As promised, I am reporting the tentative specifications agreed upon by myself and Bernie's supporters at today's meeting and the justification for these tentative specifications. I apologize for the short delay in delivering this information today but the meeting was very lengthy as I wanted to be certain to explain the options well and I scrutinized this post thoroughly in my hopes to not miscommunicate anything. Below is as much information that I can deliver with any degree of certainty as of now. I do open the floor for debate of these tentative specifications if you do have suggestions that might improve the likelihood of BERN achieving it's goal of supporting Bernie Sanders and his presidential campaign.
BernieCoin
will tentatively be pure PoW. The purpose of BernieCoin and it's use is donating to Bernie's campaign. To discourage hording of BERN and hopefully drive donations to make Bernie the next president of these United States, a PoW/PoS hybrid or a pure PoS implementation was ruled out.
The mining algorithm
will tentatively be X14 to prevent any centralized control coming from ASICs and to maintain some attainability for Bernie supporters that want to contribute via mining but do not have the funds or technical knowledge to employ a mining rig of any sort. X11 was initially discussed but the possibility of future ASIC development targeting the large number of X11 coins by the time Bernie is up for re-election brought hesitation to this. X14, with the removal of the whirlpool algorithm from X15, was brought forth by myself as a possibility because the low number of X14 coins that could potentially make future ASIC development less of a threat and, to my understanding, removal of the whirlpool algorithm specifically would benefit CPU mining. Unfortunately, this attempt at boosting non-technical people's CPU hash rate might be easily off set by the gain exposure to botnets. We ended the algorithm talks with X14 as the most likely candidate but, as with most of these details, it is by no means etched in stone yet.
BernieCoin
will have an instamine of a small percentage (1 - 2% was discussed) of the total coin supply. A large percentage (50% was discussed) of the instamine
will be distributed via an airdrop for supporters of Bernie Sanders. The remainder of the instamine
will be used for future distribution and promotion efforts such as, but not limited to, possibly a faucet and/or a second airdrop prior to re-election. The instamine, airdrop, and any further distribution
will be fully and completely transparent public information.
Total
coin supply will be 200 million. We came to this number by rounding up the total number of registered voters in the USA (~180 million
source). We also wanted to make a large number of coins available so that contributors could more easily see contributions in whole numbers.
The block reward, reward halving, and target time all
need further analysis of how they would correlate to supporting Bernie's election efforts both in this coming election and the second term election 4 years after. I will post this in the coming days.
The launch date for BERN will be February 23rd, 2016 at 0:00 Eastern Standard Time. This is a week prior to 'Super Tuesday' on March 1st. This roughly month long period from now until launch will allow a window of opportunity for supporters to suggest enhancements, sufficient marketing to spread the word, development of all supporting components, and sufficient testing to ensure a successful launch of Berniecoin on this day.
Thank you in advance for your opinion on these largely tentative specifications and any thoughtful and supported suggestions of changes.