Topic: Spin-offs: bootstrap an altcoin with a btc-blockchain-based initial distribution - page 25. (Read 53636 times)

Isn't the real purpose of most if not all alt-coins to bypass the distribution of Bitcoin?  Didn't on the bus in time, let's make another bus. While i can sort of see the value to Bitcoin of what is being suggested, I'm not sure why i'd want to bootstrap penigcoin in this way.

Another useful property of this technique is that it makes the bitcoin blockchain robust to 51% attacks.  

In the very unlikely event that the bitcoin network came under an unrelenting 51% attack, people would simply use the most promising clone.  Since users have the same slice of that pie too (unless they traded), there is no need to "panic trade into litecoin," for instance.

It is becoming clear that the value of bitcoin comes from the community's shared belief that the blockchain is an accurate ledger.  Since this is the most secure and redundant digital file in the history of mankind, it would be very difficult to destroy (just think how hard it is to get all those embarrassing photos off Facebook LOL).  The blockchain is like DNA that can rebirth our decentralized money again and again and again.  

The largest remaining technical threat then becomes a crack of the secp256k1 curve to permit fast solutions to the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, but even this would not be catastrophic (and about as likely as fusing atomic nuclei to create gold in a cost-effective manner in my opinion).

What I understand from this is you get the past benifit of Bitcoin distribution and user base; You get the future benifit of giving the whole crypto coin community an opportunity to innovate with potential participation from the whole Bitcoin community; New comers get an opportunity to mine coins leveraging the upside innovation in alts. You need not reword Bitcoin holders disproportionately to early miners by setting a different cap.

This address the exponential growth in alt coins copy improve and repeat, while eliminating scam coins and encouraging innovation.

Take quarkcoin say I think it works better Bitcoin in every way, I invest in it believing the market will use the best coin. Then someone comes along and improves it. Now my quark collapse and market innovators are fragmented and only the early adopters of quark2 benifit. 

Now if the team of quarkcoin include quark2 user base and quarkcoin in quark3 the market will benifit by maximizing cooperation in innovation. Choosing the best risk is lower given the exponential innovation curve we are about to see in crypto coins. Net benefits go to adopters of crypto coins and the innovators not the scam coins.

1) Ultimately if the alt based on a blockchain snapshot became huge you couldn't use all un spent output seed as a time stamp to minimize the need for everyone to download the Bitcoin as it bloats.

2) Another idea to considered to address "fairness" in an alt seed based on the Bitcoin blockchain is only include un spent outputs that are found between block X and block Y. That way you can excluded the lost Bitcoin, stolen coins in storage the thief doesn't want to move risking his identity and whales who have huge wallet that are inactive.

3) the snapshot could reward a target in the Bitcoin community.  If you wanted to do charity alt  i.e. you beleve that the alt should not be given to those with large holdings of Bitcoin you could only include un spent outputs in the Bitcoin blockchain with a balance with less than. 0.05 or something. 

Innovation comes from the community, each of us are just wheels in an incomprehensible machine.  domob mentioned here that he believes this idea has been around for some time: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6151659  I independently "invented" this technique only after being inspired by the insights in Daniel's paper on the coming demise of alt coins.  So where do innovations truly come from?

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this bootstrap distribution technique.  



I think perhaps you are mis-understanding the proposed technique.  If you believe 1-computer/1-vote and have a technical idea to implement this, then you could launch your alt coin with an initial pre-mine based on the bitcoin blockchain distribution and immediately have a large potential user base that already has keys to coins!  Since your coin will obviously trade at a sharp discount to bitcoin, you may have the ability to purchase 10,000 of your alt-coins for 1 bitcoin.  If you are correct and the community agrees that your alt-coin is superior, then the exchange rate of your coin will increase thereby rewarding you for your contribution.  

Bitcoin's distribution represents an empirical estimate of the most efficient distribution of coins in a cryptocurrency.  My premise is that by using this distribution to bootstrap an alt coin, this blockchain-based coin will be superior to most alternatives (IPOs, lottery, etc).  Only time will tell whether this premise is true or false.  

An interesting property of this technique is that the average bitcoin holder can simply do nothing, and they will automatically piggyback any innovations in cryptocurrency.  Yet innovators that make real contributions will be rewarded by natural market mechanisms.  

Remember, if the use of cryptocurrency continues to grow, everyone here today will be rewarded for the contributions they made and the risks they took by holding bitcoin.  There's a saying…something about a small piece of a large and growing pie being preferable…

I've been searching for "gotchas" with my proposal but I don't think this is it.  The nucleus is based on a snapshot of the blockchain's unspent outputs at a predefined time in the future (e.g, Block # XXXXX).  The keys you control that unlock the balance in bitcoin addresses at the time of the snapshot remain valid forever.  After the snapshot, nothing changes on the BTC side.  You just need to remember not to lose those private keys if you ever want to claim your share of the new alt-coin.  

Taking a "snapshot" of the blockchain has another useful side-effect: people will be incentivized to pull their coins from exchanges and 3rd party services for a few hours so they are guaranteed control of the share of the new alt-coin that those coins held in trust represent (at least until 3rd-party services establish clear protocol here).  If Warren Buffet understood bitcoin, he might say that we are creating an ocean tide so that we get to see who's been swimming naked.  If this proposal for coin distribution becomes considered "best practices" then perhaps our community will evolve to have quarterly "snapshot days" or "nucleus formation days."  Any alt coins can launch from the latest public snapshots of the blockchain, further simplifying this proposed distribution technique.  
  

no. BTC is only used to initially distribute the aether.  from then on, aether is untethered to those BTC, as they can freely trade on the market as presumably they will do so as some dump or hold.


this is no different then what we have now with Bitcoin.  the market has already factored in that Satoshi could "dump" his entire holdings.  plus, you might get a hint of that intent if suddenly a bunch of aether is claimed from the nucleus years out that are tied to Satoshi. 

That actually has more to do with us trying to have a solid business structure that makes multiple categories of stakeholders happy, spend more time building the product so ether purchasers have actual working code (eg. my recent pyethereum/serpent upgrades and Gav's POC4) to see what they're getting into, and actually being regulatory-compliant. The pre-sale is the only thing that's getting pushed back; everything else is humming along quite nicely with many contracts already running on the testnet.

I see two problems, one of them partially fixable and one not:

1. The altcoin's success is directly proportional to its destruction of bitcoin fungibility.  BTC on the BTC chain whose corresponding airdropped-altcoins have not been claimed are different from BTC whose airdropped-altcoins have been claimed.

2. This creates massive unpredictability regarding the size of the altchain money supply.  Optimistically, say 5% of the BTC coin-owners adopt the altcoin.  This means that something like 95% of the altcoin money supply is "slumbering", at risk of suddenly being dumped into the market.  Markets are smart, but they aren't clairvoyant, and this uncertainty will be interpreted as reduced value.

You might fix #2 by having only, say, 25% of the altcoin money supply be airdropped.  At least then the uncertainty in the size of the money supply is bounded to something reasonable.

I don't think #1 can be fixed.  If you can't separate ownership of the altcoin from ownership of the BTC it was airdropped to, most of the interesting features that need testing out can't be implemented.

I think this really has the basis of a great idea.

As a close follower of Ethereum, although I agree that that team have done us all a great service in outlining the potential that exists in that wide space of Crypto 2.0 - I have increasing doubts about the way they are going about realizing their vision. I was at a couple of Ethereum meetups in London recently which just gave me the impression that despite their great ideas they as a team are disorganized and indecisive (eg they keep on moving their IPO goalposts).

The idea mooted here seems far more solid and reality-based in its real-world implementation, ie making use of the solidity of the BTC blockchain rather than on an altchain with all of the security (51% attacks etc) issues associated with any new initiative.

Crypto will succeed if we all get behind a tested blockchain rather than dilute our energy with a myriad of altchains most of which will go nowhere.

This idea as well as the Sidechain idea of Beck & Hill seem the best way to go for now as they focus energy on the stablest of the blockchains where the future lies.

But the rising trend is "nation coins" or more generally, "community coins", where the whole point is that user base (or distribution) is limited...

If I made scrypt clone, called it AbbaCoin and announced airdrop to Abba Fan Club members, would you clone my scrypt clone?

this had occurred to me as a distribution mechanism, its sort of what the DAC/BTISHARE of proto shares was proposing for a built in user base.

It could work.

give it a shot.

As long as people don't put their private keys in some sort of software that sends it off and they lose their BTC.

And then they'll collapse.  But even if in an alternate universe they didn't collapse, it's still not inflationary because every user retains the same % slice of the total cryptocurrency pie.  

If the innovations in an alt-coin are actually useful, a single bitcoin-blockchain-based clone will become dominant and retain some market value.  If this is the case, the community benefits as a whole as we've made our "money" more useful.  If the innovations are useless, then the only loss is the time spent by the devs (but they chose to take this risk).    

I personally think bitcoin is ideal exactly as it is.  My proposal is simply a non-threatening and cooperative method to experiment with new ideas such that the entire community can cheer on real innovation.  

  

Therefore, someone's 10 Bitcoins will be cloned indefinitely into 10 aether1, aether2, ...  , aether9999.
Isn't that inflationary?

my first impression is that i like this idea much better than Hill and Beck's Sidechain proposal.

1.  the initial distribution is fair and codified.  
2.  Bitcoin holders have everything to gain and nothing to fear from any altcoin clone distributed in this manner.  they are free to evaluate the altcoin on it's own merits as to whether they hold, sell, or even mine their aether.
3.  it's a much more effective separation from an altcoin; no firewall needed.  i have my doubts about how BTC's can traverse back and forth btwn the main Bitcoin blockchain and a Sidechain w/o interfering with the main chain function long term.  i believe there will be some risk.
4.  they have said they are forming a "company" with "core devs" who undoubtedly will be employed and/or shareholders.  this introduces potential bias and risk to Bitcoin from profit motives.
5.  Peter has introduced an ingenious way to set up a head to head competition btwn aether and ether that can be applied to any altcoin.  this has the potential to severely inhibit scamcoins and premines.  which is a good thing.
6.  altcoin devs still have an incentive to innovate.  if Bitcoin holders dump their free aether, as Peter suggests, the devs have the opportunity to scoop up cheap aether as testimony to the belief in the merits of their altcoin.

i eagerly await more information.

I still think 1 or 2 alternative blockchains is a good idea in the grand scheme of things (litecoin)

What we know empirically is that over 5 years, 3 crashes, and $600,000,000 of unrecoverable mining costs, bitcoins have diffused across our user base and the resulting distribution has been logged to the blockchain.  By tempting you with unimaginable wealth during a rally and then threatening to take it all way during a crash, the free market has become a highly-efficient computer continuously refining the answer to the question “what is the right distribution of coins in a cryptocurrency?

If you thought you should hold more bitcoins, you'd buy more (within your means).  If you thought you held too many bitcoins, you'd sell some.  The distribution is efficient and has been tested over time and through the ups and downs of the bitcoin market-price rollercoaster.

Whether you think wealth disparity is good or bad, the truth is that it is inevitable.  The existing bitcoin distribution is the most efficient of all coins in existence.  Thus, by cloning any interesting alt (e.g., NxT) with the exact distribution contained in the blockchain, the freely-distributed clone naturally becomes superior to the expensive pre-mined version.  The clone automatically has the largest user base and a highly diffused distribution.

Why would you purchase NxT if you received bNxT for free?  Why would you think that NxT would succeed more than bNxT when bNxT automatically has a vastly larger user base should the merits of its technology prove useful?


My premise is simply that a bitcoin-blockchain-based clone will eat any promising alt-coin.  We will need empirical evidence to know if this is true.  It seems the idea is quickly spreading, however...

Weasel words - "A weasel word (also, anonymous authority) is an informal term[1] for equivocating words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said, when in fact only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated."

Mind blowing....

To the hell with Ethereum scam coin.

This is how it should be done.

Wow.  Game changer