A short history of a few things that might fill in afew details of anyone interested:
The idea for merged mining was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28696It was first used with Bitcoin + Namecoin then others (some of which were ‘killed’ ) including ixcoin, iocoun & dev coin. These five were sha2 coins mined with btc as the parent & the other five as aux chains.
In late 2013 BlueDragon launched Blake Coin. At that time other alt coins were basically clones of btc & ltc mostly (or nova coin & ppc). I was mining early and impressed with the specs of Blake 256.
Other algo alt coins start launching. Later it was identified by a few ‘unique’ items in the code they actually ‘copied’ BlakeCoin without credit to BlueDragon. (I am not going to mention names of coins but there were a few & some are still around)
I had a bit of experience at running /cloning/ working on alt coins at that time (those projects of mine are long retired) and BlueDragon and I discussed collaberation on what became Photon. I cloned his code for Blake Coin with a few changes and Photon was launched late Feb 2014. At launch Photon was NOT merge mined and BlueDragon put together the first pool for Photon.
Soon after much testing BlueDragon commited changes to Photon’s code and a hardfork was done to make Photon an aux chain of BlakeCoin using the same concepts that had worked for the sha2 aux chains with btc.
Other members of the Blake256 family were launched successfully and these were merge mined from their launch.
I hope this fills in a few gaps for new people.
I would like to stress that the Blake family of coins did not invent merged mining although we were the first non sha 2
algo to make it work. Merged mining works very well with 8 round blake 256 and in theory many more chains can work meaning we are no where near our limit for future capacity or expansion.
Myself and many other people have done a lot of work on Photon and the other Children (Umo , B + , Lithium, & Electron) and no coins were premined. Check the exact times of launch and cross match them with the block explorers to verify this for yourself. Coins owned by anyone (including anyone on the development team) were mined or purchased on exchanges.
The costs and time for running nodes and other things have been paid out of pocket by the other asst. developers like myself. In addition to running nodes Bluedragon has paid the hosting for blakecoin org and all the merged pools vm hosting expenses (at a loss) PLUS run the pools. Pools mine 24/7 so he has not had a day off in 4 years and has certainly the largest out of pocket expenses of any of us. Many volunteers & community members have sponsered Photon & the other coins for various things. I have never paid an exchange or an external block explorer. I am greatful for whoever has done this and to all the exchanges who ever listed photon. I am also greatful to all miners and other community members who have helped promote this family of coins.
I am happy there are new miners and talented new people who contributed a lovely community website
SEE HERE
https://www.photoncc.comI do urge caution with anyone getting over zealous.
For example unless you are coding it and testing it yourself saying Photon has Electrum clients or mobile wallets ready to release next month is just not true. Open source projects mean anyone can make suggestions to the maintainers for changes in the code if they follow the official process or can fork the code and run their own unapproved changes to code that do not violate the license. See here for more information
https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-sourceStating there is an ‘airdrop’ {meaning anyone with private keys from a specific blockchain can import them into a client and receive photon after such & such a date} is not true.
I’ve read on Twitter that Photon has been incorperated into CounterStrike & other video games besides Blake Zone (where it would purchase ammo) I have not had a chance to test these out yet but believe them to be true.
Finally there are no/zero plans to change any original specs of Photon.
This includes changing how many coins were mined, how many will be mined, the proof of work algo ect.
I am not concerned if asic technology mines blake 256 family coins. Since we had FPGA at the lauch of Blake Coin this was planned for years ago. I have yet to see a proof of stake system that works without centralized checkpointing and can solve the Byzantine Generals problem. Even if such a system existed (and I highly doubt it will) Photon will remain proof of work.
Please consider carefully what I’ve written here. Understand I have worked with Bluedragon a long time and could not have done this without his work & support (although he could have done this without me) . I hope moving ahead we can release things first that exist and talk about things in development that are real. If any of you have ever tried to convert something like say loaf wallet mobile wallet for litecoin for ios or android to work with a project like this I think you will understand the challenges are more than ‘just’ a mastery of swift or java.
I hope this clears a few things up. If you are still interested in the project awesome and if not I understand.
Thanks to all.
