[ANN] [MINT] Mintcoin (POS / 5%) [NO ICO] [Fair distro, community maintained]

[ol92]

It's not a fighting amongst mintcoin holders. Just community stating their opinion.

First of all whatever the reasons, I don't believe a hard fork will benefit the coin. The coin's parameters are good enough (even if not perfect), and for some minor modifications, it won't be worth to risk a hard fork. Remember what happened after removing POW (1.6->1.7 transition), for weeks we had to remind people to switch to new version. MINT's parameters are what makes MINT itself.

I don't also think devs should disclose everything such as the expected "big news" announcement, it may be hidden for some reasons, and I expect it to be good when it can be announced.

But; the problem lies with keeping the premine intransparent and devs not being active enough (I don't mean bugfixes here). For the devs; they are active and react instantly when there's anything critical going on, I'll give them that. But unless anything critical happens, we don't hear anything from them. This sometimes sounds as if they're nonexistant and abandoned the coin.

The premine transparency is another problem. I don't care if the devs are keeping it for the community, got some of it for themselves, got it stolen, or anything, I really don't care. What I care is transparency. I don't need to know exact numbers either, the community will be satisfied with answers like "around 100M is spent on bounties, around 100M's keys are lost in some data loss, we reserve this many coins for our personal payment; but you can find remaining 450-500M in these addresses in blockchain explorer and all of these coins are reserved for use at least after 1 year: link of blockchain explorer". That's all needed to resolve transparency. Exact book keeping is not required in any way. Communication is.

But devs staying mute on these issues is exaggerating the problems.


For bugfixes, problems with wallet: I don't think it's the devs job to fix everything and release things. If you can help, and want to help, just fork the coin code on github with your user account ( https://github.com/mintcoinproject/mintcoin ), fix the issue which bothers you, and send a pull request to the devs. Devs merge those sooner or later, and it'll be ready in next release. As long as something doesn't require a hard fork, it's the community's job -- otherwise it just becomes one man's coin.

I won't blame the devs for not fixing problems, but for transparency and activity (in the sense of keeping us informed of what's going on, if anything's going on, etc), it's on devs' hands, and that's what causes the issues with the community.

+1
With all the recent problems of premine with various coins, there is an increasing need of transparency : as you said, at least some estimate on main spendings, and some adresses to follow the premine major movements.

I think this is the new standard expected by the altercoin community now.

[acceptance2]

It's not a fighting amongst mintcoin holders. Just community stating their opinion.

First of all whatever the reasons, I don't believe a hard fork will benefit the coin. The coin's parameters are good enough (even if not perfect), and for some minor modifications, it won't be worth to risk a hard fork. Remember what happened after removing POW (1.6->1.7 transition), for weeks we had to remind people to switch to new version. MINT's parameters are what makes MINT itself.

I don't also think devs should disclose everything such as the expected "big news" announcement, it may be hidden for some reasons, and I expect it to be good when it can be announced.

But; the problem lies with keeping the premine intransparent and devs not being active enough (I don't mean bugfixes here). For the devs; they are active and react instantly when there's anything critical going on, I'll give them that. But unless anything critical happens, we don't hear anything from them. This sometimes sounds as if they're nonexistant and abandoned the coin.

The premine transparency is another problem. I don't care if the devs are keeping it for the community, got some of it for themselves, got it stolen, or anything, I really don't care. What I care is transparency. I don't need to know exact numbers either, the community will be satisfied with answers like "around 100M is spent on bounties, around 100M's keys are lost in some data loss, we reserve this many coins for our personal payment; but you can find remaining 450-500M in these addresses in blockchain explorer and all of these coins are reserved for use at least after 1 year: link of blockchain explorer". That's all needed to resolve transparency. Exact book keeping is not required in any way. Communication is.

But devs staying mute on these issues is exaggerating the problems.


For bugfixes, problems with wallet: I don't think it's the devs job to fix everything and release things. If you can help, and want to help, just fork the coin code on github with your user account ( https://github.com/mintcoinproject/mintcoin ), fix the issue which bothers you, and send a pull request to the devs. Devs merge those sooner or later, and it'll be ready in next release. As long as something doesn't require a hard fork, it's the community's job -- otherwise it just becomes one man's coin.

I won't blame the devs for not fixing problems, but for transparency and activity (in the sense of keeping us informed of what's going on, if anything's going on, etc), it's on devs' hands, and that's what causes the issues with the community.

+1
With all the recent problems of premine with various coins, there is an increasing need of transparency : as you said, at least some estimate on main spendings, and some adresses to follow the premine major movements.

I think this is the new standard expected by the altercoin community now.

Precisely.

When there were very few coins on the market, it was basically a sellers (developers) market. Now, there are hundreds of options for a potential investor. Coins offering the most transparency and accountability will be the winners.

[okaynow]

^^
I'd guess the bystanders can easily misunderstand what it going on.
Perhaps it would be better to discuss this privately.

Exactly my point.
Making a fuss over something that can be resolved quite easily in a private and adult manner should be the obvious way to go.

I dont mind a dev not spamming his brains away when there is nothing to be said.
Like Paspi said, when there were issues, the devs were on top.

I can understand and accept and call for more transparency, but if we are going to give more relevance to anon accounts over the devs and more longstanding members of the community, then this is just ridiculous...

This is following a clear trend. There are no real altruistic bystanders anywhere on these boards, we are all here for profits.
This can take time, more time, or even more time and effort to work.

But it will not be instant.

[mgburks77]

its pretty simple, really.

if you are looking for a prospectus like for your mutual fund or something what are you doing playing around with alt coins?

They are experimental, use at your own risk.

If you don't like it get out.

[DougB62]

its pretty simple, really.

if you are looking for a prospectus like for your mutual fund or something what are you doing playing around with alt coins?

They are experimental, use at your own risk.

If you don't like it get out.

I'm totally behind the team at this point.

This *WILL* take time.

I too am worried about this discussion being held here.

If these things must be discussed, and it appears that they must, then there should be a more "board room" type environment for the discussion. All of the nit-picking, and dirty laundry airing, and accusations should not be in this thread, and probably not on this forum at all.

To all who want out - please just sell your holdings, and leave the coin to those who trust and believe in it. 

[mgburks77]

meh, these folks are btc holders so this all FUD.

bitcoin has an anonymous creator that is out of the picture and who has a gargantuan "pre-mine".

Don't ever see any of them complaining about that, do ya?

 

I'm still behind MINT dev team as well, because I think they've designed a fine cryptocurrency, and they have supported it all of the way.

[stormia]

From what I have seen from my exploration of MINT so far is that some fairly quick changes can be made. Modifying the code to provide a quick launch of the application, modifying the code to reduce the computing resources that staking uses, and adding Qt5+ support are the first obvious things I see.

Those seem like great ideas, how difficult would they be to implement?

[Kergekoin]

- Porting to QT5 and making a static build is not hard to do.
- Checkpoints need improvements current checkpoints are badly chosen. This would probably decrease wallet launch time.
- Staking can be perhaps made better with only one change. Combine/split stake could be changed to a larger number. That would reduce "dust" - very small stakes/mints.
None of those changes does not require a fork.
The big question is, who is going to put hes/her free hours in to it?


In future perspective, i would suggest porting mintcoin code to newer protocol. This means a lot of changes. Probably around 2 days work at least.

[DougB62]

- Porting to QT5 and making a static build is not hard to do.
- Checkpoints need improvements current checkpoints are badly chosen. This would probably decrease wallet launch time.
- Staking can be perhaps made better with only one change. Combine/split stake could be changed to a larger number. That would reduce "dust" - very small stakes/mints.
None of those changes does not require a fork.
The big question is, who is going to put hes/her free hours in to it?


In future perspective, i would suggest porting mintcoin code to newer protocol. This means a lot of changes. Probably around 2 days work at least.

Well back in ancient times (think late 70's, DOS, TRS-80), I started "coding". I decided computers were "my bag", but unfortunately went the hardware route, and became a Technician - thus my coding skills are pretty much non-existent.

I'd love to help - I would put in the time. But someone would have to put in the time to teach me how first  lol!

However if I can be of any assistance whatsoever - don't know how I could be, but, I'm here and willing.

[paspi]

meh, these folks are btc holders so this all FUD.

well, I'm a MINT holder, mined MINT from its first week, still holding all my coins, and contributed my 2-3 months of time to MINT (including important fixes for main wallet, and also an android wallet I've been working on since April) -- and I don't think it's FUD.

I have to remind David Latapie is the founder of Mintcoin Fund, which means he is legally under obligation for its actions, in real life. It is a very large commitment.

Some of the other people which are curious of the premine (of which I know) are also contributers to Mintcoin (Let it be press releases, web sites, finding things to do like forestration projects, so on).


If you show the way out to the people who are actually contributing to the coin; who just have reasonable demands like seeing where the premine is spent (or how much is not spent yet), MINT would lose its community support. It is true everyone got onboard MINT knowing there is a 700M premine, but everyone from the beginning demanded to learn where it was being spent, and what is now happening is that they still do.

If you want a coin to build a community, gain traction, and increase in value, you have to get people spend their time for it. If you can't warrant people (who are spending their time on it) that it's really worth their time, then you will have just another bitcoin clone with good parameters. Spending time is an investment, if at any point anyone sees that his investments aren't worth it, he'll invest in better things instead.

I just don't understand how secret the devs have to be for 700M mint, it's just a premine, which is going to be spent for the coin at the end, it's not a strategic nuclear missile. MINT currently has good community support behind it. But people just want to be sure the premine is really being spent for the coin, and be able to track it. If not, why should they spend their time and continue contributing to the coin; just trust the words of anonymous devs who are seen only once in a while and who are every few pages argued to left the coin?

I'll really be surprised if MINT comes so far building a community behind it, and then can't manage to enlarge it due to some irrational secrecy.

[paspi]

- Porting to QT5 and making a static build is not hard to do.

What does QT5 bring in advantage?

- Checkpoints need improvements current checkpoints are badly chosen. This would probably decrease wallet launch time.

I'm not sure on that. I just traced wallet launch time today, and its bottleneck seems to be loading blocks from file to memory on startup (not even the extra calculations it does for POS after loading the blockchain). But I don't know if we're using the latest blockchain file format from bitcoin, or just an older shitty one. Maybe file format might be changed to whatever's the norm now, or maybe it's just that we have too many blocks to sustain it.

- Staking can be perhaps made better with only one change. Combine/split stake could be changed to a larger number. That would reduce "dust" - very small stakes/mints.

We had discussed this with the devs previously. Although defining combine threshold would have its benefits, there are some security concerns with it -- the network has to be big enough (otherwise there is a risk that everyone generates all their possible stakes, and network cannot find any more stakable TXs (until up to 20 days pass), resulting in inability to confirm transactions). The other point (it's current state) is that not everyone might be able to generate stake (because there is a fixed number of blocks per year, and every staking TX needs its own block with the current state).

I don't believe size of the network grew sufficiently in the last 1-2 months to support combining transactions, but some statistics might be created on the blockchain to see what the possibilities are.

None of those changes does not require a fork.
The big question is, who is going to put hes/her free hours in to it?

In future perspective, i would suggest porting mintcoin code to newer protocol. This means a lot of changes. Probably around 2 days work at least.

Any examples on newer protocol, what do you mean? This might have implications such as backwards compability or mintcoinj.

[mgburks77]

meh, these folks are btc holders so this all FUD.

well, I'm a MINT holder, mined MINT from its first week, still holding all my coins, and contributed my 2-3 months of time to MINT (including important fixes for main wallet, and also an android wallet I've been working on since April) -- and I don't think it's FUD.

I have to remind David Latapie is the founder of Mintcoin Fund, which means he is legally under obligation for its actions, in real life. It is a very large commitment.

Some of the other people which are curious of the premine (of which I know) are also contributers to Mintcoin (Let it be press releases, web sites, finding things to do like forestration projects, so on).


If you show the way out to the people who are actually contributing to the coin; who just have reasonable demands like seeing where the premine is spent (or how much is not spent yet), MINT would lose its community support. It is true everyone got onboard MINT knowing there is a 700M premine, but everyone from the beginning demanded to learn where it was being spent, and what is now happening is that they still do.

If you want a coin to build a community, gain traction, and increase in value, you have to get people spend their time for it. If you can't warrant people (who are spending their time on it) that it's really worth their time, then you will have just another bitcoin clone with good parameters. Spending time is an investment, if at any point anyone sees that his investments aren't worth it, he'll invest in better things instead.

I just don't understand how secret the devs have to be for 700M mint, it's just a premine, which is going to be spent for the coin at the end, it's not a strategic nuclear missile. MINT currently has good community support behind it. But people just want to be sure the premine is really being spent for the coin, and be able to track it. If not, why should they spend their time and continue contributing to the coin; just trust the words of anonymous devs who are seen only once in a while and who are every few pages argued to left the coin?

I'll really be surprised if MINT comes so far building a community behind it, and then can't manage to enlarge it due to some irrational secrecy.

What are you talking about? they gave some to david for mintcoin fund, they've gotten a lot of merchants to add mintcoin, which takes some more, and they have offered a lot for the android wallet, which has yet to materialize etc

The guy just told David to take out whatever he felt he had earned from what was left over from the mintcoin fund and to send the rest back. That's pretty fucking cool if you ask me. It's you guys that have a bug up your ass. Even if the guy delivered a complete accounting it wouldn't change the coin's value significantly. Going on and on about it is just something to repeat over and over to spread fear, doubt, and uncertainty about mintcoin from holders of other coins. That's all there is to that.

Something that really would increase the coins value is a completed minting android wallet. What's the story with that?

It seems to me they've done everything they have said they were going to do and if there is any left over as far as I'm concerned it's theirs to do what they want to with.

This coin is in the wild. It looks like the value is around 3 sats. That's the situation.

[mgburks77]

How come you guys aren't concerned about the $100M premine held by the anonymous creator of bitcoin itself?

[Dallas5]

What are you talking about? they gave some to david for mintcoin fund, they've gotten a lot of merchants to add mintcoin, which takes some more, and they have offered a lot for the android wallet, which has yet to materialize etc

The guy just told David to take out whatever he felt he had earned from what was left over from the mintcoin fund and to send the rest back. That's pretty fucking cool if you ask me. It's you guys that have a bug up your ass. Even if the guy delivered a complete accounting it wouldn't change the coin's value significantly. Going on and on about it is just something to repeat over and over to spread fear, doubt, and uncertainty about mintcoin from holders of other coins. That's all there is to that.

Something that really would increase the coins value is a completed minting android wallet. What's the story with that?

It seems to me they've done everything they have said they were going to do and if there is any left over as far as I'm concerned it's theirs to do what they want to with.

This coin is in the wild. It looks like the value is around 3 sats. That's the situation.

You have so many things wrong in the above statement,

- You mistakenly believe people looking to invest in new coins don't care about premine. They do, just read all the coins with pre-mines. If they see a massive premine they want to know how it's spent or already decide not to jump on the mint train.
- This is not fud from people holding other coins trying to downplay this one, if you believe that you should read better.

A coin relies on 3 things: the specs, the dev's, the community. They all have to work.

Right now the biggest issue is dev's not communicating enough with the community and in a positive way.

On the other hand mintcoin is still very young and programmers aren't known for their high social/PR skills, maybe we should just leave them alone for a few months and who knows they will surprise the community. And if not well that would suck but we made the gamble on mint without anyone forcing us.

Remember their are only a handful of mintcoin holders replying on forums and a lot more holding silently and watching how things unfold.

[mgburks77]

no way, all a coin needs is to technically function and to be used by people to make purchases in a market.

and altcoins are experimental software, not something to "invest in".

If you would like to speculate be my guest and buy some mintcoin. Other than that you have no vote on anything in regards to mintcoin, bitcoin, or any other crypto.

[mgburks77]

it seems like all this "community" does is try to get donations

[Dallas5]

it seems like all this "community" does is try to get donations

Trying to raise your activity count with replying to your own replies instead of editing


I'm going to be in lurking mode for the upcoming weeks and look how things develop, good luck everyone  

[BRUCELLA]

I think we need to know what is the long term plan for this coin. I have some millions of mint today, i believe in it but sometimes i'm in trouble... have mint to do what ?
Cryptocurrencies is not just mine it, sell it to btc, buy it to resell later... cryptocurrencies needs a real purpose...

I would like to can buy some goods with mint for a little better price than with fiat (there is less/no tax with it)... i would like to see mint in more merchants in the net.

The only thing i do for mintcoin is mining in multipool and buy mint with my btc... i hope i can buy some real things with mint later... i hope.

[paspi]

How come you guys aren't concerned about the $100M premine held by the anonymous creator of bitcoin itself?

Anonymous creator of bitcoin never stated that he will use the premine for the sake of bitcoin. People didn't contribute to bitcoin just because "there is a developer behind it, and the developer promised to use some premine when required for the coin". Bitcoin did not have alternatives, nor was born in a competitive ecosystem.

Anyway, I'm bored of the premine talk. If at some future MINT project does not arrive at where it belongs because of such simple things' insolvency scaring talented people out, I won't regret value of my MINT stash going down, but I'll regret the amount of time I put in MINT. It is worth way more than my stash, android bounties, or anything. I believe other people who are asking accountability have similar concerns.


Regarding android wallet: A bounty is a bounty, if anyone else is able to deliver a correctly working POS wallet before me, then I'm totally fine with them getting the bounty. If you want accountability, hire someone. This line goes to anyone who's confusing volunteer work with paid work. (If anyone wants to argue bounty is payment: the bounty was around 1.5-2 BTC when it was proposed (now around 0.5 BTC I suppose), and I estimate I put around 15 BTC of my time to the wallet so far, and I'm putting in more). Also I believe that I already proved android wallet's status so far: It's running in the wild (as alpha), you can see transactions in blockchain explorer that are created from an android phone (and screenshots), as well as correct calculation of proof-of-stake internals for later implementation of staking (See my posts since April).

Release of a wallet, addition of cool features to main client, announcing founding of an NGO will not make MINT's value rise in the long run, those kinds of news are only beneficial to daytraders. It's the continuous maintenance and activity which is important. That is done by a happy community.

[paspi]

A coin relies on 3 things: the specs, the dev's, the community. They all have to work.

Right now the biggest issue is dev's not communicating enough with the community and in a positive way.

On the other hand mintcoin is still very young and programmers aren't known for their high social/PR skills, maybe we should just leave them alone for a few months and who knows they will surprise the community. And if not well that would suck but we made the gamble on mint without anyone forcing us.

I'm going to be in lurking mode for the upcoming weeks and look how things develop, good luck everyone  

I agree with these 2 posts. (I will still post updates for android wallet)