Quote from: smooth on May 23, 2014, 03:46:10 AM

I'm perplexed at you how think a premine of 80% at release is only "marginally" worse than say Monero, which won't be 80% mined for about 4 years and which has only been mined about 4% so far. I don't know when you draw the line between early participants though. I kind of think that everyone involved with bitcoin now is an "early participant."

Well, for example, say you have a 100% "premine" coin, but most of it gets sold for a grand total of a few bitcoins.. and then sold again and again, gradually gaining value. Sure the person upfront at an "unfair" advantage but who cares if it was just to the tune of a couple of bitcoins? and if they put in the work to really create something original and innovative it's well earned.

Something doesn't gain real sticky value except with trade, you can't premine 100% and then expect it to be magically valuable. So asking if something is fair or not is more complicated than asking just about how much was premined or how fast the early release was. For all we know huge chunks of that large early mining may show up as donations and bounties driving innovation in the ecosystem and between that and the speculative trading of zillions of worthless coins ultimately resulting in a more equitable distribution than even the best tuned mining lottery would give. (Sadly, the forking diminishes the marginal return of this kind of activity, since ecosystem developments will also benefit the forks, making perhaps more rational to sit back and hope the forks fund that work instead).

It isn't immediately obvious to me that some of the BCN forks are inherently more fair, they may well be, but a lot of that depends on how the overall economy plays out. Right now, however, the differential profit to me mining bcn today vs four weeks ago is far far smaller than for say monero. One complicating bit is that the privacy of the system doesn't even let reliably you know if coins being moved are recently created coins churning or if its old coins moving.

Basically the mining lottery is only one element to fair distribution and its inherently limited because it is biased towards experienced altcoin early miners, computation thieves, etc. in an active economy trade tends to spread out the profits from asset appreciation, and other things like donations and bounties stemming from concentrations of wealth can further the process. Right now the forks argument is that the mining is more fair, but even more fair is pretty substantially unfair. How it all plays out is anyones guess, I think.

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I like your slow-start launch ideas though. If I'm ever involved with another coin launch those ideas will likely be used.

Feel free to seek my input I can't resist running my mouth even if I think the whole enterprise is ill-advised you might be able to extract something useful.

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or set things up so that sketchy deoptimizations games were needed sketchy deoptimizations games were needed.

Sketchy deoptimization games were never needed. The original code could have been released in at least a some baseline efficient form (e.g. not doing massive recalculations inside a loop for no reason). It is hard to know you've released something that still can't be optimized in some clever way, but the obvious stuff? No excuse other than pure sketch here.

I did call it sketchy for a reason.

But at the same time I think it's reasonable and proper that the creators of the system actually do profit from it some (at least if anyone is!) one problem with cryptocurrency launches seems to be that as soon as you launch it people with botnets and other stolen resources immediately begin mining the hell out of it and if there is an explicit 'premine' people fork and yank it out. I do not begrudge the creators of a system feeling they're owed _some_ payoff, the question is how to get it in a way that is actually _viable_ even before you ask for fairness.

One of the criteria that I think is a requirement for an acceptable POW function is that it be largely "optimization free" that is that the public implementation(s) are as close to the best implementations possible. Without being confident this criteria is met an attacker can gain an advantage. From that perspective its important that the released one be good. OTOH, you're simply not entitled to demand people give away the software they wrote for themselves especially when they're already giving you so much. Keeping some better mining code for yourself for a little while is crappy but it might be one of the more ethical viable ways to ensure compensation. I think, for example, that it's more ethical than encouraging unsophisticated investors to "buy in" to something that exists only as a white paper and maybe a couple tech demos a technique used by some altcoin proposals as of late.

Being able to fund infrastructure development in this space is still an open question. I think the general model of using altcoin launches to do this is not sustainable (for one, more currencies just dillutes network effect, hurting everyone and too much of the value goes out to lucky speculators instead of the people creating the technology... plus the supply of hopeful suckers will eventually dry up). So I'm willing to have an open mind about different approaches people used, even though I'm personally a bit uncomfortable with anything that could be seen as compromising the integrity of the software. My tolerance for approaches is weighed by how interesting the tech is. I give bytecoin more slack than I'd give most altcoins because it has actually done some very innovative things, and it's not just a white paper but a usable system released as MIT licensed code, not hype. Relatively speaking no matter how unfair BCN's initial distribution might turn out to be once the economy takes effect, I think it's inherently more fair than the many coins that never deliver anything interesting while sucking a lot of coins out of people on the basis of a bunch of promises. Bytecoin added value to the world, maybe some of the forks will add value by improving on the flaws in bytecoin's relesase I thank that remains to be seen. If everyone benefits then I think splitting too many hairs about some people benefiting a bit more than some others may be short sighted, but it does depend on how the economy plays out.

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I'm not quite sure how to respond to this except to say that you may well be on the wrong thread. First of all, the designers of BCN don't even seem to be here at all unless it is in the form of some sock puppet (I even doubt that). Second, while the Monero thread has its share of speculators, pumpers and FUDsters (apparently on a mission from the DRK side), we actually have quite interesting technical discussions over there. The Boolberry thread does as well. I can't speak for the others.

Well that wasn't directed at you. Ignore my whining if you like. Tongue

I'm just sad to see how short sighted people are sometimes, it isn't everyone. I'll probably show in the Monero thread once I've successfully mined a block there, hard to use it until I have some to play with.