Thanks for the upbeat posts. Very inspiring. Today (and past days) I had my head deep in hash function research papers and it looks like the Cuckoo hash has the best properties for the global consensus aggregation. Not tromp's proof-of-work cuckoo hash, as I had already designed a CPU favorable hash in 2014, which generalized benchmarks seem to indicate it will be on par or exceed the CPU-only attributes of Cryptonite (no specific benchmarks yet and I have a significant innovation over the generalized benchmarks).
Wishing you all the best with ... your health!
The latest development is that apparently I was drinking some remnants of Kombucha tea when I drank the first batch that was misprepared with salt instead of sugar, because that batch started to grow another tiny SCOBY in the refrigerator! So the miraculous abatement of M.S. symptoms the past days appears to be due to something in that concoction that I drank which apparently corrected some of my gut dysbiosis. It doesn't yet feel certainly stable (little signs here and there) so I am eager to receive tomorrow by courier a replacement full-size SCOBY and pre-prepared batch of Kombucha tea. Soon I will know if this lack of headaches the past few days is going to be sustained. If my M.S. goes into remission, that will be an especially important achievement for assuring I can do this coding fast.
When is release date?
We are months away, but I will try to release some of the code progress open source, at least the parts that don't reveal the secrets that need to be held until testnet. And I will try to be more specific about target dates as the coding progresses and deadlines become more realistic to estimate.
The question is how do you ensure instantaneous transactions with NO confirmation. <----seems like a paradox to me.
Of course there are confirmations but the confirmations are instant and decentralized. The key is to attain global 0-confirmation consensus on local instant confirmations. And that is already revealing too much because some of you are clever enough to reinvent what I did given enough hints, but there are a lot of details to work through to attain holistic soundness. So if anyone asks for further clarification on this, I will have to decline to comment until we get closer to testnet.
Again another hint was the white paper written by Vitalik about an abstract partitioning the network, which is conceptually similar. I as TPTB_need_war posted about that some weeks ago. You can find that post and quote it in this thread so everyone can have the link to that paper. I don't have time to go dig my archives for it. It appears he published that white paper about the same time (maybe a month after) I had discovered this scheme.
Vanilla coin already did this......no prizes for second. Move along nothing to see,
Afaik, VNL claims to do nothing about network fragmentation, nor anything significant about the scaling issue that is causing the Gavincoin war. Also I think it will be clear when the details are published that VNL hasn't come close to achieving this very significant overhaul of Satoshi's design, but let's reserve judgement on that until both VNL and ION have released more detailed white papers (than the one VNL already released). So how about we both hold our tongue and reserve this aspect of the discussion until after we publish our details.
Don't worry, we will apply the same level of scrutiny and analysis to this proposal as well as the many others.
Please do. We don't want to waste our time on anything which can't stand up to peer review. As I said, we'll try to do it in a communication format where nothing is censored but in such a paradigm that we can get the conclusions, caveats, and rational objections from discussions summarized for new readers. Hopefully a custom designed/configured Wiki.
When I write "we" there is really only me as a developer (and two angel investors that have put up some meager funds and several more potentially interested if we need more funding) at the moment but there are at least two others devs that might join in soon. And potentially more perhaps if we offer some bounties, though I've heard the experience with bounty work hasn't been spectacular.
Will you have any Ethereum like features? I am extremely interested in a decentralised exchange for assets where people could trade anything in any way possible (spot, margin, futures, cfd, etc) without the DAMN centralised gvt manipulation (see how at summer Greek, Chinese and US markets were closed, banned short selling, etc).
Good luck!
EDIT: The reason I am interested for this feature especially in your platform is for the anonymity that would be a priori build into the coin
I am very interested in decentralized features. As much as possible I liked features such as these (including anonymity) to be bolt on and orthogonal, so that we can develop on them after getting the basic block chain network solidified. This overhaul of Satoshi's design appears to be able to make for example the transaction data format orthogonal to the block chain, but I need to work through some more of the pedantic details before I can be absolutely sure of that.
Although it is not in the set of features I want to accomplish before a testnet on the block chain network, I believe my design solves the scaling problem of Ethereum-style programmable contracts that afaics Ethereum never did solve. But again devil is in the details, and I am not studying that right now. I have to stay focused on one area of the problem set of crypto at a time. The feature space is large and there are a lot of things that need to be done. Everything can move faster if we can launch a novel consensus network, raise more money with that live, and then invest in developers. Developers will be more keen to hop on the train if they see something significant launched.
The name sounds neutral and it doesn't refer to money so I assume it is not a coin? Is it Etherium type of platform or what is it?
Please explain what is Ion like I am 5 years old.
I hear you that
Ion or ion doesn't connotate money. Let me address that issue where I discuss naming below...
The first goal is to solve the fundamental problems in Satoshi's design that revolve around scaling, maintaining permission-less commerce via decentralization, attaining instant transactions without needing to centralized the network (which is where Bitcoin is headed otherwise), attain network fragmentation tolerance that Bitcoin doesn't have, etc.. Did you ever realize that if the internet fragmented, everyone could spend their Bitcoins multiple times (once on each network fragment). These are major fundamental problems in Satoshi's otherwise excellent design.
After that, the innovations won't stop. As I wrote, I already have better than Zerocash anonymity designed, but need to turn that over to other developers to implement, because I don't want to be culpable for the features that might bring on the ire of authorities, since I have decided to be the public developer on the coin.
As my reply to klee hints, many other innovations appear they may spawn from the fundamental restructuring of Satoshi's design.
Again I will try to get some code published soon, so it is clear I am a real coder.
After hearing all kinds of names in crypto, Ion did not wow like Monero did. But i hope it grows on me
I somewhat like the name, though I'd prefer to have more name choices.
Truth is the more I think about the name, the more I like it
It is normal most people would prefer the name that is already more well known. Takes some time for a name to become branded in the minds.
I also wish there were more choices and I am open to suggestions, but please let's not litter the thread will silly ones. If there are any well thought out suggestions, please share. If anyone provides a winning name suggestion, I assume some coins will come your way (but I don't have a specific offer).
Monero name's positives:
- sounding like an existing monetary unit (the Euro)
- very unlike any other name for a crypto-coin
- having nearly the literal word "money" in the name
- even it is longer than 3 letters, very difficult to misspell it, money+ero, how else could you misspell it.
Monero name's negatives:
- it doesn't connote electronic currency nor high-tech money (my opinion it connotes old world aristocratic money or money for a Monopoly board).
- the name of the currency unit isn't ideal, and I can't remember which currency unit name the community wants me to use, "moneros", "moneroj"
- the ISO currency abbreviation XMR is not the same as the name
My PERSONAL OPINION is the negative attributes are it is pronounced like "moanero", it is associated with a failing currency union (Euro), and it doesn't sound very cool to say "pay me 15 moneros". For me it sounds like I am ordering egg omelet tacos in Mexico ("rancheros").Ion name's positives:
- connotes something high-tech that can be zapped or lives in the electronic cloud
- memorable catchy currency unit name, "zap me 15 ions"
- potentially creates a new terminology for real-time electronic commerce, i.e. unproven potentially huge new markets of instant 0-conf microtransactions ("zap me 2 ions")
- the ISO currency abbreviation ION can be the same as the name (yeah I read about preference for X as first letter in standard, but this doesn't have to be strictly followed, e.g. BTC and BBR)
- three letters concise a la "Nxt" (people prefer to write short names and easier fit into web page cart screen space layouts, less opportunities to misspell it)
- is generic enough to also connote the general decentralized cloud block chain technology as capabilities extend beyond currency
Ion name's negatives:
- doesn't connote currency inherently, instead it must redefine what electronic currency is by making crypto-currency scale to millions of instant microtransactions per second globally, something no other crypto-currency can do yet.
- similar to another crypto-coin, e.g. Aeon (but likely only one or a few crypto-coins will win big in the end so it probably doesn't matter and Aeon is easily misspelled)
- first letter when capitalized is indistinguishable is some fonts between a lowercase L or an uppercase i
Note we are considering making the money supply billions or trillions of coins, so that instead of "
mIon" you would use "ion". I think it is preferable for people to use large numbers for big box purchases, e.g. 127,000 ions for that television instead of using fractional numbers for microtransactions. We are moving to a Knowledge Age economy wherein people are paid for every Like they click and every action they do.
For example instead of filling up those tedious captchas, wouldn't you prefer to pay 1/100 of a penny and click straight through without the hassles. Microtransactions can be used for anti-spamming control and
also for business models that weren't possible before (and you really must click that link and read the lack of permission-less commerce saga that I described as my former user name iamback).
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12368247 
