Quote from: jonald_fyookball on October 04, 2015, 10:12:23 PM

Quote from: Bill White on October 03, 2015, 05:50:53 PM

Quote from: YarkoL on October 02, 2015, 09:02:32 PM

In my understanding, a spinoff should work exactly the same
as the original, so altering the difficulty adjustment would
just make it an "independent" altcoin.

The idea expressed by Peter R in the original post of this thread only talks about making the initial distribution in proportion to a snapshot of the Bitcoin block chain:

Quote from: Peter R on April 10, 2014, 12:45:31 AM

Since the market has already encoded its best estimate of the most efficient distribution into the unforgeable global ledger known as the blockchain, why not use this? Since all bitcoin users can cryptographically prove ownership of their share of bitcoins, the code-base of any alt-coin can be modified in a trivial way to allow bitcoin users to claim a share of any pre-mine in direct proportion to the percentage of bitcoins market cap they control. This method (a) bootstraps alt-coins with a very large potential user base, (b) places all alt-coins on equal footings thereby allowing them to compete on their own merits, (c) automatically piggybacks bitcoin investors in any financial gains that may result due to community innovation, (d) fairly rewards innovative alt-coin developers as they can scoop up spin-offs dumped cheaply on the open market, (e) makes it difficult to pump and dump.

Later in the thread someone referred to alt-coins that do this as "spin-offs."

I have not read anyone suggest other requirements than the initial distribution for an alt-coin to qualify as a "spin-off."

What other requirements? Can you give an example?

Yes. There is no requirement that the difficulty adjustment algorithm be the same as Bitcoin's. I was responding to the quoted post of YarkoL in which he suggested that if a coin altered the difficulty adjustment, then it should not be considered a "spin-off." In response I asserted that there are no such requirements for "spin-offs".

YarkoL said that the spin-off "should work exactly the same as the original." Now that I read this again I think I misunderstood to what "the original" was intended to refer. It's also possible some of us are using the term "spin-off" differently in this thread.

The thread started with the example of Ethereum being copied to Æthereum except with Bitcoin's distribution. If such a thing were to happen, would Æthereum be a "spin-off" of Bitcoin or a "spin-off" of Ethereum? It was clear to me that it would be a spin-off of Bitcoin, not Ethereum. However, I think YarkoL may have meant "the original" to refer to Ethereum in this example.

If someone were to develop Æthereum and make it very different from Ethereum, but started it with an initial distribution determined by the Bitcoin block chain, I would still consider Æthereum to be a spin-off of Bitcoin. It would simply have a confusing name.