yellow" cryddit.  Higher denominations will be green, blue, purple, and white, but no one can possibly own blue, purple, or white cryddits until many years of inflation have passed.  After all the entire money supply in the first year only amounts to one blue cryddit.  


Edit: changed post name.  Someone else may want to use "crypto-credits" and with the domain name of my choice based on it burnt, I've no reason to stick to it.

[Nullu]

Finally a thread about a new coin worth reading about. Colour me interested.

Few questions;

1: How far away do you think this is from testing?
2: Do you see any potential problems or difficulties in implementing some of the features you mentioned?
3: Coloured denominations; they will have a fixed value, correct? They simply serve as an alternative to dealing in decimalisation?
4: How does one obtain a stake in CC?

[MisO69]

This sounds like a fun coin. I can't help other than help mine and tumble. 

[instacalm]

Cryddits?

[Cryddit]

Finally a thread about a new coin worth reading about. Colour me interested.

Few questions;

1: How far away do you think this is from testing?

Dunno really.  It depends on how long it takes me to figure out QT and adapt the Bitcoin source I started with.  I've worked out the CLI and Daemon to use "multivalent amounts"  (valence 0 = base cryddits, valence 1 = tumbler coins)  and an "amount" as a concept is replaced throughout that code with a map of valences to coin amounts.  

Incidentally, there can easily be a lot more than two valences - if another use is found for "colored coins" that requires another valence of coin amount, that's simple to implement.

But this has become a problem with QT because they don't provide anything like an input or output widget for something that bizarre - the QT code wants to handle int64 input and output through number-entry and number-display  widgets, and so far I haven't figured out how to make the colored-amount widgets that I want to replace them.

2: Do you see any potential problems or difficulties in implementing some of the features you mentioned?

Not technical problems as such.  The clients have yet to learn about "tumbling," which is why I hedged that that feature may not be available initially.  But there is no particular further problem with implementing it.  I will have to crawl through the protocol for exchanging bids and offers, and the block making code for using bids and offers to construct transactions without further input from the bidders.  It was moderately complicated to work out the proxy signature scheme needed to make it work, but I found it in Schneier's book "Applied Cryptography."

3: Coloured denominations; they will have a fixed value, correct? They simply serve as an alternative to dealing in decimalisation?

Yes.  I'm tired of hearing the crap about people being discouraged because they can only own part of a Bitcoin.  I wanted to give them an easy alternate way to think about it.

4: How does one obtain a stake in CC?

What I'm planning to do (in fact have already the code to do) is extract public addresses from the Bitcoin blockchain, excluding coinbase keys and blatant speculation purchases (the buy-and-sell exchange floors are easy to spot).  What I haven't done yet is write code to do the patch-and-join to figure out which sets of addresses are likely to be owned by the same entity.  In each such set of addresses, I'll pick one at random to use in the initial distribution.  So, hopefully, every owner of Bitcoin who has actually used it to make a transaction will have one tranch of coins (assuming they haven't lost the public key).  In practice, some will have more than one, but that can't be helped.  If that amounts to some too-small number of addresses, I'll do the same with the Litecoin blockchain.

So, at the original distribution, it'll be "The Altcoin you already own."  And people will find when they download a client and paste in their bitcoin public addresses, that one tranche of cryddits will already be assigned to at least one of their addresses.  But this will completely ignore how much or how little Bitcoin they have at that address -- everybody's getting an even stake as far as I can discern who "everybody" is.

If you want more than the even stake, the strategy is simple: download the client as early as you can and put up a node.  The proof-of-stake awards (3 percent interest on a million coins) will be divided per share among those who are actually running nodes, and shares initially are (nearly) equal.  So if you get in while not very many people have started running nodes, that's to your advantage.  

Also, you can use that large initial dump that I expect as a buying opportunity.  You'll probably be able to buy a whole bunch of cryddits for not very much money (or Bitcoin) at all. 

Otherwise, make sure that you have used Bitcoin to actually make a purchase!  I'm going to completely ignore keys corresponding to amounts that have merely been purchased from mtgox, btce, bitstamp, etc.  So if you've never yet used your bitcoin to actually make a purchase, you're likely to not get an initial tranche.  

Finally, another winning strategy is DEFEAT MY BEST EFFORTS!  If you can arrange the Bitcoin blockchain so that your addresses are not linkable by patch-and-join, you'll get more than one tranche of cryddits.  Watch closely as I fail to care too much.  Best efforts are best efforts, I'm not going to sweat that they aren't perfect.

[Cryddit]

Cryddits?

Crypto-Credits was just too many syllables to expect people to actually say, especially if they intend to use metric prefixes in front of it.

[boomerjackson]

I really really like this idea. I can help with promotion if you want, already have the subreddit set up.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cryddits

I also mod the RPC, LOT, and Colbertcoin subreddits

[Nullu]

Thank you for answering my questions so thoroughly. Unfortunately as someone relatively new to cryptocurrency I doubt my initial stake would be anything but relatively minuscule, however there's some really interesting ideas here so I'd like to get involved. I'm on the forums daily, and have some coding experience in several languages (although only as a hobbyist). I love to tinker, so I'd be more than happy to participate in any rigorous windows-based testing.

I like the idea of coloured denominations. Believe it or not, I was thinking of something very similar this morning. Not with colours, but by rating each denomination by a precious metal; tin, copper, iron, silver, gold, so on. It probably does make more sense using colours as they're an abstract and so their value is determined by association rather than preconceptions. With different dominations I feel like it's a way for everyone to get in at their own level. I think this concept could be very powerful in providing variance in any sort of market-based system. I'm sure there will also be a desire to trade in lower dominations for higher denominations and as such a natural consequence will be higher denominations would be seen to be more valuable than the sum of lower denominations they're made from. Purely from perception, at least.

Cryddits?

Crypto-Credits was just too many syllables to expect people to actually say, especially if they intend to use metric prefixes in front of it.

I quite like CC, for short.

[markonegolf]

I quite like CC, for short.

+1

[Cryddit]

CC will make an excellent "trade ticker" at the very least.  Using it as a name, though?  Hmmmm...  It lacks vowels, making it pretty unpronounceable to people accustomed to most human languages.  Of course, you could treat it as an abbreviation, making it "See See" at least to English speakers.  The same letter is pronounced differently elsewhere, but that should be relatively harmless because the names of the alphabet letters are among the very first things travelers and students learn in a foreign language.

I was, for a while, thinking of calling it "Marbles" to go with the denomination-by-color scheme.  So you could have people trading a Red Marble for a thousand Black Marbles, and so on. 

Anyway, I'm not too hung up on the name.  If people think a different name is better (and it isn't obscene or too silly) I'd consider releasing under a different name. We can use "Cryddit" and "CC" interchangeably. 

This is an idea that amuses me probably more than any good idea would, but we could even poke fun at the hazy relationship between English orthography and phonology, and just insist that C-R-Y-D-D-I-T is how you spell the word that's pronounced "See See".  It would certainly be no sillier than some other English spellings like "Tough" or "Worcestershire" or even "Groat". ....  But naaaah, nobody would go for it.


The more I think about it, the more I'm reconsidering the "has made an actual purchase" criterion.  While I want to get it out to actual users of cryptocurrencies as opposed to mere speculators,  I'm afraid that the speculator population is probably more than 95% of everybody who even owns any cryptocurrency and I don't want to restrict the initial distribution that far.  I really do want it to be "the cryptocurrency you already own" for nearly everybody, making for a very "fair" distribution.  And it might be the cryptocurrency that *teaches* people that they actually can use cryptocurrencies for purchases and sales, even if they've only done speculation up to this point.

As regards getting a stake in CC, I forgot to mention the other benefit of downloading a wallet early and putting up a node;  you have a potential claim on six additional tranches per imported key.  If you have your node already set up and running before a keyholder with a prior claim on one of your six potential additional tranches starts participating, and the timer expires enabling your key, then you get an extra share. 

[Cryddit]

Unfortunately as someone relatively new to cryptocurrency I doubt my initial stake would be anything but relatively minuscule ....

If it's anything other than the exact same size as the initial stake of everyone else, that should be merely a coincidence of linkable and unlinkable addresses.  An address with 70K bitcoins would get someone exactly the same initial stake as an address with 0.007 bitcoins.  Think of it as my way of trying to work around the "early adopter" advantage.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I've been working on a new cryptocurrency...

This explains why u were trolling in Nxt threads...

Unignored u. Watching with interest.

[Cryddit]

I really really like this idea. I can help with promotion if you want, already have the subreddit set up.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cryddits

I'm just ... not sure how to respond to this.  I knew it was going to happen, I guess.  I don't mind you doing that at all.  But as far as I'm concerned it was completely unnecessary. 

[Cryddit]

I've been working on a new cryptocurrency...

This explains why u were trolling in Nxt threads...

Unignored u. Watching with interest.

It was never my intention to provoke anger.  If I have done so, I apologize to you.  I did want to float some of these ideas and see how people responded to them, so it's likely to be true that I abused your thread.  I'm sorry.  I'm not very capable of understanding some matters of normal communication and perception, so it's difficult for me to tell when I'm doing the wrong thing.

Anyway, thanks for your interest.  It'll be quite an experiment.

[Cryddit]

I see that one of you guys promptly went out and got the 'cryddit.com' domain. 

Sneaky.  But I should have expected it.  In fact, I should have registered it before I posted here. 

Now, here's a question.  Do I just pick another name, or do I work with 'cryddit.org' instead?

[Cryddit]

Well, okay, had a little discussion with my ISP that settles it.  When it goes live it'll be with a different name. The alternative would be to reward a domain squatter for antisocial behavior.

Whatever, it wasn't the name that was important anyway.  In light of the current incident, I'll announce the new name no sooner than the release actually happens.

[jimhsu]

Watching with interest.

Some questions:
1. What did you base your assessment of 40% address activity on? Monthly BTC exchanged? Days destroyed? etc. Specifically, if the amount of "cryddits" claimed through the process is significantly less than what you anticipate, what will you do then? (based on the popularity of bitcoin compared with, well, any alt, I suspect this is the case).
2. Assuming that the distribution goes on, I expect 28 months to elapse before you get the coins necessary for your "pre-mine". How do you plan to fund the project in the interim? Bounties, marketing (if any), etc
3. Several coins that heavily weigh a PoS scheme vs PoW have susceptibility to spending attacks where a single holder mines the majority of PoS blocks (see yacoin for instance) without a PoW block appearing. What measures in PoS block generation do you propose to mitigate that?
4. You mention using transactions to determine if an address is valid. What is a transaction? Sending bitcoins to a non-exchange affilitated address?

[sumantso]

My wallet has only been used as an intermediary for exchange transactions. Does this mean I won't get anything?

[Nullu]

Unfortunately as someone relatively new to cryptocurrency I doubt my initial stake would be anything but relatively minuscule ....

If it's anything other than the exact same size as the initial stake of everyone else, that should be merely a coincidence of linkable and unlinkable addresses.  An address with 70K bitcoins would get someone exactly the same initial stake as an address with 0.007 bitcoins.  Think of it as my way of trying to work around the "early adopter" advantage.

I see. My wallet has had coins coming in and out, but only to exchanges. The coins have been spent on the exchanges, but not on services, so I'm not sure if I have any stake beyond the initial stake, but as long as I'm in the overall majority percentage of stake holders, that's not so bad.

[jimhsu]

Thank you for answering my questions so thoroughly. Unfortunately as someone relatively new to cryptocurrency I doubt my initial stake would be anything but relatively minuscule, however there's some really interesting ideas here so I'd like to get involved. I'm on the forums daily, and have some coding experience in several languages (although only as a hobbyist). I love to tinker, so I'd be more than happy to participate in any rigorous windows-based testing.

I like the idea of coloured denominations. Believe it or not, I was thinking of something very similar this morning. Not with colours, but by rating each denomination by a precious metal; tin, copper, iron, silver, gold, so on. It probably does make more sense using colours as they're an abstract and so their value is determined by association rather than preconceptions. With different dominations I feel like it's a way for everyone to get in at their own level. I think this concept could be very powerful in providing variance in any sort of market-based system. I'm sure there will also be a desire to trade in lower dominations for higher denominations and as such a natural consequence will be higher denominations would be seen to be more valuable than the sum of lower denominations they're made from. Purely from perception, at least.

Cryddits?

Crypto-Credits was just too many syllables to expect people to actually say, especially if they intend to use metric prefixes in front of it.

I quite like CC, for short.

If anything, MMORPGs have just about established the color=denomination scheme for the general public.

"That house costs 2 plats? That's absurd."

"I'll give you 3 coppers for that coffee, if you throw in a cookie."

Better than trying to memorizing abbreviations or trying to figure out whether you paid 0.0000017 or 0.000017 BTC for that soda.