Topic: MC2: A cryptocurrency based on a hybrid PoW/PoS system - page 18. (Read 195188 times)

You would need a BPP-type formula for the golden ratio -- I don't believe one yet exists.

http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/dhbpapers/bbp-formulas.pdf

How about using the Golden Number instead of Pi? It is arguably the most noble number.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html

The following sections have been updated:
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Distribution_Scheme_for_Crowdfunding
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin_Proof-of-Stake_Voting_for_Proof-of-Work_Blocks

The following sections have had their initial commits:
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Algorithms_for_PoS_Voters_to_Assess_the_Validity_of_PoW_Blocks
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin_Adjustments_to_the_Proof-of-Work_Transaction_Tree
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Addressing_the_%22Bitcoins_and_Red_Balloons%22_Issue

It looks like the "Red Balloons" issue is largely mitigated by the PoS mechanism Netcoin uses, but I adjusted the way fees are dispensed as well to further address this.

Now that this seems squared away, I can finally get back to tearing apart the old version of the whitepaper.  The new one should be shorter and more to the point, with the wiki reinforcing the concepts.

Forum will be back online when next ed. of whitepaper is released.

This introduces another vulnerability.  As these bits come from further in the past, the majority of the numbers used by the ticket are known well in advance.  The problem with this is that a person can seek to acquire all tickets with these knowns bits and effectively halt the chain if they get 64 * 3 = 192 tickets in advance, probably by collaboration with someone.  So, someone with only 0.05859375% of the total network tickets (at ideal concentrations of tickets) can now halt the chain.

The solution is to just use bits from the most recent blocks instead of those far in the past.  Creating a chain of length 8 containing all the bits you want to select for certain tickets is likely quite a computational ordeal.  Conversely, you would need to procure all these tickets within this timeframe if you didn't want to manipulate the PoW chain, also very unlikely.

Then please announce its arrival here as well 

It's still in maintenance mode. We'll open it up when the new whitepaper comes out. We'll be a few steps closer to a live Netcoin by then. It actually wasn't intentional for the forum to shut down - we ended up getting severely attacked by spam, which is under control now. No harm in just opening it up at present, but since the new whitepaper will stimulate conversation again, might as well do it then. Whitepaper should be out later this week.

Is the forum still under maintenance and not working? When will be up then?

I now have the spare time needed to fully dedicate myself to translations of the wiki and whitepaper. If you want to assign priorities to which text you'd like to see translated first, feel free to hit me up with the details.

We will be capping contributions to $10k per individual or company to prevent severe centralization, as it'd be bad to have the majority of stakeholder tickets in the hands of any single individual (not that anyone is likely to destroy the chain in the first 90 days anyway, as it doesn't make a lot of sense monetarily for the contributor).

@Impaler

Now I remember why we need bits from the current block; see the latest wiki update for more details, but I'll x-post a note from it here:

Brilliant idea.

One question that you can answer is whether or not there should be any caps, should the crowd funding be set up and a whale were to purchase most of the slots in bulk would this be an acceptable situation?

I'm looking at what RealSolid said when offering fee shares https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2825833, and the Lealana physical litecoin sale https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/lealana-physical-litecoins-for-sale-resuming-sales-243341 , both had to introduce a sort of cap so that there is a max that any single person can buy within a set period of time.

These caps were introduced to promote a more decentralized distribution so that more people overall have a stake. Is this something which should be replicated or are limits like these bad? I wouldn't have a problem with it either way, I just figure it should be brought up prior to the crowd funding as a move to be considered and debated.

At this point I can't wait for the Kickstarter or crowdfunding campaign to start.

http://www.openwall.com/lists/crypt-dev/2013/03/21/1

He later made a TMTO defeater and then defeated it himself using a thread desynchronization trick, you can read about it on crypt-dev.  In any case, he still actively posts about sCrypt related posts in crypt-dev, I wouldn't be surprised if the problem wasn't still in the back of his head today.

Details?

An update has been given on the PoW hash function and it has been dramatically simplified; it now uses the digits of pi to random algorithm selection.  N is fixed because I'm worried about it potentially introducing vulnerabilities into the chain if you play with it a lot, and I'm not sure if offers much more security even if you do.

http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin_Proof-of-Work_Hashing_Function

Nonetheless, an easy PoW function will let us put the chain out faster, which will let enable us to much more easily avoid the whole super fast ASIC fiasco.  If solar designer comes up with his proposed scrypt fork we can talk about that then, but right now it doesn't exist and Netcoin needs to move forward.

There's only a couple topics left to edit on the wiki (that I'm still meditating on), then we shall move to launching the crowdfunding.

Some answers to commonly asked questions:
1) The distribution of funds was designed to get at least $50,000 by crowdfunding ASAP, which I think should be the absolute minimum we use to launch the development with.  $100,000 is ideal, though.  There is a mathematical function governing it (that should be obvious) and you can manipulate that to cause variable price differences among the tiers.  I have sent this data to _ingsoc for him to look at and see what he thinks.
2) I want to deal with fiat so that we don't have a totally irresponsible BFL preorder-ish fiasco where the product doesn't come out forever and the investors make nothing back.  If one crowdfunder is better for global persons eg indiegogo vs kickstarter, we will go with the one that is more accessible.
3) I will add some more notes on how you will get NTC with your stake tickets soon, and how the keys will be distributed (likely PGP or snail mail).

I can't address things directly right now like web API, etc due to time constraints, but if you think it is a good idea, please add it to the wiki!  I am just going to concentrate on this so we can get the ball rolling with the basic development.  Obviously things like equivalents of BitPay or CoinBase (especially coinbase) are critical to the support and adoption of the currency, but that's beyond me right now.

The most important thing for a cryptocurrency is that it be used. It's a good idea for Netcoin to embed itself into the web as a long term adoption strategy. Think of Netcoin as becoming the Netcoin protocol, and think of Bitcoin as becoming the Bitcoin protocol, and so forth so that at some point the technology of it speaks and it can exist independently of tribal / partisan politics. At this time Bitcoin is a product and products never become as widely used as core protocols. Productism and politics in my opinion are holding Bitcoin back from mainstream adoption at this point.

I would hesitate to label it our Paypal because Paypal is an "evil" business with a corrupt political agenda. I suggest we unofficially refer to it as project Freepal because it opposes the very essence of what Paypal is doing. Freepal liberates the will of the user by allowing the user to have free speech in the economic form. There is to be no middle man, no centralized master telling us what we can or can't buy, no boss to lend us money we don't really get to own, no third party or man in the middle to charge us fees. It's a direct expression of the economic will of the user to send value person to peerson or peer to peer.

Payswarm is superior to Paypal on every level. It's an open standard, it's built into the web as a specification, it's not proprietary so that the political views and opinions of the some CEO cannot influence anything. Payswarm is attempting to be as politically neutral as possible and I think that is a good direction for Netcoin as well. Offer a very good core technology from a politically neutral point of view, offer the tools of liberty and democracy and let the users determine what direction to take Netcoin.

The reason to have an organization isn't to promote Payswarm particularly but to give people the capability of economically focused electronic democracy. To have a community you need the ability to vote, and to protect a community you need the ability to make decisions. To make it as fair as possible you need the ability to allow stakeholders to vote in a manner which is coercion resistant. It also has to be anonymous, if we know how everyone is voting then we can bully them into voting for our way of doing things or our candidate, I just want the product to adhere to the will of the users and the community of users who give Netcoin meaning.

I don't think it's enough just to build a tool but not give the community any way to regulate itself. When you don't give the community any kind of democratic processes at all then you can end up with fiefdom corporate type systems where they lock the common users out from the decision making process or share holding. We could end up with a digital caste system where individuals from other industries come in years from now and buy everything up and then set up gatekeepers, unfair legal regulations, bosses, middlemen and very undemocratic systems to create a high tier of unaccountable rulers.

Winkelvoss makes people uneasey because of what they could do. They could end up owning the Bitcoin eco-system, and if people disagree with a decision how would that be expressed? So in my opinion sooner or later the voting mechanisms and democratic processes have to be brought in and one thing I like about Netcoin is it's forward thinking enough to reach the conclusion that after 27 years we will have to bring that in for determining the interest rate. I think any cryptocurrency protocol is ultimately backed by the faith of a community and a community is in my opinion better off with democratic processes built in.

For instance lets say it's a year from now and Netcoin is released and I propose the idea that Netcoin should adopt a strategy of embedding itself into the web. If users could somehow vote on it and if they agree or disagree we know, then we have feedback which is very important. If we just for instance rely on Bitcointalk then you could have the votes get fudged because people who have nothing to do with Netcoin could vote in ways to sabotage it or confuse.

I think long term the situation is cryptocurrencies are going to be regulated. It can be self-regulating, or not self-regulated in which case it will be made to conform into the will of others. If it's self-regulating to a certain extent then the elected Netcoin leadership or representatives whomever they turn out to be would go to the SEC, Congress and politicians around the world to explain how things work. The worst case scenario is that there is a leadership void and there are no representatives for the interests of the community to go to the government/politicians and help formulate the legislation and laws around cryptocurrencies. I don't think Netcoin in particular has to be the only cryptocurrency community involved in this but I think the best case scenario is a scenario where you have various cryptocurrencies which have a way to get feedback from the community and then determine the rules based on a combination of that feedback and discussion with lawmakers. I don't think the wild west will last forever.

Really, just so (You seem talented for short manifestation)  

You could easily do both. BTC and Kickstarter. Some of us dont really care if the govt see's we helped a project like this. What are they gonna do take away my clearance level and machine gun? LOLZ they would be doing me a favor. NO just either do both or pick one and I will donate. I would much rather see this then a premine and the stigma that tends to go with that.

It's my belief that I think centralizing of the funding platform is best. I've had several projects funded and it went smoothly without any hassle at all. With Kickstarter, you have the option to close the campaign the moment that it funds. This will preserve the amount of set awards that we have.

It's hard to predict how much of the population will have Bitcoin and they may have other cryptocurrencies as well. (what's the demand like...etc) It may sound easy on paper to coordinate these two different payment methods, but I suspect it may be a tad more difficult than it appears and would require some work, that will be taken away from developing Netcoin. One issue would be the timing of the payments and you could have to cross verify the first $50k...etc and you may have to refund payments through the exchange (not sure if conversion rates would be charged for this) I don't think you can limit the amount of payments with the exchange account (if this exceeds the 30% you proposed) and if the funding happens quite quickly, then the administrator would have to verify the transactions, see who paid what and then send the payments back accordingly (there can be lots of room for error, furthermore there may be additional fees for reversal of payment, no refunds for Bitcoin...) Sounds like a mess waiting to happen

But honestly though, Kickstarter isn't broke and it's very optimized. Over $500 million projects have been already funded...and they process the payments through Amazon Payments, which allows you to fund in a variety of ways. Just stick with what they proposed and lets get this project finally started. It's really no big deal.

However, the main reason why I think it has to be done in traditional systems is that the work is being delegated to developers or teams of developers and currently these agreements are best enforceable with traditional systems. We need the transparency, paperwork and invoices, so that there is accountability.

Kickstarter also provides us with that additional legal obligation.

I think my proposal works efficiently: just receive the payments through an exchange (like merchant payment model in mtgox). People will pay in btc based on the current btc/usd rate. Received btc will be converted instantly to usd in that exchange account and when the cap is reached, it can be easily sent to any bank account or distributed among the developers. That account will have a transaction history which can be used to check honesty. (and if there are any extra conversion to usd and then wire transfer to bank expenses, it can be calculated and be paid by the buyers proportionally)
Paying directly in USD would only mean limited, sophisticated and full of hassles..

It's an all or nothing funding approach, which is why i like it because there's less risk for everyone. I believe that they will recieve the money at the end of the fundraising date that the developers have set up only if they have met their goal

There's also a legal basis that ensures that the project starter will fulfill the ends of the project.