Topic: A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin" (Read 5011 times)

Eskimobob, somehow around "must be the good guys or it's game over." you lost me. What are you trying to tell us?

You obviously want to bring up some sort of criticism about what we are planning to do, but what is it?  

Agreed. The Travian-etc chap has obviously not continued such games beyond the point where he conquered the entire world yet would not really have anything to show for it if he couldn't keep the other players from quitting the game.

It is more like running such games. Notice how the game companies run them now: they kill the server just at the moment when the game starts to get interesting, because unfortunately the way the "winner" plays is not conducive to keeping hordes of players playing and a constant influx of new players joining in generation after generation.

They are tiny little oneshot games, and the winners win by the "default the prisoner's dilemma" method on each single "shot". The games teach people that you need to slaughter all other intelligent beings in their mothers' wombs or failing that in their cradles, and scorched earth their entire civilisations if need be.

They end with an entirely unnihabitable world, so uninhabitable they don't even leave it running for people to explore "what happens next".

-MarkM-

You are using the wrong analogy. It is more like WoW, where people who come in late can buy a full suit of armor, weapons, and get leveled up by someone in China.

Absurd amount of power required to keep the network safe and running is one of the biggest flaws in BTC - 51% of the network must be the good guys or it's game over. Constant fear of attack and chance to lose everything - not a healthy mindset for something as important as BTC (or any virtual currency) and if users truly realize this, it's game over. YEs, the chance is small but someone like BFL can fire up all the (still imaginary) ASICS and ... bleep.
Sure, banks get robbed all the time but they are insured and this is can not be compared to 51% attack at all. This is more like wiping out all the banks at the same time. Puff... and it's all gone. 
Those 2 major flaws have to be eliminated in the next coin. 4.5 GB of bc download is also borderline retarded. Yes, Electrum client/server has taken a step in right direction but this has to happen in much lower level.

As has been said over and over not just here but all over the place, the initial distribution is pretty much unimportant.

If all the gold on the entire planet had been handed to Adam and Eve in one swell foop it would still work pretty much as it has always worked. The ores we find would be from things like Vesuvius eruptings or something, gold melted band oxidised or whatever, and we'd find larger nuggets such as chests of bars in sunken pirate galleons, there still could well have been gold rushes as people discovered far lands where Cain and Abel each took a big chunk of their parents' hoard and so on, but that is all trivial detail.

-MarkM-

Yes pretty much in tune with a bell shaped curve.

So how would a cryptoconcurrency be more environmentally harmful if it's distribution is closely modelled after gold? If anything it would be more environmentally friendly during the initial period since the rising block reward and exactly as environmentally unfriendly as bitcoin during the second period when the block reward declines.

Except gold production in metric tonnes has gone up almost every year and 50% of all gold ever produced was produced since 1967.
Lets not forget, that the damage don to environment grows at absurd rate every yea and less than 10% of the gold gets used by industry for something useful.

Are you serious? How about the fact that he can't alter code running on my computers?

No the current distribution is not as good as any, it's bad in a sense that is does not go after the distribution of gold mining. That follows/followed a bell curve, which is what I did suggest.
If you apply the current distribution to gold it would be if early miners did grab head-sized nuggets out of the earth with pick axes and later giant mining apparatuses only being able to drag up microscopic specs of gold out of the depths.

Independent of the exact implementation, there is no need for a fair initial distribution. It's unimportant. An early adopter can smash his coins into the market exactly once. Then, that's it, and they can be traded hundreds of thousands of times later.

But rewarding early adopters served an important purpose, namely kickstarting adoption and incentive for the developers (although they might have really hit the mark in their own getting rich method. ).

The current distribution is as good as any to start off with. For all I care, Satoshi could've just sold me the coins directly. In the long run, it's all irrelevant. I'm jealous about early adopters' quick riches too. Still, that time is over now, and as a community, we have no real reason to go back. So let's think ahead and focus on the power of international markets we could unlock; there's more than just a one-time use mountain of digital gold to get there.

Oh I do remember you shitting yourself calling merged mining and any kind of alternate cryptocurrency a "siege". Now this forum is live an well with plenty support from within Bitcoin.
Now who's petty?


At first to understand a problem you have to work on solving it. You can do that either by manual work or by better tools.
One can not work without the other but tools can get arbitrarily complex and useful and work arbitrarily tedious. So everybody will choose the approach which works best, and since almost the entire community here consists of nerds we mainly focus on tools. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we get to work at some point.

You guys really need to get over that stupid "this is a new currency" idea.
No sane merchant out here, in the real world, wants another currency to deal with. What they want, is fast and secure and a lot cheaper way to transfer "value" from point A to B. They do not need additional risks like volatility, complicated "coin"-to-fiat conversions and so on.
You go and tell someone: "this new cool internet currency" and they usually walk away. Go an tell merchant, you have a fast, secure and X times cheaper way to transfer funds... you have their attention. Mention new currency, and the door will hit you in the ass on your way out.

No matter, how shiny and fair and what not your new coin is, if it has no real life use, it will be dead sooner or later (after few pump and dumps and Trendon-like tricks)
Yes, there are huge wallets stuffed with BTC. Lot's of greedy scumbags have stolen coins from each other and so on. Lot's of scams and what not. But this all will be history, if those coins (BTC, LTC etc) do not become useful in the real life and find larger audience. Most people do not give a flying f** about mining. They do not get a hard-on when GPU fans are screaming in the corner, making them less than a EUR per day.

Real world promotions are the key for any coins success. 20+ nerds having a circle jerk session about BTC is not really a event RW cares about. What about LTC? Yes, LTC is better for a merchants in many ways but if it gets no real life use... it will be dead too.
Do not get me wrong, I really like the idea of BTC, LTC, PPC... and so on but it's time take a step back and understand this: Yapping about technology is not going to cut it. Technology is only a tool. Tool for solving a real life problem. If you do not understand the RL problem, you can not develop a tool for it.

+1

Exactly. The whole success of currency is that it's a representation of value. The labor theory of value just doesn't work. The point of mining isn't to put the value of the labor into the coin.

Why ever put value in the system at all then?

This thread is so petty!

Agree with this 100%.

But what the hell you are talking about here?

It would be interesting and useful to get some actual quotes / commitments from miners on how much exactly they would charge to merged mine how many chains (or a chain that will be their X-many'th chain, if they charge less per additional chain).

That way a realistic budget can be worked out and actually "backed" coins such as USDcoin and so on could be deployed, knowing how much the backers to whom the initial and total number of coins ever to be issued were issued need to budget for paying miners to secure their chain.

About game companies messing with the number of their coins, minting more on demand, have you not read anything about bitcoin? They have as much ability to do that as Gavin has to do it with bitcoin, maybe slightly easier is less users out there already using it.

What keeps Gavin from doubling the number of bitcoins minted, for example?

-MarkM-

Nice idea, makes even sense from a security aspect!

Maybe make the "maturity" rate on coins based on difficulty. When the diff is low it takes a lot longer for the coins to mature and when the diff is higher it takes a shorter time.

Then late adopters get rewarded by being able to use their coins earlier than early adopters.