[PRE-ANN] [VIA]

[studio1one]

When will I be able to mine this?

So the plan is this. First 7 days are surely for the presale bidding, but it will close at a random number of days after that to stop last minute buying.
Coins will be distributed over the next 48 hours while we setup the genesis block, checkpoints, start the network going. During this period there are 2000 blocks with 0 reward. During this period of zero rewards we will release the reference client. That will give enough time for everyone to get setup, configure their pools and get started fairly.

if you've got a block time of 60 seconds (assuming) that's just a little over 1 day - so the pumpers and dumpers sit on the sidelines until you hit block 2,000 nd then jump in - a better idea is to have a high number of blocks required for maturity - let's say 2 to 3 days.

you get the same impact but do not penalize early miners with wasted mining efforts.

agree with this. Interested in mining this but there is no point at a block reward of 2 so I will just wait. Would rather mine straight away and wait for block matiruty

[altcoinherald]

Your coin has been added to the Altcoin launch calendar.

http://altcoinherald.com/xwxg

We'll keep posted for developments with your coin!

[chompyZ]

Hi BTCdrak,

I know you have been working on this for months, but this is the first time details are starting to emerge.
I am interested but find it hard to understand many fundamentals.

Would appreciate some clarifications on these matters:

a. can you please clarify the 'open-source' issue. i.e. will "it" (i.e. Viacoin+ClearingHouse) be open-source from day1? later? never? partially? fully?

b. will there be any centralized 'component' of the architecture?

c. building applications on a layer above viacoin will be done via an internal scripting language or any language and then integrated by an API? other?

d. 24sec/block yet you don't seem to be bothered by forks or 51%. Can you please say/hint why?

Thank you very much.
Looking forward.

[btcdrak]

10% IS NOT PREMINE?

 

A premine to my mind means a developer premine, where the devs allocate a large quantity of coins to themselves by fiat.
This is a terrible practice because it means they can dump their coins at any time so it understandably makes everyone nervous.

In the case of this presale, coins are being allocated to early adopters. Mining rewards are deliberately slow to generate large numbers of coins so that early adopters can be the main source of coin distribution in the early months without the risks of mining pressure. I imagine this will prevent prices falling below their original buy price and encourage them to sell some coins at a profit thus distributing coins further.

Mining only tends to only favor people with technical skills and access to significant mining hardware.

[johndec2]

Hmm. Looked interesting until I did some math.  10 million premine. Well over 10% of theoretical total coins. Working on the OP figures of 5 coins per block (a fair average seeing as coin reward is on a downward sliding scale) and 3,600 blocks per day it would take miners 555 days to mine 10 million coins to equal the premine. 

Are you guys serious??? That's nearly 18 months.  MASSIVE pass from me.   Good luck with your scam coin.

[btcdrak]

Hi BTCdrak,

I know you have been working on this for months, but this is the first time details are starting to emerge.
I am interested but find it hard to understand many fundamentals.

Would appreciate some clarifications on these matters:

a. can you please clarify the 'open-source' issue. i.e. will "it" (i.e. Viacoin+ClearingHouse) be open-source from day1? later? never? partially? fully?

b. will there be any centralized 'component' of the architecture?

c. building applications on a layer above viacoin will be done via an internal scripting language or any language and then integrated by an API? other?

d. 24sec/block yet you don't seem to be bothered by forks or 51%. Can you please say/hint why?

Thank you very much.
Looking forward.

Thank you for your questions:

a. Everything will be open source. The wallet is not open source right now because we don't want anyone trying to jump the gun.
b. There will be zero centralized components, that defeats the purpose of building decentralized systems.
c. Primarily by embedding data within the blockchain as well as scripting.
b. As far as I am aware, 24 second blocks do not affect 51% attacks. We have taken steps to lower latency, for example maximum block sizes can be significantly smaller without impeding tx/sec because there are many more blocks (3600 per day) than say bitcoin (144 per day). There will be header first syncronization. Over time this means the block time could even get even faster.

[btcdrak]

When will I be able to mine this?

So the plan is this. First 7 days are surely for the presale bidding, but it will close at a random number of days after that to stop last minute buying.
Coins will be distributed over the next 48 hours while we setup the genesis block, checkpoints, start the network going. During this period there are 2000 blocks with 0 reward. During this period of zero rewards we will release the reference client. That will give enough time for everyone to get setup, configure their pools and get started fairly.

if you've got a block time of 60 seconds (assuming) that's just a little over 1 day - so the pumpers and dumpers sit on the sidelines until you hit block 2,000 nd then jump in - a better idea is to have a high number of blocks required for maturity - let's say 2 to 3 days.

you get the same impact but do not penalize early miners with wasted mining efforts.

You are right and we thought about this quite a lot. The coin maturity is currently set at 500 blocks for this very reason and may increase it more (to 850). I sincerely believe that whatever the average bid price is set by the presale will have a serious effect on sell price. Miners are not just going to sell below market price if there has been a large presale setting the price higher. Also, there wont actually be that many coins available from mining in the beginning.

The zero reward blocks also solve another problem, because once we launch the network we will need at least the coin maturity before we can distribute the coins and further more, we want presale participants to be in control over their funds before any mining rewards kick in.

[jjj0923]

When will I be able to mine this?

So the plan is this. First 7 days are surely for the presale bidding, but it will close at a random number of days after that to stop last minute buying.
Coins will be distributed over the next 48 hours while we setup the genesis block, checkpoints, start the network going. During this period there are 2000 blocks with 0 reward. During this period of zero rewards we will release the reference client. That will give enough time for everyone to get setup, configure their pools and get started fairly.

if you've got a block time of 60 seconds (assuming) that's just a little over 1 day - so the pumpers and dumpers sit on the sidelines until you hit block 2,000 nd then jump in - a better idea is to have a high number of blocks required for maturity - let's say 2 to 3 days.

you get the same impact but do not penalize early miners with wasted mining efforts.

You are right and we thought about this quite a lot. The coin maturity is currently set at 500 blocks for this very reason and may increase it more (to 850). I sincerely believe that whatever the average bid price is set by the presale will have a serious effect on sell price. Miners are not just going to sell below market price if there has been a large presale setting the price higher. Also, there wont actually be that many coins available from mining in the beginning.

The zero reward blocks also solve another problem, because once we launch the network we will need at least the coin maturity before we can distribute the coins and further more, we want presale participants to be in control over their funds before any mining rewards kick in.

I'd make it at least one days worth of blocks. It's amazing how cheaply people will dump their coins. I typically am an early miner and put some of my coins up for about 500,000 sat for sale and then buy some of them back to get the price set then folks come in and sell for a tiny fraction of what I've set the sell wall at - it's amazing and it screws up everything moving forward.

[chompyZ]

OK... It's a bit clearer now.

a. Is there any testnet where one can see, play with a clone Viacoin'?
b. If not, is there any visible proof-of-concept showing how a layer was built on top of the protocol?

thank you.

[Bobsurplus]

This seems interesting.

[KeyserSozeMC]

Why scrypt, guys?

[btcdrak]

Why scrypt, guys?

To be able to switch to merge mining reliably in the future. SHA256 is a bit scary to bootstrap.

[btcdrak]

Why do you not use escrow? With escrow you will get more BTC than without it.
Where is the whitepaper? Where is the roadmap?

This allows the building of fully decentralized exchanges, issuing of new currencies, asset tracking, betting,
digital voting, reputation management and even form the basis of fully decentralized market places.

Is it not implemented? Who will implement it, when?
Is the "ClearingHouse" protocol is only feature of this coin at this moment?

Is it open source? When will you publish the source?

Minimum period of IPO is 7 days. What is the maximum?

Good question about escrow and there are a few reasons we decided to go it ourselves.

1. Escrow is more cumbersome for participant and difficult to administer our side since no-one has a system in place.
    As a result, I wrote the presale system you see at presale.viacoin.org.
2. Our presale website uses some pretty cool technology. We leverage P2SH multisig addresses. Your viacoin deposit
    address is converted to a public key (P3) and becomes the third key of a 2-of-3 multisig address. This way
    your deposit address is mathematically linked to your BTC deposit address and no registration is required that way
    which makes it more anonymous and hassle free for all concerned.
3. We believe if we need escrow, being a serious project, then we probably have a trust issue. I am pretty well known
    in BTC trading circles and I have a lot of reputation at stake. This should be enough in my opinion. If not, we should
    probably not be bothering.

[So the upshot of this is, once we have successfully run this presale, I may actually open up the presale software to act as an
escrow system for others to use (there are two modes coded, bid and fixed price)].

To answer your other questions, with any luck, there will be a few more blog posts about the coin in the next day or two to answer your questions. This will include a roadmap.
The project will be fully OSS at github. The repository is set to private until the coin launch.

The presale will last a minimum of 7 days, then will close on an unknown day at midnight. So if the presale is live after midnight of the 7th day or any day after that, you'll know it is safe to place an order during the day but it could close at 23:59:59 UTC of that day, or roll over to another day.

I really do welcome all the questions, please be patient to get it all. Further more, please DO NOT participate in the presale unless and until  you are completely sure  you want to do so. If you don't get satisfactory answers, please stay away.

[minimila]

WHY SCRYPT? 

[jibble]

WHY SCRYPT? 

READ THE FUCKING THREAD

[prix]

Thanks for answer.
I don't understand why escrow is more cumbersome for participant and what is the advantage of linking BTC and VIA addresses (you can build anonymous system without multisig using signing by BTC private key for authentication if you need). And how your presale software can to act as escrow system if I nobody except you cannot affect the BTC refund.
I saw a number of IPO and watch now on some, so I slightly disagree here.
If you have something to tell in detail, then please. If not - I understand, maybe you just like your presale software (idea behind it), and you want to see trust to you.

And about maximum length of IPO. You said: "then will close on an unknown day at midnight."
But what can be the maximum length? Two weeks, one month, two months?
For example: IPO may be closed at any unknown day from 7 to 14 day, or from 7 to 30.

I follow the blog for other answers (I am most interested in the technical details and roadmaps). The more transparent you have and the more information you provide than the more investors you will attract.

[Winky]

Already ~30 BTC in the IPO and still 6 days remaining. People buy this coin mainly because of Drak´s rep, but let´s see how much BTC are in the IPO at the last day. I fear it´s already overpriced.

[btcdrak]

Thanks for answer.
I don't understand why escrow is more cumbersome for participant and what is the advantage of linking BTC and VIA addresses (you can build anonymous system without multisig using signing by BTC private key for authentication if you need).

All other systems I have seen rely on registration/logins or signing messages with your BTC key (and not being allowed to send from an exchange). That's terribly cumbersome and our system does away with it.

[jibble]

Already ~30 BTC in the IPO and still 6 days remaining. People buy this coin mainly because of Drak´s rep, but let´s see how much BTC are in the IPO at the last day. I fear it´s already overpriced.

what information are you using to determine that it is overpriced?


or are you just using your very special and important feels?

[stormia]

Already ~30 BTC in the IPO and still 6 days remaining. People buy this coin mainly because of Drak´s rep, but let´s see how much BTC are in the IPO at the last day. I fear it´s already overpriced.

A 30 btc marketcap would be overpriced  

The mining production is very slow to start, so at the start we can assume the marketcap will be based very closely on the presale.