How would you cope if the uptake is not as strong as you had hoped and funding becomes an issue?
By that point everything will be open sourced, so if there is any value in the work then it can be picked up in whole or in part by others. If any opportunities for paid work (or even my own profitable entrepreneurial venture) come to me from that, then I will have still succeeded personally as well, even though have failed on my wide-scale adoption aspirations.
Also it is very likely I will continue to receive some funding from angel investors if I have shown that much, because there just are not many top flight developers working on altcoins that can radically challenge the status quo in terms of fundamental tech. You can I guess include smooth and a few others in that short list.
And smooth and I talk (not so much recently because I've had my head down trying to show something other than bad health and I told him I didn't want to bind together at such as early stage where I need flexibility and don't want to put anyone else at risk for my rapidly changing/advancing decisions in a leadership role), so there is perhaps a possibility that whom ever of us is most successful at getting an altcoin platform rolling with the greatest momentum, will be capable of convincing the other to join. For example code I am developing might end up in other projects and me joining them, or vice versa. The open sourced code I've published thus far is highly modularized, so it is easy to integrate with any project not just my own.
Also my viral marketing strategy seems to me to be very solid. I am excited to see how it will work out. So I am not planning on failing with it.
What would happen to the project in the event that you are unable to continue working on it due to health problems?
Ditto as above.
My health seems to improving. It is no where near as bad as it was in August and September. And improved over October. I am sleeping well every day and working with a good concentration for more than 8 hours daily consistently. I am still having problems with inflammation (autoimmunity) that attacks all over my body including gut, head, and legs (peripheral neuropathy) which seems to uptick with exercise as it always had over the past years. The difference lately is I've got a treatment and diet regiment that seems to contain it such that it doesn't send me into an insomnia and non-productivity spiral. I need more weeks to confirm the consistency of this improvement. For example, I just awoke from 8 hours sleep and the inflammation at the back of my head from last night is abdated. I would still prefer the inflammation to be gone entirely and to be able to train sports intensely hours per day, but heck I am 50.4 years old so my sports (even ill) is already more than many 50 year olds.Is it mainly anonymity, transaction times and DDOS protection you are aiming for? What type of feature sets are you looking to include beyond that?
Anonymity is on the back burner. You can see my post yesterday (Zero Knowledge Transactions thread) about Zerocash which looks like the most promising technology to integrate in the future. But that would slow me down too much to make that a first priority.
My priority focus for now are the features I need for wide-scale marketing adoption and the distributed (and decentralized) block chain design. I am not going to detail those before I release, for reasons of competing altcoins. I will move quickly towards launch, because much development can be ongoing after a marketing launch.
I am trying to design a block chain that can be adapted to any new features with soft forks, or even viewed as user-level addons. So that adding features can be done orthogonal to the block chain design. I want to lock the block chain design in stone asap (hopefully within on the order ofa year of launch).
To give you one example of a feature for wide-scale marketing adoption, I don't want users to have to store their data any where. I want it to always be available for them on the block chain. All they need to remember is one password (and that can be a very strong one for those who have large balances or a weak one for those who are just toying around with the micro-transactions concept). Also payments won't be made to hexadecimal address, but rather to an email address just like Paypal.
So joining this currency will be as simple as loading a webpage and logging in. But you can login from any site that reads the block chain for you, not just one particular website. This is radical user friendliness (n00b ease-of-adoption) improvement over Bitcoin, Monero, etc..
Again let me emphasize again that the marketing launch will not be targeted to investors and speculators, but rather to users (including both consumers and businesses) of micro-transactions. This is how I can claim strongly that this will not be an unregistered investment security. I am creating a software and token system for users and it will be distributed to them, not to investors and speculators. If any of you manage to get some tokens, you will get them in the same way that other users do, until a secondary exchange market opens for them (and I won't be encouraging such a secondary market and will try to prevent/discourage it from being on exchanges for up to 1 year). Obviously I can't stop the free market from creating a secondary exchange, but my goal is exactly the opposite of most who try to as quickly as possible get listed on an exchange. If you want to get some of these tokens, you will be committing to hold them for a long time and/or spend them in micro-transactions, but not having an exchange available for pump & dump type activity.
If working with POW, how will you incentivize mining enough in order to secure the Blockchain?
In my block chain design, the 51% attack is fairly impotent because the minority can objectively ignore it if it attempts to unwind activity that was already confirmed. The longest chain could for a long time refuse to include already confirmed transactions, but if it attempts to unwind or double-spend already published confirmations, then the minority chain will fork off from the majority chain and ignore it as fraudulent. In my design, you need 100% of the PoW in order to snuff out the minority. This was one of my crucial goals for permissionless commerce.
The only point of PoW in my design is to provide the entropy to allocate resources so there is a single-point-of-truth on the current distributed resource set for distributed block chain confirmation. Some weeks ago, I stated that inertia could accomplish this alone without any PoW, but this was flawed. Without any PoW at all, there is no trustless objectivity on which resources are valid. However, unlike Satoshi's design, I am not using PoW to confirm transactions. One of the implications in my design is that propagation of data is crucial and thus an objective truth about who is not propagating has to be established. Afaics, this can't be accomplished with an adhoc P2P network where data propagates over several peer hops.
That is the most detail I have released on my design thus far. So I will stop for now, until actually at marketing launch.