With the latest fiasco with hidden premined coins I realized that there is no way for the average interested person to know if a coin is a risk or an opportunity. Hype and the community as a whole surrounding a coin is not always helpful. What we need is a guideline or measuring mechanism to gauge safety of a new coin.
As with free speech it would be voluntary for any coin dev to adhere to the guidelines for new coins but if we as an ALT coin community lay down what we would like to see from a new coin before it is released then we will likely see the scammers avoiding any check and balances and the honest devs happy to tick as many boxes as they can. This will help us make a more informed decision whether to jump in or not.
I do not intend to run with this as a project but hopefully get a discussion started and get interested parties involved.
Parties that stand to benefit from a set guideline for creating a new ALT coin: Exchanges, miners, traders, honest developers and the ALT coin reputation as a whole
Parties that will NOT benefit: scammers!
Suggestions:
Tick box 1: Independent code review and wallet builds.
I would suggest that a few well respected developers make their services available to ALT coin developers. This should be a pool of developers that have been part of the community and have a proven record of reliable coin development. NDAs might be required to protect the coin devs IP until full source is released. I would expect there to be a cost involved for the coin dev.
- Code should be cloned for review and all initial releases should be done from this clone. The original coin dev should not have permissions to modify on this repository
- Code reviews need to be done prior to a coin release. This will also mitigate the risk of late launches as the dev should not still be coding and compiling minutes before a coin is released.
- Initial wallet builds should be made available by the independent code reviewer not the coin dev. Post links to password protected files and let the coin dev release the password on launch. This should also ensure that there will be both a Windows and MAC wallet at launch.
- Pools need to get the initial source from the git clone that the code reviewer created for the code review not from the coin developer’s repository.
With a coin being code reviewed by someone that we as a community trust and respect I believe we will all have some confidence that a coin does not have any badness in it from the start. No hidden premines or viruses. It also gives coin devs a second pair of eyes to find any bugs they could have missed.
Exchanges will likely have a lot more confidence in a coin that was independently reviewed and could possibly help with earlier listings. Exchanges could jump in here as this is a major benefit to them as well.
Tick box 2: Any IPO is held in escrow.
The actual properties of a coin is up to a dev to decide. If their coin is to have 50% premine and distributed to investors then so be it. It is their coin and they can set the parameters of their coin as they wish. There should however be safety for investors in the form of an escrow.
Add your own tick boxes you would like to see from new coin devs. Remember this is not a thread about coin properties and should not be a discussion about whether all coins should have POS or not. This is about the checks and balances that we as a community would like from new coins to give us a measurable confidence that a coin is not a scam.
I am sure we can grow the list of "Tick boxes" we would like to see for new coin releases.