Topic: FairCryptocurrency Committee - FairLaunch Approval - Please Read - page 3. (Read 3906 times)

LOL.... this is why we need a standard.

We are not stopping anyone from mining, selling or owning scam coins, just
helping others make a "safer" investment in alt coins.

Ofcourse they have. But they are there because of the peoples demand. Which goes back to my original point which is if the demand exists then it should be able to continue. If a coin has no value and has a lot of followers then oh well, let them figure it out for themselves. You never know one of those people might create a service that will make the coin become very useful.

All im saying is that you never know, and this form of policing kills creativity and the free market.

You should put this effort into removing mastercoin  or if you really care by going through the forums and manually comment on any new coins to alarm the new users.

This whole idea is useless, 99.9% alts are made to make profit quickly, aka pump-and-dump.
Making a "foundation" doesn't make any sense, if there is something good about an alts everybody can objectively recognized it.
I haven't seen one in months

Hire me, i'll make you a pro site

Great feedback here so far!

I think the term "fair" should be swapped with "safe".

Fair is a relative term, its the safety of the novices coming in here every day that is the main objective.

It is important to me that the 'Fair Cryptocurrency Committee' or whatever it is eventually called, it should not strictly limit itself to simplistically judging whether a new issue follows particular rules.  I will explain why using a concrete example.

I've been working on an alt cryptocurrency, but with some major changes to the usual algorithms.  I'm concerned that some deliberate choices made for maximal fairness and for the long-term good of a cryptocurrency, with no intent of personal profit, could disqualify it  from being considered a 'fair coin'.  Note that these are not the only major changes made; merely those made specifically for the sake of fairness.  

Firstly, there will be little or no mining, meaning that maybe 10% of block awards or maybe no block awards at all will be available merely for having compute power.  All, or all the rest, will be distributed via proof-of-stake only.  For at least 90% of the blocks a smartphone with a permanent Internet connection should have as much chance of getting a block as a ten thousand dollar server.  

Secondly, if there is mining, it will not be anything that can be done with ASICs or GPUs.  This is because I believe in fairness.  These things are two or three orders of magnitude faster, for the money, than non-specialized equipment, and I do not want to support a specialized class of miners.  They tend to cause more problems than they are worth, especially when operating en masse, and it is both unfair and counterproductive in my estimation to exclude (by overwhelming) that fraction of the public that uses normal computers from mining.  Finally, miners who own specialized equipment are primarily those who are mining for profit only, and who can be expected to simply dump coins as fast as they mine them in order to buy Bitcoin.  They represent a drag on a coin's value, not an asset.

Thirdly, I object strongly to any pressure to allow mining pools, if mining is allowed at all.  Mining pools in my estimation represent an existential threat to cryptocurrencies; first in terms of centralization, second in terms of logistics by screwing horribly with the difficulty as they jump on and off and overwhelming the probably-small server infrastructure of a fledgling currency, and third in their propensity to attract miners who believe that no other cryptocurrency exists for any reason other than to dump it on the market in order to buy Bitcoin.  

Fourth, as is necessary with proof-of-stake, there will be a ridiculously large premine.  My intent is to distribute about a million units *WIDELY* (to at least a hundred thousand pubkeys) before even announcing.  People who check will mostly discover that they already own the corresponding privkey to at least one of them.  Some will own more than one; that is unfair, but can't be helped.  To the extent that addresses are held by those who do not participate, the coins that those nonparticipants could otherwise claim will (mostly) eventually be claimed on a random basis by those who do participate.  The initial blocks will be created with a script that permits more and more addresses to spend the coinage as time goes on;  each month, about ten percent of them will become spendable by an additional existing key, until the distribution is complete or until they have gone through seven keys each.  Those who participate will occasionally "inherit" a distribution award from those who do not.

During the first year about 30 thousand coins (that is, three percent of the existing million) will be created.  Thereafter each year will see three percent more coins created than the previous year.   So, 3 percent long term inflation after the initial distribution.  But absolutely no relevance to anything like a 'halving time' or 'ultimate total number of coins' criterion that a committee is likely to come up with.  This is specifically to avoid an initial phase of very high rewards, because that would attract pump'n'dumpers rather than people who simply want a currency to use.

Now, I believe that this outlines a plan for a very "fair" cryptocurrency.  In fact fairness is one of my *PRIMARY* intents in creating it.  But I also believe that because it works differently from the expected model, it is very unlikely to meet any set-in-stone criterion of "fairness" based on the usual set of expectations.  

Therefore I ask that whatever else you decide here the committee should remain free to exercise human judgement as to whether a new issue is fair, rather than merely interpreting narrow rules.

This community needs to make a decision, keep going down this current path, or start regulating itself.

I have been running online communities since the late 90's and there always comes a time when you need to lay down the law, or you fall into complete chaos.

Lets settle on the name via PM, Ill get a site up and running.

This is an awesome idea! Long overdue.

I volunteer to be on the approval board.

Predictably and sadly I can see lots of miners giving push back because they
have the most to lose. They are the ones who create the scam coins, build the hype,
sell them overpriced to the coin threads, and then dump them on the exchanges.

My only advice is keep it simple, don't get bogged down in minutia.

Refine the basic principles to follow to achieve Faircoin status, and create a trusted board of members who can approve or disapprove.

Let's do this!

Releasing "fair code template" would require probably one template for each PoW algo (scrypt, sha256, ...) and would require someone to maintain it and merge useful changes from bitcoin, litecoin and other coins ... potentially quite a lot of ongoing work.

I suggest rather just publish some guidelines with explanation why to stick with them, like:

your initial difficulty should be set between X and Y.
This would be harder to tune, but I'd say the really absolute minimum would be so that with original dev's mining hardware the coin would be mined at half speed, or more if the coin is preannounced, even more if massively hyped.
OTOH, if the diff is set too high and none of the initial miners can't find a single block in an hour, then the coin will probably fail horribly too ....

your retarget should be small enough to mitigate any instamine attempts on coin launch (if too many miners join to push block times to few seconds, the coin should adapt quickly), or to avoid coin being unmineable if to many miners leave for another coin (remember Catcoin? )

your block times should be reasonable. I'd say 30 seconds minimum, unless you greatly improve the protocol to allow smaller times without excessive forking
(6 seconds like 1st iteration of Nutcoin is not a good idea, as it resulted everybody mining millions, but unspendable, as the wealth was only on their own fork of the chain)

well, most coins are just clones of other coins, so they inherit certain traits that make them prime for scams. FairCoin can develop source code for coins that meet the guidelines, so that devs can launch coins with having to change very little code.

FairCoin  can also just set guidelines for devs to follow, and we can ignore having to develop source code for devs. This allows devs to have more freedom over the code they write. Remember that Faircoins intention is to weed out the scam coins that have the following traits:

Heavy Premines
Instamining
Front loaded Block Rewards.

Coins will never be equal. People with more hashing power will always get more coins then smaller miners. Better traders will always win against amateur traders. But I think that we can agree that when a few people control a large percentage of any coins existing money supply, they artificially suppress price, control supply/demand and in the end kill off coins before they gain any traction.

What do you mean by this?

Creating an exchange would be the best solution, it would be an elite club that only coins of the highest standards will be permitted to trade upon.

This would obviously be a large undertaking, but not impossible.

You are onto something.

Drop the "coin" part of the name completely so it does not sound like YACC (yet another cryptocoin).

We should discuss the finalize the name over PM to avoid squatters.

Yes exchanges add any crap attitude is part of the reason a separate (non benefiting) committee is needed.

FairCrypto, FairCurrency, FairCryptocurrency as not all cryptos are coins, but yeah committee or similar.

I think a crypto should be in the market for some period before it receives an endorsement;
otherwise a dev could premine 3% say its for bounties, giveaways etc, keep a ledger for 1% list on an exchange personally dump 2% and go "so long suckers" (with the committees endorsement to get a higher value).

I love this idea, but with so many shitcoins already on the market and so many shitcoins being created all the time, there have to be other criterium.

I think a huge obstacle is going to be getting an exchange on board. Cryptsy and CoinedUp keep adding new shitcoins. BTC-e hasn't added any new coins in some time. While a huge obstacle to tackle, any foundation is going to have to either a) promote an exchange that uses ONLY FairCoin approved coins; or b) create an exchange that ONLY adds approved coins.

Additionally, peer-review is going to be required. Transparency is essential for this to work. What are you going to do to guarantee this?

My guess is that all those coins will launch with a ridiculously low diff, which means instamine. Since FairCoin discourages instamining, because it puts a large portion of coins into the hands of few people, these coins most likely wouldn't get approval. If we can educate people on the importance as to why instamining is harmful to a coins economics, they will avoid all these coins like a plague.

I think ultimately the market will be the arbiter of this. Look at how out of the dozen or more coins to launch over the past couple weeks only a handful have made it to exchanges and only a couple of them have retained any value at all. The coins launched in the past few days are generating almost no interest from investors. Even the most enthusiastic investors seem to be learning to not put money into every piece of shit that comes along. This is good since it's the only way to solve this problem. As long as there is demand for something there will be supply no matter what you try to do. If we get to a state where people are only creating random shit coins for fun with zero expectation of profit, then we'll be in a better place.

If you do decide to start something like this, one suggestion I have is that Github repositories should be started as forks off of whatever coin they're copying. It's so much quicker to evaluate code if I can see exactly the changes that went into it --as well as which code base from which it was derived-- in the easiest way possible. It also makes it much easier to track down bugs that have popped up in certain families of alts. This should be mandatory as far as I'm concerned.

One other idea that I've suggested in a few coins' announcement threads half trolling is to make make transaction records for all premined coins public. It's trivial to export the csv of transactions from the wallet to which coins were premined. This could then be posted on the coin website with references to where all the transactions went. Links to giveaway threads or bounties paid (make sure bounty recipients have posted their addresses publicly) would be sufficient documentation for most purposes. Of course there's little to stop a dev from reneging on promises of transparency but it would make it harder to dump if everyone knew what was happening.

+1