New non-"coin" coins that would be useful without being currency

[MWD64]

I started to post this on that thread about using Bitcoin for voting, but wanted to split it off. It's gone somewhere else.

Instead of people trying to make a blockchain-based system for streamlining the theft and aggression that is government, why not try to make a blockchain-based system for "voting" over the Internet (or even in the same building) for large-scale collaborative projects. Voting is not immoral in situations like that, and the blockchain would be perfect for it. Think "distributed software projects" for starters. The expand to "running a large company."

This type of thing would be the PERFECT candidate for creating new "coins" that aren't ever intended to be used as currency. Clone Namecoin, make a few tweaks, start a new blockchain and use it to run every aspect of a modern large private university, from taking attendance (if you do that) to course delivery to the accounting. If the blockchain got too big, make a new one every year. Or every semester. "StanfordCoin - Spring2015", etc. Or even make a new coin for each department for every semester (People involved could vote on the mascot to put in the branding of the coin too. lol. I'm picturing "SlugCoin" for Santa Cruz.)

A coin like this could still be very valuable in utility even if it were always easy to mine and had no limit on number of coins. Think of it more like making new daily spreadsheets rather than building yet another currency. It should probably be as easy to mine as it is to open a new document on a computer.  

And with all this talk on "what could we do with the blockchain" lately, this kind of slipped under the radar: we did something new and totally unique with the blockchain this week. It's small, but I believe it's important and could be expanded to a lot of uses. And it's not theory, it works, TODAY:

Software update notification delivered over the blockchain:
http://meowbit.com/meowbit-now-with-update-alerts-over-the-blockchain-a-new-feature-for-all-blockchains/

There are a bunch of grand ideas out there these days on doing grand things with the blockchain and I'm glad for it. But I think many will fail, because they're too far reaching. I think a flood of baby steps will more likely get real change done.

Namecoin has been around for 3 years, but not much happened with it being adopted for its intended use (distributed DNS-like domain resolution).

Over the last nine months, a guy came up with a way to actually VIEW Dot-Bit domains securely on one browser. THAT was huge. Namecoin finally fulfilled it's promise. But only on one browser that not a lot of people use.

Then in one WEEK, my team came up with a way to do that system-wide on Windows. (MeowBit - using none of the code from that first project by the other guy). And the following week, we added a new function (Software update notification delivered over the blockchain) that hasn't been done with the blockchain, ever, as far as I know.

And another guy came up with a new use for Namecoin (OneName. And he caught hell from some NameCoin folks for "not asking for input" on his Open Source - Free Software - project interfacing with the GNU-licensed Namecoin. And got accused of "trying to make money", when that is allowed and encouraged in the GNU license that everything Namecoin is licensed under. Not only that, people making money really drives much faster innovation.

I'd love to see people make new coin for specific small, important things. If your software team is called Acme, how about AcmeCoin, that you make specifically for you and your crew to collaborate over the Internet and your Intranet? A coin that is never intended to be sold or traded, but has utility in being used to run your company, collaborate, and also have a provable ledger of everything you invoice, take in and pay out?

You could also make network-only domains, like .acme, for making easily human-memorable document locators. Our Free Software utility, MeowBit, could easily be adopted to view those domains. Source code is here:
https://github.com/Derrick-/MeowBit

Your organization-only coin could even be entirely private, running only on your own servers or desktop machines if you wanted. You could probably set up systems for particular vendors and clients to be able to view only specific parts of your blockchain. (Parts with a specific namespace, for instance.) And build apps for them to be able to easily view that. A private coin also would not be vulnerable to a 51% attack. At all.

And a coin would not have the issue that Namecoin has of squatting. Namecoin's blockchain is almost 2 gigs, hundreds of thousands of names are squatted or reserved, and there are only about 20 real Dot-Bit websites with any content, and I own about ten of them.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting replacing Namecoin, it's great and I think it's going to take off, especially as website censorship and hijacking becomes more common. But this would drive interest to it. Which could possibly get someone to make a better wallet quickly. The wallet really is the weak factor in Namecoin currently.

Source code of new project-specific coins would of course be public (since you're deriving from GNU-licensed code), and GNU licensed, so anyone could take it and make it better.


MWD

[jonald_fyookball]

if there's no limit on coins, then you dont need to address double spend problem and you dont need the blockchain...right?

[MWD64]

if there's no limit on coins, then you dont need to address double spend problem ...right?

You would still want to address that, to let's say, be able to prove that your business partner didn't go in and try to fake or change an expense report entry, or that someone competing with you on a different team in the same company/university couldn't alter your scientific research findings so he could get the raise/grant.

if there's no limit on coins,  you dont need the blockchain...right?

Mabye, but you'd still at least need/want the transaction chain.

MWD

[jonald_fyookball]

Well interesting line of thought but I'm skeptical.   Seems you would need the financial incentive of miners if you want a secure decentralized network.

[MWD64]

Well interesting line of thought but I'm skeptical.   Seems you would need the financial incentive of miners if you want a secure decentralized network.

No you wouldn't. Using crypto-coins as currency is great, I love it and I do it. But it doesn't have to ONLY be that way. How much does a new word processing document cost a corporation or a novelist? Pretty much zero. But the corporation or a novelist cannot function without that document, without thousands and thousands of them. And a corporation or a novelist can make that blank document worth a lot of money by what they do with it. And they require equipment to use and maintain those documents. The corporation needs banks of computers, and an IT department. Some of that computing and personnel could easily be allocated to run mining rigs in different locations if it eliminated the need for other aspects of their IT work.

Making a new coin from existing code, you can tweak the parameters of a coin to where mining cost virtually nothing, and difficulty does not increase. If you're making it for your private use, you mine as many as you need to record and share what you need to record and share. If you need to make it public, to ensure it can't be lost, or to allow third-party verification, if it takes a low-enough amount of computing power, interested people would mine it. Think about the SETI@home project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI#SETI.40home

That was one of the first ever wide-scale distributed computing projects, starting in 1999 when a lot of people were still on dial-up and not nearly as many people were online as today. That project had 180,000 active participants running it on their computers, and not one of them got paid any financial reward, they just wanted to help.

I'd be willing to give some computing power over to helping run a blockchain for something I believed in. I'd also probably do it for something I'm against, if allowed me to see their internal documents in a truly open way.

MWD

[jonald_fyookball]

I guess I don't really get your vision then.  Why not just use github or email or whatever... Seems unnecessary to make things a coin that aren't a coin.  Maybe someone else can chime in who understands what you're seeing.

[MWD64]

I guess I don't really get your vision then.  Why not just use github or email or whatever... Seems unnecessary to make things a coin that aren't a coin.  Maybe someone else can chime in who understands what you're seeing.

Cool.

[MWD64]

I guess I don't really get your vision then.  Why not just use github or email or whatever...

Doing it as a coin would allow proof that it hadn't been altered. For instance, even if taxes were eliminated, it would still be useful to a company to keep accurate expenditures records and income records. They'd go out of business without it.

A lot of this has been discussed with things like Namecoin. The three main differences I'm suggesting that make this different are:

1. Make it a non-currency coin

2. decrease mining difficulty to make it possible for any interested party to participate. You want true transparency? You've got it.

3. Make a new coin for each project/company/fiscal year/semester to avoid having a huge blockchain. This would also make it more workable on mobile devices, and lower-power computers and over remote slow Internet connections.....or even on fast ones. The Bitcoin and Namecoin blockchains are already unwieldy even on fast computers with fast connections.


MWD

[phillipsjk]

The difficulty is that a database rarely requires a "proof of work". The Bitcoin proof-of-work result in real work being done in the real world. In the physical sense: Power=Work/Time.

Any alternate proof-of-work using less power may be less secure.

[MWD64]

The difficulty is that a database rarely requires a "proof of work". The Bitcoin proof-of-work result in real work being done in the real world. In the physical sense: Power=Work/Time.

Any alternate proof-of-work using less power may be less secure.

Is there a way to correct this?

MWD

[Broseph Stalin]

Would it need to be proof of work for a thing like this though? Or could it be proof of stake like NXT, with the ability to create assets, domains, etc.
And if it's to be used only by your institution or whatever.. does it even need to be decentralized?

[MWD64]

...if it's to be used only by your institution or whatever.. does it even need to be decentralized?

Yes, if you want true transparency and an ability to prove to the public that what was entered is what was actually entered.

[phillipsjk]

Any alternate proof-of-work using less power may be less secure.

Is there a way to correct this?

The point of "proof-of-work" is to make cheating more expensive than being honest. So, no, I see no obvious way to use proof-of-work in non-currency applications.

Namecoin uses the same proof-of-work as Bitcoin. Currently, some of the currency is destroyed when you want to create a name:value token.

[MWD64]

Namecoin uses the same proof-of-work as Bitcoin. Currently, some of the currency is destroyed when you want to create a name:value token.

I knew about this destruction thing. But wouldn't this be made less of an issue by having a coin with a nearly unlimited limit? I don't want to say unlimited, but a much higher cap of possible units than BTC or NMC has.

[phillipsjk]

I knew about this destruction thing. But wouldn't this be made less of an issue by having a coin with a nearly unlimited limit? I don't want to say unlimited, but a much higher cap of possible units than BTC or NMC has.

https://ripple.com/currency/ does that with a 100% pre-mine.

[Elwar]

The Bitcoin blockchain is the best way forward for voting because it is probably the most secure ledger in the world.

[MWD64]

The Bitcoin blockchain is the best way forward for voting because it is probably the most secure ledger in the world.

http://www.freedomfeens.com/2014/03/16/using-decentralized-technology-to-choose-centralized-leadership-is-so-square-freedom-feens-live-radio-archive/

To be clear, I forked this off the voting thread, and say so in the first line of my OP here. So you either didn't read it, or you're posting in the wrong thread. (Or you're a statist trying to get a rise out of me, won't work.)

Thank you,
MWD

[Adambomb]

Now taking this idea a bit more in the direction of Namecoin, perhaps establish a pseudonymous SVOIP?  Not sure if that has been thought of yet, or if this would even be advantageous compared to other existing SVOIP, but from a rough perspective I'm thinking something along these lines (pardon if any suggestions are a bit off...I'm an engineer by trade, so more of a user than cryptographer or developer):

~Sending and receiving calls is analogous to sending and receiving payments. 

~One "phonecoin" gets you like 100 minutes of talk time.  Not sure how to work that out, as a call is "spent" rather than transferred.  TBH I'm not intimately familiar with how Namecoin does it, but perhaps something similar?

~The block chain would serve as a phone record, so you would probably want to anonymize it, perhaps similarly to how this is carried out with Anoncoin or Dark Wallet? 

[MWD64]

Now taking this idea a bit more in the direction of Namecoin, perhaps establish a pseudonymous SVOIP?  Not sure if that has been thought of yet, or if this would even be advantageous compared to other existing SVOIP, but from a rough perspective I'm thinking something along these lines (pardon if any suggestions are a bit off...I'm an engineer by trade, so more of a user than cryptographer or developer):

~Sending and receiving calls is analogous to sending and receiving payments. 

~One "phonecoin" gets you like 100 minutes of talk time.  Not sure how to work that out, as a call is "spent" rather than transferred.  TBH I'm not intimately familiar with how Namecoin does it, but perhaps something similar?

~The block chain would serve as a phone record, so you would probably want to anonymize it, perhaps similarly to how this is carried out with Anoncoin or Dark Wallet? 

I like it.
MWD

[jonald_fyookball]

Yeah but phone coin has value still. It's not a noncoin coin.   Must have value to incentivize miners or in other words to participate as nodes.  Or... Find some other reason why nodes should participate (think TOR)