Syscoin 2.0 February Interim Updatehttp://syscoin.org/syscoin-2-0-february-interim-update/
Everything is on track and we have several news items to share with the community as we stand on the precipice of releasing the public beta for final testing.
We’re still in the final rounds of internal testing and will be releasing the Syscoin 2.0 final beta client to the public on Sunday, February 28th, 2016. We want to allow the public at least a week to attempt to break/find bugs with the final release before we make the transition to the Syscoin 2.0 mainnet and convert the SYS1 supply to the appropriate SYS2 coins. A reminder- the trading symbol will remain SYS after the transition. We are also asking trusted third parties in the community to review the Syscoin 2.0 code for extra confidence.
WHAT’S NEXT AFTER THE LAUNCH?Following launch we have a very busy schedule. Our top priority is integration with eBay and Etsy, and any other smaller, personally-owned type marketplaces which the Syscoin marketplace can replace and out-feature on a number of levels from uptime to lower fees to lack of censorship and control over exactly who sees what in your store. Syscoin stores also allow for reselling so eBay merchants who utilize the Syscoin marketplace can enjoy increased reach and revenue through resellers if they choose to allow reselling of their items. They can even control who, specifically, is allowed to resell their items and assign individual discounts (think wholesalers v. retailers). We aim to deliver at least one (if not more) integrations with these types of centralized marketplaces to enable them with the benefits of decentralization within the first 6months of 2016. We will roll out integrations as soon as they are ready, we won’t hold back until they’re all done.
The smaller personal marketplaces powered by Ebay etc. are our first target as they’ll allow us to shake out any possible problems or usability issue we haven’t already discovered with merchants and get word of mouth going between merchants. From there we’ll move to the ecommerce plugins which target larger merchants. Direct plugin integrations between Syscoin markets and Magento, Shopify, Prestashop, and Opencart. We’ll follow a similar strategy here and release each integration as its ready, rather than waiting for all to be completed.
Then of course there is Blockmarket 2.0, this is a marketplace-in-a-box developed by Syscoin to allow merchants who don’t use any of the aforementioned systems to get up and running on a server with Syscoin as their marketplace “backend” and a friendly frontend for buyers which communicates directly with buyer’s local Syscoin wallet in a matter of clicks. We’ll be releasing the 2.0 version of this during 2016 as well. Because the demand that we’re getting from merchants at the moment is largely focused on Ebay/Magento integration that is our top priority. We will have an “umbrella” Blockmarket out ahead of the official Blockmarket 2.0 release so that people can search the entire Syscoin decentralized marketplace and verify their listing are visible for others to find (think of it as a craigslist hosted by the team, we’ll be releasing a package for hosting your own later this year).
All of these integrations and offerings are powered by the Syscoin 2.0 JSON-RPC API. We encourage developers to check it out and build their own experiences around the Syscoin marketplace. If you’re interested in joining the team we’re looking for an additional C++ developer, send your info to dan-at-syscoin.org.
WALLET EXPERIENCE UPDATESomewhere along the line we’ll be updating the wallet’s appearance even more extensively for usability improvements, releasing a web wallet (security being a key tenant of that effort) and also releasing mobile wallets for both iOS and Android. We think these deliveries will be towards the end of 2016 but they may get prioritized higher based on what the community is requesting. These will not simply be clones of existing projects but will aim to enable the full suite of services from buying/selling items and services to sending encrypted messages, escrow and more all from your mobile device.
DIRECT BITCOIN PURCHASES FROM SYSCOIN MARKETSA major feature we excited to announce today is that Syscoin 2.0 will support the ability to pay directly with bitcoin for marketplace goods and services. This will be an optional type of offer that the merchant can choose to leverage. If using DirectBTC a bitcoin compatible address will be generated for each offer in the merchant’s store. The buyer then indicates they wish to purchase using the SYS wallet but only requiring a dust amount of SYS to log the transaction on the blockchain. They then send the appropriate Bitcoin from their Bitcoin wallet to the address created by the Syscoin offer. The merchant can then export the private key for the offer from their Syscoin wallet into their Bitcoin wallet, and collect their payment (or import it before payment is send and collect as payments arrive).
This capability to natively leverage bitcoin in conjunction with Syscoin’s decentralized marketplace capabilities opens up the benefits of this feature to a much larger demographic and also insulates users from possible volatility in Syscoin prices. When using DirectBTC advanced services such as escrow are not available and the merchant must manually confirm receipt of the bitcoin by checking the Bitcoin blockchain and then confirming via the Syscoin wallet. We have plans to automate this process using side-chains as soon as possible, at which point direct BTC payments will be able to leverage the advanced features such as escrow. Direct BTC payments differ from pegged-BTC payments in that pegged-BTC payments result in the merchant receiving an amount of SYS equivalent to the BTC price listed on their offer at time of purchase based on exchange rates. Direct BTC payments result in the merchant receiving the actual BTC their item was priced at, no conversion or exchanging required.
MINING REWARD SCHEDULE AND TOTAL COINSAs communicated earlier the total coins are being reduced from 2bill (max, ever) to 6.68mil (6688630 to be exact). This means the current supply will convert at a ratio of 299.4 SYS1 to 1 SYS2. The conversion will occur by importing your SYS1 private key into your SYS2 wallet. There is no time limit for the conversion. If you coins are on exchange the conversion should happen automatically. Also Syscoin 2.0 features a new burning/inflation mechanism tied to how heavily the special Syscoin services are used, when blocks are not fully filled the fees are burned increasing scarcity, but as usage picks (and blocks fill up) up an inflation mechanism kicks in- we’ll be posting a followup blog with more details on this prior to launch. This burning/inflation mechanism was designed specifically to scale with transactions per second (TPS) so that once we achieve VISA-network level TPS the design of this mechanism will allow us to scale the Syscoin services.
Mining is also being modified in this release. In addition to switching from merge mined Scrypt algo to merge mined SHA256 (bitcoin) algorithm we’ll also be reducing the block rewards because Syscoin is constantly merge mined. The rewards will start at 8.25 coins per block and will half every 7months (314,159 blocks).
STARTING THINGS RIGHTWe feel a key to the marketplace succeeding will be having items available for purchase on launch and trustworthy arbiters as well to facilitate those purchases. We’ve had requests for “anon” but aren’t taking that up just yet because we want to attract more of a mainstream audience but we certainly aren’t ruling anything out. The team will be launching the Syscoin Arbiter Marketplace as Syscoin 2.0 launches as a directory of arbiters available to facilitate purchasing on the Syscoin marketplace if people wish for an extra layer of security. Initially the arbiters will be members of the team that are largely known and trusted by the community, but as usage increases the directory will expand. The directory is powered entirely off of data stored on the blockchain related to escrow transactions each arbiter is involved in, creating an implicit rating system that cannot be forged.
We’ll be posting again Wednesday Feb 24, 2016 with screenshots of the Syscoin 2.0 Internal Alpha to give people an idea of what they’ll see this coming weekend! If you’re just catching up with Syscoin we encourage you to join our Slack. Don’t forget to read our Team Notes on Reddit, we’ll have another set of notes up after today’s team call!
