Topic: Bitcoin fork for a small town - page 2. (Read 10452 times)

Wait, if you're trying to run a new block chain to avoid FRNs, why not just use Bitcoin? Nobody is forcing people to exchange Bitcoins for USD or vice versa.

I just can not see how this is a good thing.  The person controlling the whitelist can then be subject to cheating by allowing friends (ones even outside the town) to mine.  With such a small community the mining being controlled would allow some to profit greatly from the creation of new coins.  There would be no impartial market based control of mining as there is with bitcoin.

Just set up a barter system between your town, or convince them to use bitcoin as is.

I'd be grateful to read your model and proposal.


There's a lot to be said for organic growth.  The endgame scenario is too problematic.  Unrestricted mining is a problem we're all familiar with.  I think the official exchanges and easy speculation will defeat any alternative currency.  Printing it is a fool's game in the United States of America. 

It will be introduced here as a way to lubricate barter without relying FRNs.  If it spreads to nearby towns, that will be because of the advantage of being accepted first for real goods and services, and second, for the big idea, and far behind, for the technical aspect.

So why try to limit who can use it? If you open it up to the world then the townfolk, as earliest adopters, could bring a lot of wealth into the town as out of town people discover it and adopt it.

It would even have one advantage over bitcoin: an entire town that accepts it in return for real goods and services.

-MarkM-

I think I can connect three systems for you:
Community-exchange.org a LETS type system for posting work.
"Do bit" or millcoin (.001 BTC) trading platform for lubricating the barter system.
Some kind of Bitcoin credit union.

I have a model just let me know, I'll write it up as a proposal.

I don't want a centralized entity.  Lord knows what these people will do.  It's a seaside town where the preferred smoke is not tobacco.  :-) Anonymity is a at the top of the list.

Let me address some points that were written since the last time I checked in…


I am an open source preacher.  Not hiding a thing.  If people would prefer to work in BTC that's great. I want nothing to do with telling people what to ask for an exchange for what they're offering.  I think, however, they would prefer to avoid official exchanges (like mtgox) for cash.  I think that is where digital currencies collide with governments.


I don't want to keep GPUs out as much as I want CPUs to stay in as long as possible. A big deterrent to hashing farms is the power company.  One of the most expensive in the country.  With 310 sunny days per year, I wouldn't be surprised if the miners we get attempt to use solar.  Nobody in the town works for ATI, newegg or the power company to miners will be advised not to do these organizations any favors -especially the power company.


Then it seems that letting the difficulty adjust itself to a set amount of coins per hour is indeed the best way to regulate this problem. Leaving the mining out if it also kills the incentive to verify all transactions.


Right.  I don't want anyone to feel they have to trust me at all.  That's part of the appeal of P2P distributed verification. 

Online bank with book entry is neither cheaper nor easier.  That scenario also leaves the organizers highly liable to all kinds of nasty government behavior.


Matter of time.  The wealth of reservations can vary dramatically.  Would they be better served with BTC as it is or implementing a variation as I'm doing? I am almost certain that there's nothing in the treaties to prevent this.  The BIA might even be compelled to fund some of the buildout.  I'd love to spend BTC at the seminole nation hardrock.  :-)  I think it would be a great thread to open up.


Haven't looked over the freecoin code yet.  How much modification are we talking about?


That's how I see it.  Thank you, creighto.

To implement such a system you would just need to do a "endgame scenario" with all 21 Million (or however many you want to have) BTC (or "towncoins") in the genesis block and miners only get income from transactions.

You then can in the beginning 100% make sure that the initial conversion rate stays stable (1 cent or 10 cents per genesis-towncoin for example) and then let the economy develop on it's own. This might also be beneficial to convince others in the town council etc. (as in the end you hand out something similar to gift tokens).

To gain a few coins every once in a while, ppl. can mine themselves and to cover your own operation costs you can also run a few dedicated mining rigs permanently to make sure you have at least enough hashing power for difficulty 1.


I only see problems for implementing a highly deflationatory currency that is also very limited in the beginning - and people might not like it that much too.
If they however can earn a little bit through transactions (where fees could be as high as 1 towncoin, depending on th initial conversion rate) and otherwise play a little bit with electronic money adoption might be much easier + smoother.

I do have a model on how to do this, with bitcoin no less.

If  a  community  has  a  shortage  of  cash,  ripplepay.com  is  an  excellent  barter/credit  exchange  if  there  are  no  shortage  of  goods  nor  talents.  Don't  know  about  the  anonymity  you  require  though,  because  is  a  reputation  system  where  your  credibility  means  everything.

All the more reason to not give them the client.

Tell them all about how bitcoin works, fine. Tell them to go use bitcoin itself if they want to get into the complicated techie stuff like the bitcoin daemon and client. Great, those ho do can even maybe earn barter-points by serving as local exchangers exchanging local barter points for global bitcoins and vice-versa.

But for the everyday normal citizen or merchant, have them use the town''s modified MyBitCoin site that interfaces onto the town's barter-point blockchain.

There *is* a usefulness in going with a blockchain even while a short-sighted observer might imagine a daabase based system would be as good, and that is so you are ready to open it up in 140 years or maybe even less as a fully P2P system.

(Also of course as an excuse to tell them all about how Bitcoin works so you can tell them go use real bitcoin if the way you are locally using the code currently lacks parts of the full bitcoin benefits that they feel are important enough to be worth going to real bitcoin for instead of using your local thing.)

-MarkM-

If fostering barter is the goal, why not just print up some scrip or tokens?  The disadvantages of running a private Bitcoin network for this purpose far outweigh the advantages.  Trying to convert a town to using Bitcoins when the Bitcoin client is very much in its infancy, will be about as fruitless as trying to convince the existing Bitcoin community to switch to the "tonal" numbering system in pursuit of illusory advantages that appeal to nobody.

Not if you take other measures to disperse hashing power on the network (as I mentioned earlier by requiring them to register).  If you limited the fraction of blocks any one miner is allowed to solve over time, it doesn't matter if they are using a GPU or not.  They can run a GPU for a small amount of time per day or a CPU for the entire day. Either way they are going to have the same amount of control over the network.

But in this fork they have to trust a central entity to keep GPUs out. Might as well just trust that entity to keep the books.

Transaction processing, yes, fine. The problems mostly arise when mining also mints coins. Leave out that minting of coins and all of a sudden you don't care whether the miners are in your town or anywhere else, who cares, anyone who wants to help secure the nework for you is welcome to do so, IF enough will do so to secure it against attackers.

Maybe the fixed address that minted coins go to would work best, if one of those addresses is the address of the Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp-or-Org.

That way the insurance body would always have plenty of coin ready to finance defence measures in the event of an attack, and attackers would have little incentive to mine other than if they thought they could achieve some attack other than simply mining more coins than the entire town's own citizens manage to mine.

-MarkM-

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

Awesome.

I was wondering when someone would try something like this.

Can't wait for First Nations or Native Reservations down in the states to get wind of Bitcoin.

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

All that does is create un-needed vulnerability.

The only reason to allow open season on mining is to quickly achieve a huge amount of hashing at a price that might well seem cheap to the originators of the system simply because they personally have no need plan or desire to ever hand over any goods or services of their own in return for the coins so they do not care who gets coins all they are really after is to convince someone somewhere - someone else, not themself - to hand over real goods or services in return for such coins.

You can in effect whitelist IP addresses that connect directly to you, but you cannot stop them from allowing more people you know nothing about from connecting to them.

Maybe you could run separate daemons, one per approved connection, each with its own copy of the blockchain, compare the difficulty on each of them to see if any of them are bringing more than one CPU worth of hashing to the task and if so disconnect them, then later connect all your daemons for a nightly clearing run kind of thing to resolve all those forks against each other to form one central blockchain containing all the transactions from all the chains that did not violate the one-CPU-power rule.

Here is another idea that might be better: run one GPU yourself for 36 days to generate as many coins as 36000 people using one CPU each would have generated, then give people the coins their CPU would have generated instead of giving them any ability to generate coins using their CPU.

In other words, avoid the whole can of worms about who generates the coins by generating them yourself and giving them out to anyone who you would have allowed to generate them had you taken the route of opening up the generating to the entire criminal underworld then tried to limit which of them were from your town.

-MarkM-

Of course there is.  

But maybe you can force mining to be dispersed in some way.  

Here's an idea:

Require miners to register with you, in person, with a photo ID.  Give each miner his own private key, publish the public keys where all the nodes can see them.  Modify the software so a miner has to sign a block with his private key, all other nodes can verify with a public key, limit the portion of blocks that can be signed by any individual ID over some time window, and reject the rest.




 

That is why I am aiming at using games instead of local LETS systems as a way of starting up new blockchains.

I feel no need to defend a town's local LETS blockchain so won't rush to answer on behalf of such a blockchain.

On behalf of game currency blockchains though I suggest to players that they compare the price you charge for such massive hashing power to the price the game(s) charge for game currency and consider whether they would be better off in game currency by directly buying the currency instead of buying hashing power from you.

If they would not, the game currency is maybe being overpriced and should lower its price before someone does perform the arbitrage of buying your hashing power to apply  to the game-currency.

-MarkM- (Hey, did I just say in effect "let the market decide"? )

P.S. Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp. though should probably look into your pricing...

Now what will they do when someone rents and unleashes some awesome hashing power from me and others which would dwarf their GPU defences.