As most people know, Whitecoin has been turned over from the previous dev, and is currently being reconstructed from the ground up to fix it's proof of stake implementation by several new people. With Whitecoin under new community management, the new goal of Whitecoin is not to compete with other proof of stake coins, alt coins in general, or random gimmicks to manipulate the market for short term gain. The new goal of Whitecoin is to compete with Bitcoin itself.
A few people have proposed a Whitecoin Foundation to progress the coin further. Most long term Bitcoin community members consider The Bitcoin Foundation as either completely unnecessary at best, or a flat out scam at worst. My proposal is a temporary Whitecoin Foundation to pay development bounties. The bounties will be funded by the whitecoin multipools using a small miner tax, and then sent to a multisig BTC address requiring two out of three signatures to pay out for whoever succeeds in implementation. After all four main bounties are accomplished and paid out, the foundation is then dissolved and everything will be supported by free open source development.
Even though I loathe the term, this would essentially be a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, as described by people such as Daniel Larimer.
Development priority moving forward:
There's an infamous three letter phrase in cryptocurrency, "trusted third parties". For all intents and purposes, the trusted third parties of Bitcoin, are currently the small number of mining pools everyone connects to that verify all transactions. Proof of stake has an inherent strength, and weakness in this regard. Each individual user needs to run their own own node to verify transactions to receive their stake reward. This results in less centralization, but more logistics problems in dealing with block chain sizes on home machines (especially if raised over 1 meg), while the Bitcoin pools will eventually just convert to centralized, full out data centers. Centralized being the key word.
As you can see, there are many drawbacks to the PoW, and PoS solution in trying to scale them up as a real payment processor. They either become too centralized, or they're unable to raise TPS to worthwhile levels due to hardware limitations in home use.
The good news for Whitecoin, proof of stake implementation offers a viable solution not available to the current Bitcoin model, and will require two main strategic goal posts.
1)
Decentralized checkpoint system - Peercoin, and other proof of stake coins, have long been criticized for not actually being a decentralized currency. They rely on security features that don't originate from a network consensus. What many people don't realize, is that addressing this problem is the foundation for all other advancements in proof of stake. Some of the variables proof of stake relies on to generate interest for holders, can also be used to generate decentralized checkpoints using game theory principles.
There's not a question of, "can this be done", there's only a question of choosing the most simple and efficient way to do it out of the hundreds of possible ways.
As a simple example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=584719.msg6430133#msg6430133A super-peer network of 100 or less pools use Chord technology to form a robust ring.
I believe using an approach like this in proof of stake sounds more feasible than in PoW.
You could implement a weighted, decentralized checkpoint system for PoS. As per your example, the top 100 PoS wallets could be referenced for the checkpoint since we're relying on game theory to make any of this stuff work. It doesn't seem like the majority of the top 100 peercoin/blackcoin/whatever wallets would be interested in destroying their investment.
I'm sure there's dozens of ways to weight checkpoint negotiation without using an arbitrary number like the top 100 wallets online as well.
This is just a preliminary example, and there's a lot of things that need to be thought out for the most efficient means of implementation & security, which will have it's own thread located here until the best choice is selected:
-thread placeholder-
2)
Block Chain Pruning - Once the decentralized checkpoint system is implemented, that system can be leveraged for pruning. The protocol will begin to drop previous history after it's reached a certain depth and having a sufficient number of newer checkpoints ahead of it. This will also allow block size to be increased, and TPS to increase as well. Block times will mostly likely need to be adjusted as the block size goes higher.
*preferably with a flag to enable or disable pruning so user has the option of keeping full chain or automatically prune it
3)
Proper transaction fees based on network variables instead of static in a PoS system - I believe Peercoin is currently working on this problem. It may or may not already be solved when the time comes.
4)
Android Wallet - self explanatory
Development FundingTo fund further Whitecoin development, in the form of large bounties for working implementation of the two main strategic development goals, I will attempt to work with Whitecoin multipools to add a fixed donation percentage to either a Whitecoin or Bitcoin multisig address. The donation fee on the multipool will be in addition to the pool owner's fees so as to not come out of their own pocket and has not been discussed as to what percentage this should be yet, but will be small and not detrimental to pool operation. If multipool owners do not wish to go along with this plan, then an "official" Whitecoin multipool will be created to accomplish development funding goals. People mining on the multipool that donates towards development will most likely see a better return on their investment, so I don't see a problem in this pool being underutilized.
The development funding address will require multiple signatures to be released for the bounty as described here:
https://coinb.in/multisig/I will act as escrow for one multisig participant. I've been involved with Vertcoin and Ronpaulcoin, and an op in #altcoins efnet. Two more are needed and I would prefer one to be a top five WC wallet holder that plans on holding for a decent amount of time, and then the third is up for nomination, but would preferably need to be someone that doesn't plan on dying within the next one or two years, and doesn't have the word stackcoin in their username. Community will vote for 3rd person by general consensus from users with 2+ more stars on their name.
The Whitecoin development bounty address will be posted on the official Whitecoin page, and can be donated to without using the multipools as well. In a way, this is a "Whitecoin Foundation", like the Bitcoin Foundation, to incentivize developers for work, the main difference is, nothing will be paid until the goals are accomplished, and the "foundation" will be abolished and be volunteer only after these goals are accomplished. Anyone applying for bounty must post their work for peer review.
Whoever solves development bounty priority #1, in finished implementation, receives 100% of the total fund. The fund will then regenerate until #2 development priority is solved, until all four main development goals are finished, then the foundation will officially close and rely solely on volunteer, open source support for all other issues.
The Whitecoin bounty system is using an all or nothing approach for success. Even though development priority 3 & 4 aren't as hard to solve as the first two problems, they are not as important to the long term success of the coin so will be delayed until more important matters are finished.
Final wordPost comments and concerns below
