RFC: Yet another *coin

[Come-from-Beyond]

>> So, there is no worry about people who can mine more massively
GPU-miners make unprofitable to mine with CPU.

>> As long as whatever it is that people are doing is something you can sell to make money you are in effect charging money
Now there is no point to mine BTC with CPU. A player has to mine during 100 years with BTC JS-miner to get a Sword of Uberness. The same has happened to LTC recently.

>> So all you need do is just provide something for players to run that you will give them in-game gold or whatever for
Aye. A coin miner, coz anything else is hard to embed into a game client software.

>> You could in fact take the BOINC source code if its open source (it is, isnt it?) and use that so you can change what exactly the players computers are doing for you based in which task pays more at a given moment
There is no proper way to monetize BOINC computations.

[1715215483]

1715215483

[markm]

People are still going to have to mine 100 years to get a sword of uberness no matter what weird new coin you invent, in fact they will probably have to mine even longer mining some previously unheard of coin no-one except those players has any use for than mining bitcoins or litecoins etc.

Bear in mind too that by having them mine at your pool, they can mine Bitcoins, Namecoins, Groupcoins, Devcoins, Ixcoins, I0coins, Ixcoins and Coliedcoins all at the same time, plus if you wish a whole bunch of strange new coins no one ever previously heard of.

In fact if you can get enough players to actually make a chain secure - that is, get enough mining power to secure a chain - they can also mine Britcoins, Botcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, CZech Bitcash, General Mining Corp, General Retirement Corp, bitNicKeLs and United Nations Scrip. All at once courtesy of merged mining, with still the ability to add more to the repertoire.

That is because if you can get enough mining power to secure a chain, all those chains can move back out of the Open Transactions format to which they retreated in the face of the hideous expense of securing a blockchain to a blockchain format the amount of mining power players of games are able and willing to provide.

If you still insist on discriminating against people using GPUs, you could also look into applying merged mining patches to litecoin and other "CPU friendly" coins so that all of those can be mined at once. How to make them even more "CPU friendly" is something all of them are presumably interested in so if you do figure out some way their anti-GPU bias can be increased they will probably all be interested since that is afterall their own reason-for-being too. They are thus striving to be the coin you are looking for and merely await your upgrade patch to bring them into line with your goal while also thereby brining them back in line with their own goal.

It seems though that you are basically just uttering self-contradicting bullshit to try to justify yet another pump and dump since unless many many many more computers than just those actually playing the game mine some new shitcoin it will be far too vulnerable (*) but the more people that mine it the less uberswords each one will be able to buy with the generated coins.

How many uberswords per block are to be mined? Or how many uberswords per week? Or how many uberswords per month or per year?

(*) You could however read up on solidcoin and the various threads on "stake" to see how a spectacularly shitty series of shitcoins secured chains despite almost no mining power and how some theorists theorise a newer better solidcoin using distributed consensus instead of divine right to allocate special powers could work.

-MarkM-

[Come-from-Beyond]

I can't resist temptation to use network-bound proof-of-work, GPU-hostility won't be a problem in such case. "Block chain" security could be provided with other mechanism in this scenario. I'm thinking of using so-called "Byzantine quorum system". Still thinking...

[Come-from-Beyond]

...Well, now I have some basic details how the coin could be implemented.

Imagine p2p-network which contains nodes. Every node has an address (IP or domain name) and list of addresses of other nodes (not necessary all of them). A node also has information about how much each user has money on the account (no need to know the account balance of each user in the system).

"User" is a person or a company. The system doesn't store any info regarding a user that could help to identify him in the real world. The user has public (bound to the account) and private keys which could be used to authorize the user, sign messages and do other things.

When the user decides to transfer his money to someone, he connects to any known node and gives a command "transfer XXX coins from user YYY to user ZZZ". The node retransmits the command to some random nodes in the list. These nodes retransmit the command to other random nodes and so on. Hop limit should be used to prevent the command to circulate in the system indefinitely.

Upon receiving "transfer XXX coins from user YYY to user ZZZ" command each node checks if YYY has enough money and adjust balances of the both users. Time to time nodes share data each with other to keep it recent. Due to finite speed of data propagation it's necessary to use a delay between commands that change an account balance. This trick also let to get rid of transaction fees (which mainly used as defense against transaction spamming).

Nodes earn money during sharing data. (It's like u get 50 BTC every time u generate a block.) If a node doesn't have RECENT info about particular user and his balance it's unable to take part in transactions. The reward is randomly given to a pair of nodes when transaction data is hand off from Nth node to (N+1)th one. The random function is deterministic though and depends on such data as user public key, transferred amount, transaction itinerary and other things. Nodes that have recent info about a lot of users have better chance to take part in transactions so they have better chance to get a reward. Nodes which provide better service to users have better chance to take part in transactions too, coz they become a starting point of a transaction.

This system could be used to support different currencies, not only certain one. I still have no exact answers how different aspects of the system should be implemented. Comments and questions are very welcome.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I redesigned my idea a little.

Using accounts seems to be a bad idea. It lets to track funds transfers. It's impossible to know how real coins came to a particular person and it's a very good feature of real cash. Nodes should store info about coins and their public keys. When person XXX gives coins to person YYY, he just gives private keys (sends with e-mail, for example). Then person YYY connects to the system and sends command "destroy these coins and give me fresh ones with these public keys". This command is necessary to prevent double-spending.