Topic: A proposed fair premine idea (Read 2485 times)

What about the very first amount of coins mined is non-transferable out of the wallet for certain amount of time (e.g. 1 year), by that we wouldn't see huge amount of coins dumped at exchange for quick buck and the price goes to near Zero.

The argument that people can and should work for free isn't going to build infrastructure. I agree with you all the various blockchains have to be secured, that hashing power has to be increased, that each coin needs to be promoted with websites, word of mouth, blogs, twitter, full marketing campaigns have to be launched for each.

So what we need to do as a community is actually put our minds together to develop a fair model to reward the behaviors we want to encourage. If we aren't willing to pay for infrastructure then we can't complain about the lack of distributed exchanges or MtGox going down or sites being hacked all the time and so on. In order to build this infrastructure, members of the community have to be compensated and Devcoin isn't working and probably isn't going to work either. My advice is instead of a centralized Devcoin which isn't really working, we should design an IPO funding model and test that model out and see exactly how well that model works in practice, then write up case studies and papers detailing what did work and why so the next generation can rely on those research papers and the scientific method to refine their launches to make them even more fair and more impressive.

To start we need to assume each developer will need $100,000, as this isn't enough to make a developer rich but it is enough to pay a US or Japanese citizen in the most expensive part of the country to live for at least 1 year. Also this is only slightly more than what developers usually make, so it's a fair amount and will get developers to quit their jobs and want to do this. The funding mechanism has to be something we continue to improve on and we have to find a mechanism to reward the people who do that, so that those people can research full time, develop new prototypes based on that research so that future launches can become even more fair than the last.

We can disagree on numbers, on how to get it done, but infrastructure has to be developed, new coins have to be developed, research has to be funded, and we cannot expect it to just happen or for it to happen for free, we have to figure out how to generate enough money as a community to create a vibrant self sustaining economic eco-system.

Time isn't free. So basically only rich people or retired people will get to work on these projects? Not fair at all. And to think people will dedicate years of their lives for free or to expect slave labor to produce quality is basically the sweat shop model.

Developers should be allowed to get paid. How much is fair? Whatever they would be paid in the private sector + 10%. So $100,000 would be fair for the developer, but to expect the developer to work essentially for free, full time? We are talking PHD level work. Linux was developed by private corporations like Redhat, Suse, IBM, Oracle, they all funded Linux. The developers working on the Linux kernel and other critical components like Mozilla are getting paid.

The risks are still there today. What if the government decides to crack down on everyone? These risks still exist and every new cryptocoin faces these risks and every miner, investor, developer and early adopter faces these risks. Allowing them all to profit doesn't reduce the risk but it might give them enough money to move to a less oppressive location or hire a lawyer at least.

The purpose of developing a coin shouldn't be to get rich, but it shouldn't be expected that people will work for free. The purpose of developing these coins is to make peoples time worth something to the economy and to monetize things. The idea that the developers time is worthless, or that electricity is just free, is unfair. The developers time is not worthless, and electricity is not free. Developing a successful cryptocoin is not easy on any level, and while Bitcoin launched on the cheap it also took 4 years to go mainstream. The next generation coins may only have a year, or 6 months to launch and that is if they are planned out, it's also going to require a lot more effort in terms of programming.

Go read the Bitcoin code and see how it was hacked together. The design of Bitcoin is the design of a mathematician but the code is a hack job. New coins need to be designed by full time programmers with highly modular and secure code bases. No more just taking the Bitcoin code and adding a hack or two or a new hash or two, but we need new better rewrites of the code and that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time. As a programmer go compare the QT5 code to GTK and see for yourself the difference in quality.  

Bitcoin was also made to get rich. Why else make the reward decay with a power series, the fastest decaying series there is. The difference is when bitcoin w born, there were significant doubts and risks and much less crowd interested.

Since ideally we would want a team that is expert at maintaining and promoting a chain, the best source of funding would be for them to get rich improving and promoting bitcoin so we all know they are qualified to maintain and promote such a product.

Or if not bitcoin, then there are already oodles of other chains they can catapult to success to demonstrate their expertise and oodles of chains that are sorely in need of some maintenance they can demonstrate their maintenance skills on.

Currently the community is not even able to keep up with maintenance of all the existing chains, so creating more seems kind of pointless. Lets prove we can actually maintain the ones we already have.

Already some of the latest ones are spawning "Is RecentScamCoin (RSC) dead?" threads.

So we are already overstraining our maintenance capacity. Maybe our hashing power too, as we also have not been able to keep all the existing chains at high enough levels of hashing to secure them all.

So again we really need to get off our asses and work on what we already have instead of piling up more work we likely also will not have enough hashing and maintenance-work to adequately support.

-MarkM-

What does that actually mean though? If a developer brings out a new coin in the future full of innovations and took a year to code what is your objection to him profiting from his hard work?

There is a goal and purpose (But let's ignore this for now. Assume Interest). But just wondering what the best way to award the early investors and what the community won't object to as a way of funding the development of the coin.

What are your thoughts on the methods that I suggested?

I'd start with a goal or reason for the new coin.  Something investors would want to invest in.  A good purpose for it's existence.

Let's say that investors are needed to get a hypothetical coin to be developed.

What would be an ideal way to set this up?

1) Direct premine.  Make block 0 X coins and then give them directly to kickstarter investors
or

2) Tickets method.  Similar to a premine, but when the investors get the money is random.  Investors are given tickets to use to gain stake rewards proportional to their investment on kickstarter.  In doing so, these first investors also help to secure the blockchain.

your thoughts?

There is still tons of money to be made just mining bitcoins.

Using p2pool to merged mine all the merged mined coins you get 15 second blocks with the GeistGeld for your fast block times applications/needs, so people needing fast blocks are already taken care of right there.

The bitcoins pays for more than just the electricity, even this late in the game.

The DeVCoins and GRouPcoins take care of the people who insist you need to keep creating coins forever.

The namecoins provide a p2p DNS system.

If other features are needed, at least add them to the merged mined mix, so they can be secured economically.

Also the merged mining mix is extremely fair, you can still get plenty of many of the coins in the mix mining with just one GPU, heck some of them are still low enough difficulty that CPUs could still get a block now and again even.

-MarkM-

I see what you did there, but you didn't fix anything. The incentive for mining bitcoin early was not to get in on a pump and dump like it is now with the latest alt coins. Hence, why premining is so chaotic and unfair.

You can rebase to work in mbtc and add more decimal points if neceessary.  This was all envisaged by Satoshi.

But you can also create btc certificates, in fact you SHOULD do this.

Let's say a govt was to start paying workers in bitcoin certificates.  They would make them redeemable by their own mined coins, or exchanged for currency, tax credits or court fines.

Very soon the bitcoin certificates would be as valuable as money.  More importantly, as the economy is stimulated, so go up revenues, yielding lower deficits (and hence borrowing costs) and ultimately surpluses.  The bitcoin certificates can be bought back easily and more money gets invested into goods and services. 

FTFY

Well, bitcoin can be considered a beta, but in no way this design can be used to overthrow the banking system because:

1. the cap is at 21 millions and there are 7 billions people on Earth, so everybody will have to work with decimals, and this will not work for multiple reasons.

2. the block chain is big and it will get bigger. Moore law is not the answer, when you will need 1 BTC hardware to store 0.1 BTC. Plus you can't get it with you to pay at the store

3. The transaction time is huge.

Because of this reasons, bitcoin is only a good investment and saving currency, is not a currency for spending. We need a currency that you can take with your phone, to go with the phone and buy something at the store and we need to wait a maximum of 10 seconds for confirmation and not 2 hours, and we need to pay 1 or 0.5 for a pack of biscuits and not 0.00000000732

Yes, i know, all of the early adopters will say otherwise, and is normal because they have a lot of bitcoins and they want them to have a big value.

And we arrived at the last problem why the bitcoin alone can't overthrow the banks:
4. GREED.

The banking system is where it is because of the greed, because they want more that they can need. But the banking system is using a "centralized greed", but in crypto world is a P2P greed, envy and hypocrisy. The ones that have a lot of coin X (this is including BITCOIN) will defend that coin no matter how broken or flawed it is, the ones that are late will hate them and will try to bring the coin down or to clone it for a quick profit.

At this pace, the crypto coins will remain a geek only thing, where the guys that where early on the bitcoin can afford big rigs to take down new coins, and the late guys will clone some coins to make a quick profit.

Unless we don't get our shit together and don't acknowledge that:
1. we need incremental coins
2. the developers need to be payed in some way for their work, like the miners are now.

You think that a good programmer will quite his job to donate his time just so you can mine and make a profit?

I know when someone proposed that for first X block the reward will be 0, everyone jumped: and the miner mine for nothing?

3. we need to support the coins that brings something new and rejects the clone. I am still amazed that novacoin or PPC are ignored but everybody are so in love with feathercoin or china clone.

4. We really need to dump the old coins, when a new increment is ready.

And this is the hardest part. Because none of the ones that preach the world peace and the donation of time and other BS will do this, and this is because of the greed. So don't accuse other to be greedy when you are just as greedy.

For now the crypto coins are just a get rich scheme and speculation investment. If you really want to overthrow the bank we need this changes. And we need to use the greed for something constructive, we need to use the greed of the people as an incentive to work and improve the project.

If you jump on every developer who do something new that he has premined some coins you will just have a geekcoin and a bunch of useless clones and the crypto movement will die in a civil war.

People who mined bitcoin early on deserve every bit of their profits because at that time, they were basically mining just to support bitcoin while taking on all of the costs of power and risk of having the whole network fail and become history. If everyone knew you could just print money back then that would be worth a lot today, everyone would have gotten in... We didn't know that, but the early miners believed in bitcoin.

+1000

Really well put

Although it never took off, I sort of liked the Solidcoin (1st version) pre mine method. There was a pre mine to test the chain and what not, but the coins were given as bounties for the first people to set up pools, services, etc. Of course looking back the system as a whole didn't work for various reasons, but I don't think that the SC premine method was a bad idea. Or at least if a pre mine is necessary, it wasn't a bad way to go.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Discussions of to premine or not, to make such and such coin with different block times and total coin amounts are all mute if the original idea (Bitcoin) is doing it's thing.  No matter how a creator of a new coin wraps their argument up with a pretty bow, the clear goal is to get rich quick. Otherwise they would be helping Bitcoin be the best it can be.  The groundwork is there, growth will come with time.  Are you following Satoshi's steps of fixing a broken financial system or are you trying to find the elusive golden egg? 

Bitcoin isn't broken, so which is it?

DeVCoin is merged mined. The miners basically get it free on the side while they mine bitcoins.

Even with GPUs mining bitcoin is still profitable, and the merged mined coins add to that profit.

Miners who also add namecoin to their merge make even more profit, it looks like Slush dropping namecoin from his merge might actually have made merging it even more profitable for everyone else too simply because less namecoins are being given away free on the side to miners who don't care about them. Less people who don't want namecoins so throw them away cheap might lead to a better exchange rate, or maybe it is just that lower difficulty encourages more people who actually care about them to add them to their merge.

DeVCoin doesn't need to give a large percentage to the miners because there are already lots of coins the miners get 100% of while merged mining. Bitcoin already pays their electricity, all the other coins are mined effectively free.

-MarkM-