[ANN] RealPay [A new e-commerce business platform][Release Date: TBA]

[SgtSpike]

Sounds like you took most of my suggestions and made them a reality.  I am glad to see it, and intrigued to see if this project works out.

To all the jokers - this isn't meant to be a Bitcoin competitor, it is meant to be a Paypal competitor.  The biggest draw (if you want to compare it to Bitcoin) is that it is tied to the dollar, so merchants and users don't have to worry about value dropping minutes after doing a transaction.  1 RLC will always be worth $100 USD.  And of course, allowing (eventual) decentralized user-to-user transactions could provide for the anonymity that some people desire.

Granted, I think TheGlobber will have a lot to prove as far as legitimizing himself and his business (we've seen too many scams to fall for another one), but I think once that legitimacy is established, it could prove to be a useful service.

[Syke]

Users send transactions to miners, miners send blocks to corporate node. Why not just have users send transactions to corporate node? Miners are only useful when there is no central authority. Once you stick in some sort of central authority, then there's no point in having miners.

[cunicula]

I am afraid that the issue of legal operation is going to prove to be an insurmountable issue. But let's put that aside.

Don't you think a 1% fee is unnecessarily high? Why pass this out to GPU users? What are they doing for you and your customers again? Do they have any particular function that I'm missing?

Why not a logarithmic fee? Say (1/a)*ln (1+ax) where x is the amount spent and a is a constant? Then you start off at a 100% fee for infinitesimal amounts, the fee increases with x, but the proportion goes to 0% as the amount increases. How fast you converge to 0% is determined by a.  If you want you could use (1/a)*ln(1+a(x-k)) instead. Then k could be thought of as a minimum txn size, and the fee would be 100% for txns exactly equal to k.

Ideally, the system could supplant Mt. Gox and allow for a decentralized currency exchange. However, this won't work very well if you are putting in big unnecessary fees everywhere.

[TheGlobber]

Users send transactions to miners, miners send blocks to corporate node. Why not just have users send transactions to corporate node? Miners are only useful when there is no central authority. Once you stick in some sort of central authority, then there's no point in having miners.

As viperjbm and SgtSpike correctly stated, this is meant to be a PP competitor and therefore a business rather than a BTC competitor.

A business needs some kind of protection in order to stay alive and thus it needs to avoid people seeking to harm it. This centralization thing has been discussed many times around here but you are missing the point here:

Scenario #1: A new cryptocurrency (lets say FantasyCoin) is created from a group of people within the BTC community with the goal to get rich and they impose some kind of centralization when it comes to mining. This is definitely bad since their interest is to control miners.

Scenario #2: A new financial business (like RealCoin) is created from a group of investors that were not members of the BTC community with the goal to create a PP alternative. In this case, it is in the best interest of the business to protect its assets and therefore some kind of control has to be imposed ONLY to keep things rolling and to be able to offer a 100% safe service to the users avoiding bad miners.

As i have posted numerous times, although we believe that mining is an integral part of the system, i myself am not into mining (although i have educated myself over the past two months i still dont understand some parts of mining) and i can assure you that none of the investors is into mining as this is just not the point we are focusing on.

Therefore, we welcome the BTC community and its miners to earn tx fees in return for securing the network and helping with transactions from users.

The plan is to be fair to all miners. If you are a good helping miner then you dont have to worry about anything. This is just an extra layer of protection for the business nothing more than that and as said in the future it could be removed allowing for a completely decentralized service.

[TheGlobber]

I am afraid that the issue of legal operation is going to prove to be an insurmountable issue. But let's put that aside.

Don't you think a 1% fee is unnecessarily high? Why pass this out to GPU users? What are they doing for you and your customers again? Do they have any particular function that I'm missing?

Why not a logarithmic fee? Say (1/a)*ln (1+ax) where x is the amount spent and a is a constant? Then you start off at a 100% fee for infinitesimal amounts, the fee increases with x, but the proportion goes to 0% as the amount increases. How fast you converge to 0% is determined by a.  If you want you could use (1/a)*ln(1+a(x-k)) instead. Then k could be thought of as a minimum txn size, and the fee would be 100% for txns exactly equal to k.

Ideally, the system could supplant Mt. Gox and allow for a decentralized currency exchange. However, this won't work very well if you are putting in big unnecessary fees everywhere.

Thanks for giving the opportunity to post the following.

This is one of the things we were looking for when i first posted the thread!

The only thing left for RLC is to figure out a good Tx Fee %. The 1% was just a random number selected (of course it was selected as it is a lot lower than what the other payment gateways offer) and we are looking at discussing this part in more detail with all members of BTCtalk to figure out the best possible solution to have both happy miners and happy users.

Therefore, i invite everyone that posted above as well as reputable miners of this community to openly discuss the best formula for the transaction fees.

Feel free to post your opinion on what the fees should be or how they should be calculated.

[cunicula]

This is the important part of the question:

Why are there miners at all? What do they do? How are you better of with them? Why are you giving them payouts? Why do you care if they are happy or not? Why do you call them miners instead of parasites?

[TheGlobber]

This is the important part of the question:

Why are there miners at all? What do they do? How are you better of with them? Why are you giving them payouts? Why do you care if they are happy or not? Why do you call them miners instead of parasites?

This is a little harsh to say since miners do a specific job.

We cant expect regular users to fill in for miners.

Therefore, a solution has to be found for a fee structure that is good for both miners and users.

[TheGlobber]

UPDATE #1: We have switched from a fixed 1% fee to a minimum 0.1% fee with the option for the user to set a higher fee from within the client.

Mining will also be enabled within the official client.

We will work closely with both miners and users to find the best possible fee structure for the future.

[cunicula]

Since our previous exchange has been censored, I assume you are responding to me again.

What is this "specific job" that miners do?

Why not just maintain a few company controlled computers with central databases of txns as the "miners"?

Wouldn't this group of company-controlled miners do the job just fine?

What additional function do miners independent of the company bring to the table, if any?

[Syke]

As i have posted numerous times, although we believe that mining is an integral part of the system, i myself am not into mining (although i have educated myself over the past two months i still dont understand some parts of mining) and i can assure you that none of the investors is into mining as this is just not the point we are focusing on.

Perhaps you have some idea what this central node is and you haven't explained it. But as it is now:

1. Miners provide network security in the absence of a central node.
2. You have a central node.

Therefore, you have no need for miners.

If you have the miners performing bitcoin-like hashing, they will simply be wasting electricty for nothing. Call them affiliate nodes or something else, because they are not miners.

[SgtSpike]

Since our previous exchange has been censored, I assume you are responding to me again.

What is this "specific job" that miners do?

Why not just maintain a few company controlled computers with central databases of txns as the "miners"?

Wouldn't this group of company-controlled miners do the job just fine?

What additional function do miners independent of the company bring to the table, if any?

I think the idea is that, once the centralized transaction authentication is removed (as TheGlobber stated it would be in the future), people could make person to person transactions without having to worry about the status of TheGlobber's servers.  Which would help in the event of the government trying to block the service, or a DDOS attack, etc.  A distributed network is much more difficult to attack.

[Syke]

I think the idea is that, once the centralized transaction authentication is removed (as TheGlobber stated it would be in the future)

What are the exact conditions that must be met for this to occur? Or is this just a vague promise that will never come to pass?

[Nachtwind]

Why is this considered a crypto currency anyway? As i see it there is a central position that controls all available funds. You basically simulate slow crypto-chain like transaction propagation with so called mining... so whats the point except a totally useless waste of power? Just keep everything on your servers and manage user's balances. YOu could just skip all that pseudo-crypto-chain stuff and be happy...

[cunicula]

As i have posted numerous times, although we believe that mining is an integral part of the system, i myself am not into mining (although i have educated myself over the past two months i still dont understand some parts of mining) and i can assure you that none of the investors is into mining as this is just not the point we are focusing on.

Perhaps you have some idea what this central node is and you haven't explained it. But as it is now:

1. Miners provide network security in the absence of a central node.
2. You have a central node.

Therefore, you have no need for miners.

If you have the miners performing bitcoin-like hashing, they will simply be wasting electricty for nothing. Call them affiliate nodes or something else, because they are not miners.

Note that the system also charges fees to pay for this wasted electricity.

[steelhouse]

1. Miners provide network security in the absence of a central node.
2. You have a central node.

1. Worked well with coiled coin.

[TheGlobber]

The plan is to go decentralized in the near future.

The added layer of security (e.g. the central node approving/rejecting blocks) will be soon removed to create a fully decentralized e-commerce platform.

Also, we do NOT disapprove the creation of other exchanges around RLC. We want a competitive market because it is in the best interest of all.

Lastly, as stated before, we plan to become a PayPal alternative and not a competing cryptocurrency. The reason behind this, is that there is a need for a really low cost global payment gateway without foolish restrictions, frozen accounts, difficult procedures and the Bitcoin platform serves as the perfect foundation for such a service.

On a side note, we will gear towards being 100% legal (following all AML/KYC procedures) as far as the exchange goes. Now the RLC network is a different story and soon it will be fully decentralized thus having all the benefits that a p2p platform offers.

[TheGlobber]

UPDATE #2: The release date for both the client and the exchange has been scheduled for February 10.

[tiker]

Your websites www.realcoin.org and www.realcointalk.org have disappeared.  The names don't resolve anymore.  Does this mean you're not releasing RealCoin now?

[TheGlobber]

Your websites www.realcoin.org and www.realcointalk.org have disappeared.  The names don't resolve anymore.  Does this mean you're not releasing RealCoin now?

There has been a problem with the host from yesterday. They are having a network routing problem and neither my websites nor the host's website is working normally.

We have contacted them twice and they said that they are working on it and soon will be up and running again.

Their service has been excellent so far and this is the very first problem we have encountered with them.

The release of RLC is scheduled for February 10. If there are still problems with the host, we ll probably move to another host.

[tiker]

And this is the same host for the exchange and block validation services or do you have several hosts for these services?

If it is the same (and only) host, what happens if this host goes down again and there's no block validation and no exchange services available when clients need them?