Spin-offs: bootstrap an altcoin with a btc-blockchain-based initial distribution

[Bill White]

In my understanding, a spinoff should work exactly the same
as the original, so altering the difficulty adjustment would
just make it an "independent" altcoin.

The idea expressed by Peter R in the original post of this thread only talks about making the initial distribution in proportion to a snapshot of the Bitcoin block chain:

Since the market has already encoded its best estimate of the “most efficient distribution” into the unforgeable global ledger known as the blockchain, why not use this?  Since all bitcoin users can cryptographically prove ownership of their share of bitcoins, the code-base of any alt-coin can be modified in a trivial way to allow bitcoin users to claim a share of any pre-mine in direct proportion to the percentage of bitcoin’s market cap they control.  This method (a) bootstraps alt-coins with a very large potential user base, (b) places all alt-coins on equal footings thereby allowing them to compete on their own merits, (c) automatically piggybacks bitcoin investors in any financial gains that may result due to community innovation, (d) fairly rewards innovative alt-coin developers as they can scoop up spin-offs dumped cheaply on the open market, (e) makes it difficult to “pump and dump.”

Later in the thread someone referred to alt-coins that do this as "spin-offs."

I have not read anyone suggest other requirements than the initial distribution for an alt-coin to qualify as a "spin-off."

What other requirements?  Can you give an example?

Yes. There is no requirement that the difficulty adjustment algorithm be the same as Bitcoin's. I was responding to the quoted post of YarkoL in which he suggested that if a coin altered the difficulty adjustment, then it should not be considered a "spin-off." In response I asserted that there are no such requirements for "spin-offs".

YarkoL said that the spin-off "should work exactly the same as the original." Now that I read this again I think I misunderstood to what "the original" was intended to refer. It's also possible some of us are using the term "spin-off" differently in this thread.

The thread started with the example of Ethereum being copied to Æthereum except with Bitcoin's distribution. If such a thing were to happen, would Æthereum be a "spin-off" of Bitcoin or a "spin-off" of Ethereum? It was clear to me that it would be a spin-off of Bitcoin, not Ethereum. However, I think YarkoL may have meant "the original" to refer to Ethereum in this example.

If someone were to develop Æthereum and make it very different from Ethereum, but started it with an initial distribution determined by the Bitcoin block chain, I would still consider Æthereum to be a spin-off of Bitcoin. It would simply have a confusing name.

[tokeweed]

Very interesting.  How did the aethereum thing go?  I never heard anything about it tbh.

[smooth]

Very interesting.  How did the aethereum thing go?  I never heard anything about it tbh.

Has not been launched. There was someone a few posts back who was working on some code that can be used for æthereum or other spinoffs.

[YarkoL]

The thread started with the example of Ethereum being copied to Æthereum except with Bitcoin's distribution. If such a thing were to happen, would Æthereum be a "spin-off" of Bitcoin or a "spin-off" of Ethereum? It was clear to me that it would be a spin-off of Bitcoin, not Ethereum. However, I think YarkoL may have meant "the original" to refer to Ethereum in this example.

We haven't established the nomenclature yet, so
your interpretation is as good as mine.

However, the point remains that  the original vision is to render
the production of genuinely innovative alternative blockchains
economically unsound because they can be spun off easily.

Now if that vision were to become reality, developers would
have incentive to base the initial distribution of their coin
on Bitcoin right from the start. But in that world, would we call them spin-offs
any longer? Wouldn't they just be "new coins" or something?...

[Bill White]

The thread started with the example of Ethereum being copied to Æthereum except with Bitcoin's distribution. If such a thing were to happen, would Æthereum be a "spin-off" of Bitcoin or a "spin-off" of Ethereum? It was clear to me that it would be a spin-off of Bitcoin, not Ethereum. However, I think YarkoL may have meant "the original" to refer to Ethereum in this example.

We haven't established the nomenclature yet, so
your interpretation is as good as mine.

However, the point remains that  the original vision is to render
the production of genuinely innovative alternative blockchains
economically unsound because they can be spun off easily.

Now if that vision were to become reality, developers would
have incentive to base the initial distribution of their coin
on Bitcoin right from the start. But in that world, would we call them spin-offs
any longer? Wouldn't they just be "new coins" or something?...

I agree that the nomenclature isn't fixed yet. Incidentally, I got involved in this thread because I am developing a Bitcoin spin-off (Qeditas), and I certainly intend to call it a spin-off. People on this thread convinced me that I needed to include p2sh addresses for it to qualify as a spin-off. This was somewhat painful since it required me to implement the Bitcoin script language, but I did it.

There's a separate pre-announcement thread about Qeditas with more details. It hasn't launched yet.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=998559.0

[sfultong]

Update: creating a snapshot of p2pkh transactions and claiming from it with signed messages appears to work.

TODO:
 * support for other transaction types
   * multisig
   * p2sh
   * miscellaneous scripts
 * support for specifying block height to take snapshot at
 * fork bitcoin core to wire in snapshot-taking code (I've done this locally, but building it is a pain... I've hand-edited makefiles)

After those are done, I'm going to test it on the live blockchain, and also create a snapshot from the same block that Bill White did, so I can do a comparison of our snapshots.

After that, I'm going to create a proof-of-concept spinoff of another cryptocurrency, which of course is the real goal.

Optimistically, I'll be done in a month. Pessimistically, I'll be done by the end of the year.

[Adrian-x]

Update: creating a snapshot of p2pkh transactions and claiming from it with signed messages appears to work.

TODO:
 * support for other transaction types
   * multisig
   * p2sh
   * miscellaneous scripts
 * support for specifying block height to take snapshot at
 * fork bitcoin core to wire in snapshot-taking code (I've done this locally, but building it is a pain... I've hand-edited makefiles)

After those are done, I'm going to test it on the live blockchain, and also create a snapshot from the same block that Bill White did, so I can do a comparison of our snapshots.

After that, I'm going to create a proof-of-concept spinoff of another cryptocurrency, which of course is the real goal.

Optimistically, I'll be done in a month. Pessimistically, I'll be done by the end of the year.

exciting work! looking forward to seeing it.

[Adrian-x]

The thread started with the example of Ethereum being copied to Æthereum except with Bitcoin's distribution. If such a thing were to happen, would Æthereum be a "spin-off" of Bitcoin or a "spin-off" of Ethereum? It was clear to me that it would be a spin-off of Bitcoin, not Ethereum. However, I think YarkoL may have meant "the original" to refer to Ethereum in this example.

We haven't established the nomenclature yet, so
your interpretation is as good as mine.

However, the point remains that  the original vision is to render
the production of genuinely innovative alternative blockchains
economically unsound because they can be spun off easily.

Now if that vision were to become reality, developers would
have incentive to base the initial distribution of their coin
on Bitcoin right from the start. But in that world, would we call them spin-offs
any longer? Wouldn't they just be "new coins" or something?...

I agree that the nomenclature isn't fixed yet. Incidentally, I got involved in this thread because I am developing a Bitcoin spin-off (Qeditas), and I certainly intend to call it a spin-off. People on this thread convinced me that I needed to include p2sh addresses for it to qualify as a spin-off. This was somewhat painful since it required me to implement the Bitcoin script language, but I did it.

There's a separate pre-announcement thread about Qeditas with more details. It hasn't launched yet.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=998559.0

also sounds way cool!

[Bill White]

Update: creating a snapshot of p2pkh transactions and claiming from it with signed messages appears to work.

TODO:
 * support for other transaction types
   * multisig
   * p2sh
   * miscellaneous scripts
 * support for specifying block height to take snapshot at
 * fork bitcoin core to wire in snapshot-taking code (I've done this locally, but building it is a pain... I've hand-edited makefiles)

After those are done, I'm going to test it on the live blockchain, and also create a snapshot from the same block that Bill White did, so I can do a comparison of our snapshots.

After that, I'm going to create a proof-of-concept spinoff of another cryptocurrency, which of course is the real goal.

Optimistically, I'll be done in a month. Pessimistically, I'll be done by the end of the year.

It's good to hear you're making fast progress. It will be especially interesting to me to have confirmation (hopefully) that the snapshot I took was correct. To be specific about my snapshot, it was of the address balances after the block at height 349,999 and before the block at height 350,000. Since the genesis block has height 0, this means it includes the first 350,000 blocks. Also, I simplified the snapshot to list accounts using either p2pkh or p2sh. As you probably know, many of the "scripts" can easily be made p2pkh (most or all of the early txouts had the right form, but were not yet p2pkh). All the others can be made p2sh. The snapshot data is available here:

https://mega.nz/#F!0xhzUbTS!h-LeyiTbF9dXgusKCc_bfQ

[YarkoL]

After that, I'm going to create a proof-of-concept spinoff of another cryptocurrency, which of course is the real goal.

Care to share your criteria for picking one? If for nothing
else, just to stir up some exciting speculation 

For my part, I'd steer clear of any biggies now, but still would
go after a coin with a decent following and a nontrivial
divergence from the Bitcoin codebase.

[sfultong]

Why steer clear of the biggies? Why not start at the top?

I suppose it's better to work out the kinks on a smaller crypto, so that I don't risk the hype dying if/when I have to fix things and possibly restart the chain. But I'm fairly impatient, and the ideal for me would be if the hype pulls in other developers who are better than me with C++ and are willing to support the code.

Figuring out how I want people to claim multisig and other pay-to-script-hash transactions has been a bit of a stumbling block, but I think I've finally settled on something that will work for all of them and isn't too hard on the user.

[YarkoL]

I suppose it's better to work out the kinks on a smaller crypto, so that I don't risk the hype dying if/when I have to fix things and possibly restart the chain.

That is pretty much what I thought. Since it is a proof of concept and
turned out not entirely successful, it could still attract devs precisely for the
challenge of going after bigger game. Lessons learned and so on.

But if an attempt to target a very prominent alt right from the outset
should fail, it could dissuade anyone to proceed with the development.
The perception could be that spinoffs are a dead idea.

[Adrian-x]

I suppose it's better to work out the kinks on a smaller crypto, so that I don't risk the hype dying if/when I have to fix things and possibly restart the chain.

That is pretty much what I thought. Since it is a proof of concept and
turned out not entirely successful, it could still attract devs precisely for the
challenge of going after bigger game. Lessons learned and so on.

But if an attempt to target a very prominent alt right from the outset
should fail, it could dissuade anyone to proceed with the development.
The perception could be that spinoffs are a dead idea.

I like the idea of doing a spin off using bitcoin and an alt or even a handful of alts that have similar and desirable features. You could peg the exchange rate at a cretin block height with all merged alts.

why I like the idea of going for "big game" is it adds to the the dynamic that rewards developers.

here is an examples:
During the early development stage the spin-off has no value or very little. I am presuming the spin-off still has an mission schema tied to PoW, a developer invests time in a project has an opportunity to mine along with everyone else and should.

The idea of a problematic pre-mine is largely mitigated because the spin-off has a pre-mine built in with block height of the spin-offs as its initial distribution it just needs to be claimed.

Now if the idea gains traction and the developer is motivated and the developer has a new opportunity to buy spin-off coins that will be dumped on the market, the developer has insider knowlage in a way, and that's a belief in the system and his willingness to continue working on it.  he also has the ability to work with his mined coins selling them or saving them depending on his criteria for success.

I think the market dynamic of "Big Game" will bring in developers and big winners and looser very early on, it's likely in a success scenario the winners could be the developers and eventually the network of users, the only losers are the people who don't believe and dump their coins. The advantage here is there is a double gold rush 1 to mine and 2 to buy dumped coins knowing the mining scheme.

The developer has another advantage and that is to accumulate coins of the other alts or bitcoin, knowing the block height of the snapshot.   

Keeping the developer financially invested in the success of the spin-off is important, and i think "big game" snapshots will make or break the idea so worth trying form the start. 

[sfultong]

I'm happy to announce the snapshot creation code for p2pkh balances seems to mostly agree with bill white's snapshot, taken at height 349999.

The 5 addresses where our balance amounts disagree seem to come down to bitcoin quirks (like the genesis block not being a valid input to other transactions).

There are 4 addresses present in his snapshot that aren't present in mine and aren't present on blockchain.info. They're only like 3 btc, so whatever.

There are 1061 addresses present in my snapshot that aren't present in his, but they're all dust.

Full details:
https://mega.nz/#!llxnmb7J!ND9NMtO-XQQRsLHyM7227sBkA2EWr6lLr15o5seEObs


Next steps:
 1. check p2sh balances against bill's (should be pretty quick)
 2. add code to filter dust (or really, give the ability to filter below arbitrary amounts)
 3. the fun part... a real, proof-of-concept spinoff! (I've already put some work into this while waiting on slow snapshot-taking processes)

[sfultong]

p2sh comparison is complete. There are no disagreements on balances for hashes present in both snapshots.

I took any bare script uxtos and converted them to p2sh, and it appears bill did the same.

There are 448 p2sh transactions that are present in bill's but not mine. They're all dust, and of the 5 random ones I tested, I couldn't find them on blockchain.info, so they must've been bare scripts, if anything.

There are 22 p2sh transactions that are present in mine but not bill's. One of them is a massive 2609 btc utxo which must've come from a bare script. I'll write some code to see if I can track that down for him.

[YarkoL]

Next steps:
 1. check p2sh balances against bill's (should be pretty quick)
 2. add code to filter dust (or really, give the ability to filter below arbitrary amounts)
 3. the fun part... a real, proof-of-concept spinoff! (I've already put some work into this while waiting on slow snapshot-taking processes)

Exciting to see this actually going forward!

[Bill White]

It certainly is exciting to see progress being made on the spin-offs front.

I'm happy to announce the snapshot creation code for p2pkh balances seems to mostly agree with bill white's snapshot, taken at height 349999.

The 5 addresses where our balance amounts disagree seem to come down to bitcoin quirks (like the genesis block not being a valid input to other transactions).

I see three of the addresses which are corner cases where it's reasonable to make different choices. The block reward of the genesis block is not spendable in Bitcoin, but it counts as part of the 21 million. Also, the two addresses 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa and 1GktTvnY8KGfAS72DhzGYJRyaQNvYrK9Fg got two block rewards each, but due to a bug the transactions have the same id and are only spendable once. It's reasonable to assign each of them 50 BTC or 100 BTC. As for the other 2 addresses, my code seems to have definitely missed transactions. I will investigate this further.

There are 4 addresses present in his snapshot that aren't present in mine and aren't present on blockchain.info. They're only like 3 btc, so whatever.

For the last one, 1P8GMhC3qYkuvRRBsS5gqGegT7GvQoxAwY, the balance in my snapshot comes from tx d087410c172f57a7857b6341c952592de7934d1fee0fc745e9b7569487656876. The script appears to be a standard p2pkh script except with a OP_NOP at the end. I'm not sure whether or not this makes the 0.038... bitcoins unspendable, but it's reasonable to decide to include it or not. I still need to investigate the other three.

There are 1061 addresses present in my snapshot that aren't present in his, but they're all dust.

Yes, I didn't include txouts with a value of 0, and that explains some of these. However, it does appear that I unintentionally missed several dust outputs.

p2sh comparison is complete. There are no disagreements on balances for hashes present in both snapshots.

I took any bare script uxtos and converted them to p2sh, and it appears bill did the same.

This sounds correct, although it's possible I recognized some scripts as provably unspendable. In addition, I may have converted 1-of-1 multisig into p2pkh instead of p2sh.

There are 448 p2sh transactions that are present in bill's but not mine. They're all dust, and of the 5 random ones I tested, I couldn't find them on blockchain.info, so they must've been bare scripts, if anything.

There are 22 p2sh transactions that are present in mine but not bill's. One of them is a massive 2609 btc utxo which must've come from a bare script. I'll write some code to see if I can track that down for him.

The 2609 btc p2sh does worry me, so please let me know if you do track it down. Can you post the p2sh results on Mega as well?

I hope you're enjoying the project. I know it's a surprising amount of work.

[Crestington]

I suppose it's better to work out the kinks on a smaller crypto, so that I don't risk the hype dying if/when I have to fix things and possibly restart the chain.

That is pretty much what I thought. Since it is a proof of concept and
turned out not entirely successful, it could still attract devs precisely for the
challenge of going after bigger game. Lessons learned and so on.

But if an attempt to target a very prominent alt right from the outset
should fail, it could dissuade anyone to proceed with the development.
The perception could be that spinoffs are a dead idea.

I have a working chain with PayCon and a clone that I created and have up and running that I want to use to test out snapshots. I want to use PayCon and do a snapshot to prune off all the old Blocks, possibly something you might be interested in since it's a live traded alt-coin with a small marketcap (about 20k).

I am currently trying to find information on the process of doing the snapshot, are you able to provide any links or guides you might have? From what I've been told from talking to SuperClam, Mullick and a few others, you need to parse all addresses as a richlist into a dumpfile and send Coins to the same addresses within the new chain, things being much easier if it also has the same address starting letter.

[sfultong]

I've made a new archive, this one has both the p2pkh and the p2sh results.

https://mega.nz/#!F4oWEZSb!ZDPYldwnhGIh6KPuTglfRpYVmMMpDQQG_EXRM9f0FAw

The big amount that bill didn't include (260936304319 satoshis) are actually a bunch of txos with the script "OP_DUP OP_HASH160 0 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG", so not spendable. The relevant tx ids and vout indexes are:

3be0ac3dc1c3b7fa7fbe34f4678037ed733a14e801abe6d3da42bc643a651401 1
64c01fedd5cf6d306ca18d85e842f068e19488126c411741e089be8f4052df09 1
6a86e6a5e8d5f9e9492114dafe5056c5618222f5042408ad867d3c1888855a31 0
15ad0894ab42a46eb04108fb8bd66786566a74356d2103f077710733e0516c3a 1
9edab6e7fadf1d6006315ff9394c08a7bf42e19cf61502200a1f73994f8da94b 1
3ab5f53978850413a273920bfc86f4278d9c418272accddade736990d60bdd53 1
aebe39a99114f1b46fc5a67289545e54cbfec92d08fc8ffc92dc9df4a15ea05a 1
2d00ef4895f20904d7d4c0bada17a8e9d47d6c049cd2e5002f8914bfa7f1d27b 1
03acfae47d1e0b7674f1193237099d1553d3d8a93ecc85c18c4bec37544fe386 1
aa62bdd690de061a6fbbd88420f7a7aa574ba86da4fe82edc27e2263f8743988 0
835d4dcc52e160c23173658de0b747082f1937d1184e8e1838e9394bc62c0392 1
305fbc2ec7f7f2bc5a21d2dfb01a5fc52ab5d064a7278e2ecbab0d2a27b8c392 0
ddddf9f04b4c1d4e1185cacf5cf302f3d11dee5d74f71721d741fbb507062e9e 0
6d39eeb2ae7f9d42b0569cf1009de4c9f031450873bf2ec84ce795837482e7a6 0
7ad47a19b201ce052f98161de1b1457bacaca2e698f542e196d4c7f8f45899ab 0
5bd88ab32b50e4a691dcfd1fff9396f512e003d7275bb5c1b816ab071beca5ba 1
f0137a6b31947cf7ab367ae23942a263272c41f36252fcd3460ee8b6e94a84c1 0
6d5088c138e2fbf4ea7a8c2cb1b57a76c4b0a5fab5f4c188696aad807a5ba6d8 0
0ca7f7299dc8d87c26c82badf9a303049098af050698c694fbec35c4b08fc3df 0
633acf266c913523ab5ed9fcc4632bae18d2a7efc1744fd43dd669e5f2869ce5 0
111291fcf8ab84803d42ec59cb4eaceadd661185242a1e8f4b7e49b79ecbe5f3 1
07d33c8c74e945c50e45d3eaf4add7553534154503a478cf6d48e1c617b3f9f3 0
81f591582b436c5b129f347fe7e681afd6811417973c4a4f83b18e92a9d130fd 1

To be honest, this project has been fairly tedious, but I'm almost done with this part.

[sfultong]

Oh, and those txos don't fit the schema for p2pkh according to libbitcoin, so it treats them as bare, nonstandard scripts, which is why they're in my p2sh list.