Spark: The future is now

Thread 2 of 4 : Answering questions

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If you are looking for actual information on Spark, follow this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=525419

In this post, we shall answer your questions about Spark to make everything clear before the investment phase and official release

This is the thread where you post your questions about Spark if you want them answered.

Spark is a brand new cryptocurrency made by a team of 3 professional developers who wish to remain anonymous.

It takes the best from all the interesting cryptocurrencies out there (bitcoin, nextcoin, darkcoin) and mixes it with fresh and new ideas.

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Announcing a change in plans

Having discussed the topic with a few people, we decided that instead of releasing 10% of the Sparks each month for 10 months, we will release them all on day one.

We fear that we would otherwise be giving too much power to our escrow. They are very trustable, but we won't take risks that big.

We have also already been contacted by an altcoin exchange, and will work on making Spark available for trade on day one.

They will get our lightweight wallet (sparkyd) a week before release, which should give them way enough time to implement Spark trading using our testnet.

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Answers to your questions and criticisms

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Why are your topics self-moderated ?

To have a way to ward away trolls, flooders, and advertisers who would want to take advantage of our thread.

We do not delete any negative criticism, as we view them as a necessary reaction to anything new. Instead, we will reply to them to point out why we believe they are wrong, and let you and them make up your mind on whether you believe we or them are right.

You can find proof of that in the original thread, which is mostly scam accusations that we left unedited.

Quote from: stealth923 on March 21, 2014, 10:03:04 PM

So you are taking the best of BitCoin, Dark and NXT.

Do you plan on writing over 10,000 lines of code just for the anonymity piece like the Dark team has done or wait until they finish all the hard innovative work so you can rip it off? Same goes for NXT....a lot of dev has gone into that as well.

You have heavily misunderstood Spark.

100% of Spark's codebase is handmade. We have taken all the ideas that we thought were interesting from other coins, and implemented them ourselves into Spark. Nothing was stolen, nothing was copy pasted.

Innovation is meant to be built upon, and this is what we attempt to do here. If someone in the future takes Spark's ideas and builds upon them to do something better, we would be proud of it and applaud them.

Quote from: lemfuture on March 21, 2014, 11:08:32 PM

open source?

Of course !

WTFPL licence, you will be free to do what you please with the codebase without asking us first. Read more: http://www.wtfpl.net/

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Technical questions

Quote from: GBattaglia on March 21, 2014, 08:57:00 PM

So without the blockchain, what happens exactly when a "Spark Cloud" gets shutdown? Are the transaction records no longer available to anyone?

Think of Spark clouds as blocks, since the concept is similar. Instead of being inserted in a blockchain, they are generated individually, and only kept by the nodes which have used them for transactions, instead of having a copy stored by everyone.

It is also important to know that there is a « Main cloud » which contains a registry of which transaction happened in which Spark cloud. There will be a copy of this main cloud on each Spark node. We took inspiration from the way the Electrum bitcoin wallet works.

When someone needs info about a particular transaction which is in a Spark cloud that he does not have a copy of, the Spark protocol will perform the following actions:
- Query a random node on the network to know in which cloud his transaction ID is stored (the node knows from its Main cloud copy)
- Query other random nodes to verify that the information is true (as it is possible to carry false information on a decentralized network)
- If a node carries false information, it will be flagged as unreliable. More than 2 unreliable ratings in a 1h timespan and the node is considered forked and will automatically resync its data from the other nodes.
- Query all nodes on the network to know which ones carry a copy of the cloud that contains the transaction ID
- Reliability check, flag nodes that carry wrong info, etc
- Download the cloud that contains the transaction required
- Depending on client settings, keep or discard the cloud that was downloaded once the transaction is checked

The whole process is extremely quick, as all those operations are done almost simultaneously.

As you will understand from reading this, the network relies heavily on its nodes to keep the information trustworthy. However, due to the concept of Lightning bolt transactions, and the need for commercial entities to have a functional network, we believe that enough people will run nodes to keep the network safe and decentralized. Any attempt at forking will get flagged at bad nodes, and no client will use the incorrect nodes until they have the correct data.

Upon launch, we will provide 8 nodes in Europe, 4 nodes in the USA, and 5 nodes in Asia. The first version of the Spark client will be set by default to run as node, therefore building up our network. Once we have enough people willing to run nodes, we will distribute the client in the default mode that discards clouds once done. This can be toggled easily in the client settings.

With enough nodes, the only thing the Spark network would be weak to is a false flag attack, where healthy nodes would get flagged as unhealthy. To prevent this, we have set up a system that should work in theory, works in testnet, but needs to be tested on a much wider scale to know whether it works properly. Basically, a flagged node will get peer reviewed by other nodes to make sure the flags are legitimate and not a sabotage act against this particular act or the network. If the node passes peer review, it will lose its flags and be able to continue working normally.

There is of course an incentive for people to run nodes, the ability to be able to recieve Lightning bolt transactions, thus eliminating the need for a third party centralized payment processor to do near instant transactions.

I know this is a lot of information to process, and our team is sadly graphically impaired enough to not be able to make an easy visual representation of the whole process.

A full documentation on clients and nodes comes with the Spark client, it should clear up the confusion.

Quote from: coin123123 on March 21, 2014, 09:07:22 PM

Quote from: GBattaglia on March 21, 2014, 08:57:00 PM

So without the blockchain, what happens exactly when a "Spark Cloud" gets shutdown? Are the transaction records no longer available to anyone?

without blockchain its centralized coin

Just like any other cryptocurrency out there, it relies on its users, and is fully decentralized. With no mining, we rely fully on nodes to keep the network alive and healthy and to make sure there are always copies of every cloud somewhere. The no mining model was adopted after seeing that it works just fine for Nextcoin. We took it a step further by making it a decentralized network that does not require a blockchain, thus giving the average user much more ease.

Quote from: YouIsPeng on March 21, 2014, 09:23:24 PM

How is this a 'cryptocurrency' if there is no cryptography involved?

There is minimal cryptography involved, indeed. Many things however are hashed in Spark, mostly for integrity checks. There are cryptographic hashes on transactions, spark clouds, node flags, etc.

We however agree that the term decentralized currency fits more than cryptocurrency. It's a different direction for the same concept.

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The distribution controversy

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[...] scam [...]

We will be using a public third party escrow to do all the collecting and distribution for us. At no point in the process will we touch the bitcoins or the Sparks that are invested/given out.

If it is a scam, it sure is a very elaborate one.

Quote from: B2BigAl on March 21, 2014, 09:45:58 PM

Well, I was excited until I read "can not be mined at all". So its a 100% IPO coin. How is this a good idea?

A few months ago, we read this (and other similar things), and decided that we should not use proof of work: http://pando.com/2013/12/16/bitcoin-has-a-dark-side-its-carbon-footprint/

We however agree that 100% IPO is not a good idea either. We tried to look into a fair distribution method, and could not find a single one that gave no one an advantage. Here is what we looked into and why we discarded it:
- Proof of work (mining) would be supporting a concept that we want to disappear. We want Spark to be eco friendly.
- Requiring a proof of identity and giving a fixed amount to each unique person can be cheated on (fake passports, borrowing passports, etc.). Besides, this kills the whole anonymity thing.
- Doing giveaways puts too much power in our hands, and it is very easy to cheat on giveaways to get as much of them as possible.
- Opening faucets makes them cheatable, it is easy to change your ip an infinite amount of times (or just use a botnet) and run the faucet dry.

We had thought of other methods that I do not remember right now, but none of them satisfied us. Besides, the IPO method lets us build a marketing fund through our escrow with the collected bitcoins, which gives us a chance to promote Spark very heavily as soon as it is released. This makes investors winners, as they not only get their money's worth of Spark, but they also get free promotion for the currency that they are now a stakeholder of.

Quote from: hopped on March 21, 2014, 10:24:15 PM

A new coin with no premine sweet , but wait the only way to distribute the coins is through ipo so 100% premine then as that is what it is.

How does one premine what can not be mined?

The cryptocurrency userbase is too heavily focused on mining, and sees everything from a mining point of view. As discussed above, we agree that IPOs are bad, but we also think that mining is even worse, as it has real life consequences.

Besides, mining, just like IPOs or buying on the market, is a way for the rich to get richer. We do not buy the concept that mining puts everyone on the same level, as investing ASICs and GPU farms gives a pretty massive advantage on the mining market.

After looking at Nextcoin, we are confident that the market will adjust itself and that Sparks will be fairly distributed as soon as people start « dumping » their shares.

We'd like to share this very interesting graph that we found about Nextcoin's distribution, since we will be using a similar model : http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/818/9098/original.jpg

Quote from: wangdaniel2014 on March 21, 2014, 10:32:25 PM

Some questions:
1. Set a IPO cap.
2. Distribution in 10 months is totally a joke. Make market smooth? Or market will crash if the coins being distributed at once?
You know what happened to NXT.
3. Most coins are in your hands. So you can manipulate the market for at least ten months.

You are completely right, after looking at it, the 10 month distribution serves no purpose at all, and makes you trust us / the escrow service much more than you should have to. We have changed this plan, and all Sparks will be given right away to the concerned parties once the IPO is over.

As for an IPO cap, we simply have no idea how much is a good idea. We'd rather leave it open and see what happens.

Quote from: vitarian on March 21, 2014, 10:38:01 PM

Can we just jump to thread 4 and skip all the crap in between? Huh

We are sorry, we would have liked to do that, but the best way to make an IPO as « fair » as possible is to have people be aware of it. The more people know about the coin before the IPO starts, the less people will be scorned by not having heard of Spark before it was too late.

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About anonimity

Quote from: jesor on March 22, 2014, 03:12:43 PM

"3 professional developers who wish to remain anonymous"

THIS is what wrong with cryptos these days, everyone just hides behind some fake ID's, premine the shit out of stuff and abandon their coin once they made profit and just do it all over again under new usernames.

And even if there's no premine, you won't get any trust from people when you want to remain anonymous.

If you do not trust us because we decided to remain anonymous, we will undertsand it.

Anonimity is, for us, the one most important thing about cryptocurrencies. The true freedom to do whatever we want with our wallets and money without having anyone being able to trace us.

All three of the Spark developers work both professionally and personally on security and anonimity related projects, and believe that in the wake of current geopolitical events, anonimity is a very important concern. Whether you are a first world citizen concerned with the NSA issues, or a third world citizen trying to evade your government's grasp on currency, you need anonimity more than you think you do.

We are what we preach, and, as of such, will remain anonymous. I don't see people complaining about Satoshi or Sunny King being anonymous (which is a good thing), and we opted to do the same.

In the event that we stop supporting Spark, the community will be able to take over very easily, as the project will be open sourced in a public repository. There is no « premine » for us to dump, it would be extremely silly to distance ourselves from Spark right away after 4 months of hard work on it. Spark is our baby, and we'll help it grow into an adult.

Quote from: odin99 on March 21, 2014, 09:02:44 PM

q: have the devs worked on other coins, if so can we know which ones?

edit: and thanks for not calling it Sparkcoin....

The developer that came with the idea for Spark has worked on a previously unsuccessful, generic, and boring altcoin. Said altcoin is currently traded on Cryptsy. He is not proud of it.

The other two developers have no past experience in cryptocurrency, but were able to learn the trade quite fast.

We dislike the « coin » naming of every new currency these days, it would have hurt us to call our currency a coin when it is not physical.

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In closing

Post any further questions in this thread, and we will edit this post to include their answers if we believe they require one.

We have no date set for the IPO as we are still negociating the exact terms with our escrow, our current goal is to start it monday (tomorrow) if possible.

If you are confusedly trying to figure out what this thread is all about, then you have not followed the very first link in this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=525419

Thank you all for your interest in Spark. The future is now !

- The Spark team -