Quote from: olsn on February 02, 2014, 10:07:34 AM

Not another coin!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdZhhV0AyA

Answer this one question HONESTLY: WHY do you want to start another coin? Are you REALLY trying to contribute to crypto by bringing yet another currency to a market of 100 other currencies and therefor mixing up that landscape even more, making a solid adoption for the broad masses more and more difficult? Or are you in it to try and get some quick money out of it by stating a bunch of fake benefits and having 90% of the coin premined for yourself?
Based on the fact that you are not able to setup a new coin yourself, chances are low that you are actually contributing to crypto by trying to bring in a new coin to the game, if you really want the community to benefit, write a white-paper, and if it kicks ass, be happy if someone adopts it.

Just to state my point of view, I don't want to accuse you of anything, only you know your true intentions until you share them. But I hope you can see why I am concerned about your idea/project by looking at the whole crypto-coin landscape.

I can see why you are concerned, there are a lot of coins out there that are completely unoriginal. In fact the way I see it there are only really two original coins out there, bitcoin and litecoin (and one when the proof of work is actually useful there will be a another). I plan to introduce a third unique coin. I know what changes to make but I'm more of a mathematical programmer myself (I use matlab all day) and so I haven't got the skills to implement these changes just yet.

One thing that I should point out is that I don't believe in "free trust" in an online anonymous community and so I completely I understand if you don't believe that I have anything original to contribute because I'm playing it very close to the chest at the moment. However, there are two sides to the coin of trust so to speak, the reason that I'm being rather secretive is simple, with so many other coins out there (and so many other people that can make it before me) I'm worried that someone will just steal the idea and implement it first. The coin will reflect this mutual mistrust and adopt a high level of transparency and a minimal premine.

I have a few professional programmer friends (irl) and I was planning to get them on board however I also know that they have no experience with starting a coin either and so I thought this might be a good place to start. It still might be, I haven't called zackclark70 yet because I'm still thinking of the right questions.

Ok, with or without giving away secrets on how to start a coin can anyone please answer the following.

Without using a coin generator how difficult is it to change the source code yourself by the bare minimum to get a new coin? This might sound like that is what I intend to do but honestly I'm trying to figure out the amount of work involved in the whole process and this is the first part of that. Given the amount of coins out there I know it's not going to take a team of expert programmers months but I also don't know if it's a trivial matter for someone that has done it before. Change line 273 and line 8092 and you're done?

Lets say you made a new coin, how would you go about setting up a "testnet"?
I really do plan to make some changes and these need to be tested thoroughly pre launch. The last thing I want is a fork or a fundamental source code error that crops up one month after launch.

Before the coin goes live, do you give information to pools at the last second so that they can't get in their own pre mine? Any tips on a fair launch procedure? Don't start the difficulty super low with a long diff adjustment time etc? It would suck to have done all the work to make a great coin only to have it ruined by a failed unfair launch.

For now all I really want is to create an offline/private coin for testing purposes. This is step one. What might suffice for now is just modifying the litecoin code and running the whole thing on a private network. Does anyone know how I can run my own little fork of litecoin starting from block 1 on a private network?