Hey all - sorry I don't get onto this forum much and haven't been around a lot of late.
I've set up a fresh Telegram group, MAZAtribe(I'm not a Slack fan) so we can have a real chat happen
MAZAtribe Telegram Please join us!
Peter - thanks for sending some funds into the premine address! I've not had a chance to read through all the latest posts here, but I will shortly.
Nothing has changed with regard to the premine addresses - we have full control of the one address (owl has the privkey)
and no control in the moment over the other address (privkey is encrypted and we do not have a password). All the funds
we expect to be there are accounted for. To recover the encrypted address will take some work, but it's certainly possible.
There are several possible scenarios, each of which will require a hard fork.
Because those coins were premined (or donated to the same address) and do not belong to any individual
or group other than the network as a whole, I feel like we can use an extra-ordinary measure (hardfork), and finally put the
concerns that people have about the premined coins to rest. I would suggest that these are not simply recovered and moved
to a new p2pkh address, but be put to use for the network as a whole in another way.
I have some further plans, and a good lot of documents to share with y'all over time, I'll be doing this over in the Telegram group.
Right now it'd be helpful if we could find a few folks who'd like to help with some web development projects/marketing, and
we very much need to find a few qualified coin developers. I'm mostly a systems architect, and have been doing the release management
for maza-qt and some other projects for maza. There's a lot that needs updating before we can move much further forward.
I'm happy to answer questions anytime on Telegram, but do prefer that we can have most of those in the open group.
Regarding the bittrex delisting: Those guys never responded to us at all. It's unclear why they delisted us, but I think overall it's for the best
Volume on Cryptopia has been steadily picking up for both MAZA and their whole market. With some development work that's visible, I think there's
a good chance of getting onto a few more exchanges - don't expect poloniex or bittrex listings anytime soon! I also think that the network needs to
take the matter of interchain exchange into its own domain - so that people & contracts & code don't need to rely on custodial exchanges to
move their MAZA in and out of other chains.
My own life has been a bit of a hectic struggle through the past year, largely scraping by with little to no cash (and trying hard to not sell any MAZA unnecessarily), so it's been difficult
to find the time, network, and physical space to get any real dev work done of any sort. I am currently away from my home in Mt Shasta, California, and have very crappy 3G-4G service
most everywhere I've been. I expect to be back at home around the end of August.
If you've been following me on Twitter
https://twitter.com/guruvan you've seen that I've taken a very active stance on Bitcoin scaling issues. Because MAZA is a sha256-pow coin, the development path of Bitcoin is very crucial to our own. We must either integrate with, or differentiate from our big sibling. There are several "common" paths that coins have been taking all of which we can explore, and there are some much more uncommon possibilities I've been working on. I'm inclined to think that a mixture is best for the longer term health of the network.
If you've read my Twitter feed, you're also sure to know that I'm not a fan of SegWit, and have limited attraction to Lightning. There are, in my own opinion many more
ways that a network can grow than to simply increase transaction throughput on a blockchain. There is no good reason at this time to radically alter the mazacoin base protocol. We do know
about scaling issues that are likely to catch up to the current mazachain, but we know better ways to use it as well. I've put a great deal of time into scalable designs, and
would be delighted to discuss those with a team that can execute on them.
There is a clear fact that absolutely must be addressed before MAZA can proceed - MAZA is not secure by any measure. The current blockchain network is sha256-pow, and therefore it necessarily competes with Bitcoin for hashpower. This competition means that the network is 100% always at risk, and cannot be secured fully by this hashpower alone. There are several approaches to take, but most leave the network still exposed to large amounts of rentable hashrate. One example here is merged-mining. The largest of mergemined sha256 coins, namecoin, has a significant share of the bitcoin hashrate. While namecoin is largely secured, the same effect isn't seen in other merge-mined sha256 coins - UNO, CRW (Crown) included. CRW has typically around 16PH/s when I last checked, while UNO was around 5-8PH/S - Antpool alone is sporting 1300PH/s, and available hash on rentals is over 150PH/s. This means it's very unlikely to secure the network by mergedmining alone.
I've fielded several questions about MAZA converting to an ERC20 token on ETH or another EVM. I understand the reasoning for this, and while I think that could provide some immediate relief to current
bagholders investors
I don't think that it leaves a long term value proposition. That said, I think that smart contract based tokens, and the ethereum platforms in general are important to MAZA's success.
The low price of maza has definitely concentrated a good deal of it into just a few hands. This necessarily affect how we can, and must proceed forward. Perhaps the best example is to consider the idea that MAZA convert to a PoS consensus mechanism. It's clear form the behavior of so very many peercoin-protocol and NXT protocol PoS coins that the concentration of coins in just those few hands will lead us into a race to the bottom in the market, and leave us in no better situation for network security than the current mining situation. There are valid functions that can utilize PoS, albeit in a much larger overall network design than just a simple Satoshi Transaction Processor (bitcoin protocol blockchain).
I'm also firm in the knowledge of the value that Proof-of-Work mining brings to the network. The value of the hardware investment brought to the network is a very concrete measure of the value of the network itself. When we look at the development in Bitcoin, Litecoin, DASH, Siacoin, and others, we can see that it's not just the actual mining hardware itself that does this. Over the course of the years, we've seen the development of ASIC technology, which has lead to the biggest miners needing to produce their own chips. That, combined with the lack of chip fabrication facilities worldwide has lead to those ASIC manufacturers having to build their own ASIC plants. As competition narrows margins in mining, those miners need to look for new advantages, and this will necessarily lead to new hardware & facilities investments. We can easily expect that power generation facilities are in the minds of the top miners, and manufacturers. Each of these makes the network much more secure.
Unfortunately, because MAZA shares hashpower with Bitcoin, this investment in hardware & facilities is not an investment in the maza network, nor does MAZA derive any other type of value-benefit from this. Other options must be explored. While a PoW change is one possible path, the level of expertise required to develop a new mining algorithm plus the level of capital required to develop new ASIC technology, and produce ASICs for it is very significant. I do think there are other approaches that we can take to bring some of that hard investment value to the MAZA network directly, but to address those would take more space than we have here.
So, if you are able to help with
Communications & Marketing
Community leadership
Web Development
Code maintenance
Code development
smart contract development
Protocol development
Legal counsel
Business development
Tribal relations
We would very much like to see you become involved.
The current website is on github
https://github.com/mazacoin/mazacoin.orgYou can see in the library
https://github.com/mazacoin that we have several projects and need people who can work in
C/C++, Java, Javascript, Python, go. We also will need rust development expertise.
It's very important that we assemble a team that is able to execute on our ideas as we develop them.
Competition in crypto is severe, ideas are easy, execution is hard.
Before I discuss too much of my own work, I need to see that we have this ability.
My own skill is not in development of code - for any of the ideas I have to bear fruit, I will need to work with more skilled people.
Its important as we move forward that we bring the network back to serve those people it was intended to serve, and fulfill Payu's original vision,
while not unnecessarily limiting ourselves to just the ideas it was created upon. The entire market has matured significantly since the Mazacoin Genesis Block,
and so now must MAZA in order to succeed.
If we're to expect Oglala Lakota SiouxTribe, or ANY other North American tribes to work with MAZA, we must provide them with the inroads to do so. Simply put, asking a tribe to buy some MZC on the exchange is not the path to success. We need to provide them the inroads to put value in, as well as derive utility from the MAZA network. This cannot be done while the majority of the circulating supply of MZC is in just a few hands.
This brings me to the current
investors baghodlers & miners, of which I am one (though by no means am I a majority hodler, nor sadly am I able to mine today
)
In order for MAZA to succeed, the coin needs to become more widely distributed, and by more rapid means than the limited trading markets will allow. In my own opinion, the network has a responsibility to you, the baghodler, and especially miners who've become hodlers. You need to make a fair profit on those coins you've been holding for, likely, some time. You need also to understand that part of the network is YOU. You need to provide value to the network to get value out - simply acquiring coin at the lowest price the market will bear isn't sufficient. We need your participation to move forward. You need to help you decide how you're going to get your value and ROI from MAZA. MAZA is, after all, an autonomous organization - it only works if we all work on it.
MAZA is not a corporation - MAZA does not have a foundation. There is no entity that can steer it but itself. If MAZA wants to remain autonomous,
it must not find itself under the control of either a corporation or a foundation, nor may it become one. To do so, it must build itself the capabilities needed to
develop and maintain itself, and fund that work.
With all this in mind, I'd like to encourage you to join us on Telegram, and bring your friends.
We need a large team if we're going to succeed in a world that includes Bitcoin, Dash, Tezos, Ethereum, EOS, LTC.
We've got a lotta work to do if we want MAZA to be the success that we all know it can be.
- Rob
EDIT 14 Jul 14:30 - updated MAZAtribe Telegram link
