UPDATE So an issue has come up that I would like to bring to the community to get your opinions. Many of you may have heard of "Node", another node.js based crypto currency that is currently in development. They have made a lot of promises of features up to this point but had made no claims as to how their system will actually work. I suspect this is because they didn't have one yet, but either way, today they launched their whitepaper.
The whitepaper can be read here:
http://goo.gl/1KuuZwThere is a specific portion of their whitepaper that I found disturbing, unethical, and downright unprofessional at best. Node has finally announced their "new mechanism for a secured an equitable forging process". It's called Proof of Activity (PoA) and is a combination of node up-time and purchase activity. Sound familiar? That's because it is. We designed it and released a whitepaper about it 4 months ago.
I tried to PM the lead of Node and ask that he simply give attribution for the design and idea to our tam and he refused in yet another unprofessional manner and tried to claim he didn't know about us and had never seen our Whitepaper. I completely believe that not only did they read our whitepaper but they lifted our system (minus a few essential parts that will ultimately cause them to fail, but its not our job to tell them that).
They now have people in their thread claiming how innovative their "new system" is and how they've never seen anything like it.
Excerpt from their whitepaper to follow (keep in mind this is just one similar section): Q: How does PoA work, and what is different?
Node relies on an new mechanism for a secured an equitable forging process.
Because the current forging algorithms are not sufficient for ensuring a long term exploitation and have drawbacks we decided to innovate further.
We had the following prerogatives when elaborating PoA:
To motivate people to actively participate in the network development;
To encourage users to spend coins, facilitating the further distribution;
To reward those that give back to the network by maintaining their node active;
To increase democracy/fairness/egalitarianism/chances towards generating a block;
PoA stands for Proof of Activity, and its name expresses the way forging will be executed and forgers will be elected - by activity.
In this context activity is viewed as contribution towards the network, and the main indicators are:
Time and Spent Amount
Time
Each node’s active time will be recorded and calculated in seconds, since its last connection. This way a TimeHeight will be determined and used in the algorithm.
Spent Amount
Each extra coin spent will equivalate one unit of time, in this case 1 Node = 1 second. The Spent amount will be calculated within a day timeframe. Those extra units will be added to the timeheight to determine the actual Nodeheight = Timeheight + Units.
Here is how we worded it in our Whitepaper 4 months ago: https://github.com/crypti/whitepaperSo, what do we do to fix it?
With Crypti, we will be instituting a Proof of Time (PoT) / Proof of Purchase (PoP) / Proof of Identity (PoI) algorithm. This means that there are 2 different ways to earn weight towards forging new block rewards. The calculations of both methods will be combined to form one weight that will determine who forges the next block and earns their reward.
It was important to us that with Crypti, we reward those who are giving back to the network. We had 3 major priorities that we wanted to focus on going in:
We wanted to encourage the users of the currency to help secure, stabilize, and grow the network.
We wanted to encourage users to spend their Crypti (to solve the hoarding problem)
We wanted to encourage merchants to sign up to accept Crypti.
Our motto is that an active community grows, and a stagnant community decays. Our goal was to keep the network active and reward those who were a part of moving us forward.
In the end, we decided on a hybrid system to help meet these 3 goals. Let’s look at the 3 methods in which that system works.
So heres the deal: I need your support, feedback, and consideration of how to move forward with this matter. I would like you to get involved, read the whitepaper, and tell me if you have concluded much like I did that it is a direct ripoff and if so, what should we do about it? There are no rules in Crypto but I feel that it is completely dishonest for a company to sell shares in something they are claiming they built when it is obvious to me at least that they did not.
Part of the problem is that many of their supporters must not be familiar with Crypti and therefore don't realize what is happening, but I don't want people losing money on another team that is just half-heartedly attempting to claim our innovations in order to try and pump their price.
I would really like to hear your thoughts and ideas on how we should approach this.
Thanks guys!