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Re: [BTC-TC] CIPHERMINE.B1 - a virtual corporate bond with a 22% fixed-fiat APR
I note that CIPHERMINE shareholders received dividends yesterday.
Now that Kate is back I would expect that CIPHERMINE.B1 bondholders are due to receive all interest payments since the last one (which my records suggest was late October).
Now that Kate is back I would expect that CIPHERMINE.B1 bondholders are due to receive all interest payments since the last one (which my records suggest was late October).
According to the client I use for sending the dividends, the last payment was on 24/11/2013 at 21:19. If you're referring to the last payment via BTC-TC, we moved to paying direct when it closed down (first direct being the 26th October). Those direct payments were sent to your public withdrawal address, as set on BTC-TC. As issuers we just got a list of email address, number of shares and public withdrawal address - that is why I asked everyone many times, both here and via the messaging facility on BTC-TC to set their public withdrawal address (which was separate to the main withdrawal address on the site - specifically for use by issuers post-closedown).
Kate.
Not sure what's happening with Ciphermine.B1 - but if Kate's paying dividends to Ciphermine then it looks like it may be a scam. I say that because common-sense suggests Ciphermine is making a huge loss (its liabilities - denominated in BTC - are rising far faster than it can conceivably be mining coins). If she's pretending its making a profit and paying dividends, hence increasing the extent to which it has negative equity, then that is defrauding bold-honders (paying dividends to equity holders when unable to service debt is basically fraud/theft). The conflict of interest I referred to previously (in respect of me becoming invovled in her exchange) was basically that point - that it would be unwise for me to increase financial links with her with the likelihood of me having to initiate civil and/or criminal proceedings against her in respect of the bonds.
As I have stated multiple times in the past, we cannot pay the CIPHERMINE.B1 dividends because the size of the smallest dividend (ie. one one hundred thousandth of EUR 340 in BTC), even with the amassed amount over the last few months, is below the minimum transaction limit. A quote from CIPHERMINE.B1's thread:
Quote
Apologies for both my absence (I have been very unwell) and for the lack of dividends. Unfortunately the siutation has not changed since I last updated you about it; the smallest dividend payment is still below the "dust" level / minimum transaction size level for the bitcoin network, and I therefore cannot send an aggregated payment. We have many single bondholders and even with an aggregated balance of several BTC now, one hundred thousandth of a few BTC is below the minimum transaction size which will be accepted by the network. This will not be a problem once they are on CipherTrade, but for the time being we're a bit scuppered.
For the time being please consider CIPHEMINE.B1 to be frozen. However, the dividends will still be paid and are being sequestered safely. They are still calculated based on the 30 day weighted moving average price (ie. you get more when BTC is rising, as it generally has been in recent months). I do have a conundrum now though in terms of how to keep the dividends now that I've simplified our approach re. CIPHERMINE divi calcs (ie. the BitStamp account gets completely emptied). Currently the CIPHERMINE.B1 divis are BTC in a cold wallet, which has been good for investors thus far but I understand that increases your risk.
I cannot do anything else right now, but CipherTrade is poised to launch after many delays so it will get resolved soon I promise.
However, should you wish to give us 3 months notice to redeem the bonds then please email bonds@ciphermine.com. The email must come from the email address associated with your old BTC-TC account. We will then send you a unique code to verify you do have possession of the account. Redemptions will only be made to the public withdrawal address associated with your BTC-TC account.
For the time being please consider CIPHEMINE.B1 to be frozen. However, the dividends will still be paid and are being sequestered safely. They are still calculated based on the 30 day weighted moving average price (ie. you get more when BTC is rising, as it generally has been in recent months). I do have a conundrum now though in terms of how to keep the dividends now that I've simplified our approach re. CIPHERMINE divi calcs (ie. the BitStamp account gets completely emptied). Currently the CIPHERMINE.B1 divis are BTC in a cold wallet, which has been good for investors thus far but I understand that increases your risk.
I cannot do anything else right now, but CipherTrade is poised to launch after many delays so it will get resolved soon I promise.
However, should you wish to give us 3 months notice to redeem the bonds then please email bonds@ciphermine.com. The email must come from the email address associated with your old BTC-TC account. We will then send you a unique code to verify you do have possession of the account. Redemptions will only be made to the public withdrawal address associated with your BTC-TC account.
However, given DMS's large stake in CIPHERMINE.B1 and given that you've now reappeared, Deprived, I am willing to process those dividends manually. This offer is not extended to any other bondholders, sorry (there are too many). Also, if you'd actually been around and answering emails sooner D I'd have offered this to you directly sooner as well, but your email account appeared to be a black hole so I didn't bother.
Deprived, it is good to have you back, but frankly I'm astonished that someone of your caliber would cast such aspersions without checking the facts!
Further, CIPHERMINE.B1 and CIPHERMINE dividends are quite separate. We are making a profit under CIPHERMINE since that is based on what we mine, not what our outstanding liabilities are on our balance sheet! The only P&L cost associated with the bonds are the interest payments, which have been deducted from mining profits and, as mentioned above, have been safely sequestered away until such a time as we can pay them out.
Kate.
PS. For your convenience I've uploaded a PDF of the BTC-TC "contract" page for CIPHERMINE.B1, here. Unfortunately I did not forsee the possibility of the exchange failing/closing combined with this bloody minimum transaction limit getting in the way. In the circumstances we're doing the best we can (ie. building a new exchange so that your securities will be liquid again!). The entirety of the funds were spent on mining hardware, as planned.
Re: [BTC-TC] CIPHERMINE.B1 - a virtual corporate bond with a 22% fixed-fiat APR
Dear All,
Apologies for both my absence (I have been very unwell) and for the lack of dividends. Unfortunately the siutation has not changed since I last updated you about it; the smallest dividend payment is still below the "dust" level / minimum transaction size level for the bitcoin network, and I therefore cannot send an aggregated payment. We have many single bondholders and even with an aggregated balance of several BTC now, one hundred thousandth of a few BTC is below the minimum transaction size which will be accepted by the network. This will not be a problem once they are on CipherTrade, but for the time being we're a bit scuppered.
For the time being please consider CIPHEMINE.B1 to be frozen. However, the dividends will still be paid and are being sequestered safely. They are still calculated based on the 30 day weighted moving average price (ie. you get more when BTC is rising, as it generally has been in recent months). I do have a conundrum now though in terms of how to keep the dividends now that I've simplified our approach re. CIPHERMINE divi calcs (ie. the BitStamp account gets completely emptied). Currently the CIPHERMINE.B1 divis are BTC in a cold wallet, which has been good for investors thus far but I understand that increases your risk.
I cannot do anything else right now, but CipherTrade is poised to launch after many delays so it will get resolved soon I promise.
However, should you wish to give us 3 months notice to redeem the bonds then please email bonds@ciphermine.com. The email must come from the email address associated with your old BTC-TC account. We will then send you a unique code to verify you do have possession of the account. Redemptions will only be made to the public withdrawal address associated with your BTC-TC account.
Kate.
PS. For your convenience I've uploaded a PDF of the BTC-TC "contract" page for CIPHERMINE.B1, here. Unfortunately I did not forsee the possibility of the exchange failing/closing combined with this bloody minimum transaction limit getting in the way. In the circumstances we're doing the best we can (ie. building a new exchange so that your securities will be liquid again!). The entirety of the funds were spent on mining hardware, as planned.
Apologies for both my absence (I have been very unwell) and for the lack of dividends. Unfortunately the siutation has not changed since I last updated you about it; the smallest dividend payment is still below the "dust" level / minimum transaction size level for the bitcoin network, and I therefore cannot send an aggregated payment. We have many single bondholders and even with an aggregated balance of several BTC now, one hundred thousandth of a few BTC is below the minimum transaction size which will be accepted by the network. This will not be a problem once they are on CipherTrade, but for the time being we're a bit scuppered.
For the time being please consider CIPHEMINE.B1 to be frozen. However, the dividends will still be paid and are being sequestered safely. They are still calculated based on the 30 day weighted moving average price (ie. you get more when BTC is rising, as it generally has been in recent months). I do have a conundrum now though in terms of how to keep the dividends now that I've simplified our approach re. CIPHERMINE divi calcs (ie. the BitStamp account gets completely emptied). Currently the CIPHERMINE.B1 divis are BTC in a cold wallet, which has been good for investors thus far but I understand that increases your risk.
I cannot do anything else right now, but CipherTrade is poised to launch after many delays so it will get resolved soon I promise.
However, should you wish to give us 3 months notice to redeem the bonds then please email bonds@ciphermine.com. The email must come from the email address associated with your old BTC-TC account. We will then send you a unique code to verify you do have possession of the account. Redemptions will only be made to the public withdrawal address associated with your BTC-TC account.
Kate.
PS. For your convenience I've uploaded a PDF of the BTC-TC "contract" page for CIPHERMINE.B1, here. Unfortunately I did not forsee the possibility of the exchange failing/closing combined with this bloody minimum transaction limit getting in the way. In the circumstances we're doing the best we can (ie. building a new exchange so that your securities will be liquid again!). The entirety of the funds were spent on mining hardware, as planned.
Hey,
I love your service and have subscribed. Good work!
Only one thing bugs me though. The little lines at the end which give a snapshot of the order book are, IMHO, the wrong colours. The top one (sell bids) I think should be red (a large sell wall is generally considered bad), and the lower ones (the buy bids) should be green (again, a large buy wall is generally considered good - like a green candlestick indicating a rising market). At present the reverse is true.
It is possible that I've confused which line is which (I assessed that by comparing the shapes to current order books), but in that case the lines are in the wrong positions; the sell wall should be on the top (it is a ceiling) and the buy wall should be on the bottom (it is a floor).
Kate.
I love your service and have subscribed. Good work!
Only one thing bugs me though. The little lines at the end which give a snapshot of the order book are, IMHO, the wrong colours. The top one (sell bids) I think should be red (a large sell wall is generally considered bad), and the lower ones (the buy bids) should be green (again, a large buy wall is generally considered good - like a green candlestick indicating a rising market). At present the reverse is true.
It is possible that I've confused which line is which (I assessed that by comparing the shapes to current order books), but in that case the lines are in the wrong positions; the sell wall should be on the top (it is a ceiling) and the buy wall should be on the bottom (it is a floor).
Kate.
Re: Help us choose the 6th cryptocoin securities market for CIPHERTRADE
Pecunia non olet, your Majesty.
Quote
I advise your advisory board to be more agnostic and less judgmental, instead letting the market decide desirability of and assign legitimacy to coins.
4,500 BTC worth of Feathercoin changed hands today. Why let BTC-E alone reap those trading fees? Because of the 'ZOMG PUMP&DUMP SCAMCOIN' FUD common to all altcoins? That harms my interest as a shareholder and I object.
4,500 BTC worth of Feathercoin changed hands today. Why let BTC-E alone reap those trading fees? Because of the 'ZOMG PUMP&DUMP SCAMCOIN' FUD common to all altcoins? That harms my interest as a shareholder and I object.
You make a good point. From a business standpoint, we would be missing out on those high volumes. From the point of this thread also, we should be coming to it without prejudice.
Quote
Megacoin, despite being open-source as well, faces the exact same charges of premining and other forms of bad-faith. It has excelled regardless, now with a market cap of $45 million.
MEC has only very recently had its huge (200x) price increase. With an absence of any explanation of news that might have caused this, I find it concerning. It looks like a pump, in which case it will likely collapse to previous values and be among the masses once more.
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If Litecoin has a glorious future so does its little sister Feathercoin. Just as Litecoin is a backup for Bitcoin, Feathercoin provides Litecoin with hot swappable redundancy.
I just checked which cryptocoin clients I have installed. Only BTC, LTC and FTC. When I first jumped in, I absolutely agreed with you. Also, a more business-like approach to a coin is not in itself necessarily a negative; just innovation.
I would like there to be more transparency over FTC's activities though. Regardless, based on your eloquent argument I therefore hereby retract the blanket ban and will allow FTC to be judged on its merits.
Quote
As Ciphertrade's large marking budget attests, there's nothing wrong with commercial backing. Play time is over; the adults are arriving.
Megacoin's success springs from the same factors lifting Feathercoin: attention to translations, services, community, ease-of-use, aesthetics, and yes, marketing.
Megacoin's success springs from the same factors lifting Feathercoin: attention to translations, services, community, ease-of-use, aesthetics, and yes, marketing.
So there is real backing behind MEC? That changes my view since it ticks the #2 requirement. I'd like to understand more about it though since, like FTC, I don't think there is room for another LTC-based/pure scrypt coin.
Quote
If Feathercoin is PNG at Ciphertrade, Megacoin must be for the exact same #REASONS.
And so my vote changes to Quarkcoin, in order to sidestep this rabbit hole for the time being.
And so my vote changes to Quarkcoin, in order to sidestep this rabbit hole for the time being.
Hah!
Well that's +1 for Quark, bringing it to 3. FTC to 2 and MEC to 1. I'll edit the OP with some statsQuote
All hail Queen CipherKate of Bitopia! 
/em smiles benevolently at her wards and subjects
Re: Help us choose the 6th cryptocoin securities market for CIPHERTRADE
The top ICT in Britain uses "shill" and "troll"? Really? Respect decrease incoming...
What's wrong with an ICT entrepreneur using colloquial language? I am of the net generation. I have spent years in MMO's, chats etc. "Troll" is a clearly defined term.
As for "Shill", from the OED:
noun
noun: shill; plural noun: shills
1. an accomplice of a confidence trickster or swindler who poses as a genuine customer to entice or encourage others.
"I used to be a shill in a Reno gambling club"
Please can we get back to the topic? We genuinely want to include the community in the appropriate elements of the decision making for CipherTrade.
Kate.
This looks like an interesting method. I've been using Multiminer to bounce me from pool to pool, but a concentrated solution could be a better route.
I developer CIpherMiner to do that; a custom application that started out based on cryptoswitcher. It is now over 1,000 lines of Python - many many things to ensure smooth operation (it fully controls all our GPU rigs as well as trading the coins).
The issue is the sheer number of new coins coming up, and the fact that many of the pools to support them are unreliable. Manually signing up to many pools is time consuming. That's another reason we want to promote multipool.us - so Adam implements more scrypt coins as well and we don't have to actively manage the pools.
Kate.
Pointed my jupiter to your pool :-)
Any chance of lower mining fee? :-):-)
Any chance of lower mining fee? :-):-)
The fee should be 0% for everyone. THat's the sweetener - 0% until the end of the year. Are you sure you're paying more? If so I'll take it up with Adam.
CipherMine is paying 2% though, so subsidising this.
Kate.
Re: Help us choose the 6th cryptocoin securities market for CIPHERTRADE
- Kate (me, one of Britain's top ICT entrepreneurs)
You like to talk big about yourself don't you
Yep. I'm a classic narcissist in all ways. Vanity is perhaps my single biggest flaw! :/
Kate.
PS. I'm an awesome, unique genius. Deal with it.
Re: Help us choose the 6th cryptocoin securities market for CIPHERTRADE
Feathercoin, Megacoin, and Quarkcoin are all in the top 10 by market cap and worth of inclusion.
Of those, priority should be given to Feathercoin as it has the most active community and well developed user base, plus much higher trading volume than the other two.
Of those, priority should be given to Feathercoin as it has the most active community and well developed user base, plus much higher trading volume than the other two.
I'm afraid we have agreed to have a blanket ban on Feathercoin. Our advisory board does not believe it has a future. It is clearly a commercially-backed coin, not a product of the open source community. The strength of the order books are definitely artificial - they are too regular and too big. Also, there are many shills out there from what I can tell. Just hang out in the BTC-E Trollbox for a bit!
Megacoin is one I'd like to understand more. It has outperformed all other coins in terms of value this week (a 200x increase). But why? What is special about it?
I had not looked at Quark before. I thought it was just another scum coin. That looks very interesting indeed. A coin with a USP focused on security is definitely a niche. Of course there's the likes of Cryptogenic Bullion which strive to be extra-secure, but I don't think they have actually made any differences to the base scrypt coin other than increase the confirmations requirements.
Kate.
Hey guys.
Today we have formally announced that one of the crypto-security markets we are creating under CipherTrade will use Anoncoin as a based. For more info please see this thread.
Kate.
Today we have formally announced that one of the crypto-security markets we are creating under CipherTrade will use Anoncoin as a based. For more info please see this thread.
Kate.
Help us choose the 6th cryptocoin securities market for CIPHERTRADE
TL;DR
We're launching CipherTrade, the new crypto-securities exchange, with the following securities markets: BTC, LTC, PPC, XPM & ANC. We have room for a 6th. Which cryptocoin do you think it should be?
Update on CipherTrade
As you may have heard, a group of us have got together to launch a new exchange which will be called CipherTrade.com. We will be offering coin-to-coin trading, but much more importantly we will be offering multiple securities markets; one for each coin.
We have brought together a power-house of people for this project:
We are aiming for a beta launch in mid-December, at which time we will be offering a selection of pre-registered securities (which will actually be treated as contracts, shares in which can be purchased). From early January we will be accepting new contract issuance applications.
A key part of our strategy is to become a fully registered investments securities exchange with HMRC in the UK. We shall operate within the law, and I shall endeavor to work with government to encourage them to be supportive (I have a solid track-record in influencing government policy).
Finally, we shall be offering a range of features unlike any other exchange. I do not wish to give too much away at this time, but one example is that we will be incentivising issuers by sharing trading fees with them.
Giles is heading up operations, obviously full time, and we have an aggressive expansion plan. We currently have over $100k of sales and marketing funding - and that's before we're IPO'd. We are going all-out for large-scale from the outset and, to be blunt, our competitors stand little hope; unless we decide to acquire them of course.
Watch this space, we'll be making more announcements as we get closer to launch. For now though, let's focus on the coins.
The coins / markets
We believe that, like types of credit card (Visa, Mastercard etc) there is room in the market for a handful of cryptocoins. In determining which coins to choose we used the following metrics:
Based on this, the top 6 cryptocoins which we think most likely to have a future are:
1) Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin can be argued to be technically inferior to its newer brethren. However, history tells us that the most popular standard wins out, not necessarily the best (for further reading I highly recommend my good friend and British government Cabinet Office adviser, Simon Wardley - eg. this post). Bitcoin's dominance is hard to dispute, with a market capitalisation now standing at over $13bn. Bitcoin also has numerous fiat (normal currency) to bitcoin exchanges, such as BitStamp in Europe and BTC China, which its younger brethren lack. It is also the most widely adopted coin in terms of merchants who accept it.
1a) Namecoin (NMC). Namecoin and Bitcoin are "co-mined" and thus it does not make sense to separate the two in many ways. It is also technically very different, with its main purpose being to secure and transfer arbitary names / keys without censorship. The intention is also that it wil be the currency for the .bit domain, for which the community is pursuing an ICANN accreditation (it is now possible to create your own global top level domain). However, we are not going to offer a securities market around Namecoin.
2) Litecoin (LTC). Litecoin is the leading competitor to Bitcoin, with its market cap of $900m it is almost as far ahead of its competitors as Bitcoin is ahead of it (in relative terms). It was the first "alt-coin" and the original Scrypt coin - it has the first-mover advantage there. Not only is Litecoin more secure than Bitcoin, it has other advantages like faster confirmations; 2.5 minutes rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. Thanks to its memory-intensive proof-of-work algorithm, it appears to be mostly immune to ASIC mining (unlike SHA256 coins). LTC also has a very devoted community, again second only to Bitcoin. Many merchants do accept litecoin alongside bitcoin, and its ecosystem is growing with services like Litecoin Local (a location-based in-person brokerage similar to Local Bitcoins). There can be 84 million Litecoins in existence, four times as many as the maximum possible Bitcoins. This could be significant since the smallest unit of a bitcoin (one 10^8th) is already worth 0.001 of a dollar cent. Charles Lee, Litecoin's creator, views it as "silver to Bitcoin's gold".
3) Peercoin (PPC). Peercoin is technically different again to both Bitcoin and Litecoin. It is designed to be less energy-intensive when mining (something of which I approve) and also more secure than Bitcoin. PeerCoin takes the #3 slot with a market cap of $150m. It also have an extremely voiciferous and dedicated following, at times verging on the fanatical (many believe PeerCoin should replace all others, rather than be complimentary to them as Litecoin's community sees itself). Peercoin uses a "proof of stake" algorithm as well. Perhaps peercoin's most notable difference to its brethren is that there is no limit to the number of peercoins that can exist, though they are still "found" at a constant rate.
4) Primecoin (XPM). Primecoin differs mainly in the way it is mined. Mining Primecoins consists of finding ever-larger prime number chains. In theory this work could be useful. SHA256 and scrypt coin mining is a complete waste of power and computation by comparison. Also, Primecoin can be effectively mined with CPU, which means you can apply spare compute resources to it. CipherMine is successfully utilising the spare CPU resources on Memset's Miniserver VM hosts to mine Primecoins. Although Primecoin mining is of questionable use, it could in theory be adjusted to be more useful to the scientific community.
5) Anoncoin (ANC). Last but by no means least. Although cryptocoins are designed to be decentralised and thus somewhat anarchic, they can quite easily be traced through the blockchain combined with transmission through the public Internet. Since many of the users of cryptocoins want anonymity, a group of very clever guys created Anoncoin. Its main feature at this point is that it is routed through I2P, the Invisible Internet. Anoncoin is a scrypt-based coin like Litecoin, so shares Litecoin's advantages over SHA256 coins. We believe that governments will ultimately come down hard on cryptocoins once they comprehend the threats posed to their existence. Anoncoin therefore fills an important niche. Excitingly, the Anoncoin dev team (who can be found in the #anoncoin room on I2P IRC, and who were recently in the news) have a longer-term plan to improve anonymity either through implementing Zerocoin or the CoinJoin extension.
What we'd like from you
So, that is our starting list. There are now in excess of 100 cryptocoins and we are entirely confident that the vast majority will fail. However, we also believe, as above, that there is room for several to survive and thrive. The upper limit is probably around six or seven, and to that end we are considering an additional securities market for a final pre-launch, sixth alt-coin. We'd like to hear from you, the community, as to which coin you think should be added to our list, and why.
Kate and the CipherTrade crew.
Scorecard
I'm going to try and keep a score card matrix to capture your collective wisdom. It is a work in progress.
We're launching CipherTrade, the new crypto-securities exchange, with the following securities markets: BTC, LTC, PPC, XPM & ANC. We have room for a 6th. Which cryptocoin do you think it should be?
Update on CipherTrade
As you may have heard, a group of us have got together to launch a new exchange which will be called CipherTrade.com. We will be offering coin-to-coin trading, but much more importantly we will be offering multiple securities markets; one for each coin.
We have brought together a power-house of people for this project:
- Kate (me, one of Britain's top ICT entrepreneurs)
- evilscoop (Giles, my right-hand in cipherspace)
- Benny (issuer of BUY-A-HASH)
- Deprived (man behind DMS*)
- krypto (long-term crypto-investor)
- Simon (not on the forum; the entrepreneur behind zone.in, and our lead developer)
- richwest (another of our developers; creator of is.gd, Tweetails & other popular Web services)
- OgonDark (an experienced, CBOT-registered futures floor trader)
We are aiming for a beta launch in mid-December, at which time we will be offering a selection of pre-registered securities (which will actually be treated as contracts, shares in which can be purchased). From early January we will be accepting new contract issuance applications.
A key part of our strategy is to become a fully registered investments securities exchange with HMRC in the UK. We shall operate within the law, and I shall endeavor to work with government to encourage them to be supportive (I have a solid track-record in influencing government policy).
Finally, we shall be offering a range of features unlike any other exchange. I do not wish to give too much away at this time, but one example is that we will be incentivising issuers by sharing trading fees with them.
Giles is heading up operations, obviously full time, and we have an aggressive expansion plan. We currently have over $100k of sales and marketing funding - and that's before we're IPO'd. We are going all-out for large-scale from the outset and, to be blunt, our competitors stand little hope; unless we decide to acquire them of course.
Watch this space, we'll be making more announcements as we get closer to launch. For now though, let's focus on the coins.
The coins / markets
We believe that, like types of credit card (Visa, Mastercard etc) there is room in the market for a handful of cryptocoins. In determining which coins to choose we used the following metrics:
- Useful, functional differences to its competitors.
- First-mover advantage and a commensurate leading market cap for its coin-type.
- A strong ecosystem of users and developers supporting it.
Based on this, the top 6 cryptocoins which we think most likely to have a future are:
1) Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin can be argued to be technically inferior to its newer brethren. However, history tells us that the most popular standard wins out, not necessarily the best (for further reading I highly recommend my good friend and British government Cabinet Office adviser, Simon Wardley - eg. this post). Bitcoin's dominance is hard to dispute, with a market capitalisation now standing at over $13bn. Bitcoin also has numerous fiat (normal currency) to bitcoin exchanges, such as BitStamp in Europe and BTC China, which its younger brethren lack. It is also the most widely adopted coin in terms of merchants who accept it.
1a) Namecoin (NMC). Namecoin and Bitcoin are "co-mined" and thus it does not make sense to separate the two in many ways. It is also technically very different, with its main purpose being to secure and transfer arbitary names / keys without censorship. The intention is also that it wil be the currency for the .bit domain, for which the community is pursuing an ICANN accreditation (it is now possible to create your own global top level domain). However, we are not going to offer a securities market around Namecoin.
2) Litecoin (LTC). Litecoin is the leading competitor to Bitcoin, with its market cap of $900m it is almost as far ahead of its competitors as Bitcoin is ahead of it (in relative terms). It was the first "alt-coin" and the original Scrypt coin - it has the first-mover advantage there. Not only is Litecoin more secure than Bitcoin, it has other advantages like faster confirmations; 2.5 minutes rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. Thanks to its memory-intensive proof-of-work algorithm, it appears to be mostly immune to ASIC mining (unlike SHA256 coins). LTC also has a very devoted community, again second only to Bitcoin. Many merchants do accept litecoin alongside bitcoin, and its ecosystem is growing with services like Litecoin Local (a location-based in-person brokerage similar to Local Bitcoins). There can be 84 million Litecoins in existence, four times as many as the maximum possible Bitcoins. This could be significant since the smallest unit of a bitcoin (one 10^8th) is already worth 0.001 of a dollar cent. Charles Lee, Litecoin's creator, views it as "silver to Bitcoin's gold".
3) Peercoin (PPC). Peercoin is technically different again to both Bitcoin and Litecoin. It is designed to be less energy-intensive when mining (something of which I approve) and also more secure than Bitcoin. PeerCoin takes the #3 slot with a market cap of $150m. It also have an extremely voiciferous and dedicated following, at times verging on the fanatical (many believe PeerCoin should replace all others, rather than be complimentary to them as Litecoin's community sees itself). Peercoin uses a "proof of stake" algorithm as well. Perhaps peercoin's most notable difference to its brethren is that there is no limit to the number of peercoins that can exist, though they are still "found" at a constant rate.
4) Primecoin (XPM). Primecoin differs mainly in the way it is mined. Mining Primecoins consists of finding ever-larger prime number chains. In theory this work could be useful. SHA256 and scrypt coin mining is a complete waste of power and computation by comparison. Also, Primecoin can be effectively mined with CPU, which means you can apply spare compute resources to it. CipherMine is successfully utilising the spare CPU resources on Memset's Miniserver VM hosts to mine Primecoins. Although Primecoin mining is of questionable use, it could in theory be adjusted to be more useful to the scientific community.
5) Anoncoin (ANC). Last but by no means least. Although cryptocoins are designed to be decentralised and thus somewhat anarchic, they can quite easily be traced through the blockchain combined with transmission through the public Internet. Since many of the users of cryptocoins want anonymity, a group of very clever guys created Anoncoin. Its main feature at this point is that it is routed through I2P, the Invisible Internet. Anoncoin is a scrypt-based coin like Litecoin, so shares Litecoin's advantages over SHA256 coins. We believe that governments will ultimately come down hard on cryptocoins once they comprehend the threats posed to their existence. Anoncoin therefore fills an important niche. Excitingly, the Anoncoin dev team (who can be found in the #anoncoin room on I2P IRC, and who were recently in the news) have a longer-term plan to improve anonymity either through implementing Zerocoin or the CoinJoin extension.
What we'd like from you
So, that is our starting list. There are now in excess of 100 cryptocoins and we are entirely confident that the vast majority will fail. However, we also believe, as above, that there is room for several to survive and thrive. The upper limit is probably around six or seven, and to that end we are considering an additional securities market for a final pre-launch, sixth alt-coin. We'd like to hear from you, the community, as to which coin you think should be added to our list, and why.
Kate and the CipherTrade crew.
Scorecard
I'm going to try and keep a score card matrix to capture your collective wisdom. It is a work in progress.
| Coin | Quark | Megacoin | Feathercoin |
| Votes | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Technical uniqueness / first mover: | In niche and tech, yes | None apparent (LTC fork) | None apparent (LTC fork) |
| Market capitalisation | $14,139,969 | $47,287,839 | $32,111,689 |
| Unique selling point / niche: | Security | Unclear | "Copper to Litecoin's silver" |
| Community backing: | Very popular at present | Very strong community | Commercial backing, fanatics, and big volumes |
We've been having a few issues with our BitFuries on multipool.us when on BitCoin. Adam is using P2Pool for BTC mining while we have <25 TH/s (enough to get a block per day) to mitigate our risk when mining BTC.
However, because the BitFuries have an in-built stratum proxy that seems to be conflicting in some way with the multipool.us link to P2Pool (ie. mining doesn't work).
Adam is working on the problem his end (Plan A: fixing the stratum server), and we're also working on our own solution (Plan B: installing bfgminer on all BitFuries instead of chainminer so they can connect direct).
I don't want people to think we've abandoned our promise! We will bring the full CipherMine 5 TH/s back to multipool.us. At present we're splitting it between multipool.us and BTCguild. Irritatingly you can't set the BitFuries to failover between pools, only load balance (another reason we're installing bfgminer). I'm hoping that we'll have this resolved by the end of the weekend.
Kate.
However, because the BitFuries have an in-built stratum proxy that seems to be conflicting in some way with the multipool.us link to P2Pool (ie. mining doesn't work).
Adam is working on the problem his end (Plan A: fixing the stratum server), and we're also working on our own solution (Plan B: installing bfgminer on all BitFuries instead of chainminer so they can connect direct).
I don't want people to think we've abandoned our promise! We will bring the full CipherMine 5 TH/s back to multipool.us. At present we're splitting it between multipool.us and BTCguild. Irritatingly you can't set the BitFuries to failover between pools, only load balance (another reason we're installing bfgminer). I'm hoping that we'll have this resolved by the end of the weekend.
Kate.
It depends on your appetite for risk and the quantity of coins you are mining. With our scrypt mining activities our management software (CipherMiner) places sell orders in the middle of the spread. That has proven pretty reliable for selling the quantities we were generating with 20+ MH/s.
When I tried it selling just below the lowest ask (semi-equivalent to Cryptsy's "Sell at top sell bid (Higher Pirce)"),it sold most of the time but I did have to check every day or so and "clean up" trades which had been missed due to a fall in the market.
However, the "middle of the spread" strategy has not worked well for the SHA256 coins though because with 5 TH/s we were swamping the volumes a little bit. Instead I've currently got Cryptsy set to sell at the highest bid price ("Sell at top buy bid (Lower Price)"), and that has been 100% reliable so far (CipherMiner's trading function is offline for some upgrades).
If you want a fully automated solution you can just check in on once a week then I'd suggest the above.
It is a shame that neither Cryptsy nor BTC-E support automated withdrawals yet (even via their APIs, despite listing the functionality) since with that too and a simple bot you could withdraw from Cryptsy to Gox or BTC-E and use something like ButterBot to mange your BTC (ie. selling it to USD if the market falls).
Kate.
In case anyone is new to multimining, I recommend using an exchange like Cryptsy which has auto-trading.
Put your Cryptsy deposit address for each alt-coin (eg. PPC, TRC etc) in as the multipool.us withdrawal address, and on Cryptsy set the coins to auto-sell. This way you'll still just get BTC from your mining, but a little bit more when the alts are more profitable to mine.
Put your Cryptsy deposit address for each alt-coin (eg. PPC, TRC etc) in as the multipool.us withdrawal address, and on Cryptsy set the coins to auto-sell. This way you'll still just get BTC from your mining, but a little bit more when the alts are more profitable to mine.
TL;DR: Please join multipool.us's SHA256 pool so it can achieve critical mass and become a viable SHA256 muli-mining pool. We (CipherMine) are putting our 5 TH/s there tomorrow!
At CipherMine we like to mine the most profitable coin at any given time. Unfortunately, most ASIC hardware does not have the capability to manage the mining software via an API so we cannot use our software to retarget them at different pools as we do with FPGAs and scrypt-mining GPUs.
We have used multipool.us (flound1129's baby) as our default scrypt pool for some time now; it is helpful to have a fall back in case one of the usual pools fails. We have found them to be solid and reliable. Now, we want to start using them for SHA256 multi-mining.
The problem is that at present multipool.us doesn't have many SHA256 miners. This is understandable since they have not achieved the critical mass to find blocks. I have agreed with Adam, multipool.us's owner, to switch all our of SHA256 ASIC hardware (~5 TH/s) over to multipool in exchange for him giving us an introductory 0% fee.
To make this work we need other miners to join us though! On average we will only find one block per week, and that is unlikely to attract many more. What I'm asking is for as many of you as are willing to join us on multipool.us for at least one week, commencing tomorrow (Tuesday 26th Nov). We commit to have switched all our SHA256 capacity across to multipool.us before midnight tomorrow.
It is in the community's interest to have another good mining pool out there; at present it is far too dominated by a few pools (eg. BTCguild). This is also a chance for miners to profit during the times other SHA256 coins become more profitable to mine. With Cryptsy now offering auto-exchanging back to BTC you don't even need to worry about trading the coins (indeed, I'd recommend this approach).
Finally, even after the 0% fee period, Adam (flound1129) has committed to keeping multipool.us's fees to no more than 1.5% - much less than the competition.
So, please join us and help this up and coming pool be a success!
Kate.
Note: I have no vested interest in promoting multipool.us other than wanting to be able to use the service for SHA256 mining.
Re: [BTC-TC] CIPHERMINE.B1 - a virtual corporate bond with a 22% fixed-fiat APR
Good evening,
This week's dividend payment is BTC0.964 (including last week's remaining balance of BTC0.043), calculated using BitStamp's 30 day EMA of $500/BTC.
Kate.
Re: [BTC-TC] CIPHERMINE.B1 - a virtual corporate bond with a 22% fixed-fiat APR
All,
This week's dividend, calculated using a 30-day average of $310, would have been BTC1.480.
However, after the reduction from the aforementioned dividend overspends (BTC1.437) that leaves just BTC0.043.
Since it is such a small amount, rather than wasting transfer fees I'm going to roll that into next week's dividend. This is also because I'm not 100% certain whether our dividend payment script will cope with sending BTC0.00000043 (the amount that one bond share would get)!
Kate.
This week's dividend, calculated using a 30-day average of $310, would have been BTC1.480.
However, after the reduction from the aforementioned dividend overspends (BTC1.437) that leaves just BTC0.043.
Since it is such a small amount, rather than wasting transfer fees I'm going to roll that into next week's dividend. This is also because I'm not 100% certain whether our dividend payment script will cope with sending BTC0.00000043 (the amount that one bond share would get)!
Kate.
Dear All,
I've been contacted by several people asking if I know where Deprived has gone; he's been quiet for 2+ weeks now, which is somewhat unlike him. I was in regular email contact with him before my honeymoon but have not had contact from him via email since the 15th Oct.
I have been asked what would happen to DMS's CIPHERMINE.B1 holding in the event of his disappearance. Unfortunately we do need security issuers' cooperation to reinstate securities on the planned new exchange (I'll have more on that this weekend btw), since we need their shareholder report .csv files.
The last time we spoke, Deprived appeared to remain committed to participating in the new exchange, not just as an issuer but also as a founding investor and contributor. I think it highly unlikely he has done a runner.
I could freeze dividends on DMS's CIPHERMINE.B1 bond shares in theory though I'm not sure what we could do beyond that if something bad has happened. Regardless, the contract is between CipherMine and Deprived rather than DMS shareholders (who we have no record of anyway).
It is a tricky situation. Let's just hope that it is nothing serious and he'll be back soon!
Kate.