State of the Coin (** our version of the State of the Union)
Major News: BonusCoin switching to Pure PoS at block 75,000** Been informed I write books, lol. So here are bullet points if you don't want the full update:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=524212.msg6411381#msg6411381Or read the full update here if you want a full report on BonusCoin:
Ok, so the BonusCoin community has been asking for us to put out an update on what what's happened so far, what we've been working on over the last few weeks, and what our future plans for the coin. So, in that spirit, I've spoken with everyone involved and taken a lot of feedback from our users. As with everything, we're community oriented and your suggestions weigh heavily with us. Everything discussed has come from our community and if you guys have more suggestions, continue to bring them. We believe a coin is ultimately a product of the community, and like anything, BonusCoin needs to grow and change as the community sees fit.
So, let’s start with what we've done already!
What's happened alreadyWe had a great launch, if we do say so ourselves. The community invested over 130 TH/s of mining capacity, and we're proud to say that our difficulty worked exactly as planned. Rather than doing what most coins do (i.e. dumping out 50 times what they are supposed to at launch), BonusCoin released exactly what it was designed to. As a result, our faithful miners didn't get crushed on day one by fly by night miners. After our custom difficulty algorithm finished its job, KGW kicked in, and stabilized the difficulty.
Everything has run smoothly since launch, with the only real hiccup being a potential time-warp exploit in the KGW algorithm. It was patched within a week, and in the process we invented an entirely new form of forking for coins that we've label “soft forking.” We believe it went pretty smoothly, and the developers tell me that the logic they designed has already been showing up in other coins. We also corrected a few minor bugs that we noticed at launch. We've been stable otherwise.
We think we've begun building a great community, we're glad to have a lot of people who joined us at launch still with us, and working toward our next plans.
What's going on nowCurrently, we have over 10 pools supporting the coin, and are currently trading on 7 exchanges. We've also broken 6000+ votes on MintPal (which we think is pretty amazing). And, as we're sure you're all aware, we're working on getting listed on both Cryptsy and CoinedUp. We've had a lot of great support from you all pushing for the listings, so thanks to everyone who's helped! We've been receiving positive feedback from the exchanges, and we hope to get listed for voting soon.
BonusCoin has also had great adoption in the crypto-community at large. With listings on CoinMarketCap.com, CryptoCoinRank.com, Gravaco.in, cryptocoincharts, crypto-prices.com, and many more I'm sure I'm forgetting, we’ve been very happy with the expansion into the larger crypto currency infrastructure. Of course, there are also several games, faucets, block explorers, and a paper wallet have all been built for the BonusCoin community to support this coin! And we can't forget to mention our forums, reddit and twitter support!
With all that said, we're always looking to expand further and constantly working to market BonusCoin to new adopters in this building phase of the coin. Full adoption takes time, but were very happy with how it’s gone so far! As we said earlier, we take our community feedback seriously, and we've been listening to your suggestions. Based on your input, our developers have been focusing on a few changes that we think everyone will like. The dev team has been working on developing a new wallet which brings us to, what’s next for BonusCoin.
What's coming next (here's where it gets interesting)Before we get to all the details, I need to give you a little bit about how this was decided. SHACoin (which collapsed brilliantly this week if I don't say so myself) has been having problems over the last month. During the initial problems, the SHAcoin community members approached us and asked us to fix their coin and replace the original developers. We politely turned down the offer, as we were devoted BonusCoin and our community. It did however lead us to start thinking about PoS in coins, how few solid SHA256 ones there were, and how that could benefit both our current miners and investors, as well as, our future miners and investors. As the SHACoin drama continued we also got several requests from the BonusCoin community to move the coin toward a PoS model as well.
** Most of you probably know already that PoS stands for Proof of Stake. Pure PoS coins are designed to basically pay interest on currently owned coins after a period of time. Mining periods are limited to the initial phase and then coin expansion only occurs via Stake.**So, our devs began testing a few weeks ago to see if this model could fit inside of BonusCoin. After looking into it they decided it could and have been working on converting BonusCoin into a stable PoS coin. To say that they're sticklers for details would be an understatement.
We were going to hold off on announcing this until after we had fully completed the wallet and were ready to publish, but with SHACoin's collapse and the community asking about our plans we felt it was now time to announce.
So, in line with the community desires, and to fill the need for a Solid PoS SHA256 coin, we've decided to change the structure of BonusCoin at block 75,000 (We're currently around 22,000). Everything will stay as is until that block (approximately 2-3 months more of full mining time) then the coin will switch to pure PoS. We have yet to decide the PoS percentage to be paid yearly, but were thinking from 1-5%. We've also considered reducing it over time. This should amount to a reduction in the overall coins minted from 2.5 Billion to 420+/- Million at block 75,000, plus expansion via stake over time (minus transaction fees of course).
We think this should have very positive effects both for our miners and investors. The coin will only be minable for a reduced period of time, so our miners will get maximum value for the next few months and our investors will have a good opportunity to get in and benefit from the long term stake creation. After the mining period ends our miners can move their rigs on to other coin and continue to grow their BonusCoin value via stake and our investors / traders will get a nice long term benefit to joining into our community as well.
This all fits hand in hand with our long term objective of building a commerce model around the coin too. With the coin at its current low pricing, it needs more investors and traders, and less coins so it can get to the larger exchanges, build volume and build usage in commerce. All of this will occur with this basic change!
We debated a lot about the impact of changing the coins structure, but in the end we realized that the only people it could possibly hurt were dumpers and those who had no faith in BonusCoin, our commitment, or our community. We decided that was alright by us. They sold early and got the prices they wanted, for anyone who had faith, we believe this decision will ultimately benefit you, as has always been our intention.
**And before anyone asks, yes, we're still working on the merchant frameworks, but we wanted to get the coin moved over to PoS first and then we'll return to getting the merchant frameworks finished**What we need from the communityFirst off we want to thank everyone for their support! You all have been amazing. As I said a moment ago, we're aware that everyone may not like this change, but based on the comments we've received the majority will. Please feel free to express any opinions on this. Ultimately, it's your coin so if you like or dislike this direction, please speak up! We want your feedback, that's why we watch these forums.
Secondly, we'll need some beta-testers willing to help us with the new wallet when it's ready for final testing in the coming weeks. If you're willing to help with that, please let us know.
Third, we would really like everyone’s input on the stake percentages. We’ve been thinking between 1-5% and maybe declining yearly to 1% min. Any opinions will be helpful in making that determination.
Finally, I know it's been said before, but if anyone has any additional ideas, please post them. It's been said that no idea is a bad one. That's bullshit of course, but we don't bite, and you never know when something crazy comes out amazing. We're all ears, and we want to keep you all happy.
