Quote from: Bill White on March 04, 2015, 09:19:02 PM

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.

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%.