Glad to hear this great news. What an ambitious experiment!
I'm skeptical of both PoS and democracy, but if anyone can make it work it's TacoTime.
What's the tl;dr answer to the (soon to be frequently asked) question "how is MC2's PoW/PoS hybrid different from Peercoin?"
*puts on Newtsuit; prepares for deep dive*
Definitely exciting news. I'm a big fan of the work that has been done on BTCD - being associated with this project is a big positive. Keep up the work - we'll be here whenever you guys are read to share more details!
Thank you for the kind words and taking the time to post again! In terms of dissimilarity to Peercoin - to paraphrase tacotime informally - we're more PoA-like, PoS miners don't make blocks, we have per block stake validation, explicit dependency on PoW validation, lottery requires locking of funds rather than all outputs, cold minting, and efficient decentralized stake pooling. We'll have detailed specs on the system up in the near future now that it's getting close to completion and undergoing testing, as it's changed a bit since the early days.
We've tried to put together an overall system that ensures a long-term future for what we're introducing. We want to make consistent and active development happen in a progress-focused environment. This is a central tenet of the whole system. For those interested in the bigger problems we're trying to address, you can read about some of
the challenges we think exist in Bitcoin today (that we're hoping to address with this project). At very least, we hope to begin as an alternative system with a community where we can do things we can't do in Bitcoin at present.
We've got another entry coming to explain how the theoretical system that started in this thread will attempt to address the outlined problems evident in Bitcoin. I'll come post that as well for those curious in digging a bit deeper on the information side.
We're planning an announcement thread here on Bitcointalk in about a week's time, so it's official and we can all start engaging the issues directly as a community. We'll do a new thread for that and it'll be straight from tacotime this time. People can also meet the other guys there, but I'll come x-post so that those who follow here can find it.