I'm not dead, but supcoin kinda is, isn't it :/
I had 3 features I wanted to have in NextCoin. Two of these features I wanted to carry over to Supcoin, but I've found flaws and/or they are dangerous to implement.
I'll go ahead and name off the two features and their flaws.
1. PoW+PoS hybrid mining method. Basically the idea was to make it so instead of buying $200 of mining equipment, you could buy $200 of coins and have the same mining power. However, the only workable way for this involved computing a significant amount of cryptographic signatures with a private key that holds this large amount of coins. Because computing signatures became a portion of the process covered by mining, this might mean that some people would try to make "specialized" private keys that though less secure, could be optimized in some ways to make signatures easier to compute. Also, a huge number of cryptographic signatures means that side-channel attacks would be significantly easier to pull off.
For these reasons, I've decided to not publish the specs or any more details beyond this. It's too dangerous and feels like something that could be a hackers playground. If you're an experienced altcoin dev (a real dev, not a copy-paste dev) or even a cryptographer or some such and think you know a way around this, I'd love to talk about it. I don't want to release a flawed "good sounding" spec to the world though that some coin will try to implement and cause a lot of people to lose money by hackers.
2. PoN, Proof of node mining method. This isn't completely my own idea (
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/alt_ideas), but basically my idea is to make it so that you mine by hashing previous blocks in the blockchain. By requiring careful selection of which blocks can actually be used for mining, you could ensure that only miners with a full copy of the blockchain could function as PoN miners.
The flaw with this idea is that doing such a thing would make mobile/SPV wallets significantly less secure/capable. The problem is that to validate a block you must not only check it's proof of work, you must now also be able to verify that all the blocks in the PoN hash is valid. I could change it to only use the UTXO set, rather than the blockchain... but that is not really my goal for this mining method. My goal is to make sure to reward nodes with full copies of the blockchain. This idea still has some merit and I'm still thinking about how to make it work, but it's no longer slated for being in NextCoin at launch.
I don't want to go into details of what the one Killer Feature of NextCoin will be.. But basically it involves data on the blockchain, decentralization, and censorship. (And yes, I've seen some of the data on the blockchain stuff out there... This is much more powerful than what's out there)
Now, as for Supcoin. I want to reward the Supcoin bagholders in some way. I'm still determining what would be the best way to do that, but I don't want to just leave everyone high and dry. I'm not going to promise a coin swap or anything to NextCoin.. but I also don't want to immediately say no either. Idk, we'll see. I haven't forgotten about you guys.
