Topic: Innovation in the alt chains - page 3. (Read 6238 times)

Fractional reserve banking also destroys money in a similar method to how it creates it. That is just as creating $1000 in a new loan will end up creating more $1000 loans then destroying $1000 end up with more lots of $1000 being destroyed  If we go through a period of rapid deflation it would be interesting to see how alternate currencies play out. Coins with inflation may in some ways be desirable. Alternately we may need coins with even faster deflation than fiat is being deflated at. The race may be on to make a coin with very fast deflation that is still attractive to both miners and investors.

1) Use the existing bitcoin chain for a new coin. Despite it all bitcoin is the fairest of the chains.  Millions of dollars worth of coins have been bought, sold, and used in commerce.  One thing solidcoin did do is before the release of SC2 is compress the chain to very small size.  It would be nice if this could be automatically be done somehow like on the 1st of the year.  It might be good to eliminate all addresses with less than 1 btc.
2) 2% transaction fee.  1% deleted, 1% to miners.  Thus a sale of 300 DC would result in 3 DC Being deleted with 3 DC going to miners.  The sales tax in California about 9%, and a 2% fee will help the miners and the savers of coin and should not hurt economy.  I would really like to test this with a 10% transaction fee with most deleted to see what would happen (possibly moving most transactions to exchanges and wallets).
3) minimum fee 0.01, auto-adjusting  There has to be a minimum fee to prevent chain bloat attacks.  However it would be nice never to have to worry about deciding this but have it change automatically.
4)1 mining reward. Although mining rewards would end a small block reward would be added to prevent number of coins going to zero.  This should be less than 1% annual inflation.  Using the existing bitcoin chain will result in about 1% inflation.

maaku, is the start up you mentioned back in the day here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.499698 still in the works or has your focus turned to this new project?  Or, are they one in the same?

Can't wait to see your products.

You are accusing Satoshi of not having your 20/20 hindsight? So it seems like your basic criticism is that Satoshi is not a Keynesian. Check out the the genesis block that contains:
Time will tell if Satoshi was right. The disruptive part of the technology is not that it is Austrian-based, it really is not. Bitcoin has emergent properties unlike any of your aforementioned examples or anything previously tried. Sure there are alternative experiments and I hope they succeed, but they won't take anything away from Bitcoin's simplicity. Besides, Bitcoin has a ways to go until v1.0.

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I take issue with a few of the details. Satoshi is an interesting case in that he clearly thought out many of the advanced use cases of bitcoin, and took baby steps toward implementing/enabling them before releasing the client into the wild. As an example, all of the contracts/scripting code was not necessary for bitcoin to do what bitcoin did at launch, and indeed some features were clearly untested as they did not work as advertised. However Satoshi was either very rushed or not a very competent programmer by industry standards, and that shows up in his code. Much of the work Gavin and others have done is just in cleaning up that mess. Also, Satoshi demonstrates an ignorance about the state of the art in academic computer science, unnecessarily cutting off valuable future enhancements. Finally, while Satoshi had the foresight to imagine complex use cases in the future, he lacked the imagination to think up many applications outside of tech and finance, which the current implementation unnecessarily hinders.

I have the utmost respect for Satoshi. He single-handedly took anonymous crypto-cash, which we've been talking about since the 90's, from concept to practicum. Beyond my respect as a fellow engineer, my company hopes to profit greatly from that. But... deification doesn't help anybody. It only obscures existing flaws and potential for future improvements.

The other aspect is that the economic underpinnings of bitcoin are fringe and esoteric, and the in practice application of it as a currency is clunky and, well, not very practical (I'm being honest and stating my informed opinion--not trying to start a flamewar!). Don't underestimate how much of a turn-off that is for the vast majority of developers and business people, who probably have real-world experience using e-payment solutions like Braintree, WePay, Stripe, or Square, or were trained in Keynesian economics. To these people (I count myself among them), the bitcoin project is seen as a combination of childish optimism and inexcusable ignorance. From that standpoint, the people bitcoin attracts are either 1) the fringe intellectuals (Austrian-school economists, extremist libertarians, etc.), 2) engineers who recognize the significance and disruptive nature of this technology, 3) those with something to hide (tax evasion, drugs, money laundering, general profiteering), and 4) the ignorant and/or naïve. While I of course count all the good sirs I have conversed with here in the first two categories, unfortunately bitcoin has attracted predominantly #3's and #4's, and in this subforum that is more true than others.

This really brings us back to the real issue, doesn't it? The reason why you aren't yet seeing real innovation in the alt chains is because everyone is just standing around in shock trying to comprehend this world-changing technology. Less than a hundred people in the world probably understand the intricacies of Bitcoin... and only one person understands it completely. For example, not even Gavin knew that it was possible to implement OP_EVAL in a backwards compatible way until quite (relatively) recently, and he's the lead developer! How can you expect alt-chain developers to fair any better than that?

The thing that you need to realize is that Bitcoin, in its current state, shouldn't have existed for at least 10 more years. Had ANYBODY else invented Bitcoin today, fairly major things like the scripting system would have simply not existed. THAT is something an alt-chain would have invented. However, Satoshi beat them to it.

When it comes to innovation in the alt-chains, instead of the phrase often used to describe plots in TV shows - "The Simpsons did it" - we have a case of "Satoshi did it".

That's because we're not public yet.

I'm CTO of a Mountain View-based startup that is working on a number of products using a bitcoin-derived protocol. Actually when we first started a little more than a year ago we trying to solve a problem in a completely unrelated field. The primary technical challenge and the key to monetizing the product basically boiled down to building a distributed, peer-to-peer time-stamping service for notarizing changes in ownership. Sound familiar? Unfortunately none of us heard about bitcoin until the bubble over the summer when bitcoin mania spilled into the mainstream media. Naturally it was refreshing to find a ready-made solution to our problem, with most of the kinks already worked out.

So why am I telling this long, uninteresting, and self-absorbed story, you might ask? Because once we we saw that bitcoin solved our problem we wondered what else it could do. And lo and behold, just about everywhere we look, in every industry (even--especially--outside of tech and finance) there are low hanging fruit ready to be optimized or made obsolete by the introduction of products based on bitcoin P2P technology. We've set aside for now our original project and are now working on a number of products that all much easier, and many of them much larger in potential impact (and revenue)*.

It took me a while to convert (not the least because bitcoin's economic underpinnings are populist bullcrap and it will never take hold as a viable currency--but please start a new thread if you want to debate me on this), but now I am convinced that without exaggeration bitcoin is the most disruptive technology to emerge since the World Wide Web. Just not for the reasons most on this forum probably think.

In the time the truth will show itself. Now if you excuse me it's Christmas day and my present to myself is a long block of uninterrupted coding

* You'll have to forgive me for being cagy, but I'm under NDA and of course all potential businesses we've identified are company secret until we launch or decide for sure not to ever pursue.

(Oh, and before anyone cynical wonders outloud why I'm posting this (and I've said the same thing as the OP before), it's because we could actually use some competition. The potential applications are diverse enough and it'd actually validate our business in the eyes of investors.)

But the alpaca isn't a marsupial!

-MarkM-

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

Your beliefs are nice— but where is the evidence?

Litecoin has been a little inventive responding to various flooding attacks, but nothing I could call genuine innovation.

SC has been a nice demonstration that you can break the centralization of the system completely and abuse central authority substantially while keeping a solid base of believers— a fair warning for bitcoin itself: you can't count on loss of confidence from the believers as evidence that you're doing it wrong.  But nothing really innovative there.

Namecoin brought us a real implementation of merged mining... an innovation which should not be downplayed. But what has it done for us lately?   (namecoin would be a good target for a lot of other improvements, like flipped chains— but there doesn't seem to be much interest in taking it further at the moment)

As for the rest— mostly they've just failed ... sometimes due to technical attacks from their minor changes to the bitcoin algorithim. They now stand as monuments to the general wisdom of the particular magic values bitcoin was started with.

At the moment the satoshi client is the primary basis of innovation in the decentralized cryptotoken field. This is sad considering how hard it is to innovate.

So, yea, speculate that the advancement will come from elsewhere if you want... but it's just speculation without some evidence to back it up.

2013 will be the year that bitcoin goes mainstream, but not a way that you would currently recognize. 2012 will be a year of transformation, the impetus of which will not come from the Satoshi client (Gavin's great work notwithstanding).

STOP THE THREAD EVERYONE, a big piece of no information has slipped out, contact the bloggerverse so they can put out a press release regarding the announcement of an announcement

I don't know much about it, but there is definitely one radically new blockchain under development.

bitcoin had the luxury of a few years to establish itself before people started judging it.  All of the alternate chains need to "prove" themselves quickly which is why some of them came up with weird retargeting things.

Beyond that is where the innovation really needs to start, but I agree that faster blocks / small tweaks haven't been that much worth the market accepting a new coin, rather than sticking with bitcoin.

These things are very complicated and take a long time to understand, I doubt there are more than a few people in the bitcoin community that really understand them. I'm not even sure these things belong in the block chain instead of being handled outside of it (via Open Transactions or something similar).

Extending the single-purpose bitcoin infrastructures (exchanges and block explorers and mining pool software and etc.) to be multi-coin is a real accomplishment.  Sites like allchains.info, blockexplorer.sytes.net, and the multi-coin exchanges are a big improvement over having lots of coin-specific sites.  You might not consider them innovative, but you aren't giving them enough credit.

Most of attacks on the alt-chains were possible against bitcoin too, bitcoin was just lucky that no one attacked when it was young and didn't have the value it has now.  Even so, a well-funded adversary could easily spam the bitcoin block chain.  Be glad that these issues are being worked out on the alt-chains where the stakes aren't as high.

There has also been a lot of experimentation with the fundamental economic models.  No one knows if  a coin should be deflationary, inflationary, or stable-value, nor do they know the best way to accomplish the goal.  Pre-mining to provide funding for improvements versus no premine and no funding for improvements has been another area of experimentation (it looks like pre-mining lost). The economic basis for a coin can't be changed easily (if at all) so it isn't surprising that is the first area that is worked on.

Merged-mining is pretty innovative, as is namecoin,  both were developed this year.

I think you are trying to get people riled up so that they try and prove you wrong.

Your probably right on this.  It is very hard to make substantial changes to an existing block chain.

I think you pretty much summed it all.

Even with that, it's hard to compare IMO: when it started, BTC didn't have some large cryptocurrency user base to pick in. And it didn't face a (kind of) well-established concurrent.

Good job.  Now, links for the other coins that match that page :p

http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

I agree it isn't the size of your hashes, it is how you use it.      Does someone have a timeline to compare where Bitcoin was at it's conception against where Solidcoin/IXCoin/Litecoin/etc is at currently.  Like when Bitcoin was six months old, what things were going on with it compared to where Namecoin was six months in?   Userbase, coin generation, actual usefulness in the world.