Topic: Bitcoin fork for a small town (Read 10370 times)

You fail to see the point, if your intentions are this...

1: Use overly-priced CPU that requires TONS of electricity to MINE to create a WORTHLESS coin that you intend to GIVE AWAY for a BARTER-ITEM.
2: Limit those who can participate, to being the ONES WITH THE FASTEST CPU, that WASTES THE LEAST POWER.

You will not be able to control any "pooling", which would hide the mining-tools. Thus, you would have to MANIPULATE/CONTROL the market/mining, to people YOU BELIEVE deserve the coins they mined...

Here is what you want to do...

1: Make a coin that represents a individual "offering" of a bartered item. This simply requires a "bank" system to "accept" that JOE gave SUE x-coins worth of things. (But now you are back to money. Thus, not a barter.) SUE is the one who decides what JOE gets for coins, not YOU.
2: JOE should be able to give those coins to SUE for the GOODS that he gave her. (But that makes the coin useless, without any "value". JOE would have to get LESS than what he gave to SUE, or SUE did not make anything, she just wasted his time in the process, and SUE still has no food in the end, only her worthless coins back. If she KEPT some food, thus, giving JOE less food for the coins then SUE made money/value/coin.)

Thus, what is the point? You just like wasting electricity, thus, loosing value with every coin you make, giving DOLLARS to the power-company, instead of to those who are bartering? You want them to constantly loose, the more they trade?

Why are they getting coins? They just give stuff to the person doing nothing... then have to spend them on what... electricity?

You do realize "bartering" is a taxable "gain", right... Only you have to pay taxes on the "value" that the IRS thinks is the value, which is MSRP, not "Actual traded value". Only unprepared food can be bartered without taxes, because it can be SOLD without taxes. (Thus, you are just creating more waste.)

Do you work for the power company? Is that why you want this horrible system in place?

Well, it is the same idea. I figured since this project never seemed to get completed, anyone still interested can read about a newer similar project.

This thread was about something different, necroing it was not really needed!

Working on Starting a Bitcoin town here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-town-lets-make-the-future-come-to-us-216139

If you run it over a VPN it would add an extra layer of security.

Sounds like the LETS model might work here and maybe using the Freecoin newchain as the method of tracking and distribution of the LETS model.  If you need help with Freecoin setup I would be glad to help.   I guess you would still need some central site as the LETS has to start the initial distribution, but could continue operation even if the central site went down.  Or just manualy have a distribution point from some trusted party or group.  And as far as Sukrim is saying about attacks that make development of money more difficult, my model with WEEDS creates all the  coins that will ever be produced in the fist 50 blocks in it's trial case it produced 10million coins in 50 blocks and no more after.  then you distribute initial loans from your central point and continued distribution continues on it's own.  It's all ajustuble in Freecoin for ajustable inflation

As far as I understood, difficulty 1 blocks would yield the most money and the higher difficulty gets, the lower the payout?

This means the more secure the network gets, the fewer money is produced (if I understand you correctly).

Also on-off attacks are possible (mining a lot for ~10 days weeks, waiting 3-4 weeks (as the next round will take MUCH longer) and mining a lot again) as well as supply shortening attacks (drive up difficulty so nearly no new money is produced after you've mined a lot of money via on-off attacks).

This would again make towncoins quite unstable and trust can be lost very easily.

Drop the reward according to a stretchy rule applied to difficulty ratios and there can be no take overs.

Well, then


But anybody in this town could just use their kid's computer to potentially gain a lot of local money or screw with the whole system, if it is a bitcoin fork with money generation per new block.
If you start limiting mining, you start harming your local economy + you still risk mining pool attacks (if only a hashrate of 5 MH/s is "allowed", let 60 miners run on one GPU and create a pool). Bitcoin is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to mine, limiting this can have severe issues!

Again, there is also no real way to make sure only town people are mining (and if mining only has very small rewards it doesn't even matter!). IP adresses won't work, as you can go online with mobile phos too (and they usually are even NATed). Selling mining certificates (however you implement that into bitcoin...) makes mining non-anonymous again and harms your network security (and still certificate holders can form pools to attack the system).

With straight BTC rules you favor early adopters and high hashrate miners far more than people who trade with that "money" initially.
This is intentionally with BTC to make sure the network kicks off with a secure hash rate until enough money is in the system to really start an economy (which is currently happening as mining gets harder and harder + ppl start to sell stuff for BTC instead.)
BTC itself has a huge inflation initially (the first 1000 BTC become only 50% of all BTC after just 20 blocks!) which might also scare people away.

Right now you can easily get a fairly secure hashrate via GPU mining and what you wnat to have is I think a quickly working money system, not a bootstrapping economy, right?


In the end, if you want to have something VERY similar to BTC, use BTC - and if you want to have something that just uses a blockchain, make sure that you do NOT have to limit participating miners in any way artificially.

Just turn them on to bitcoins ... $8, $0.8, $0.08, $80 ... who cares what the exchange rate is?

It is a decimal point and you are on a computer, it doesn't matter what the exchange rate is, only that it CAN be exchanged ... and what is this "mining chaos" you are obsessing about,  

Humboldt County then eh? nice countryside.

Another idea I'm working on Glad to know I'm not the only one who understands 1 internet is worth 1000 internets.


With a series of water level locks you can go to and fro from lake to ocean and back.

A global reasonable system for negotiating different difficulties would not only mean there are no "foreign" blocks but it would mean the path to BTC = $100 by the productivity of the town.

The system of locks also results in bootstrapping / kickstarts caused by vendors trying to negotiate dollar value in mainline blockchains versus productivity in townchains.

Again it comes down to whether mining pools merely hide from fiat insanity or grow community.

I have a model that can work with very little change in the client/daemon. In fact I would suggest not even touching the client/daemon if possible and just adding a plugin. Pools who want to confirm the subnets can add it. The distribution can grow rather than force any philosophy on anyone.

Since it is so very easy to start a new blockchain, maybe you just start one up and have everyone use it with the -noirc switch or even disable IRC entirely in the cline (or in the config file if using freecoin client for convenience of configuring in config files instead of by hacking code).

Then if someone *does* let some foreigner connect to them, who lets more foreigners connect to *them* and so on, just issue new clients to the townsfolk using a new blockchain, leaving the foreigners to honour the now-foreign chain if they wish, and arrange among the locals to get their balances in the new chain set up right, accepting old coin from local on site at physical exchanges in town.

After a few iterations maybe foreigners will either have fun with the chains they hijacked or get tired of hijacking chains that no-one honours after they have been hijacked.

-MarkM-

Another "just use bitcoin" suggestion:

You buy 1 bitcoin and donate it for the entire town to use and just trade everything in your town at around 0.000001 (or some other low value.)

If you really wanted to restrict it you could release a modified client that would only honor transactions based on the "town origin coin" (but I don't think this is a good idea - it brings back the scam angle.)

Isn't that the point of a localized barter currency?

There is a very good reason for that.  The potential market for a localized currency of any sort is, by intent, limited.  A bitcoin derivitive isn't going to change that.


Be careful what you wish for.

Which operates entirely on people forgiving the initial debt which gets passed around like a hot potato. Yes it's time based which is relevant, but it also isolates.

I got involved in LETS type things and the service development speed pales in comparison to bitcoin.

I think I have a few interested individuals looking forward to "towncoins". After tomorrow expect a formal proposal. The beast is coming down.

You're really better off going with an electronic LETS system. 

You can try whatever you want. But something like bitcoin with an entity that excludes people is not anything like bitcoin at all.

I would use bitcoin but there's a little problem with the numbers…

Approximately six million btc at $8.00 for 10,000 people.  I have not been able to convince one person that that is not a scam in progress.

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

I don't mind anybody disagreeing with the merits of the idea but to accuse me of dishonesty is completely out of line.  That kind of attitude is just going to egg people on for truly forking this in the way that mambo was buried by joomla. 

"Mine the shit out of that village." Is that your bitcoin rapist threat? Are you 12?

Does anybody in the audience really fault me for exploring limiting *who* can mine in our town with morons like that on the loose?

To repeat: nobody in this town owes the power company any favors.  Nobody in this town owes ATI any favors.  Nobody in this town owes newegg/provantage/tigerdirect/etc any favors.

Furthermore, nobody in this town needs to share their local currency with luminary organizations like the [$ethnic_group] mafia or [$country] intelligence services.

Maybe I will do this straight bitcoin rules on a new chain under a different name.  I don't know yet.  I'm exploring the implications of changing certain points.  That's the point of this thread.

So you love bitcoin under 0.3.  Congratulations.  Some people don't.  I happen to like it quite a bit as is but it simply does not fit for the group of people I'm working with and I need to keep things a little less chaotic than the main project.

They could pay in cash...? 

If you want to create something exactly like Bitcoin, it might be more useful to just use Bitcoin itself.

To me it just seems YOU want to be an "early adopter". In 36.000 ppl one or two will be smart enough to google how bitcoin works, invest a few bucks in GPUs and mine the sh*t out of that village! As you could be happy to have a few hundred participants mining at home, if they only CPU mine, a single strong GPU miner might even be able to do 50% attacks...

Sorry, but first mining the towncoins out of thin air (and algorithms) doesn't seem very intelligent/useful to me. Besides there is NO anonymous way to guarantee that only townfolk have "mining licenses".

You could do something similar as the bitbill people did: Send batches of towncoins to addresses and print their private keys on cards or something. These then can be easily used to create a wallet and withdraw the money from there and also anonymously traded before. This would again look very similar to an already known concept (gift cards that are accepted in multiple local stores) but be more anonymous and if someone wants to, they even can mine along and earn a few towncoins from transaction fees.

It will be hard enough to convince even the town council (or however your hippie commune calls it ) of doing an experiment like this, adoption might be even more risky. The more you can relate to known models, the better I guess.

How can this be? Are they running out of pennies?