Infocoin aims to provide an uncensorable space for storage of information directly on the blockchain, a space to safely store messages, files, forums, anything.
For this purpose I cloned Cryptonote, increased TX_EXTRA_PADDING_MAX_COUNT from 255 to 102399, set the initial block size to 150KB and adjusted the blocksize growth to 20% per year. That means you can store up to 100KB per transaction, ofcourse you must pay a fee for which the optimal values will have to be found. Also the block reward is a thousandth of most Cryptonote coins (~700 initially). If these are sane values will have to be tested for sure, I'd also like to hear your input on these. Should feedback be positive I'll do an embarassing test release.
I am a noob when it comes to coding and forking coins, so I followed
https://cryptonotestarter.org/inner.html for the most part, who have done outstanding work. Not sure if my changes will have the desired effect or break anything, so there will be a test release, to find out if the idea is even achievable.
Why did I go with Cryptonote? Well, because it's the only coin I was able to successfully fork so far. A Bitcoin clone might be way more suitable for this idea because of OP_RETURN seeing plenty of use already, so there are many ways to insert data into and retrieve data from the Blockchain already. TX_EXTRA doesn't see much use in Cryptonote coins so far and thus there is not much info to be found about it. I don't know how to insert data into the TX_EXTRA field in transactions, it is possible however (one likely needs a modified wallet to do this):
http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1381/how-are-the-various-tx-extra-types-formats-usedIf you are an experienced dev and like the idea, feel free to help or even take over. I just want to make the idea popular because the implications are pretty huge. It could be possible to e.g. make a forum that is impossible to censor, upload files, directly reward good posts. Astroturfing would be expensive as well, the fee should provide quality and security. So this is basically just a thread to see if the community likes the idea.
Also, yes, there have been a few Infocoins already, all seem dead and they didn't come close to the name anyways.
TO DO before release:
Find a way to insert data into transactions (tx_extra)
Explore other options besides Cryptonote
Seed node
Windows Wallet
GUI Wallet
Testing, testing, more testing
edit: TEST RELEASE in fifth post!
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.18269690edit 21st July: Network for
testing is up and running.
PS: Why has noone tried this idea yet?