Is there any concrete thing being done to make HIRO more useful in the real world and thus create true value? Currently there is nothing that would make someone actually need HIRO as opposed to many other cryptocurrencies.
I'm really asking this out of legitimate interest, not to spread FUD, but let it be clear that being X11 does not count as something useful, there are dozens of other x11 coins by now and it never mattered if a random assortment of miners are coming here in the future
It is a good question, what can we do to make ourselves stick out?
I hope that some people take some solace in the fact that we just added a new unique feature in Hirocoin, the ability to import private keys from QR codes. This is a neat feature but it is niche, however it shows that we are earnest about developing Hirocoin and can stand out from the majority of coins that we see launched where the devs disappear soon after launch. In fact, as I have said before, if you are technical you can take a look at the effort put into launching this coin to see that a proper and complete job was done bringing this coin into existence more so than the other X11 coins that have some out, no offence Darkcoin, but even they forgot to do a lot of things before launch like change the alert keys, pchMessageStart, PROTOCOL_VERSION and so on. I helped out Darkcoin with this and added the makekeypair command so that Evan could generate new alert keys to avoid picking up alert from Litecoin. The point is that no one puts the effort that we have put into Hirocoin if we were not intending to be committed to its longevity.
So what do we do from here?
It is not easy to find the killer application for Hirocoin. Let's make sure that we are at least the best of breed. So if anyone sees a good feature elsewhere in crypto bring my attention to it as we want to have all the good features that are available. As for more unique features I think we need ideas on this front. The easy thing to do is keep up-to-date with Bitcoin by moving to the latest code base. I've not had much interest on moving to the 0.9 codebase but it is on my agenda anyway.
Let's not only move to the latest code base and take the best but let's find other unique features to develop. The fact is that Bitcoin does what the majority of other coins offer, what needs to happen to secure our longevity and market success is find an area to move into that Bitcoin cannot follow. Something that for whatever reason Bitcoin would not be interested in being used for. If we can find an area to segment into and then rule it then that is how we win long term.
To start with we set ourselves to exist in a GPU only segment. So that all of those GPU miners who have to find another solution have one in us. Darkcoin is doing very well but as said before they have the inverse difficulty reward. So the more people that mine Darkcoin the lower the reward. This makes for an odd inflation model and one would guess that this is a indirect bid for scarcity. We have no such feature so hope to be a better choice for miners. We are yet to see the true impact of Scrypt ASICs but that time is coming soon. I remember well what the impact of SHA-256 ASICs had for Litecoin when the GPU miners had to migrate. Litecoin went from 2 cents to several dollars and never looked back. There is only a couple of months now before we will see the Scrypt ASICs come out, it is going to be a very interesting time.
If you know of a good feature or have in your mind a feature that does not yet exist then please let me know. We can make this happen and for new features it can happen with Hirocoin first like the import QR code feature. I am optimistic about what Hirocoin will be able to achieve long term.