(...or "pre-non-mine", or whatever it should be called exactly).
EDIT 2014-05-04: I'm throwing this open to the community, since I have to concede large software development defeats me. I'm recommending Peter R's "spin-off" concept as the best style for Splash, but anyone who wants to do it my originally intended way is welcome too. See message immediately following this one for my grand announcement putting the Splash names / slogans up for grabs.
(original message resumes here...)
I'm currently developing a fork of Ripple which may be of interest to readers of the alts section of the forum. I call it
"Splash: Ripple without the pre-mine".
There's been a lot of talk recently about possible forks of Ripple - in particular, is it possible to do without the built-in ripples (XRP), and have
only IOUs with counterparties, denominated in external currencies? Well, maybe that's possible, and if someone wants to have a go, it should be an interesting experiment. But for myself, I quite like the existence of XRP. It has useful path-shortening and anti-spam functionality, which would be difficult to achieve with only externally-defined IOUs. And it's nice to have something counterparty-free in the system.
The thing I
don't like about Ripple's XRP, though - and I know I'm not alone in this! - is that it's "pre-[non-]mined": created by software fiat in one big bang at the start, and allocated to accounts controlled entirely by RippleLabs. RippleLabs then starts behaving something like a central banker, introducing it into circulation as it sees fit. All users must play guessing games about just how fast or slow they'll be in doing this.
It would be so much more in keeping with our community's traditions if XRP could instead come into existence gradually, by proof of work mining, asymptoting towards a ceiling quantity on a fixed schedule everyone knows in advance - i.e. like Bitcoin.
The Ripple folks have stated that their consensus algorithm is not compatible with proof of work. Well, I'll take their word for it - and in Splash I'm leaving the Ripple consensus algorithm alone: I'm
not trying to introduce proof of work
there.
The exciting news is:
I've found a way to introduce proof of work at transaction level, rather than ledger (block) level. Thus, barring any unexpected hitches in the development process, I hope to unleash
Splash on the world soon.
Splash will be just like Ripple in its core user functionality - it'll have both a built-in pure cryptocurrency ("splashes", XSP), and the ability to manage IOUs with counterparties, denominated in other, external currencies. All the Ripple trading and order book features will be present unchanged. The difference will be that
no XSP will exist initially.
All XSP will be born by decentralized, anonymous miners submitting a special kind of transaction to the network: one with proof of work embedded in its syntax, which, when accepted by the Splash consensus algorithm into a ledger, causes new XSP to be born at whatever address the miner chooses.
I'm hoping to launch around late February 2014. In the meantime, I've put a Splash page on the wiki:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Splash (still very introductory for now). I'd be delighted if any Ripple gateway folk would be interested in running a Splash gateway too. For example, perhaps the good folks at DividendRippler (
https://dividendrippler.com/) might like to run a "DividendSplasher" too?
This is, as I say in the title, not so much an ANN as a pre-ANN. I hope to say more as development progresses, either here or on the above wiki page (or both). Wish me luck!