Appeal to the community for the development of MC2 and related technologies

[Korean]

If not, I hope it's something that can become mainstream and the general public can understand well.

[Mr.V]

That's a lot of coins generated per annum. Do you think it's really best to do it this way? Market Cap would be huge in order to get significant traction.

Well, it can be adjusted by an order of magnitude in base 10 if you guys want it to be, e.g. 18,700,697 coins in the first year.  This doesn't affect market capitalization against USD or BTC though, just the price per coin.

+1 price/coins are the only thing that will be affected. Personally I'd rather own 1 million coins that are worth $1/coin, instead of owning 10btc that are worth $1 million or $100k/btc. I'd rather make payments in whole units so, please dont reduce the order of magnitude by 10x.

[styxical]

Just as a preamble, I've been a long time lurker, even though this is my first post. I started mining last April and followed your guides and I've been following MC2 since around that time. I always look at your posts within threads with a high level of respect, because I know you know what you're talking about. I have been looking forward to this project coming to fruition for a long time.

That said, I just wanted to caution you, tacotime, about what your coin is turning into. Consider what this will look like to people who have never heard of MC2 and know nothing about it, and the first things your competition will grab onto to put your coin down.

1. Premine?
2. Backed by corporation?
3. Closed source?

We have already seen examples of all of these and they don't turn out well. I would like to suggest you fully develop your coin and relevant services/pools/miners/etc before launch, so that you can have a successful OPEN SOURCE launch without fear of competition. So that all your shit is lined up and ready to go. It would be a real shame to put all this time and work in, to quit your studies, just to have your coin fall flat on its face before the community even gives it a fair chance.

Surely other people are thinking this?

What are your thoughts?

[tacotime]

If not, I hope it's something that can become mainstream and the general public can understand well.

We're working on a new name for release, MC2 is just a working title.

[tacotime]

Just as a preamble, I've been a long time lurker, even though this is my first post. I started mining last April and followed your guides and I've been following MC2 since around that time. I always look at your posts within threads with a high level of respect, because I know you know what you're talking about. I have been looking forward to this project coming to fruition for a long time.

That said, I just wanted to caution you, tacotime, about what your coin is turning into. Consider what this will look like to people who have never heard of MC2 and know nothing about it, and the first things your competition will grab onto to put your coin down.

1. Premine?

Well, it's going to be hard to code the entire thing by myself with thorough testing.  I'm not sure what would make people feel secure about pushing money our way for work on this.  Some people tell me that I should try and get as much BTC as possible as early as possible, other people tell me I should take no BTC, and most people seem happy with progressive funding that extends only to fit our needs.  Scaling funding to the minimum needed amount to keep the premine as small as possible seems ideal, too.

It's going to be hard to get this all from donations now, with all the other fundraisers present for coins like SkyCoin and Ethereum, which promise users at least something in return for their donations.

2. Backed by corporation?

Conformal is strongly dedicated to FOSS that assists users in achieving more security, such as btcd and xombrero.  It's a small company.

3. Closed source?

Well, I had wanted this to prevent forks, and only for three or so months post release of new featuresets.  nxt is still closed source and is doing okay.

We have already seen examples of all of these and they don't turn out well. I would like to suggest you fully develop your coin and relevant services/pools/miners/etc before launch, so that you can have a successful OPEN SOURCE launch without fear of competition. So that all your shit is lined up and ready to go. It would be a real shame to put all this time and work in, to quit your studies, just to have your coin fall flat on its face before the community even gives it a fair chance.

Surely other people are thinking this?

What are your thoughts?

I would really love to be able to do this, but I'm pretty sure I need at least a couple more well versed coders to get this out in a reasonable timeframe.  On the low end, programmers cost $60-90k USD depending on level of experience and proficiency.  Again, it's hard to compete with other chains that are paying their coders huge amounts per month, e.g. Ethereum.

I mean, I could try to work for free for the community for the next year and hack this out myself as best as I can... but I'm not sure that's fair to myself, and I'm not sure it's fair to the community in terms of time and security.  I don't know how other people feel.

[_ingsoc]

MC2 is name of coin?

No, MC2 is the original working title of the project that introduced some ideas in a white paper to the community. You can have a look at the original thread if you want to see where it comes from. It was just a name used as a container for the ideas because of the original memory-hard focus of the cryptocurrency.

Bear in mind this was in a time long ago, long before Mastercoin, BitShares, and Nxt. Heck, it was even before Litecoin got cool. Pretty sure there's a MemoryCoin 2.0 now too. We finally arrived at a name that we think works well. We'll do a [PRE-ANN] soon for some information on this (pending on getting all the hosting sorted and getting stuff online).

[_ingsoc]

Alright, I sent you a PM regarding this.

Received and responded. Sorry about taking so long. I feel like we're two guys in a garage and everyone is queuing up to get some lemonade. We gotta make sure it's good lemonade.

[Korean]

Could we vote for the new name?

[_ingsoc]

+1 price/coins are the only thing that will be affected. Personally I'd rather own 1 million coins that are worth $1/coin, instead of owning 10btc that are worth $1 million or $100k/btc. I'd rather make payments in whole units so, please dont reduce the order of magnitude by 10x.

Fair point, and a clear dichotomy of opinion. Would people prefer it if we put up a poll and keep it going for a long time while we work on things so we can gather as many unique votes as possible on this?

[_ingsoc]

Could we vote for the new name?

We scratched our heads on a name for a really long time. I can't believe how hard it is nowadays to get a top-level domain. We managed to get one, but we can certainly put up a suggestion form so people can submit names.

We also need names for units. I'm not sure how essential it'll be, but it's kind of fun to name things. E.g., Ethereum has wei (10^3), szabo (10^12), finney (10^18), etc. Similar to Bitcoin's mBTC/uBTC/satoshi debate.

I'll put up a form now so we can see what kind of suggestions come out of it, and we can share the submitted names with the community.

[_ingsoc]

Just as a preamble, I've been a long time lurker, even though this is my first post.

Thank you for stepping out of the darkness, lurker. I'm in the light too, and I get to type lots now.

1. Premine?

I'm not speaking for tacotime here, but I'd like to chime in on the 3 points you raise (sorry about a lengthy post - I'll split it over posts):

(1) Premine. It's impossible to do this without demand and supply. The only reason this is possible is because there's enough demand for tacotime to work on this cryptocurrencies full-time. If nobody wanted any of the coins backed by the software he and the team writes, they wouldn't be able to do it because they wouldn't get any money to buy food with. I actually think premine isn't really correct. There are different types of premine.

What the project is doing is saying "Hey community, I want to write some software to represent some digital coins that you can purchase from me so I can continue working on making the software better. I've used digital coins before and have written some software that you can look at to help you make a decision about whether you want to contribute".

Now if the project said to the community that they need to purchase these digital coins but people on the "inside" of the project aren't going to purchase any coins and will get them for free, then that's a different story altogether. That to me is a premine, especially if the insiders try and hide the fact that they got stuff for free!

The facts about the premine:

(1.1) Anyone who develops can buy a maximum of USD $10k worth of coins (this might end up being in BTC/LTC terms, but the idea remains the same). The reasoning behind this is that you need to add incentive so that they have a long term interest and won't just dump the coins (assuming anyone wants to buy it).

(1.2) Anyone else can enter into a queue and buy a maximum of USD $5k worth of coins per person until the hard cap of USD $500k is reached. This is also locked for a period of time so that the same logic applies as above (however, it's yet to be ironed out how long it's locked for - a vote would be interesting to determine this once the community is a little larger).

(1.3) Nobody gets anything for free. The only people who will get any of the BTC/LTC donated will be developers who work on the software (the first confirmed dev being tacotime). I'll set up all the hosting and community stuff and maintain it as long as the project lives (this will also come out of our own pockets and if it gets too big, we'll have to figure something out). I won't take any money for working on this stuff because I feel it takes away from the core of the project and I can live with that.

We're also not making any crazy promises about these digital coins. There is absolutely no guarantee any of the coins will have any value whatsoever. Think of it as tacotime making really cool dreamcatchers in his garage that he wants to sell at a community marketplace. They might end up having awesome magical powers and can do amazing things, or they could just end up being useless objects of string with shiny rocks. Someone might see how cool they are and want to use what they can do and decide to pay you money for them, more than you bought them for, or they can decide to not buy them at all. Cryptocurrencies are a bit like that.

What you'll see from this project is honesty. No shiny and pointless marketing and no big budgets. Certainly no promises we can't back. It's a risk, and the risks will be communicated very clearly to everyone who is thinking about getting involved. But we also want to have some fun and build some cool stuff. Everyone is welcome on that journey.

[_ingsoc]

2. Backed by corporation?

Conformal Systems is an LLC. They're a small group of guys, most of whom are old school OpenBSD hackers. They're crazy about open source. Aside from btcd, they maintain lots of OS stuff too, like Spectrwm.

I had no relationship with Conformal Systems prior to getting involved in this project. When I found out tacotime was really busy with grad school and couldn't develop, I went out and looked for developers. It turns out there aren't a lot of people producing quality cryptocurrency code relative to other fields. I found Conformal Systems through a Google search and joined their IRC channel. I spent months in there (I'm still in there) and spoke to all of their guys. We talk a lot about the future of cryptocurrencies and where the field is moving. There are a lot of concerns with a monoculture developing (if it hasn't already), and alternatives are important.

I explained to them that tacotime has some cool ideas that are worth exploring, and the CEO (behindtext on Bitcointalk) invited tacotime and cunicula to meet with him for dinner and talk cryptocurrencies. Everyone got really excited about the field and what can be done and it was decided that Conformal Systems will help us by reviewing code written and making sure it's of high quality. They can do this because they have the experience and had to learn a lot about Bitcoin over the last year as they developed, and continue to develop btcd, which is a full-node implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in Go. They even reached out to MtGox and offered to fix the latest debacle free of charge because it affected everyone.

They also do commercial stuff to pay the bills, and you can check that out too if you like. There's Coinvoice and Cyphertite, for example. For the record, I'm not getting paid by them and reached out to the guys in my free time. You can jump on their IRC and meet them if you're interested in doing so, to see for yourself if you're concerned about a company helping tacotime out. They use SSL for security, so if you have trouble connecting to their IRC server, send me a PM and I'll help you get on this ship! No space marine will be left behind in this space opera.

[_ingsoc]

3. Closed source?

This comes back to the earlier points on protecting the coin from falling flat on its face if it's decent tech when someone comes in with a big marketing budget and buries our little community. It's a balance, and the only thing to offset a big marketing budget is some steady growth to show it's a good system that was built on the good faith of those who supported it and the developers. That will take a little bit of time.

It will be open source. There is no doubt, and there will be no turning around on this. Question is when and how much until it's all open source. If we keep 100% closed source and pretend this conversation never happened, you can crucify me in hell for it. You have my permission.

We have already seen examples of all of these and they don't turn out well. I would like to suggest you fully develop your coin and relevant services/pools/miners/etc before launch, so that you can have a successful OPEN SOURCE launch without fear of competition. So that all your shit is lined up and ready to go. It would be a real shame to put all this time and work in, to quit your studies, just to have your coin fall flat on its face before the community even gives it a fair chance.

Surely other people are thinking this?

What are your thoughts?

I couldn't agree more. As a bear minimum there will have to be pools from day one on mainnet. I believe an optimal solution to this launch drama that we keep seeing is everyone mining on testnet for a while on pools and use everything that will be there for the mainnet launch so any issues can get ironed out. If pools get DDoS'd, let's get so many pools up and ready that it's impossible to target them all. Obviously this is a while away and logistics will need to be discussed, but I think anything less ends up screwing people over. We'll need tons of help with that though, but there will be community engagement nonstop.

I stayed up two nights for the Maxcoin launch thinking it sounded like something decent and let me just say I even posted a profane Walter quote from the Big Lebowski in that thread. If our launch goes like that and we treat people like that I will kill myself. Because I don't want to do that, we will make sure things are planned properly and we'll work with anyone who steps forward and who is reasonable.

[_ingsoc]

Could we vote for the new name?

Please submit any suggestions for a name using this form (Google Docs Form - MC2 Project Name Suggestions). I'll ask tacotime to add the link to the first post when he's back.

[Joerii]

I've also been following MC2 for a while and I want to thank you guys for your continued hard work.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Indeed interesting particularly with the Conformal backing.

Looking forward to this.

[DontTicklePenguins]

Long time lurker also. I just want to say this looks like a commendable project.  To do something vastly different than the typical clone coins is a breathe of fresh air. I hope you guys succeed. It seems like you guys are realistic in terms of your goals and aren't over stepping which is reassuring. I wish you guys much luck and success.

[indiemax]

I offered to help fund this project but Taco Time is far too important to reply to PM's. Good luck guys.

Me too,ah well, all the best

Send it to me and I promise I'll get it to him and a response for you, if I can't assist you with it directly. Problem is he's running around like crazy tying up all the loose ends before he moves into this full-time. That will all change in the future. In the meantime, if you don't get a response from him, send it to me, and I'll get it sorted. I want to commit to try and look into everyone's concerns. An insane task, but let's see.

Thanks guys have a reply now

[Lawyer]

It's truly a community driven effort. The project appreciates all the help that we can get in order to bring this to the top! That would mean participation or suggestions regarding important decisions, such as the name, logo, color scheme, etc. So please use that Google Doc form!

[JessicaMILFson]

Whatever name you come up with, please run it through a focus group. Please ask random people what you think of the name on the streets, at the cafe, or at the shops. Do some research. Do they like it? This is very important.

I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the ultimate goal would be to get critical adoption of this coin and that means that this is not going to be a coin for just the technologically literate, but also the general lay people. And that must be represented and their feedback must be addressed over the name.

Whatever name is present is critical to the success of the project and the subsequent marketing of it.

Don't be like Peercoin (originally PPCoin), which realized its ways until considerable adoption.