Topic: Spin-offs: bootstrap an altcoin with a btc-blockchain-based initial distribution - page 5. (Read 53561 times)

While this distribution method may seem more fair than those previously used in the alt-coin world, it still leaves you with an alt-coin after the distribution date, and all the implications of that.  After the date of distribution, the new coin would be in competition with Bitcoin for market share.  It's time someone researched turning Ethereum into a fully fledged Bitcoin side-chain.  There's no reason to use another coin, when Bitcoin itself will work great as fuel.  A separate coin will end up being siphoned by "developers" to fund their (lack of) activities.  A Bitcoin side-chain can prevent this from happening in any hidden way.

@alexkravets and @smooth: Thank you for your replies. One yes (more or less) and one no. I agree 7.5% is a great deal to omit. It's probably fair to conclude there will not be an overwhelming majority agreeing it's a spinoff with only P2PkH outputs.

I will spend a few days attempting to cover as much of the P2SH outputs as is reasonable. This will require me to code a subset of the script language in ocaml. While this doesn't sound like fun, it will hopefully be educational. If I run into unusual cases, I will ask on the board and hope someone can help.

There will be no way to tell how many of the current P2SH spendable outputs I can handle since the redeem script is only known when it is spent. However, I will try to make sure it at least works on 90% of the P2SH outputs that have been spent so far. At that point it will be fair to estimate that at least 99% of the distribution has been copied.

As for when I will take the "official" snap shot, I am leaning towards block 350,000. This should be found at the end of March or beginning of April. As of block 350,000, 2/3 of the bitcoin distribution will be complete.

This thread makes it quite clear that taking a snapshot to create a spin-off is still highly nontrivial.

Our team will be presenting shortly a proposal for a working alternative implementation of the famous "smart contract enabled" technology : Ethereum

Most of the work consists of adapting and blending various existing opensource software including the excellent go-ethereum by Jeffrey Wilcke; our main goal is creating a fully working Ethereum alternative implementation, compatible with the existing protocol and able to seamlessly interact with its blockchain.

With this in mind, we will be doing some important modifications to the current Ethereum specifications :

• Changes in the initial distribution - We will take a snapshot of the Bitcoin blockchain and automatically assign coins based on unspent outputs.
• No fees for computational steps in the Virtual Machine - more on this soon

This project is meant as an experimental research in financial modeling of decentralised systems and it is by no means an attempt to speculate on other group of developers hard work.

More material to be released within this week.

It will be possible for people to prove, given a certain address, that the address started with the snapshot balance (possibly modulo dust).

I will probably only start with one txOut for each funded address, essentially combining all the snapshot txOuts for that address in the bitcoin block chain.

With a million coins excluded I would say no. That's roughly 7.5% of the total outstanding and more than that if you consider lost coins (many, many coins were lost to technical errors and apathy early on when they weren't worth much if anything). Hardly negligible.

Furthermore the precedent would be terrible as the P2SH proportion is likely increasing. Someday it might approach 100%.

Does the script you're using allow people without the private key for the txOut, to identify which txOuts in the spin-off chain correspond to which txOuts in the original bitcoin chain? 

IOW, can you publicly prove that you *did* include all the P2PkH transactions, short of someone producing the private key and spending them?  Can people who are running your client prove it? 

Yes, although to be more precise it could also be called Bitcoin Non-Multisig Spin-off or Bitcoin 92% Spin-off :-)

I hope to start an alt chain soon, and I'd like to use this spin-off idea for the initial distribution. Using some ocaml code I parsed the block chain up to block 346,000 (yesterday morning). It's easiest if I only handle those that can be converted to P2PkH. Since P2SH has become more popular in the past year, this would mean omitting about a million bitcoins. (To be exact 1,011,673.35678149 cannot be converted to P2PkH. The vast majority of these are from P2SH outputs.)

The total value would still correspond to over 92% of the current number of bitcoins, even if I omit "dust".

I plan to release a whitepaper and announce at least a week before I take the real snapshot I will use. This will give a chance for those with bitcoins held by third parties or held in multisig an opportunity to move the bitcoins to an "ordinary" address in time for the snapshot, if they are motivated to do so.

Question: Should this still be considered a "Bitcoin Spin-off"? I am only asking about the terminology, not an attempt to claim the bounty. To be very clear: I will not attempt to claim the bounty and do not expect to meet the criteria for it.

Augur to go with Ethereum? If you can't figure out how to do a sidecoin/spin-off for Augur, someone else will. Hitching your wagon to anything other than the economic majority, as cumbersome as it may seem, does such a powerful idea a disservice in my opinion. Thinking Ethereum "isn't about being money" is dangerously close to the fallacious mainstream "Forget the currency, it's all about the blockchain technology" meme.

Money makes the blocks go 'round. Ethereum will fail unless it understands that, or someone will create Aetherium, or even launch it as a sidechain. The point is that the economic majority, meaning Bitcoin holders, is where the action is. Not fixing Augur's coin distribution to Bitcoin will be needlessly hampering it in the extreme.

joeykrug and I have just implemented a proof-of-concept version of the "spin-off" idea discussed in this thread:

Website: http://www.sidecoin.net
Source: https://github.com/AugurProject/Sidecoin
Whitepaper: http://augur.link/sidecoin.pdf

"Sidecoin" (our demo/example implementation) is a fork of Bitcoin 0.9.1.  We modified it to support loading "snapshot" balances into the first (non-genesis) block, as well as trustless sidecoin claims using a new "claimtx" RPC command.  Details are in the whitepaper!

Hope this can be useful to someone 

- Jack

No.

The initial ledger of a bitshares blockchain is set from a file called genesis.json. I had hoped that I could simply add bitcoin addresses into that, and change the transaction signing code slightly to allow for verification by bitcoin address as well as the native pts/bitshares address.

But it seems easier to just keep it a separate snapshot.bin, the way Peter R's original idea was stated. The other advantage of that, is that my code might be more reusable for other blockchains.

Interesting. Can the Bitshares toolkit provide snapshot of Bitcoin?

I've started the bitshares spinoff, which I've called "coinshares".

If you're interested in contributing:
https://github.com/sfultong/bitshares_toolkit

I'm developing in the coinshares branch.

I plan to start a spinoff based on the bitsharesx code, hopefully soon. The initial stake will be 80% bitcoin, 10% bitshares pts and 10% bitshares ags. I'm not sure how far I can get on my own, so any coding help would be much appreciated.

it's a beautiful play on economic incentives....

I'll put up 2 BTC for the bounty.

Are there any known efforts towards claiming it? If so, which altcoins?

Looks like it to me. I know a lot of exchanges like to list PoS coins to collect their stake, I guess they have the same policy with snapshots. I'm also assuming that any coin using this bootstrap method will definitely get listed on cryptsy.

It seems Cryptsy has something in their terms that explicitly gives them ownership of spin-offs, if I'm interpreting correctly (I assume that's what they mean by "conversions, snapshots"):

I'd like to throw in my Satoshi's worth to the apparently polarising issue of whether distribution of new coins according to bitconin distrobution is 'fair' or a good idea.

I'm not one of the absolutists, believing today's distribution to totally represent some ideal that it has as a consequence of the decisions of the smartest and wisest found its way to its just place.

As others have said first there's the issue of a significant number of coins, especially early days and more recently, gox, of scammed coins out there in possession of the less savoury characters.  Second there is something in me that simply won't buy the idea that someone who mined or bought a huge chunk early and sat on it who are now worth the same as an entrepreneur who brought something fantastic onto the market and created a company and employed people and marketed it to make it happen 'earned' it to the same extent as the entrepreneur did.*  I will note that I do not begrudge early adopters and though a winter 2012/13 guy myself I consider myself both a reasonably astute and very lucky early-ish adopter myself.  Third, again as someone said further up, a rational investor who was balancing the risks might have put some money in early days but I also suspect many saw $$$s, ignored the risks and threw in way more than they could afford - even to the extent of reckless borrowing.  They may in retrospect have made a 'great' decision but like me, were also very lucky in what happened next and it could have (and in some cases still could) go horribly wrong so I don't see it reasonable to deduce that it is the consequence of rational behaviours that gives the current distribution some magic property of being just.**  No matter how good the technology, nor how good an idea, nobody knew, and nobody knows whether enough people would recognise that and want to be part of it for it to take off - and the question is still valid though much less so today.

However, in practical terms if we want to best leverage a network of people who value crypto and believe in its future then I can think of no better way than to use spin-off or side-chain-type technology which utilises the distribution of bitcoin as it is.

As for the idea of using litecoin or combination of alts etc. nobody will stop anyone from doing it but I see no value in it at all as an idea.  Much as some for instance ltc may by some criteria be a 'fairer' distribution for the reasons others have given here's why I think not:
 i) Where are the 'fundamentals' for alts in terms of numbers of wallets, numbers of transactions, numbers of merchants etc. etc? The fact there activity is miniscule compared to bitcoins leads me to believe the alt population does not largely consist of the smartest; ii) There are many who really get crypto who have not bothered with alts given so few of them are bringing anything new to the table.  This would exclude them (us) from distribution;  iii) many litecoin owners are in because they bought the 'silver to bitcoin's gold' idea which was a great way of marketing but I can still see no validity in it as a reason to consider it as being of value; iv) I know some people buy litecoin simply because it's 'cheaper' than bitcoin (per unit)!  What does that say about their understanding of crypto or maths or...?  v) ... and many people who are in the alts don't actually believe in them but just play the trading game to fleece the less astute (many of whom end up getting fleeced themselves).  As a network of people I really can't see how they'd likely turn out to have been a more valuable team of custodians for a new coin that actually does bring something substantial to the table than the bitcoin network!


*I could go on about this but to illustrate there is a parallel with owning land in the middle of a city and sitting on it for generations whilst doing nothing with it, watching the family's net worth go sky high thanks to the efforts and risks of everybody around them who is making the city a more attractive place to live thus driving up the value of their land for them.

**Just for the record, I am delighted Satoshi has what he has (assuming he still has access to the private keys) in terms of Bitcoins, would like that he he could also benefit from spinoffs and I would hope that enough people would see the injustice of anyone doing spin-offs excluding Satoshi that they don't take off.

[cynical] LOL, it isn't! I dont have any and if I had to buy LTC it would be unfair as I am enriching those who adopted early.
In addition I think the only reason LTC has value is because early Bitcoin thieves bought it up to get rid of there hot bitcoins. [/cynical]

more to your point, if it hasn't been debated here, the idea has been debated as to what would be fair, with the spin-off you could only count unspent outputs between cretin block heights, or you can exclude unspent outputs of a cretin age, or heaven forbid exclude unspent outputs of a cretin value, worse distribute to both LTC and BTC in your Spin-off.

If you believe the value is in the network of users, this idea is the most fair way to launch a new coin, further more, it's the market that decides the innovation, and dumping spin-off coins is just a way for those in the know to get cheep coins.