It's interesting to see what will happen. In the end, in my opinion, potential worldwide merchant acceptance is really the only thing that pushes coins to the top of the market cap. And that simply cannot happen with the current centralized CureCoin 1.0 . .
In my opinion it's sad that the CC team was somehow lacking ambition for CC2.0... Indeed their aim should have been to create THE ULTIMATE COIN that would send to trashcan all the useless global-warming-increasing GPU-based coins out there and concurrence Bitcoin, because being the ultimate cryptocurrency would push the coin to the top of the market cap and conversely offer tens, maybe hundreds of GPPD to F@H.
But for CC2.0 to be the ultimate cryptocurrency, I think they should:
- Remove all the flaws of CC 1.0 (mainly the premine -> DONE)
- Not add flaws in CC 2.0 (the certification authorities)
- Add massive advantages over Bitcoin (either new or inspired from other popular coins):
- Protection against quantum computing (DONE)
- Block time under 30s to allow effective payments
- Anonymous transactions (Vorksholk argued that it might allow illegal stuff, but cash payments in US$ allow it too and they don't help F@H in compensation)
Maybe SigmaX or CC3.0 will be the ultimate coin...
And then, having the technically ultimate coin that moreover helps F@H, CC's PR should contact all major merchants accepting Bitcoin and convince them accepting Curecoin.
Let me preface this by saying these are really good debates to have--and if you have specific ideas to address some of the concerns (namely certificates and WU validation of a dynamic WU system), we'd love to hear and discuss them. Here's how we're currently seeing these issues:
Currently, the certificate system looks like the best way to be able to validate peoples' contributions to scientific computation networks. Bitcoin works because PoW uses SHA-256D which everyone can validate--they know the exact requirements and validation procedure for any PoW. Since the very nature of scientific computing is large workloads which continually evolve and change format (not everyone is folding the same molecule in the same way--in fact, aside from redundancy, no one is), this means of decentralized work validation isn't possible. It's really a tradeoff--technically it's possible to create a PoW based on validating a computation related to simulating a single molecular system, but then it's unusable as a means of scientific research because research teams can't change the molecule, can't change what about it is being simulated, etc. They also can't improve the software (aside from optimizing the software to produce the same results faster), and the workloads would have to be unimaginably small to be practical PoW targets (because everyone needs to recompute them). It's also a DDoS vulnerability to the network, because people could pretend to mine a ton of blocks with bogus WUs, and everyone would have to recompute the entire WU to see that it's false. With Bitcoin it's nanoseconds to compute a double-SHA256 hash. With even a small molecular simulation it's on the scale of seconds to minutes, which means someone could submit a few bogus blocks to the network, and the entire network would spend an hour frozen while it reprocesses every WU just to find out that they weren't valid PoW submissions. We also couldn't have a short blocktime for this reason, because even the slowest full nodes would need to validate blocks much faster than they are transmitted, and making the PoW validation require more than a trivial amount of time requires that the blocktime leaves a large enough window to ensure that peers aren't being "buried" by PoW validations, even ignoring the DDoS factor.
We are considering a pretty fast blocktime--in the range of 1 to 2 minutes. 30s might be a bit short, but our goal is to get it as low as reasonably possible without causing any issues on the network. Anonymous transactions aren't our goal.
As far as motivation, CureCoin is waiting for a technology I'm currently working on to become available that will drastically improve CureCoin's network security. The technology isn't built
for CureCoin specifically, but for the entire ecosystem to use, and CureCoin will be one of the first adopters. Update to come very soon (Tuesday) about what exactly the technology is.