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

[RandyMagnum]

Been in, still in.

[_ingsoc]

Been in, still in.

And still not negotiating with terrorists.

[_ingsoc]

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!

Already seeing some great names in the submission. Even if we can't get the top-level domains for some of these, they can work really well for components of the system. No efforts are in vain.

When we get the forum, wiki, and the landing site up, I'm hoping we can put a community effort behind the image we create out of the cryptocurrency. The primary focus is the tech behind the system, but what I hope to do is kind of present a blank canvas for people to paint on. Maybe we can provide some pastels and general ideas of the picture we're trying to paint, and it's by no means an ugly canvas, but there's a long journey to walk.

[RandyMagnum]

Been in, still in.

And still not negotiating with terrorists.

NEVER!

[canth]

Have been following MC2 and Taco for some time - I don't know how many newbies have used Taco's GPU mining rig recommendations to get involved in cryptocurrencies, but I was one of them.

At least as an investor/supporter, I'm in. Time permitting, I'm happy to assist as I can.

[_ingsoc]

Have been following MC2 and Taco for some time - I don't know how many newbies have used Taco's GPU mining rig recommendations to get involved in cryptocurrencies, but I was one of them.

At least as an investor/supporter, I'm in. Time permitting, I'm happy to assist as I can.

Nice to see you in this thread, canth. Have you gotten in touch with tacotime about getting put on the queue? Want to make sure everyone gets included who's taken the time to seek out this project. We'll probably get screamed at eventually for not having enough exposure by the time the queue is full, but we don't have a big marketing budget and the project is only now really finding its feet after almost a year of discussion, thinking, and searching.

Everyone who's interested in contributing/donating to the project should let tacotime know so he can keep record and know about your intentions prior to the process starting. He's going to start coding full-time in March and our stuff will start going online at the same time.

[canth]

Have been following MC2 and Taco for some time - I don't know how many newbies have used Taco's GPU mining rig recommendations to get involved in cryptocurrencies, but I was one of them.

At least as an investor/supporter, I'm in. Time permitting, I'm happy to assist as I can.

Nice to see you in this thread, canth. Have you gotten in touch with tacotime about getting put on the queue? Want to make sure everyone gets included who's taken the time to seek out this project. We'll probably get screamed at eventually for not having enough exposure by the time the queue is full, but we don't have a big marketing budget and the project is only now really finding its feet after almost a year of discussion, thinking, and searching.

Everyone who's interested in contributing/donating to the project should let tacotime know so he can keep record and know about your intentions prior to the process starting. He's going to start coding full-time in March and our stuff will start going online at the same time.

I'm on the mailing list and I've let him know, but I'll remind him. :]

And yes, once/if things are successful there will always be someone that will complain about missing out, no matter the exposure.

[c_jp]

I support tacotime and im in.

[Luckybit]

40,960,000 coins issued through stake tickets is a lot. My opinion is let the demand determine the supply. But it can reach a return on investment if the inflation rate from mining is kept low. These are just my opinions and everyone is free to have their own.

Cunicula was originally in favour of stemming the initial issuance to a period of 10 years.  In the paper, it's described as 27 years to 1%, after which the inflation of the supply because to increase exponentially (but slowly), similar to fiat but slower.  This will make mining continually attractive, because it does not rely on fees.  Mainly it's designed to to supplement Bitcoin as a goto point inbetween that of equity and actual fiat (in response to criticisms like these), and indeed, with the decentralized reserve system, intends to have an in place public oracle system to hold fiat within the chain itself.

Time-to-1% inflation (TT1%?) can be tweaked to whatever, so if you guys want a faster distribution, this can be done.  Initial issuance must also be tweaked if you want it to stay at a 3%/10y target.  It is a delicate issue though; adjusting decreases in inflation so that they occur very rapidly can lead to accusations of a ponzi scheme e.g. protoshares.

Fear of accusations shouldn't determine what we do though. In my opinion if there is inflation it must be for some specific purpose other than to avoid bad publicity.

If the argument you're making is that less people would want to use it as a currency if it's deflationary, this is a valid argument. I think different people will be attracted to deflationary currencies and that deflationary currencies may actually have many positive benefits.

One positive benefit that I postulate is a reduction in crime. A lot of crime is out of desperation or out of competition. Violence over turf happens among drug dealers often because in inflationary currencies the idea of saving doesn't make sense. You're punished for saving in an inflationary currency and I postulate that this encourages the thug capitalist mentality where short term profits rule.

If you want to promote long term thinking, long term investment, saving, and reduce violent crime I believe one way of approaching the problem is to offer a deflationary currency to allow people to think not just about day to day profit but the next year, the next decade, and not to spend all their money down so fast.

I use the street criminal as the individual in this metaphor because in American society the street criminal is the purest capitalist. Inflationary currencies encourage crime because why would anyone want to make and spend money slowly, or save money, when they can spend it as soon as they earn it and never save a penny? As a result of not saving this keeps the street criminal as an individual in a state of always being on a tread mill, or always struggling to stay afloat, and as a result it promotes a kind of ruthless competitiveness.

Let's take it out of the street level, how about it's stock investors? If you have a stock which dilutes over time then it requires that people keep buying it. The faster the rate of dilution the more people will have to find money to keep investing to maintain their position. This is like trying to keep up with the Joneses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses and in my opinion is a problem which would not exist if people were encouraged to think about long term investments.

Protoshares has it's problems because it over relies on prediction markets. The developer seems to believe that prediction markets will solve all of societies ills. But a lot of changes have been made to the design since the time when Cunicula called it a ponzi scheme. I don't think it's a ponzi scheme at this time, but if people wanted to make a case for it being a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme the truth is you could make the same case against Bitcoin.

1. Bitcoin itself is not decentralized. It's actually controlled by a mining cartel. This mining cartel controls the hashing power of the network. For this mining cartel because they make the chips we use to mine with, if Bitcoin were to inflate forever they would not mind because they are closer to the generation of new coins and stand to benefit from inflation. It is this same attitude in my opinion which leads people to believe inflation for the dollar is helpful, it helps only the people who are close to the creation of new dollars because the initial distribution goes to those people.

As a result of the centralization of both Bitcoin and the fiat currencies as well we could say they are both pyramid schemes which benefit (certain people) most the people who control the production capability behind the currency generation of the network. At this point Bitshares is looking like it will be more decentralized than Bitcoin just as Bitcoin is more decentralized than the USD, because they switched away from mining and moved into a transaction based proof of stake which allows for them to both minimize inflation while increasing decentralization. I will say this has not been proven in practice so it's entirely theoretical, we have to wait and see.

2. We have to in my opinion measure or quantify the level of decentralization and as a principle agree that greater levels of decentralization is better. This should apply to Bitshares, Bitcoin, Netcoin, we want to have some way that generation of new coins or shares is decentralized. Netcoin is in a position where it can easily be more decentralized than Bitcoin provided that it's hard enough to mine, but if it cannot resist centralization around it's mining then whatever that inflation rate is, whether it be 1% or 4%, it will ultimately be a tax on anyone who saves in Netcoin. So if that 1% tax or 4% tax to miners goes to securing the network or paying miners I would say that sort of inflation has a purpose but if mining becomes centralized then that 1% to 4% tax goes to the same few people who basically will use their influence to maintain high inflation rates forever because they now have a coin faucet which pays them at the expense of everyone else in the network.

3. I believe deflation has more social benefits than inflation. I haven't seen anyone make a case for the social benefits of inflation. Inflation is always promoted as if it's some kind of necessary evil. It's usually spun up by economists that if the currency does not inflate then people will hoard (save) too much money and the economy will grind to a halt. This hoarding in my opinion only happens if a currency is too centralized. If it's decentralized in the initial distribution then since no one is going to become a trillionaire there is no massive wealth disparity argument. Instead you could end up with lots of millionaires who saved for years, but the social impact of that isn't the same as the social impact of a few people becoming trillionaires. So it seems to me that over centralization is what makes inflation or deflation bad. If anyone can mine and earn a reasonable amount of coins or shares then there is no real complaint with deflation.

4. Proof of Work seems to be the main problem behind all of this. We need a better Proof of Work which rewards work which is actually valuable to society, or we will have to move away from Proof of Work in the current form. I don't think Bitshares has completely solved it with going to Proof of Stake and I don't think Proof of Work as it is now is very good either. Proof of Work right now generates an effort with minimal to no social utility, all of that computing power essentially goes to waste, we have to make Proof of Work both economically and socially useful. We have to also make sure it's as decentralized as possible and by decentralized I mean resistant on the social network level as well so that it resists the formation of mining or other kinds of cartels to try to control the hashing power.

Some of my ideas on how we might be able to do it, the idea of the mining lottery is a good metaphor and perhaps is a direction if we keep mining. This would make mining a bit less predictable for the miner in a good way because it would decentralize the power dynamics in such a way that any random person could hit the jackpot while mining. It would also create some disassociation between hashing power and the reward by adding an element of uncertainty.

It should also be that we can create some disassociation between how much money a person spends and how much power the person gets. Money alone should not be the deciding factor in Proof of X. I think in the case of Bitshares money is the deciding factor but that is because they are treating it as a decentralized autonomous corporation so it has to be focused around profit. I think you can easily create a DAC which focuses on profit but do the crowd funding donation in such a way that money isn't the only way to mine or send value. For example perhaps you can donate computing power, money, or anything to the network to earn credits/shares.

I don't have the solution I'm just presenting some directions to explore and trying to encourage a high level debate on strategy.

[Luckybit]

I prefer the crowd funding rubric with a factor of 10 less than what it already is. Given the total amount of coins after year 1, 2...etc, I feel that 40 million would be too much.

I'm happy with a factor of 10 less or the way it is now. Ultimately the tech should represent the value of the cryptocurrency, but before that can happen, we can only look at what we already know about other cryptocurrencies. On a very primitive level, it looks like people like a lot of supply because it's easy to throw around for plenty of reasons, whereas less supply equates higher value (as we can only assume a market would determine through supply/demand). This is a tough balance.

Would love to see what the arguments are for and against a factor of 10, because obviously there are also psychological factors to consider as opposed to strictly economic rationale.

I'm happy with 0.108 cents each. What about the others?

Even at 0.18/coin, it's reasonable considering at that point tacotime and the devs would have produced quite a bit of tech to show they're good for it. 0.10/coin feels reasonable for the amount of risk early adopters carry because there is nothing to show for it yet, aside from (1) reputation of the developer and (2) the ideas themselves. If (1) and (2) check out and people feel what's being asked for to pay the developer to do the work is reasonable, then that balances against the risk they're asked to undertake (of course, that's not for everyone). So I think the model reflects that really well.

The only argument I can make for having a higher supply is for psychological effect. Like with Dogecoin because there are so many everyone who has them feels rich. People look at Bitcoin and they think Oh My God it's too expensive!

So you want enough of a supply so people even in third world countries can afford to have a chance. Long term it does make sense only if you think people wouldn't buy coins in fractions. I do think people could be convinced to buy coins in fractions though so I favor selling the coins in the Satoshi denomination.

Another thing which could be done. We have Netcoin as the largest unit but if there were fewer and not many people have them then you would use the largest unit for large transfers between businesses and for daily transactions people would use the smaller proportions.

Now this is important to note, depending on the blockchain technology and whether or not you can handle a lot of transactions should decide whether you go with a smaller or larger cap or even no cap.

If there is no cap then you still must limit inflation, as that is what is bad. If the cap is low or high it does not matter if inflation is 50%. If inflation is low, and the cap is low of course that is better. If inflation is zero and the cap is low like Mastercoin, Counterparty, of course that is best of all but then it's not much of a currency for transaction purposes and more of a stock.

What psychology do we want? To attract investors the cap and low inflation rate is good. To make people spend money having a higher cap is better because people are more likely to tip in a currency where they feel like a billionaire. The profit investors would make is the same no matter what the cap is, just so long as the inflation rate is low.

[kdrop22]

Hello TacoTime and IngSoc,

Great job on the whitepaper and conceptualization of the coin. A coin that is a worthwhile investment.

As with any great innovation, there is significant risk associated with the project. This is further exacerbated by the persistent inflation.

If you need to receive more funds, you need to reduce the inflation in the coin, this will increase the reward to risk ratio and make it favorable for investors.

[danzilla]

I've followed the MC2 discussion a bit, and love some of the ideas in the whitepaper.  The voting based decentralized "central bank" sounds very interesting.  I can't contribute much, but would chip in a bit to the project, and don't think this funding model is unreasonable.

Also, I have a hat that says TacoTime on it, so hey, that's worth something.

[KrLos]

I am following this proyect since tacotime announce it almost a year ago.

How can i be in the list? I cannot invest too much but i want to join.

Cheers

[Korean]

It would be interesting to address the POW and inflation concerns as laid out by Luckybit. Both valid concerns for the future of this coin.

[MadCow]

I am a long time follower and supporter of MC2. I have funds and I'm ready to invest in tacotime. Please send PM when you need the money.

[tacotime]

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.

We're working hard on trying to figure out an agreeable name.  Honestly, _ingsoc and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on it.  So, hopefully what we use will end up agreeable to everyone.

[tacotime]

Fear of accusations shouldn't determine what we do though. In my opinion if there is inflation it must be for some specific purpose other than to avoid bad publicity.

If the argument you're making is that less people would want to use it as a currency if it's deflationary, this is a valid argument. I think different people will be attracted to deflationary currencies and that deflationary currencies may actually have many positive benefits.

One positive benefit that I postulate is a reduction in crime. A lot of crime is out of desperation or out of competition. Violence over turf happens among drug dealers often because in inflationary currencies the idea of saving doesn't make sense. You're punished for saving in an inflationary currency and I postulate that this encourages the thug capitalist mentality where short term profits rule.

If you want to promote long term thinking, long term investment, saving, and reduce violent crime I believe one way of approaching the problem is to offer a deflationary currency to allow people to think not just about day to day profit but the next year, the next decade, and not to spend all their money down so fast.

I use the street criminal as the individual in this metaphor because in American society the street criminal is the purest capitalist. Inflationary currencies encourage crime because why would anyone want to make and spend money slowly, or save money, when they can spend it as soon as they earn it and never save a penny? As a result of not saving this keeps the street criminal as an individual in a state of always being on a tread mill, or always struggling to stay afloat, and as a result it promotes a kind of ruthless competitiveness.

Let's take it out of the street level, how about it's stock investors? If you have a stock which dilutes over time then it requires that people keep buying it. The faster the rate of dilution the more people will have to find money to keep investing to maintain their position. This is like trying to keep up with the Joneses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses and in my opinion is a problem which would not exist if people were encouraged to think about long term investments.

Protoshares has it's problems because it over relies on prediction markets. The developer seems to believe that prediction markets will solve all of societies ills. But a lot of changes have been made to the design since the time when Cunicula called it a ponzi scheme. I don't think it's a ponzi scheme at this time, but if people wanted to make a case for it being a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme the truth is you could make the same case against Bitcoin.

1. Bitcoin itself is not decentralized. It's actually controlled by a mining cartel. This mining cartel controls the hashing power of the network. For this mining cartel because they make the chips we use to mine with, if Bitcoin will to inflate forever they would not mind because they are closer to the generation of new coins and stand to benefit from inflation. It is this same attitude in my opinion which leads people to believe inflation for the dollar is helpful, it helps only the people who are close to the creation of new dollars because the initial distribution goes to those people.

Kinda-sorta.  I would argue inflation basically helps anyone who has money invested in things which do not consistently devalue (equity, precious metal) while destroying the wealth of those who do not.  But there exists a host of problems for any deflationary currency that Bitcoin doesn't solve as well, and doesn't even attempt to solve.

As a result of the centralization of both Bitcoin and the fiat currencies as well we could say they are both pyramid schemes which benefit (certain people) most the people who control the production capability behind the currency generation of the network. At this point Bitshares is looking like it will be more decentralized than Bitcoin just as Bitcoin is more decentralized than the USD, because they switched away from mining and moved into a transaction based proof of stake which allows for them to both minimize inflation while increasing decentralization. I will say this has not been proven in practice so it's entirely theoretical, we have to wait and see.

Tx based proof of stake has similar issues to those for Peercoin, in my opinion, so I'm not overly hopeful.  Even my proposed system has some issues, though, but I think it's an improvement.

2. We have to in my opinion measure or quantify the level of decentralization and as a principle agree that greater levels of decentralization is better. This should apply to Bitshares, Bitcoin, Netcoin, we want to have some way that generation of new coins or shares is decentralized. Netcoin is in a position where it can easily be more decentralized than Bitcoin provided that it's hard enough to mine, but if it cannot resist centralization around it's mining then whatever that inflation rate is, whether it be 1% or 4%, it will ultimately be a tax on anyone who saves in Netcoin. So if that 1% tax or 4% tax to miners goes to securing the network or paying miners I would say that sort of inflation has a purpose but if mining becomes centralized then that 1% to 4% tax goes to the same few people who basically will use their influence to maintain high inflation rates forever because they now have a coin faucet which pays them at the expense of everyone else in the network.

That's the point, yeah.  The problem with Bitcoin is that once you get to the fees level of inflation (inflation = 0), you run into the problem that no one wants to conduct on-chain txs because it's poorly incentivized.  So, ultimately, for the system to continue functioning, you need to enact some inflation.  I chose exponentially increasing inflation, like fiat, but at considerable slower rates of inflation per year than are standard.  The reserve banking system (when/if it gets off the ground) is then intended to be a more dynamic system that is more responsive to world economic rates of inflation as determined by public oracle consensus.

3. I believe deflation has more social benefits than inflation. I haven't seen anyone make a cause for the social benefits of inflation. Inflation is always promoted as if it's some kind of necessary evil. It's usually spun up by economists that if the currency does not inflate then people will hoard (save) too much money and the economy will grind to a halt. This hoarding in my opinion only happens if a currency is too centralized. If it's decentralized in the initial distribution then since no one is going to become a trillionaire there is no massive wealth disparity argument. Instead you could end up with lots of millionaires who saved for years, but the social impact of that isn't the same as the social impact of a few people becoming trillionaires. So it seems to me that over centralization is what makes inflation or deflation bad. If anyone can mine and earn a reasonable amount of coins or shares then there is no real complaint with deflation.

My gut feeling is that neither inflation nor deflation solve what is a considerable social and philosophical problem: that people will more money end up usually having the means to obtain more money, regardless of the financial system they are working under.
Having slow exponential inflation also insures investment into mining technologies in the future, as the hardware will continually be useful.  However, with Bitcoin, eventually when inflation = 0, hardware investment will probably fall apart as far as I can tell.

4. Proof of Work seems to be the main problem behind all of this. We need a better Proof of Work which rewards work which is actually valuable to society, or we will have to move away from Proof of Work in the current form. I don't think Bitshares has completely solved it with going to Proof of Stake and I don't think Proof of Work as it is now is very good either. Proof of Work right now generates an effort with minimal to no social utility, all of that computing power essentially goes to waste, we have to make Proof of Work both economically and socially useful. We have to also make sure it's as decentralized as possible and by decentralized I mean resistant on the social network level as well so that it resists the formation of mining or other kinds of cartels to try to control the hashing power.

Some of my ideas on how we might be able to do it, the idea of the mining lottery is a good metaphor and perhaps is a direction if we keep mining. This would make mining a bit less predictable for the miner in a good way because it would decentralize the power dynamics in such a way that any random person could hit the jackpot while mining. It would also create some disassociation between hashing power and the reward by adding an element of uncertainty.

It should also be that we can create some disassociation between how much money a person spends and how much power the person gets. Money alone should not be the deciding factor in Proof of X. I think in the case of Bitshares money is the deciding factor but that is because they are treating it as a decentralized autonomous corporation so it has to be focused around profit. I think you can easily create a DAC which focuses on profit but do the crowd funding donation in such a way that money isn't the only way to mine or send value. For example perhaps you can donate computing power, money, or anything to the network to earn credits/shares.

I don't have the solution I'm just presenting some directions to explore and trying to encourage a high level debate on strategy.

Well, having something like this functional (useful PoW) is one of the the holy grails of cryptocurrencies, but doing it in a way that is decentralized seems unlikely at the current time.  You can kind of hack it on (e.g. RippleLabs), but you need to rely on centralization of some kind to make this work.  SCIPs can give some kind of voodoo black moon magic approach to this where you can verify that you'd done some kind of very complex work very quickly and easily so long as you disseminate a massive (gigabytes or terabytes) consensus parameter set.  These are a relatively new technology though, and I want to see how ZeroCash fares with them (they'll be the first currency to use them, for the sake of anonymizing cash flow).

[tacotime]

The only argument I can make for having a higher supply is for psychological effect. Like with Dogecoin because there are so many everyone who has them feels rich. People look at Bitcoin and they think Oh My God it's too expensive!

So you want enough of a supply so people even in third world countries can afford to have a chance. Long term it does make sense only if you think people wouldn't buy coins in fractions. I do think people could be convinced to buy coins in fractions though so I favor selling the coins in the Satoshi denomination.

Another thing which could be done. We have Netcoin as the highest unit but if there were fewer and not many people have them then you would use the highest unit for large transfers between businesses and for daily transactions people would use the smaller proportions.

Now this is important to note, depending on the blockchain technology and whether or not you can handle a lot of transactions should decide whether you go with a smaller or larger cap or even no cap.

If there is no cap then you still must limit inflation, as that is what is bad. If the cap is low or high it does not matter if inflation is 50%. If inflation is low, and the cap is low of course that is better. If inflation is zero and the cap is low like Mastercoin, Counterparty, of course that is best of all but then it's not much of a currency for transaction purposes and more of a stock.

What psychology do we want? To attract investors the cap and low inflation rate is good. To make people spend money having a higher cap is better because people are more likely to tip in a currency where they feel like a billionaire. The profit investors would make is the same no matter what the cap is, just so long as the inflation rate is low.

I prefer a higher cap in either case, because for whatever insane reason the laymen seem to believe that if the price of a single unit is lower it's somehow a better investment.  I want low long term exponential inflation, so that when compared to fiat it's much more desirable to hold MC2 coins.

Initially the coin will lower tx throughput than even Bitcoin, so we need to take this into account too.  In the future I can work on optimizations, but I wanna get the chain up and running first and then worry about that.

[tacotime]

Hello TacoTime and IngSoc,

Great job on the whitepaper and conceptualization of the coin. A coin that is a worthwhile investment.

As with any great innovation, there is significant risk associated with the project. This is further exacerbated by the persistent inflation.

If you need to receive more funds, you need to reduce the inflation in the coin, this will increase the reward to risk ratio and make it favorable for investors.

Inflation that is high and decreasing in the initial rounds are necessary to ensure that the coin is well and fairly diffused to people by miners.  The persons obtaining it initially then are incentivized to figure out ways to maintain and preserve the functionality of the network, and add new and interesting functionalities.

Long terms reasons for low exponential inflation are given in response to LuckyBit above.

[tacotime]

Also, I have a hat that says TacoTime on it, so hey, that's worth something.

yes.