[ANN] ORA :: NXT 'monetary system' currency

[Kora]

Great idea.
Would love to see some of these videos.

Will you be publishing the videos, as they are submitted?

Yes, submitted entries will be viewable on the CryptFest website - http://www.cryptofest.tv/

I think it might take a while to get the word out, but I'm very hopeful CryptoFest will snowball into something really interesting, and ultimately I hope it becomes a worthwhile promotion for the crypto movement.

I think CryptoFest will be a lot of fun, and thought provoking too!!

[kora2]

Guess who got banned for running an impromptu ORA give away?? It was for a good cause so i don't regret it, but I must admit I am quite disappointed that an incredibly nasty thread is allowed to continue on this forum.

This is the thread in question (very nasty piece of work). All the give away posts have been deleted.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=809466.0

'kora2' will hold the fort while 'kora' is in the sin-bin for 30 days!

onwards & upwards

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Introducing

ORA ASSET FAUCET (live)

Link : http://188.226.197.131/orafaucet

3 Easy Steps to Claim your FREE ORA :

Step 1 : Type your Nxt Account Number (Reed Soloman Format)

Step 2: Type the captcha

Step 3 : Claim Ora

A total of 1,500,000 oras has been allocated for this purpose. I would like to thank cr7yp for making this asset faucet possible. This, ladies & gentleman is probably the first of its kind, an Asset Faucet. cr7yp will be the official operator for this faucet. Should you face any issues or trouble, please do not hesitate to contact me or cr7yp.

With this faucet, you will need to accumulate at least 100 oras before you can transfer them into your account. This is because of the minimum transfer fee of 1 nxt. We will be funding this account with 1000 nxt each time. Kora has funded the initial 1000 nxt for the start. We need to look into the ways to fund this account continously (we may need to fund this account at least 15,000 nxt to disburse the total sum of 1,500,000 oras). Any donations for this purpose will be appreciated.

Have some fun, people. Take this opportunity to introduce ORA to everyone you know.

DH

[DarkhorseofNxt]

any idea how to make that image view-able. Can't seem to make it appear. hmm. Help?  

edit: done.

[bluedude]

Nice faucet Like it.

Couple of suggestions/queries.
1.Is there a way to see how much I have accumulated so far, by entering my nxt address?
2.There would be lots of people, who may not reach the 100 mark. Do we still send coins to them at the end of the 1.5M target?
3.Traditionally people dont like keeping their tokens/coins in faucet as there are so many cases of faucet theft and the users end up with nothing for their time.
   So users prefer instant transactions. With a 1NXT fee for transaction, at the current rate its not a feasible solution.

How about creating the asset in another framework like NFD, where the coins are very cheap to make the instant transaction possible.
This gives the user a choice to either enter an NFD or NXT address, and if its an NFD address, then the asset is instantly transferred.
This will expose us to the NFD community too.

I hope the faucet can determine if its a NXT or NFD address by looking at the address format somehow, so that it can decide if it has to send an instant transaction or not.
As NFD is a pure clone of NXT, it would be very easy to integrate into our existing faucet system.

End of the day, we are promoting the ORA coin, so I dont think it matters, where the assets are held while we develop the coin.

NFD is an example, it could be any platform where AE is possible and is easy to integrate into the faucet backend code
My 2 cents.

[EDIT]
The only problem I can see is potential double dipping, one with the NXT and another with the NFD address, if there are no IP validation in place.
You could reduce the coins from 3-10 to 2-5, if that matters

[bluedude]

Click on the image to visit the faucet.

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Nice faucet Like it.

Couple of suggestions/queries.
1.Is there a way to see how much I have accumulated so far, by entering my nxt address?

It should be possible, but i am not sure, let me check with cr7yp on this.
Edit: do-able. Will implement this.

2.There would be lots of people, who may not reach the 100 mark. Do we still send coins to them at the end of the 1.5M target?

After you accumulated 100 oras, it will be automatically sent to your account. But yeah, a valid question which needs clarification. Good question.
Edit:

Both is possible!

I will implement a little function to query the current Ora collection by providing the Nxt address. Additional, I will implement a job that checks the last Ora claimof of a Nxt address automatically. If the last claim is more than one month ago, it will pay out the ora.

Did I forget something?

cr7yp

3.Traditionally people dont like keeping their tokens/coins in faucet as there are so many cases of faucet theft and the users end up with nothing for their time.
   So users prefer instant transactions. With a 1NXT fee for transaction, at the current rate its not a feasible solution.

Exactly, the original faucet was designed to send ORA after each click, but we noticed with the tx fee of 1 nxt, we will need a very huge sum of nxt to make the faucet operational. So limit of 100 oras is introduced to counter this for the time being.

How about creating the asset in another framework like NFD, where the coins are very cheap to make the instant transaction possible.
This gives the user a choice to either enter an NFD or NXT address, and if its an NFD address, then the asset is instantly transferred.
This will expose us to the NFD community too.

I hope the faucet can determine if its a NXT or NFD address by looking at the address format somehow, so that it can decide if it has to send an instant transaction or not.
As NFD is a pure clone of NXT, it would be very easy to integrate into our existing faucet system.

End of the day, we are promoting the ORA coin, so I dont think it matters, where the assets are held while we develop the coin.

NFD is an example, it could be any platform where AE is possible and is easy to integrate into the faucet backend code
My 2 cents.

Honestly, no plans for that right now (have not discussed this yet). But since this has been asked for the 2nd time, i will check with the team on this. Although my opinion would be keeping all the assets in one place, makes it easy and less complications for the future.

[EDIT]
The only problem I can see is potential double dipping, one with the NXT and another with the NFD address, if there are no IP validation in place.
Or you could reduce the coins from 3-10 to 2-5

[/quote]

[bluedude]

[DarkhorseofNxt]

With the faucet out, and the meme give away completed, nio will be concentrating on the ORA software development while, the rest will be looking into making the Crypto Festival a success. Any ideas, help will be greatly appreciated.

[DarkhorseofNxt]

Okay guys,  a little update for the faucet. We changed the withdrawal limit to 50 oras. Any not withdrawn oras for a month will be automatically sent to your account. Also the actual accumulated amount of ora is also added.

Let us know anything else you guys need in the faucet.

[moore]

Okay guys,  a little update. We changed the withdrawal limit to 50 oras. Any not withdrawn oras for a month will be automatically sent to your account. Also the actual accumulated amount of ora is also added.

Let us know anything else you guys need in the faucet.

Do too good

[xinyichao]

thats good news,and i can get my share . thanks

[kora2]

Announcing - 'CryptoFest: Early Birds'

more details - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=801933.msg9192148#msg9192148

[kora2]

I'm in the process of writing an extended article on my thoughts and experiences around my attempt to bootstrap ORA.

Here is Part 1, parts 2-4 coming soon! Feedback most welcome

PART 1

Living on the NXT asset exchange!

Introduction
The ORA project is about one week away from celebrating our 5th month of existence! Not bad for a crypto coin project that still has NOT decided what it actually IS yet! A strange situation for many no doubt, but this is crypto after all, and most of us have learnt to expect the unexpected by now. A prolonged period of naval gazing is giving us more time to grow the community and filter ideas on what direction we should take.

I said in my original (K)Ora announcement on 22 May on BTT that 'Kora' (later changed to ORA) was an experiment, and I think it's a good time to reflect on what's happened so far. We've had many good things happen, but we've also struggled in a few areas too, and there's definitely room for improvement in some areas.

We always welcome suggestions and feedback, and that’s why I think it's a good time for a wall of text on ORA. ORA project development is NOT fixed, and anybody who would like to get involved is more than welcome to pitch in and help! If you have ideas we have ears

If I was to try and summarise my original ORA game plan it would probably be something like this:
"Try and bootstrap a new PoS coin project that attempts to learn from the past experiences of other crypto coins. Concentrate first on community building around a broad objective, then try and empower the community to work out the specific details for itself, including community processes like funding allocations and decision making."

Bitcoin is obviously an amazing invention, but IMO PoW coins will not be seen as acceptable by the general public due to the waste issue, and while mining as a method of distribution was a great first step, I believe the advantages of PoS coins make them superior.

PoW coins do make themselves very expensive to attack, and the 'impersonal' nature of coin distribution via mining makes PoW coin generation and distribution seem 'fair', and therefore, acceptable to most people (i.e. an algorithm distributes the coins, and there's no need for an IPO). Mining has, however, become very concentrated now through large mining pools, and PoW coin networks (and therefore blockchains), are far less robust than they originally were, making them much more vulnerable to attack than previously IMO.

PoS coins do have some serious obstacles to overcome if they are to achieve wide spread adoption though. As all the coins must be created at the start there needs to be a 'conscious' decision on how the coins will be distributed. The deliberate nature of the initial distribution can present perception problems ('hey, a small number of people got all the coins in an IPO, that's not fair!). The 100% "premine" does, however, create many new opportunities that aren't available to PoW coins though.

Some of the PoS genesis coins can be held in trust and used to pay for some of the costs involved in bootstrapping a new crypto coin - development, promotion, community building ... paying people, keeping people motivated and active!

BUT who will safe guard all those 'community' coins? How can we trust a decentralised community to 'do the right thing'? Who's in charge of the 'Starfish' organisation, who's responsible? These are important questions to resolve.

In order to make it possible to keep such a large amount of community funds undistributed at the start, the new fledgling PoS community needs to develop a culture of "trust", both internally among the early adopters, and externally in the eyes of the wider crypto community. The young community also needs to develop extremely robust  and resilient community processes around decentralised decision making in order to have any hope of functioning effectively.

These are not easy things to do, especially in a 'Starfish' community without a leadership structure, but this is ORA's initial objective. We are trying to build a strong & cohesive decentralised community around the goal of creating a new PoS coin (that doesn't exist yet), then we will organise an efficient and effective distribution scheme that is (hopefully) 'accepted' by the wider crypto community (i.e. people now and in the future believe it was fair). Then we will try and develop innovative new tech using the best available resources at hand. Some of those resources will be code from other open source crypto projects, and other key resources will be the talents and energy of people who like the basic road map of ORA, and decide they would like to join in and help.

Can a strong 'credible' community with a clear worthwhile goal attract talented people? This is one of the propositions the ORA experiment is trying to test.


History: Why start ORA at all?
I made the decision to try and bootstrap a new alt coin after spending a couple of years following bitcoin, alt coins and Ripple. Having been fortunate enough to make a reasonable return on my investment of time and money in crypto, I felt that I had a pretty good understanding of the crypto landscape, but as someone with limited dev skills, I felt myself being dragged (unwillingly) into the role of 'balcony critic' like many other longer term residents of BTT. I wanted to avoid ending up as just another BTT no-it-all  'troll' spitting negativity and cynicism at newbies.

http://i57.tinypic.com/nvt6br.jpg

In order to get involved you need to put some 'skin' in the game IMO. You need to 'show' yourself (even if you stay anonymous), be sincere, spend time working on things to promote your objectives, be passionate about your ideas and goals, and importantly for me, put some real resources into trying to get ORA airborne. Putting resources into a project shows others you are committed and serious, and that hopefully helps build trust among the early community members.

I had my 'awakening' during the first week after Qora was released in mid May. Up until then I had closely followed NXT and NEM from their beginnings, and when Qora came along I felt frustration that past mistakes of other coins were going to be repeated again. It seemed obvious to me that NXT, NEM & Qora were all 'interesting', and they all had many excellent features and attributes that made them potentially superior to most PoW coins.

Unfortunately IMO, no PoS coin has managed to put all the necessary 'elements' together so far, or at least not together in a well thought out way. With NXT being the first new PoS coin, not getting everything 'right' is understandable, and NEM’s biggest failure was probably a lack of planning, and that was understandable too given its history. I think both NXT and NEM will still be very successful, but from here on I think later coins will need to raise the bar in order to survive. Don't get me wrong, I think technically NXT (and probably NEM) are superb, and the community around NXT is decentralised and leaderless, and still very active and full of energy, so NXT (and NEM) are very robust, and quite resilient to attack IMO.

Qora is different though, or at least it appeared different in mid May.

After Qora was released it felt like a potentially great coin was going to suffer unnecessarily because the qora community wasn't consciously trying to benefit from the past experiences of NXT and NEM. History serves a critical function when it helps us make things better in the future, and when it helps people avoid previous problems. IMO the crypto community has enough evidence now from past coin successes and failures, and I think it's possible to almost ‘design’ new coins that have better objective chances for long term success.  

Some of those factors are obviously technical, but many are not. Other critical factors are things like:
- organisational structure
- decision making processes
- funding issues, how developers & community workers are compensated
- distribution of coins
- promotion & marketing

The key IMO is planning all of the above, but still keeping things decentralised and leaderless … the Starfish!


ORA is an attempt to try and address some of these issues consciously, rather than leave them to more random processes and chance outcomes. Obviously the tech is critically important to long term success, but cloned coins like Doge have been very successful recently, so tech alone isn't enough, especially once crypto coins try and break into the wider community where the vast majority of users won’t know or care much about the tech, or where the tech came from, and who invented it.

[Mac Red]

Very nice summary kora.

[kora2]

Very nice summary kora.

Thanks Mac!

Here's part 2

PART 2


It's still too early to know whether ORA will succeed, or even whether ORA will get off the ground as an independent coin at all (rather than exist briefly just as a token on the NXT asset exchange), but I'm still confident the ORA experiment will be worthwhile, even if it's just because other people learn not to repeat some of our mistakes.


ORA History
I announced "Kora, a clone of Qora" on 22 May. This seemed like a good starting point for someone like me who is a supporter of PoS coins. I was NOT interested in promoting a straight clone of Qora long term, but as a non-developer I knew the tech direction for ORA was always going to be ultimately set by someone else, and my primary objective from day one was to make ORA a decentralised leaderless organisation from birth, and that meant handing over the tech decisions to other people who would be autonomous from me asap.

I am merely the catalyst who proposed the original idea to start a new coin, and I don’t have the skillset to design the perfect PoS coin, but I can assist people who might, and I am also prepared to put some resources into the ORA experiment.

The Game Plan
My first objective was to outline an appealing and credible road map - "Kora, the first clone of Qora, issued on the NXT AE while we wait for the source code". I'm quite proud that (afaik) my (K)Ora announcement on May 22 was the first time someone proposed publicly to issue a coin on the NXT AE. Due to our conscious effort to plan things properly and take our time getting the registration webapp right, some other coins actually did this before ORA (most notably NEM) but I'm 'claiming' the idea to issue coin assets on NXT AE was mine! I was more than happy when UtopianFuture borrowed from (K)Ora, as we are/were crypto brothers in arms after all!!

I also fully expected that many people would be cynical and critical of this approach, so I knew in order to attract a competent dev to help me design and develop the 'phase 1' registration webapp, I would need to pay a 'real' bounty in bitcoins, not just offer a 5% stake in ORA tokens.

My secondary objective (after the leaderless Starfish community structure) was to avoid any hint of ‘scammyness’. That's one of the main lessons we should have ALL learnt from crypto history by now IMO. Other things being equal, the coins that have the best chance of survival are the ones that gain 'acceptance' by people, and any hint of scam means almost certain death for a new coin.

People don't like unfairness, and if given a choice they will always choose a 'fair' option if it's available. The first mover *might* get a pass-card for some perceived 'unfair' elements like an IPO with a small number of participants, but any clones (even heavily modified ones with unique features) will probably die a quick death if the market (i.e. people, users, consumers) suspect there was/is something 'unfair' going on. Sometimes the perception of unfairness might be unfair itself, like the NXT IPO for example, which IMO was conducted openly and fairly, but in the end it doesn't really matter. If the community consensus opinion says a coin smells unfair it will probably die.

Perceived unfairness might be an IPO, or a developer premine that looks a bit too big, or a delayed start announcement that implies a possible secret ninja mine for insiders, or maybe some insiders had access to an optimised miner earlier than the rest of the community. Many previous coins have suffered from lingering smells due to these type of issues.

Fairness is good IMO because it’s ethical, and that’s an important goal for its own sake, but fairness is also a necessary requirement for success in an open market with low barriers to entry. Tenebrix died but Litecoin lives because Tenebrix was judged "unfair" by the market. Monero is more successful than Bytecoin, because people have judged Bytecoin has "unfair" aspects.

Fairness is a pre-requisite for community acceptance. Why is Lance Armstrong rejected now? His cycling achievements are exactly the same as they were before his admission of drug taking (he still won seven Tour de France races), so is he still the best cyclist in history or not? Most people would say 'No' because he took performance enhancing drugs, so it's not 'fair' to the other competitors, but in absolute terms he did come back from cancer and win seven times in a row, and despite the drugs, that's still pretty amazing.

The reason most people would disagree (Lance isn't the best cyclist in history) because humans don't like cheating, lying, scamming ... we don't feel good about things that look unfair. Sometimes we don't know the truth, or we don't have the option to reject the 'unfair' option before it's too late (a network effect has already cemented the 'unfair' incumbent), but when we do, most humans will go for the 'fair option if they can. This is not so much an opinion, but what I think is readily observed over human history.

When things are judged as 'unfair' trust is broken, and eventually things can become unworkable, and even those who previously benefited from the 'unfairness' often come to the point where they see that there own self interest requires fixing the most extreme effects of the 'unfairness'.

That's sort of what happened in South Africa in the lead up to when apartheid ended, and the white community had a referendum to decide whether to continue negotiating with the black majority to change the South African constitution, and effectively end apartheid. The referendum was passed with a 68% majority! It would be nice to think that 68% of white South Africans in 1990 voted based on ethical and humanitarian considerations alone, but I think it's safe to assume *some* white South Africans voted 'yes' despite their own 'prejudiced' feelings because they finally accepted that such an 'unfair' system like apartheid was broken, and would never be accepted. The 'unfairness' would eventually make South Africa 'unworkable' as a society and as an economy. I think many whites voted in favor of 'fairness' not from the heart, but from the head. I've been to South Africa a few times and met many wonderful people on my travels, black & white, and that's the impression I got from talking to South Africans about that period in their history.

Many times I've seen NXT'ers saying similar type of things to NXT IPO whales 'distribute your stake, it's in YOUR interest to improve the distribution, you will destroy NXT if you are greedy and think you can keep 5% stake of ALL NXT' etc etc Many whales have probably done just this, sold NXT motivated by something other than their own profit. To try and keep NXT 'workable' -  Distribute or Die!!

I think most crypto activists agree that a pre-requisite for a crypto coin's success is acceptance, and a pre-requisite for acceptance is a collective judgement of "fairness" by the market (i.e. the coin users) for the processes and culture around the coin, and that includes the initial distribution. IMO NXT and Qora both had "fair" IPO's, but the consensus of the market is *probably* the opposite, that both IPO's were too small and so 'unfair'. NXT will probably 'get away with it'  based on having a first mover 'pass-card', (similar to early bitcoin miners), as the network effect has already started to cement the first movers into their dominant positions.

Qora??
With Qora things might be a bit different though.

If the Achilles heel (rightly or wrongly) for NXT was the initial distribution, why did Qora repeat the same mistake with an IPO for only a small number of initial shareholders? That 'error', combined with some early 'pumping' frustrated me, as IMO it was obvious an early price pump would only burn early investors when the price fell later, and Qora obviously had so much more promise compared to most other alt coins, and Qora was so much more than just another clone coin.

That’s what got me off of the couch as an arm chair critic and into the game so to speak. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and see if I could spark a new coin into life based on some of my main opinions & ideas as to what makes a successful coin 'work'.

So ... my game plan when I posted my announcement on May 22 was:
- Find a dev to make a distribution webapp
- Pay him/her a bitcoin bounty, because that's fair to them, and so that hopefully gives me the best chance to get a quality applicant
- No IPO, FREE stakes - avoid any hint of 'scam'
- The registration webapp prime directive - "make it fair", so people accept the outcome - FREE stakes, long time period to register, lots of advanced warning, ant-sockpuppet measures, use common-sense to solve problems

I think we probably got a few sockpuppets but overall Mac Red (the webapp dev) did a marvellous job! Paying a 2 bitcoin bounty to Mac was a great investment in ORA, and since then he's gone on to make many other contributions to ORA (like setup our forum oraforum.org, and organising his own giveaway), plus he's involved with planning, offering new ideas, and providing opinions and feedback on all other aspects of ORA. Getting a great guy like Mac Red involved with ORA early made me look much more 'credible' than I otherwise would have (hopefully), and that then snow-balled into making ORA look more credible, which then made/makes it easier to attract more high quality people. People are the key!

A fundamental lesson I've had confirmed by my experiences with ORA so far is the most important ingredient for a successful project is the quality of the people involved. You can always debug a buggy program and put out a new version, and most users will forgive you for a few tech inconveniences and delays, but you can't debug a person if their character is shown to be wanting in some way. If people suspect something 'dodgy' is going on it can be fatal, even if the suspicion turns out later to be false. Mud sticks, and 'scammy smells' linger! Many coins have obviously suffered from this problem in the past, and avoiding this (if possible) for ORA has been one of my prime objectives.

I think ORA can have great tech too, but at this stage the most important thing has been getting good people involved. A small group of honest, motivated, active, and community minded people is the basic foundation for any project, and if you have good people involved at the start you can start BUILDING something worthwhile! You can even delay some of the BIG decisions around the tech, and you can still start building community trust around the people. That's probably still an assumption at this stage, but I think ORA will prove it is right. People make communities great!

ORA has only attracted a small group so far who are actively doing things, but they are ALL really good people - exceptional people - so I'm SUPER confident we can build something “interesting” together, and I’m also confident we can attract more ‘exceptional’ people as time goes on.

After 5 months I think that’s what I am most happy about - the quality of the people who were interested enough in what I was talking about trying to do with ORA in the middle of May 2014, who ended up putting in some effort & taking some risks to get involved and help me! Without active committed people who actually care, ORA won’t succeed, but that goes for all other crypto coins too!

I feel very fortunate that i was able to attract great people who actually care about doing something 'interesting' and worthwhile with crypto currencies & blockchain tech!

[DarkhorseofNxt]

I wonder what would be the first submission be like. Shouldn't we do something like, you know a small video clip, lets say 5-10 secs each from everyone with their mobile around the world (all continent) with a paper, cardboard, anything in their hands with words like "We support Crypto", "You can't ban crypto" etc. Then we can compile all these clips together with a nice soundtrack in the background. The clip ends with some dramatic ssage like , "this is the beginning.." and lastly a few secs clip of Cryptofest in the end.

And hey, we actually don't have a logo for this Cryptofest.  

[*Sakura*]

I wonder what would be the first submission be like. Shouldn't we do something like, you know a small video clip, lets say 5-10 secs each from everyone with their mobile around the world (all continent) with a paper, cardboard, anything in their hands with words like "We support Crypto", "You can't ban crypto" etc. Then we can compile all these clips together with a nice soundtrack in the background. The clip ends with some dramatic ssage like , "this is the beginning.." and lastly a few secs clip of Cryptofest in the end.

And hey, we actually don't have a logo for this Cryptofest.  

Yes, this video, with good design, can create a good resonance.

[kora2]

WooHoo! We have an entry in CryptoFest!

This wonderful video about NXT was made with something else in mind (I think), but the creators kindly entered it in CryptoFest too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CWTtFZroEA

They're in the running for the first prize (The Palme d'ORA) and the 'People's Choice', plus the 'CryptoFest: Early Birds' as the submission is one of the first ten!!

The creator will also receive an ORA stake of 166,666 ORA assets as part of ORA's 'phase 2' 'proof-of-action' giveaway!

A slow start, but the CryptoFest snowball is finally rolling

[kora2]

I wonder what would be the first submission be like. Shouldn't we do something like, you know a small video clip, lets say 5-10 secs each from everyone with their mobile around the world (all continent) with a paper, cardboard, anything in their hands with words like "We support Crypto", "You can't ban crypto" etc. Then we can compile all these clips together with a nice soundtrack in the background. The clip ends with some dramatic ssage like , "this is the beginning.." and lastly a few secs clip of Cryptofest in the end.

And hey, we actually don't have a logo for this Cryptofest.  

A CryptoFest logo would be cool! I was also thinking of music today also, how it would really help promote the crypto movement having a catchy song.

I think if CryptoFest is successful we could consider starting a 'song competition' for an original piece of music with lyrics to promote the crypto movement.

Music is 'emotional' communication!