Topic: New fun coin idea: RandomCoin (Read 616 times)

You mean ZeroCoin? Could be added in, I'm just describing the basic idea for simplicity.

worth looking into, why not have synced node mixing of coins to add anoynmity?

Motivation: Let's confuse regulators by sending an unknown amount of money. If they're having trouble understanding how to regulate Bitcoin, how will they regulate a coin where you don't know in advance how many coins are sent in each transaction?

The Idea is simple:

Mining is proof of work just like Bitcoin. The one difference - you don't know how many coins you mined for another K blocks into the future.

When you solve a block, you receive a random number of coins (even distribution between 0 and 50).
The exact number of coins depends on the hash of the next K blocks.
You get (hash(next K blocks) % 50) randomcoins.

In this coin, you can:

1. Send a fixed number of "matured" randomcoins (mined more than K blocks in the past).
2. Send an "undetermined block" - you can send these undetermined 0-50 randomcoins to someone else, even before the exact number of mined coins is determined.

Note - K can be chosen to be arbitrarily high.

Originally I thought K should be chosen by the protocol, but here's a twist that lets miners choose K:
When you start working on a block, you choose a K between 0 and 2^16-1. The amount of coins you get if you solve a block will be an even distribution between 0 and 50*(1-2^(-K)). The higher the K value you choose, the longer it takes for the coins to solidify, but the more coins you get (asymptotically you get very close to a mean distribution of 0-50 coins ~ 25 coins on average).

Bonus - allow a new type of "indeterminate transaction" that sends some yet unknown portion of the coins contained in an address to another address - basically expand the idea from just mining unknown amount of randomcoins to expanding the unknowns into each transaction.

Confusion galore.