Topic: Innovation in the alt chains - page 4. (Read 6177 times)

Yes and yes.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin is "old" compared to the alt chains.

There will probably be lots more, with numerous small changes.  Think micro evolution rather than the big bang.

If a new chain is too revolutionary, or its founders have too much "personality" it will probably be too hard to get much traction quickly (Bitcoin itself took a while)

Patience is in order.

You are right that there has been little innovation on the Satoshi blockchain. Bitcoin is like concrete, it gets stronger over time. Form follows function.
Bitcoin has unique traits that fill important needs. Tools can be invented to exploit these traits. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Gavin, anyone who was truly interested in innovation would have volunteered to work with your team.  These alternative currencies are nothing more than "get rich quick" schemes.

Gavin, I agree with your sentiment, on both the potential experimentation that could be happening as well as the actual failure to truly innovate.

Having said that there have been some minor variable tweak itch scratching of note: shortening the block reward (has anyone bothered to analyze the dis/advantages?), forcing miners to use the CPU (has that broadened the miner-base, produced any social or other advantage?), and... well that's it, actually, as far as I've noticed.

While Satoshi's public, proof-of-work transaction ledger seems obvious now, it is of course revolutionary. But I can't help feeling there's got to be a better way to prevent double-spending. I would like to see an algorithm that can be done on paper; an altcoin party trick; a truly anonymous, side-channel, no electricity, post-nuclear Armageddon stone age, isolation tolerant blockchain something. I certainly don't have the answer, but I miss discussions of that level around here. Where has all the creative intelligence gone?

The thing is BitCoin is very well designed and implemented. It's seriously hard to improve it without breaking the system in some way.

The alternative cryptocurrencies proposed so far have either been genuine but misguided attempts at improving some feature of BitCoin or cynical copy and paste jobs intended to get people rich.

Me too, no idea how the alt chains catch up with OP_EVAL etc.

Tbh, I think most of the altchains have been created as a way for the creator to get a bit more cash in his pocket. Not a lot have had impressive improvements (imo) and that all everyone is doing is just s/bitcoin/l33tcoin/ etc. Also, the need for someone to know C++ (not saying it's bad or anything) is a drawback, as I have alot of great ideas for things, but C++ hurts my eyes so to speak.

In my opinion a lot of the delay has been simply waiting for merged mining in order to be perceived as having any chance against attackers.

The Coin Wars Two concept I just posted is one approach to trying to work-around this by permitting trading of coins of privately mined chains or even chains that are moving all accounts out of their old blockchain implementation to get away from the "you have to give miners the minting of the coins in order to get started initially" paradigm. (For example, chains that want to "back" any coins they allow to fall into other people's hands, keeping whatever they managed to sell them for as "reserves" with which to buy them back.)

How many chains can be practically merged-mined at once? Will any fast deployment of the entire allotment of coins chains ever reach enough transaction volume to attract miners on the bassis of transaction fees alone? Unfortunately the Coin Wars Two approach loses some of the perceived / perceivable benefits of using a blockchain, but what the heck, it might yiel;d some kind of insight(s).

Coin Wars Two is being implemented using an Open Transactions server, so smart contracts are definitely on the roadmap; but currently we have not quite finished getting markets working quite the way we want them to work so fixes in the markets system have delayed some further smart-contract work a few days lately.

-MarkM-

So...

I've been mostly quiet about the alternative block chains, but I have to say I'm a little disappointed.

I had hoped that they would be full of interesting experiments with different transaction types or smart contracts or different fee-setting algorithms or maybe some innovative scheme for instant transactions.

Instead, it seems like you've been too busy dealing with low hashrates and transaction-spam attacks, and have been spending all of your time re-inventing a lot of infrastructure (exchanges and block explorers and mining pool software and etc.).

I'm curious to hear what other people think:  will altchain innovation pick up in 2012?  Am I irrationally biased and just not seeing the awesome power of (insert-your-favorite-altchain-feature-here)?

I think there's an interesting dynamic, where the larger and more popular an altchain gets, the harder it is to do things like schedule a block-chain splitting-change (because you have to get all your exchanges and mining pools and etc. to upgrade). I wonder if that means the experimentation will only happen with brand-new blockchains, and if a blockchain will only really take off it the inventor manages to "get it 99% right" the very first time...