Proof Of No Developers
Introducing some new concepts for decentralized development and fair distribution - Open Development Model - No formal development team or "Lead Dev"; ongoing development of POND will be determined by the user base
- Fair Distribution - Block reward will start low and ramp up over an extended period to enhance accessibility
- Multi-algo Merged Mining - Merged mining across 5 GPU friendly algrorithms for enhanced network security and a decentralized mining base
Why POND?2014 - the year of the (failed) altcoin? Looking back over the past year, and all the altcoins that have launched, I see a very clear pattern emerging which could almost be dubbed the life cycle of an altcoin, and could be broken down into 4 distinct phases as follows:
- 1. In the embryonic stages there's lots of hope and expectation both among developers, "investors", and the alt coin community. This coin will be the next big thing because......[INSERT GROUNDBREAKING, KILLER FEATURE HERE] We'll call this the "honeymoon phase."
- 2. It doesn't take very long for the next big thing to come along and much of the passing interest is gone. The best altcoins maintain some active development well beyond the honeymoon phase and retain a reasonably healthy community as a result. Call this the "still hopeful of great things" phase.
- 3. The next phase involves a period of stagnation (at best) in terms of both price and development projects. Promising projects are fewer and further between, and those that have been promised previously are subject to extended/indefinite delays. We can term this the "stagnation" phase.
- 4. Finally comes the "recrimination" phase when what's left of the coin's once active and vibrant community becomes polarized into a group of fanatic bag holders who won't have a bad word said about their beloved coin, and another more rational group who just can't help but hold the developers responsible for the coin's downfall.
If like me you've grown weary of watching this cycle repeat itself over and over again, then I invite you to help break the cycle with POND. I submit that the above cycle is set in motion by an unrealistic expectation in phase 1; the expectation that developers will remain loyal and dedicated to a coin. This is unrealistic because it's not consistent with the transient nature of open source software development. The solution: break the dependancy on development teams by not having a formal development team in the first place.
Instead of being tied to a development team, POND is designed to utilize the mechanism of success/failure of hard forks as a means of fully democratizing ongoing development. To this end, POND is not intended to have a static repository for source code. Instead, anyone wishing to modify source code to develop POND may do so by creating their own repository, and inviting users to upgrade to their new version of the wallet. For their new version of the source code to become the commonly accepted version of wallet, they will need to justify their changes to the user base. If they don't manage to do so, their proposed fork fails and nothing changes.
I hope that this unique development model may attract developers who are open to the idea of using POND as a platform to implement (or even test) their ideas, rather than always starting from scratch with a new coin by default.
I also suspect that one of the reasons that so many coins got launched this year is because the prevailing model almost always involves maximum coin production at launch. The extreme example is the PoW/PoS hybrids with a very short PoW phase. Having such a large supply of coins in the hands of early adopters is not conducive to gaining momentum and widespread adoption. Even the "fairer" pure PoW coins all have supply skewed in favour of early miners/adopters. This is bad because a) it turns these early adopters into evangelical salesmen who need to convince others to buy into their coin to support it's valuation, and b) any successful attacks on the coin in the early days could kill the coin by landing a significant percentage of total supply in the hands of the attacker. The first point almost perfectly fits the dictionary definition of a ponzi, which is why it should come as no surprise that this model lends itself so well to pump and dumps. Has the altcoin market become little more than a succession of pump and dumps?
So instead, I propose that the POND block reward should start low and ramp up over a period of 2.4 years. This design will prevent early adopters from monopolizing supply. Due of the low initital block reward, POND should utilize multi-algo merged mining across 5 gpu friendly algorithms. Merged mining will be necessary to secure the network in the early stages when block reward will be too low to incentivize miners to mine POND alone. Multi-algo has been selected to enhance network security and further decentralize the mining base. GPU friendly algorithms have been selected to allow for the development of PONDhopper, a profit switching app for switching between parent coins/algos for maximum profitability. Such an app may help POND to avoid the common problem associated with merged coins, where they're considered "free lunch" by the miners of the parent coin.
Proposed Specifications (I say proposed, because these are just my ideas, and the whole point of POND is that it's intended to be far bigger than just one man's ideas. So these specifications should be considered subject to change at any time, by anyone.)
No premine
Proof of Work - auxPoW on the following algorithms:
Neoscrypt (Feathercoin, Phoenixcoin)
Lyra2RE (Vertcoin)
Skein (Myriadcoin, Digibyte, Skeincoin)
Myriad-Groestl (Myriadcoin, Digibyte)
Qubit (Myriadcoin, Digibyte, Qubitcoin)
Block time: 10 minutes per algorithm (2 minute average over 5 algos)
Difficulties adjusted to produce the same % of blocks (on average) for each algo
Distribution divided into three distinct phases as follows:
Phase 1: Starting block reward of 2 POND, increasing by 2 POND every 5040 blocks (~weekly), to a maximum of 250 POND/block at block 630,000 (estimated to be reached after about 2.4 years),
Phase 2: Block reward decreases by 3% every 10080 blocks (~fortnightly), until block 1,708,560 (reached after approx. 6.5 years),
Phase 3: From block 1,708,561, there will be an indefinite static block reward of 10 POND/block, equating to an initial annual rate of inflation of about 1.5%
Difficulty adjusts every block
P2P port: 16114
RPC port: 16115
Launch date: TBC
Proof of conceptAs proof of concept, I've taken the Myriadcoin source code and made some modifications to create a draft version of POND. The changes I've made reflect the above specifications.
I am not a developer. I am a hobbyist miner and cryptocurrency enthusiast with very limited technical ability. It's highly doubtful I will be able to independently launch POND – otherwise I might legitimately be able to call myself a developer! So in order to make it out of the starting gate, POND will likely need the intervention of altruistic developer(s) to see the potential of what I've tried to create, tidy up all my mistakes, and compile wallets. The very first version of the POND wallet will be a product of the intended ongoing development model.
(very rough) Draft source codehttps://github.com/depboy/PONDMerry Christmas. Let's make 2015 the year of POND!
