HyperStake Development Journal (HDJ)

[David Latapie]

Welcome everyone to the HyperStake development journal. Here we will share our thoughts on HyperStake on a bit more personal way that we do on the official HyperStake thread. Not that we feel constrained in any way of course, but we feel it is better to have two different threads for two different goals - one for the coin, one for more personal considerations - and as a courtesy to people not interested in long theoretical speeches.

The title itself is an obvious nod to one of my favourite thread, tokyoghetto's late HBN Investment Journal (by the way, this thread will be self-moderated, so no abusive trolling problem here). I really enjoyed reading tokyoghetto all these weeks and he was instrumental in my interest in PoS. So tokyo, if you read this, a big thank you.

Thanks to the polysemy of the word development I can use this word in the title without being incorrect. So I will mostly speak here about considerations regarding the future of HyperStake, the faster-than-light crypto.

1. Project management
2. Inception
3. Stone=1; Birds=many
4. Where no coin had gone before
5. HyperDigest #1
6. HyperDigest #2
7. Live and let dump
8. Rich man's problems
9. The virtues of inflation
10. HyperDigest #3
11. Hyperstake for everyone - Stake and Cash
12. Miners dump, stakers don't
13. HyperDigest #4 - HyperStorm
14. Teaming up for new heights
15. HyperPool, the first PoS pool mining
16. Max generation and its consequences (mostly incorrect)
17. Network security and why it matters
18. Features galore!
19. Feature: disablestake if X
20. HyperDigest #5
21. Development entry not in the development journal

[mafort1469]

Excellent David. Look forward to this thread and topics!

[presstab]

Awesome idea David 

[David Latapie]

Alright so where should I start? Oh yes. The Holy Trinity.

I like to say than when you want to create a project (and make it work), you shall focus on these three things:

1) Gather a (good) team
2) Focus on what really matters
3) Keep on going
(addition from my teacher: have a vision)

I have some experience with managing groups. I started with Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdom (I just learnt they shut it down on September 1, 2014, two weeks ago) - I still remember what it felt like to be one of the very first users (it was French-only by that time), a bit like I felt on these days of April 2014 with Monero. On MM:HK, I learnt to handle an alliance, to be sure people were happy, to delegate, to negociate, to grow... and to spend too much time on it, to develop bad sleeping and eating habits, to endanger the rest of my life.
Later on, I created a still-running publishing house, Scriptarium (Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf) and I learnt (we learnt) to face adversity and calomny, to handle growth, to get a reputation as being reliable enough that we are routinely signing international contracts. And again I learnt how do delegate better, how to spare my own life more, how to better handle stress and criticism and, maybe more importantly, to be proud when the pupils became better than the master (hint: the master was me).
Same again for the International Longevity Alliance and, closer to what is at stake '(oops, pun not intended), with the Mintcoin Fund, the world first-legally registered NGO for an altcoin. I'm so glad I found Jessica Hartmann (happy birthday, Jess'!), she is doing an awesome work with the team on Mintcoin.

In all of these projects, a good team was instrumental. The more it goes, the lesser the time ratio of my time over total time on a project, because the more proficient I became at finding people who would do better than me and be happy about it.
A project is as good as the people running it. Remember this, always. And always remember that strength doesn't come from uniformity, but from diversity. The great Saint-Exupery once wrote (Citadelle, 1948): "If you differ from me, my brother, you do not hurt me; you make me richer".

This is how I approached HyperStake. Two souls both different and similar. Presstab is a great coder, I've seen him working on TEK, MINT and NOBL. I do not code (save HTML) but I dare say I have some ideas and I'm pretty good with communication. And above these complementary differences, we both have the same thirst for honesty, exploration, optimisation and giving something to the community.

And thus came HyperStake.

(to be continued)

[mafort1469]

All I can say is Bravo David!

[presstab]

Good post David, interesting to hear about your background.

[iantunc]

You are a very professional project manager, David, and your projects are the proof of it.

[David Latapie]

Thank you everyone, I'll try to post at least once a week, but I can't promise. Presstab, mafort1469, zeewolf, feel free to post to about coding practices, management practices, background... this is HYP dev journal, not only David's. But you can also just read, no problem either

[David Latapie]

We decided to create HyperStake for at least two reasons:

• We wanted to experiment in cryptoeconomics. Only by doing our own coin we could place an emphasis on experimentation ("something crazy like 750%" dixit presstab), without the burden of existing holders feeling betrayed. So the creation of the coin itself was an experiment, since it became the very first fork launch (that we know of).
• We wanted to do something good for TRK holders who got burnt by what was by then (that is, before noise23's take over) just a fast-POW-dump-on-POS coin like many others. As the ANN says: "After buying into TruckCoin and seeing the diminishing exchange rate because of lack of dev support, we decided to take things into our own hands. We are giving the TRK community a chance to make their coins worth something again.  We get to take the coin into our own hands through a voluntary hard fork and we plan on adding many features through time. Join the experiment with us.". Caritas at work.

Then came the time to choose the name. We did not want the name to end with -coin but that was our only requirement. Then lighting stroke:

Code:

juil. 06 00:01:37 <presstab>	  i think stake should be in the name
juil. 06 00:02:42 <davidlatapie>  hyperstake? Since TEK is superstake
juil. 06 00:02:54 <presstab>      ooo
juil. 06 00:02:57 <presstab>      thats not bad
juil. 06 00:03:30 <davidlatapie>  With play of words about going to hyperspace,
juil. 06 00:03:46 <davidlatapie>  Hyperstake the faster-than-light coin
juil. 06 00:04:04 <davidlatapie>  Completely stupid so in the mood for absurdly high stake

Tadam!

(to be continued)

P.-S.: Three anecdotes.

• 750% was first considered for NOBL, but technical difficulties prevented (and still prevent) a pure PoW like NOBL to become PoS. So we recycled the idea for TRK.
• TRK was supposed to have a min age of 8 hours, like Blackcoin - and that's why I was interested in it first : 200% like BottleCaps and min age 8 hours like Blackcoin. Unfortunately, the so-called "dev" of TRK messed something up and the min age became 8.8 days. I wanted this fixed for HYP but ultimately it was not (presstab could not wait to launch HYP , so we have 8.8 days. I still miss the 8 hours, but well, c'est la vie.
• I planned the original ticker to be HYPE, but several people (including me at a time), were concerned with this ticker giving HyperStake a bad reputation. So we sticked with HYP.

[mafort1469]

Love it David. Great that you still have the original posts of how HYP came to be. One day a book will be written on HYP and how it changed the crypto POS world.

[David Latapie]

Thus, almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci, Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original minds borrowed from one another. Miguel de Cervantes makes his Don Quixote a fool; but pray is Orlando any other? It would puzzle one to decide whether knight errantry has been made more ridiculous by the grotesque painting of Cervantes, than by the luxuriant imagination of Ariosto. Metastasio has taken the greatest part of his operas from our French tragedies. Several English writers have copied us without saying one word of the matter. What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. (※)

I like to kill several birds with one stone. So my first idea (I'll let presstab write about his first idea) was that what we'll learn with HYP would be used for NOBL. At a time, I even considered fork launching NOBL for a new crypto called NOBLE (like TRK => HYP), but it seems the technology couldn't fly (or at least, presstab could not make it fly).

You can't connect the dot looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. (※)

It is not only HYP to NOBL. It is also XMR to HYP. What I learnt with Monero, I try to use if for HyperStake. Some examples:

HyperStake account. Get generic accounts for ease of updating OP (like HyperStake for use by the core team and HyperStake-extended for use by the community management team, modeled after Monero and Monero-extended, respectively).

IRC matters. IRC is all too often downplayed. I was in Monero from day one, I saw how the activity rose on IRC. IRC is like meeting some buddies IRL and only after posting on forum - like after-party mentions on social networks. I wanted to emulate the same activity for HyperStake. I have to admit at the beginning I felt I was presomptuous to compare Monero and HyperStake. Fortunately, I was wrong .

Emulation works. Give some exclusives on IRC, so that people have an incentive for coming there. Have a tipbot, too. Promote new usages and creativeness. Be there and be kind, people want human contacts, we are not machine ("why I moved from Forex to crypto? Community" source). Dedramatise involvement; "fun" means "don't be afraid of trying". Finally and most importantly, be lazy: just bring the fun in and let the community do the work for you. The community has ideas of its own. That's how the lottery tipbot came to fruition - pure community.

By the way, you'll get a nice bonus by doing this.

Interestingly enough, you will quickly find that if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you as though you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius. We can all see how well this worked for Linus!"
(When I gave my talk at the first Perl Conference in August 1997, hacker extraordinaire Larry Wall was in the front row. As I got to the last line above he called out, religious-revival style, "Tell it, tell it, brother!". The whole audience laughed, because they knew this had worked for the inventor of Perl, too.) (※)

At the time of writing, some other such inspirations are on the way. No, I won't tell you

[*Sakura*]

Very interesting topic. Kept in my bookmarks.

[David Latapie]

At the time of writing, some other such inspirations are on the way. No, I won't tell you

Just happened.

[rfcdejong]

cool, and it seems monero whales might buy some hypers if the market starts moving

[David Latapie]

cool, and it seems monero whales might buy some hypers if the market starts moving

I will definitely watch the volume here. Volume = market has confidence on HYP.

[David Latapie]

HyperStake is hyperactive. We are releasing features very frequently. Why? Not to pump the price, just because we like to do it. Of course, the features have to be useful. Being sort of old-timers in high-PoS does help.
Some features we developed:

Device support
Raspberry Pi
Thanks to Sluppy for much of the work. Apologies guys if I forgot some people, just mention it and I will correct.
Raspberry Pi are very useful because the are low power (3W?). HYP wallets benefit from being online 24/7, whilst not requiring much power. In short Raspberry Pi and HyperStake are made for one another.    

ARM
We plan to have Android and iOS wallets. Staking ones. Sure, they will drain your battery, but you could turn this off. Now, out of the fun part, is it really useful to stake on wallet? You should not have most of your coins in a device that you can easily lose/get stolen like a phone or a tablet. Thus what you have in mobile device should be for buying, so hardly time for staking, especially since buying would more often than not imply destroying your coinage. For the moment, I see no reason for a staking wallet on mobile device, out of the sheer fun (which is important, and maybe central in HyperStake).
In any case, having working wallets on ARM is important, because I envision ARM to become an even more important part of the computers in the future. A company (which was sadly way to ahead of time) was even designing ARM CPUs for supercomputers.

Inflation control
That's what scares most people, especially in a deflationary environment like Bitcoin and with crazy-high interest rates like 750% (even 20% seems crazy when compared to real world but you just can't compare the risk in real-world and the risk in Cryptoland - the risk must be mitigated accordingly).
The danger is exagerated, but there is still a danger of spiraling in hyperinflation. That's why most high-PoS coins introduced several mechanisms. The best-known is NoVaCoin Stake (NVCS) but we decided not to use it (Presstab could explain in more accurate terms why we did not use it).

Instead, we are using two other inflation control mechanisms: max subsidy and max generation.

Max subsidy reduces compounded interest and economically encourages increased security - if your block is so large that you would get more than 1000 HYP by staking, the HYP above 1000 are lost, so you'd better have several smaller blocks instead of a giant one. In turn, several smaller blocks will take longer to stake, so they will secure the network longer (provided you leave your wallet open, which in turns is more of an incentive when you have several block almost to the point of staking than when you know there is no chance you stake before long).

Max generation works this way: the daily generation is capped. We are presently at around 20% of the maximum (960 000 HYP per day) but we will eventually arrive to it. When this will happen, I expect the price of HYP to increase because of scarcity - assuming adoption continues to extend. That bothers me a bit because this would lead to a situation similar to block halving, which I personally dislike. We are considering ways to "smoothen" this max generation cap. No promise we'll find a way. If we do find a way, this will be integrated into the "mega fork" that we will implement in several months and that will integrate a lot of changes all at once - the goal being to minimise the amount of changes for the holders and exchanges.

Staking management
We say HyperStake has the "Most Advanced Coin Control Wallet" for a reason. It really has, it's plain fact. And with max subsidy, this is not a gadget, this is actually useful. You'll see plenty of discussions regarding the "sweet spot" (fastest reward without wasting coins because of the 1000 HYP barrier from max subsidy (hint for finding it). Still, there is an issue here: people would have to merge the split blocks every day (for the block with less than one day of age). Ultimately, only devoted holders will do it, so it would lead to a concentration of coins. Worst-case scenario, it would lead to the coin being abandonned, because it is "too cumbersome to manage". An automated system would act as an equalizer. One more thing to consider for future coding.

New uses of staking
The combination of very high interest rate, pretty quick min age (8.8 days) and focus on experimentation paves the way to new uses of staking, beyond "I hoard and I get rich" (look at what is going in real estate with such a mentality). This is really what makes me the most excited about with this coin. Following the footstep of Apple, I proposed that major features would have a catchy name. Apple has CoreAudio, Grand Central, AirPort, FireWire, ThunderBolt... HyperStake has two initiatives: HyperShield and HyperSend.

HyperShield
The HyperShield initiative is oriented toward protecting the coin (the name comes from Blackcoin's BlackShield). Below are some of the instruments.

• A pledge for a buy wall (sell 25% or your stake every month and devote a part of this profit to a buy wall, itself being coordinated by the community).
• Using the endowment function to have self-sufficient faucets and community bounties "staking bounties" (which in turn requires some maths to know how much should be used during every staking period to avoid reducing the principal sum). The rationale is that faucet and giveways encourage people to care for HyperStake even if they don't have much.
• To maintain intentionally small blocks devoted to security only, since they will take a lot of time to stake.
• Using the HyperSend feature to increase adoption and encourage liquidity (Poloniex already gave his agreement for "staking to exchange")
• A buying bot for market making, further increasing liquidity, which is a plague of high interest securities.
• Hopefully we’ll find way to ensure a better distribution of coins too. I did not run the maths about coin distribution, but we should do our best to have a better distribution. Concentration leads to the demise of a coin (one could argue this is the problem now with fiat graph, video, by the way). Speaking of that, I’d like to have something similar to a Gini index but for HYP and others, to compare - but since every one can have multiple wallet, that makes it difficult a discussion on this.

HyperSend
The HyperSend feature is a generalisation of Stake for Charity (S4C), a great innovation by Tranz. Stake for Charity allows to automatically devote a part of the staking to a secondary address, which is turn will be used for donating to a charity of your choice. Historically, Stake for Charity was not even implemented in the GUI wallet, it was a RPC-only feature. True to the great relation between presstab and Tranz, presstab created the GUI wrapper and Tranz used this code to integrate it further into the HBN wallet.

Stake for Charity further evolved into some more uses in BottleCap, the second coin Tranz is taking care of. Here, it is called Autosaving and its goal is mainly to backup some coins to a cold wallet, for security, including against oneself (compulsive spending, anyone?).

Why not push the limits further? Ultimately this is not about charity or about saving, this is about automatically sending a part of your stake somewhere else. Hence the term HyperSend.

Possibilities are endless. On top of the above "charity" and "cold wallet" options, it is now possible to automatically send a part of the stake to an exchange (Poloniex already agreed), for selling. This will in turn encourage liquidity since people will have HYP ready to be sold. Since it is not automatic, it won't lead to contant dumping like multipools. And since exchanges usually do not stake (for obvious security reasons, staking requiring a hot wallet) holders will still have an incentive to sell from time to time (money on the exchange is basically sleeping money). Another possibility is to automatically send HYP to friends to make them aware of it in an way that both incite them to pay attention and doesn't hurt you - you are giving a part of your profits, not your principal sum. With some extra coding yet to be scheduled, (namely, timed sending for, say "I stake for my friend for 30 days then he is on his own and I stake for another friend"), this could become a very effective way to spread the "HYP love". Yet one more option, for later, is to arrange contracts with merchants, for instance to get a free coffee every month or week. You send HYP to a merchant's wallet and once you get enough, they offer you a coffee or a meal. "HyperStake: there is such a thing as a free lunch."

Have fun
HyperStake is meant to be fun to use. Fun means adoption and, remember, game is the second most efficient way to learn (the most efficient of all is shame, but this is hardly a pleasurable one).
So, among other things, HyperStake will be the very first wallet (that we know of) to implement skins — and on the fly theme switching, on top of that. Yes, you'll be able to choose between different appearances. The default appearance will be called HyperBlue (see a trend, here?) and once the feature will be released, there will already be a second layout to choose from, called Poloniex, in hommage to the biggest exchange for HYP (we received legal authorization from Poloniex to use their name).
In turn, having a themable wallet make it easier to have a theme for children - remember what I said about learning? financial illiteracy is plaguing the modern world. Piggycoin was the first coin to try to address this topic and we believe that HyperStake with HyperSend could help raising awareness on sharing and saving - plus the ease of keeping track of spending thanks to the blockchain technology.

I hope I gave you some more reasons to get interested in HyperStake. Now is a good time to buy or hedge HYP with Bitcoins or Monero.

[rfcdejong]

Nice post David, i'm very happy with my advanced hyper staking wallet, but reading about new features is good.

[CrazyLoaf]

Gini Index for HYP and other high PoS coins with decent adoption and market cap levels sounds sexy!

[Kuriso]

Interesting...  I've watched hyp but have not bought it.  You're concerned about hyperinflation so you'll use two inflation control mechanisms.  One can be worked around, the other will not take effect for a while.  Why build a coin with 750% PoS and then be worried about hyperinflation?  This seems a bit asinine.

[David Latapie]

Interesting...  I've watched hyp but have not bought it.  You're concerned about hyperinflation so you'll use two inflation control mechanisms.  One can be worked around, the other will not take effect for a while.  Why build a coin with 750% PoS and then be worried about hyperinflation?  This seems a bit asinine.

To make a point: very high inflation rate can be managed if done well. Remember HYP is an experiment at heart. Now, it is a very successful experiment for the moment, but still an experiment.

Update: presstab's interview just released. A great one, a nice introduction for people who don't know PoS and explains well where we are heading and how.
HyperStake, a coin with 750 % annual PoS