Here is one way to prevent scam coins with the community, offer a bounty for coin inspection from newly made coins, to check if the code is legit or not
That's what the proposal BinaryClock from Dedicated Pools is working on is about:
Committee for Development and Sustainability of the Altcoin Industry
http://dedicatedpool.com/draft1.pdfI applaud the CfDaDofAI for the accuracy of their assessment as to where might be the right area to start and the soundness of their assessment that there is a fair chance that the domain might benefit significantly if its practitioners could successfully be motivated to adhere to an agreed set of standards.
The Committee's effort may be well-intentioned but it is also unfortunately profoundly and fatally flawed; it provides none of the crucial operational definitions that would enable the scheme actually to be implemented. The consequences of this omission are fundamentally destructive to the intention --- in essence it guarantees that all of the quality assertions stated in the document will reduce to purely personal subjective opinion.
The recent Poloniex/Supercoin kerfuffle was an entirely predictable result of Poloniex neglecting to provide even themselves with a reliable
operational definition of the software standards they are attempting to impose.
I can't seem to find evidence in the draft that the CfDaDofAI did any desk research whatsoever before attempting to set forth what is, in essence, a software engineering standards proposal. The end result suggests that they omitted to inform themselves of even a sliver of the vast amount of existing work on standards in software engineering, their construction, validation and implementation.
I would hope that it is very clear to most that the only feasible starting point for such an effort is: “what is the nature of the problem?” That stance has at least a chance of avoiding the ineffectual cargo-culting that currently characterises all the efforts I'm aware of.
I find it enormously instructive and, I hope, eventually modestly profitable that the entire industry is apparently oblivious to the fact that the primary issue is not technologic in origin but actually mostly psycho-social and
any mooted solution that arises from a single domain can trivially be rejected as insufficiently broad-based to be demonstrably effective.
As yet, I've not come across any public manifestation of the problem that doesn't essentially boil down to some people hurling imprecations of “Scaaaaaam!!!” at some other people. (As far as I can make out, the only agreed convention seems to be that periodically they change ends.)
Whilst this in itself is unremarkable, unsurprising and quintessentially human, it does leave a lot to be desired in terms of characterising the different factors involved and their interrelationships --- a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for the identification of a set of candidate solutions, one of which might even include some software standards ... if we're lucky.
Agreed, I could have chosen to couch this response in a more gentle auctorial voice but the signal-to-noise ratio of bct rarely rises above the proportion of gold in seawater and experience informs me that mild == ignored. This Committee of apparently anonymous people is potentially in the right position to exert some positive influence but it will need to raise its game
substantially if that potential is to have a significant chance of being realised.
My idiosyncratic definition of “constructive criticism” in this context is: i) draw attention to a fundamental omission and its logical implications, ii) maybe help people to avoid wasting time pursuing an activity that can be objectively and cogently argued as futile and ii) gesture vaguely in a direction where a remedy
might be found.
Cheers,
Graham
