Damn it's back up to 8k now? I should have bought some when it was at 3k. Missed opportunity.

If you don't understand coding then you just won't understand why delays like this can happen very easily. Does anyone remember how Windows 98 was supposed to be called Windows 97?

I think he has that handled, I've been asking if anyone could help me get a faucet up and running though.

Neither the release of screenshots and confirmation that BitKey indeed isn't vapourware increased faith in the dev, and caused a number of people in increase their stake, thus causing the price rise to 10K, but hitting that mark also allowed certain people to sell either at a profit or without taking a loss, people who've decided to give up and move on, or who possibly bought a large chunk at 6K and made themselves a handsome profit selling at 10K. thus the price drop.

Overall trading volume is still so low that these things are able to have such a large impact on the market, it's part of why we desperate need to get into another exchange.

With hopefully more regular update of progress however confidence should continue to grow and that will be reflected with a slow increase in price and gain in trading volume.

afaik it will be integrated in 2.0. The way BitKey operates right now is that it is a standalone application, it doesn't interact with any of the existing opensource code. Or at least that was my best understanding from what I was told, as a lay person I don't necessarily understand all the technical stuff even when it's explained to me.

Great work Bitsta.

Guys I did promise you a screenshot. Sorry I took an extra couple of days, Bitsta really is a very busy guy.

Well first I can't speak for Bitsta, second I have no idea what "promovated" means, third, that message is a good couple of weeks old, I had a discussion with Bitsta about Bitkey like 3 days ago where I stressed to him to importance and testing it to death, and he agreed. An IT engineer can check your code, but code is what they know. Bitsta is a good coder, pulling in another good coder to check his work is a good idea but think about it like this, imagine his code is designed to destroy any trace of your DNA. A second coder reviews the code and the operation and concludes that indeed there is no trace of Bitsta's DNA. A third expert comes in, doesn't even look for DNA, after 5 minutes he traces Bitsta to where he's hiding, Bitsta says, how did you find me I destroyed all he DNA, and the guy says, "shoeprint".

Okay it's a crappy analogy but my point is if it's going to be bullet proof it has to be tested by people who don't think like a software engineer.

That's not my department, right now I just want someone who can help me get a faucet running. I ought to still remember enough from my webdesign days to get a frontend up, I had hoped a very generic php/perl type script would have been written I could install in cpanel, tweak a few settings and off it'd go, but from the limited research I've done it seems that while there is open source code out there adapting it to a new coin requires actually changing code and compiling it. I'm after someone who can do that. This is just my pet project to try and help stir up a little more interest in the coin.

So don't need, coding revolutionary new anon-tech skills, just knows a little php / their way around linux skills. I am a windows power user, or as they say in the linux world "an idiot". As far as I'm aware Bitsta isn't looking for help with coding, or no more than he has. 

ICG has been refunded, it was confirmed this morning.

Does anyone else in this community have any coding skills? If so please fire me a PM.

Also at some point in the not too distant future I imagine we're going to be needing someone with some forensic accounting skills, if anyone fits that bill or you know someone who does, Bitkey is going to need to be tested by someone who knows all the tricks of tracing a transaction through the blockchain. So please step forward, I can't speak for the project in any official capacity but I'm sure a reasonable bounty can be arranged for such work.

On a personal note I know it is a complete pain in the ass not getting updated on what's going on, things are happening behind the scenes, I know some things I'm not allowed to tell you. I am trying to push for greater transparency, I am lobbying for him to post some screenshots / code snippets. I wish I could explain to you what the problem is but I feel like I'd be revealing some privileged information by doing so. Please I know taking my word for it is no better than StudioOne's or Bitsta's but he really is a good coder, and the tech behind Bitkey is sound. Hang in there guys, If you can afford to buy more root than you should, at it's current price it's a steal.

Also if you guys want to do something to help, please everyone lobby the other major exchanges to get us added. BitKey will unfortunately take as long as it takes (that's really what Bitsta should have and realises he should have said in the beginning) in the mean time, we need to try and avoid disappearing into obscurity, so those of you who actually believe in the tech, believe in the mission statement of a secure and anonymous internet for the people, and those of you who just want to see a 1000% gain on your investment, it takes a team to keep a coin alive in its early stages, do what you can to help, rather than just sitting here waiting for updates. BitKey will come, it would help the coin a lot if Bittrex wasn't the only major market the coin was on when it drops, that single market is far too easy to manipulate, and I don't want the whales and fudders making their fortune on root and potentially destroying a revolutionary coin before it gets a fair shake.

In fact I tell you what, There'll be no way to prove who delivered the final blow, but everyone who tweets, emails, votes, or otherwise lobbies one or more of the major exchanges to add root, post proof of doing so in this thread and when we get added, I'll stick everyone's name in a hat and someone will get 500 root. Personally from me.

So couple of thoughts and ideas, first of all why has still no one made a faucet, do they just not work for raising awareness any more? I've said I'd be glad to do it myself if someone can point me at some plug and play code, the closest I fund still required editing source code to change the coin and compiling and that's a bit beyond my technical skill unfortunately. At least not without a lot of reading. The referral program could be a good idea, but I think a faucet makes sense too. the referral program is intended to get people interested in investing and holding (of course we really need to be showing steady growth for that to happen) but from the other like of attack if we gave a million people half a root each then most of them would just want to turn it into something spendable, but that would boost trade volume and more importantly we'd have a million people all sending messages to bitstamp, kraken, cryptsy, btc-e etc all asking them why they can't sell their rootcoin.

launching on a new exchange is just the pickup we need to get the coin unstuck from the mud, to bring in new people who haven't gotten jaded from the waiting and delays.

Another thought I had is why not release an option (not mandatory) or an ad-supported wallet which pays a higher interest rate, the 3% for staking would still be the same, but say 80% of the ad revenue is paid in root to people using the wallet, the rest towards fund for bounties and marketing and the like. I realise ads won't mean much if there's no reason to look at the wallet but if you throw in a couple of other generic useful functions like an exchange ticker, and I don't know, other people can probably come up with suggestions. Not that I think Bitsta should be taking his attention off BitKey to do this but if we have someone else on the team who could make basic modifications to the wallet.

We all need to pull together and work together to make this coin the revolution we all know it can be.

At some point I'd really like you to properly explain the anon tech to me. I think something we could really do with to stir up noise is a nice youtube video explaining it, which I could probably help with except that even having read the whitepaper I don't get it. I had figured that you used the staked coins as a pool for mixing but you make no mention of doing this. it seems like all your system does is bypass the blockchain, but to maintain the integrity of the blockchain you can't have coins simply disappear or come into existence, so even with no direct link between the two addresses, I'm not sure how you are going to avoid tracing through basic auditing methods. e.g. you don't know the destination address but you know the amount and the time sent, and can then find a new address on the blockchain which has that exact amount, created at that time.

I'm pretty sure I know how to avoid this, by like I say, using the staked funds to fill the new address and exchanging some address and signature information via a TOR routed, encrypted P2P tunnel but you don't mention anything like this.

Another option would be to bundle transactions onto the blockchain, so BitKey waits for 20 people to send transactions, collects all that money up into a single address, and then sends out the correct amounts to multiple different addresses and broadcasts that list of all those addresses to everyone receiving funds. At the same time bitkey then transmits the private key for each address to the correct recipient, possible proxying it through the sender, the end result being that each receiver tries to open every wallet and only has the priv key for the correct one.

If either of these approaches are used, or something similar or something completely different I'd really like to know.

I have concerns about a few things. (i.e. if all bitkey really does if effectively maintain a second set of books, then it could potentially be exploited)

I'm pretty sure I know how I would build this system, the fact that the blockchain is public and distributed to everyone can actually be advantageous since it's the perfect medium for for exchanging PGP-style information, that is a very powerful tool.

Ugh voting on bter is a pain, I have to open an account and hold a certain balance which of course almost all my money is in root, which I can't transfer in, at the moment I barely have any use for a bter account.

I've been trying to look at setting up a faucet but as soon as the searches for instructions just lead back to some sourcecode on github I'm lost. how no one just built like a php script that you can plug in any coin's wallet, get it up on hosting and be done? My thought was that if we could set up a faucet maybe some of us would be willing to donate our earnings from staking to a faucet. I don't know if there's a simple or automated way to do that but possibly a slight code tweak from Bitsta could fix that. We ideally ought to be able to redirect staking rewards to another address.

This leads me to an interesting thought / question would it be possible to have a service like an exchange that rather than charging fees is funded from staking the coins you hold with them?

Err Other thoughts on promotions, can we scrounge up a list of somewhat influential people with an interest in tech and/or particularly cryptocurrencies that we can send gifts of rootcoin to? We'd need a way to give them the private keys for  the addresses we generated for them, umm is there any way to do that? Like a way to send a message to someone that can only be unlocked using a person's twitter account?

Also we should create some sort of scavenger hunt type competition with a number of bounties and/or the chance to win a ticket for a prize draw for a large prize like 10,000 root. Make some of the scavenger hunt questions require people to have to do research on cryptos and specifically root coin, so that anyone who want to try and win some free money has to learn how promising root coin is. But also obviously make it fun.

I think it would be massively abused by people referring themselves (it's not like we can check ID) and after 2 weeks or so, we'd suffer the effects of a high percentage of people dumping all their coins, it would all depend on just what percentage of people became interested enough to hold onto their investment and keep staking it. I don't know how many we'd have to keep, 30% maybe? for it to be an overall gain for the network. I think the numbers you suggested are a bit too generous, people referring themselves would gain 10% which would allow them up to that margin for selling at a loss and still making a profit.

I'd rather any kind of benefit like that be paid in small sums over at least a couple of months, or longer (maybe 6 or 12), more like an introductory rate on PoS like you might get when opening a savings account.

Please will you consider pushing back the final date to invest in rootEX, I doubt I'm the only person who was waiting to see how rootcoin and BitKey faired before making a final decision on if / how much to invest. I also have so much sunk into root and don't want to have to dump a significant amount of that while it's still a such a low price to fund my investment in rootEX, I was very much hoping to make a tidy profit on rootcoin so that i could reinvest. RootEX could be very promising and likely a good investment but I'm loathed to live off my credit card for nothing but promises, even if the beta of rootEX launches on time, it's just another market and nothing guarantees it'll be used or make a profit without the various integrations and the rest of the root network.

The buy in for rootEX is supposed to be closing in a few days but roadmap wise, BitKey should have been out around a week ago, we should have launched on cryptsy and BTC-E (and possibly others) by now and the price should have hit 30Ksat. These things haven't happened so if you want me (and I'm sure some others) to seriously consider investing in rootEX, you need to give us more time, at least a couple of weeks as the BitKey launch, even if you have to extend the private beta for rootEX we want to see evidence of success and of delivering on promises. Everyone repeatedly says that Bitsta is a good dev with a good track record, but IMO you're only as good as your last project, it's fine and good saying that you've help with other coins and written some good bits of code but root is a very ambitious project, and you need to show us you can hack it (cope with the workload / demand).


I debated posting this publicly because I really don't want to add the the FUD or give the suggestion that I don't have confidence in Bitsta but there's no point just sounding like a fanboy all the time either and I didn't think I'd get a reply to a private message. While I do have confidence it is about tapped out at the $800 - $1000 I have sunk in rootcoin. That might not seem like much money to some people but it's a heck of a lot to me.

Gah c'mon already are we ever going to break 13K again? We're back below 12 yet again, which I wouldn't mind if I had any money to buy any more coins, but I already have plenty invested. BTW is the "transporter" anon-tech in BTCD actually implemented yet or is it still basically what root is, i.e. just another altcoin with promised features? If I wanted to make an anon transaction today what options would I have besides pouring my bitcoins through a mixer? DRK presumably but anything else? Would buying DRK with my bitcoins, and then transferring them to another wallet and selling them back for bitcoins via another account on an exchange created with an anon email account and via a proxy / TOR, before then transferring them out into another bitcoin wallet, be enough to completely obfuscate the origin and ownership of the bitcoins?

And presumably doing the same thing with root, once BitKey is released?

BTW Bitsta, I don't know if this was in your original plan or not, but once rootEX is launched, an option built into the rootcoin wallet to send an anonymous payment to anyone in virtually any coin using your rootcoin balance would be really useful. So it will use a BitKey transaction to exchange the coins at the best possible rate on rootEX, and then deposit them in a newly created wallet in the cloud (or via some sort of p2p network), with no link back to your IP address, before then sending them onto the final destination (and any change into another wallet which can then be retrieved - perhaps adding a slight randomised fee so that someone can't try and do the math to trace to origin) all automatically / transparently. So that I can pay people in bitcoin (because lets face it, the chance of widespread acceptance of rootcoin, at least in the near future is fairly low) but keep my balance in root, earning my nice 3%.

In fact exchange-neutral would be even better, obviously rootEX FTW but it'd be nice if it was capable of supporting multiple exchanges to find the best possible price for the given volume and how long you're willing to wait (i.e. if you need to send the bitcoin now then you obviously have to exchange at whatever price someone has offered to pay for root at the volume you're exchanging, rather than if it's not urgent you can set a sell price based on the best recent price, or even extrapolate a price based on the current trend.)
It's probably a big coding job but it would make the wallet really something very special, the ability to transparently pay in bitcoin and it be completely secure and anonymous would be incredibly useful, and I think very popular. I think BTCD does something similar, or is supposed to, I'm not sure if it's implemented or just promised, I haven't downloaded the wallet to see what's possible, but obviously mobile and/or on line versions are necessary for everyday transactions.

Assuming rootcoin is a success BTCD is going to be your primary competition I would imagine, something is going to knock litecoin off its second place spot.

I often get annoyed at how difficult it is to follow best practice, I am incredibly lazy and almost always forgo best practice for convenience. I know I should use PGP email but it's a pain in the ass, and no body else bloody uses it. It doesn't matter that I'm not talking about anything that particularly needs to be kept secret, it still ought to be private unless I expressly chose for something to be public but you can't send people encrypted email because all they get is a jumble of non-sense and refuse to install the software / learn how to decrypt it. So I end up sending everything plaintext because it's convenient/ necessary.

And the same goes for spending, I hardly ever use cash, I put everything on plastic, because it's incredibly convenient, not only that I don't have to anticipate how much money I'll need and then carry it around with me where it can be easily stolen, but also because I don't have to remember / write stuff down to audit my finances. I just log into online banking and I know that £30 was spent at the supermarket, and that £7.99 was spent at Netflix etc. But I really don't like the idea that every government agency in the world and who knows what private companies also know exactly how much I spend when and where, especially when they having information like whether it was a customer present transaction or not, I realise it's useful for fraud prevention, but the fact that swiping my credit card somewhere means that the government knows exactly where I am at that exact moment is just downright creepy. So best practice would be money that spends even more anonymously than cash (there's no CCTV of you physically handing cash to someone) but that has an encrypted "my eyes only" transaction log that is as good/informative as my credit card statement.

It is my hope that widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies will make that a reality.

Incidentally is anyone else expecting a rise in the price of bitcoin after the announcement from Apple yesterday about allowing the blockchain app back onto the app store. I know it's been back a while, but the fact that it was mentioned in the context of NFC being included on the iPhone 6 and the iWatch and support not just for secure mobile payments but for a cross platform standard. This to me spells big things for bitcoin, if a player like Apple puts the infrastructure in place for widespread acceptance of bitcoin transactions via NFC (possibly via some kind of throwaway virtual credit card number) then it could suddenly lead to bitcoin becoming very commonplace. Of course the news that would blow bitcoin through the roof (like back over the $1000 mark) would be paypal announcing they're launching / integrating their own bitcoin exchange. That's the news i'm waiting for, I think it'll happen, I think they'll charge a processing fee of enough to be able to insure transactions as they do now, without the possibility of being able to issue credit card chargebacks, but the ability to pay in bitcoin to anyone who accepts paypal would be huge, I think people would happily pay a 3% fee, which is what visa / mastercard charge anyway and paypal would get to totally bypass them. The government would love it too since they'd be able to get the transaction data from paypal for regulation / tax purposes. The only way they'll ever be able to regulate cryptos is at the point where you exchange them for fiat, and this would be a single, huge, easily subpoenable entity that would get a massive slice of the pie all in one go.

Okay so I've gone waaaay off topic, but it's more interesting than people just whining at the dev / asking for updates isn't it?

This is anonimisation technology, any bug in the code could potentially result in people getting DOXed with disastrous consequences. So getting solid code is kinda fundamental, I'd rather a slight delay than a flawed release.

I think I screwed up the staking by trying to tidy up my coins, I moved my smaller amounts of coins to one single address hoping it would fix the dust issue but I guess even though it's the same wallet it looks to the system that I moved my oldest coins to a new address and thus they are no longer 'aged' (although I shouldn't have been able to move coins that were being staked??) I really don't understand this whole PoS thing.

I have to see it seems like there is useful information missing from the wallet, Like I can only see how much money each address has if I got to the advance send page. and Nothing mentions the age or maturity of a coin or collection of coins. I expect this is something that can be seen from the block explorer? Although I haven't figure out how yet.. and err information is getting a bit spread out now, maybe a wiki would be useful, I'm sure I read that coins start to age at 4 hours, what is their maximum age? (and if someone could convert that to like, so 1 day old coins earn 1%, 30 day old coins earn 3% type terminology that'd be really handy.

Finally Bitsta I know feature requests maybe be a bit late at this point, you've already hardforked once, (personally I thing 5% would be a better PoS rewards but I'll live, but I'd like to suggest as a further incentive to hoard, that you include some kind of lottery, kinda like premium bonds in the UK if you're familiar with that) I'm not quite sure how you'd accomplish it, I know lottocoin used a random block reward for mining, I don't know if you can use the same thing for minting, because I assume that a single person doesn't find a "block" in the same sense with PoS. But some system where you earn your 3% but also ever time you mint a coin you have a random chance of minting anywhere from 10 - 10,000 root and obviously the more you're staking the more virtual tickets you have.

I'm not sure how it would eventually be funded but I assume at least for now with cutting of PoW early, that your numbers are now short of the 3 mil mark anyway.

Can someone explain this to me? a couple of the mintings have confirmed but most of them are saying "Generated but not accepted" What does that mean when it comes to PoS no one else has the same coins right? Does PoS still do the whole finding blocks thing?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7949294/2014-09-07%20-%2005.37.51%20%7E%20capture.png

Okay I'm minting, can someone explain this dummies style to me, it's 3% per year right? cos I have a lot of transactions coming in right now, and immediately I'm noticing 2 things, first there's a lot a dust, tons of very tiny transactions, what's causing this? is it because I have amy money in several addresses in my wallet instead of just one? second some of the transactions are for reasonable amounts, like 0.25 root, which seems like a lot if we're talking 3% per year, maybe someone can explain the math to me cos I am really dumb on these things.

now 9258 and I've just withdrawn another 2k from bittrex to my wallet. I still have enough on there for playing around with. Geez if root kits 100k sat and I sell everything I'm holding at that price I'll make about £10,000 which would be pretty fricken sweet.

Not that I would dump everything (at least not all at once). But It'd be nice to recoup my initial investment and make a couple of btc to invest into rootEX

Edit: oooh 9300 can anyone tell me what those numbers mean in real terms? PoS is 3% a year right? which isn't exactly a fortune, although a better interest rate than my bank. Still with the instability oh altcoins it's not like it's something that right now you'd want to leave your savings in. That's the problem with PoS I think. It's such a small reward for holding onto large chunks of something exceedingly volatile, in theory it's fine but in practice until an alt coin proves to be at least as stable as btc and preferably a lot more, no one is going to want to keep hold of much of it for too long.