Quote from: Cryddit on January 04, 2014, 09:02:45 PM

It is important to me that the 'Fair Cryptocurrency Committee' or whatever it is eventually called, it should not strictly limit itself to simplistically judging whether a new issue follows particular rules. I will explain why using a concrete example.

I've been working on an alt cryptocurrency, but with some major changes to the usual algorithms. I'm concerned that some deliberate choices made for maximal fairness and for the long-term good of a cryptocurrency, with no intent of personal profit, could disqualify it from being considered a 'fair coin'. Note that these are not the only major changes made; merely those made specifically for the sake of fairness.

Firstly, there will be little or no mining, meaning that maybe 10% of block awards or maybe no block awards at all will be available merely for having compute power. All, or all the rest, will be distributed via proof-of-stake only. For at least 90% of the blocks a smartphone with a permanent Internet connection should have as much chance of getting a block as a ten thousand dollar server.

Secondly, if there is mining, it will not be anything that can be done with ASICs or GPUs. This is because I believe in fairness. These things are two or three orders of magnitude faster, for the money, than non-specialized equipment, and I do not want to support a specialized class of miners. They tend to cause more problems than they are worth, especially when operating en masse, and it is both unfair and counterproductive in my estimation to exclude (by overwhelming) that fraction of the public that uses normal computers from mining. Finally, miners who own specialized equipment are primarily those who are mining for profit only, and who can be expected to simply dump coins as fast as they mine them in order to buy Bitcoin. They represent a drag on a coin's value, not an asset.

Thirdly, I object strongly to any pressure to allow mining pools, if mining is allowed at all. Mining pools in my estimation represent an existential threat to cryptocurrencies; first in terms of centralization, second in terms of logistics by screwing horribly with the difficulty as they jump on and off and overwhelming the probably-small server infrastructure of a fledgling currency, and third in their propensity to attract miners who believe that no other cryptocurrency exists for any reason other than to dump it on the market in order to buy Bitcoin.

Fourth, as is necessary with proof-of-stake, there will be a ridiculously large premine. My intent is to distribute about a million units *WIDELY* (to at least a hundred thousand pubkeys) before even announcing. People who check will mostly discover that they already own the corresponding privkey to at least one of them. Some will own more than one; that is unfair, but can't be helped. To the extent that addresses are held by those who do not participate, the coins that those nonparticipants could otherwise claim will (mostly) eventually be claimed on a random basis by those who do participate. The initial blocks will be created with a script that permits more and more addresses to spend the coinage as time goes on; each month, about ten percent of them will become spendable by an additional existing key, until the distribution is complete or until they have gone through seven keys each. Those who participate will occasionally "inherit" a distribution award from those who do not.

During the first year about 30 thousand coins (that is, three percent of the existing million) will be created. Thereafter each year will see three percent more coins created than the previous year. So, 3 percent long term inflation after the initial distribution. But absolutely no relevance to anything like a 'halving time' or 'ultimate total number of coins' criterion that a committee is likely to come up with. This is specifically to avoid an initial phase of very high rewards, because that would attract pump'n'dumpers rather than people who simply want a currency to use.

Now, I believe that this outlines a plan for a very "fair" cryptocurrency. In fact fairness is one of my *PRIMARY* intents in creating it. But I also believe that because it works differently from the expected model, it is very unlikely to meet any set-in-stone criterion of "fairness" based on the usual set of expectations.

Therefore I ask that whatever else you decide here the committee should remain free to exercise human judgement as to whether a new issue is fair, rather than merely interpreting narrow rules.

I think coins that are relying on a substantially unique code base should be treated somewhat differently than coins which are just copy/paste clones. Otherwise this organization would do more to stiffle innovation than help it. As far as the copy/paste scrypt and sha clones go though there really should be a compelling reason for creating another coin at all, in addition to the other requirements listed. The whole point of currency is to be at least a somewhat universal unit for trade.

That said, I do like the idea of a colbertcoin for publicity purposes IF the developer can get a Colbert endorsement (he started a super PAC so why not this?) AND if the developer has the skills to pull off a decent coin/launch. On the later point, I would hope the dev has enough familiarity with the code to not fork an existing coin with known bugs or other issues (which is a large portion of them).