Do you really need a new cryptocurrency for this? I thought about how to build StorJ many times and at no point did I never need anything more than standard Bitcoin as it exists today.
You don't _technically_. But it is a very good way of funding a decentralized protocol economically. I personally think the ugliness to benefit ratio here is several orders of magnitude lower than something like proprietary software, mandatory fees or, satoshi cyber christ forbid, DRM.
I've thought about this a bit too, my idea for funding it would be to own most of the nodes at launch. So the developers start off with a monopoly, and as the the community grows, more competition is added.
Edit: obviously this would work better if you developed privately and then released the code at launch
I want people to use the node software for many different uses, and expand upon it. If I lock it up and have a monopoly, where is the innovation in that? The competition comes from people improving the base software, and running it themselves.
What do you mean? This is pretty close to the bitcoin model. When Satoshi started running the bitcoin network, who else was mining? It was just him. Perhaps "monopoly" was a poor choice of words, call it a "head start".
Because you won't have any benefit from low difficulty like he did, I'm suggesting you have a lot of storage infrastructure ready the day you release. After that, anyone else will be free to enter, but if it's anything like bitcoin mining, it will take some time before you have any competition.
The downside, is of course, there's no guarantee you'll have enough customers to get paid before the competition gets online. That's more of a marketing problem that's outside my area of expertise.
Anyway, it was just an idea, feel free to ignore it if it doesn't suit you.
I met you at Texas Bitcoin Conference. Your project is so amazing.
Will you be doing proof-of-burn against bitcoin for initial distribution of coins?
Why not use slasher for your blockchain?
http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/
When will I be able to buy StorJcoins?
No, neither are particularly useful on our case. Our prototype coins + a storage application will be launch very soon.Will you be doing proof-of-burn against bitcoin for initial distribution of coins?
Why not use slasher for your blockchain?
http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/
When will I be able to buy StorJcoins?