Mark Friedenbach

???? ???? ???? ????
Yeah!!!

The current block height is 160755. By my calculation that's 3,085 blocks (about 3 weeks) until the initial issuance of 100M freicoins is fully played out. That is also when the coinbase blocks stop including foundation outputs.
Time to organize a celebration?

???? ???? ???? ????
Yeah!!!

The current block height is 160755. By my calculation that's 3,085 blocks (about 3 weeks) until the initial issuance of 100M freicoins is fully played out. That is also when the coinbase blocks stop including foundation outputs.
Time to organize a celebration?

The current block height is 160755. By my calculation that's 3,085 blocks (about 3 weeks) until the initial issuance of 100M freicoins is fully played out. That is also when the coinbase blocks stop including foundation outputs.
Time to organize a celebration?

The current block height is 160755. By my calculation that's 3,085 blocks (about 3 weeks) until the initial issuance of 100M freicoins is fully played out. That is also when the coinbase blocks stop including foundation outputs.
Time to organize a celebration?

Reminder to miners to please upgrade... the 144-block window currently shows 75% have upgraded, but 2016-block window hovers at about 50%. I suspect the difference is multi-pool related although further analysis is required. In any case there does appear to be some long-term freicoin miners that have not upgraded, enough to keep us from activating the BIP 66 and input-truncation forks.
Also, if anyone has contacts with exchanges that host Freicoin, getting their daemons upgraded should be a priority.

There's a new release of the Freicoin client for Linux and Windows, version 0.8.6-2, hosted on the official website:
http://freico.in/download/
Note that there was a problem in trying to update the Ubuntu PPA, which I am working to resolve. The recommended solution is to use the gitian-built, statically linked binaries on the website.
The new release contains TWO soft-forks. One is a security update to the consensus rules documented in BIP 66 (strict DER signatures). The other is freicoin-specific: truncation of input amounts. This greatly simplifies the code diff between Bitcoin and Freicoin, making the client easier to maintain and hopefully allow us to bring back regular supported releases in a cadence matching Bitcoin Core: Freicoin releases shortly after Bitcoin's.
The next release of Freicoin will be based on Bitcoin 0.13.x, and is currently being worked on. Because of the changes in the accounting rules, a 0.13 release will be conditional on successful activation of the input truncation soft-fork. So miners & mining pools, please upgrade!

There's a new release of the Freicoin client for Linux and Windows, version 0.8.6-2, hosted on the official website:
http://freico.in/download/
Note that there was a problem in trying to update the Ubuntu PPA, which I am working to resolve. The recommended solution is to use the gitian-built, statically linked binaries on the website.
The new release contains TWO soft-forks. One is a security update to the consensus rules documented in BIP 66 (strict DER signatures). The other is freicoin-specific: truncation of input amounts. This greatly simplifies the code diff between Bitcoin and Freicoin, making the client easier to maintain and hopefully allow us to bring back regular supported releases in a cadence matching Bitcoin Core: Freicoin releases shortly after Bitcoin's.
The next release of Freicoin will be based on Bitcoin 0.13.x, and is currently being worked on. Because of the changes in the accounting rules, a 0.13 release will be conditional on successful activation of the input truncation soft-fork. So miners & mining pools, please upgrade!

There's a new release of the Freicoin client for Linux and Windows, version 0.8.6-2, hosted on the official website:
http://freico.in/download/
Note that there was a problem in trying to update the Ubuntu PPA, which I am working to resolve. The recommended solution is to use the gitian-built, statically linked binaries on the website.
The new release contains TWO soft-forks. One is a security update to the consensus rules documented in BIP 66 (strict DER signatures). The other is freicoin-specific: truncation of input amounts. This greatly simplifies the code diff between Bitcoin and Freicoin, making the client easier to maintain and hopefully allow us to bring back regular supported releases in a cadence matching Bitcoin Core: Freicoin releases shortly after Bitcoin's.
The next release of Freicoin will be based on Bitcoin 0.13.x, and is currently being worked on. Because of the changes in the accounting rules, a 0.13 release will be conditional on successful activation of the input truncation soft-fork. So miners & mining pools, please upgrade!

By this point I assume that everyone here has heard about the new venture capital funded startup that is making waves in the Bitcoin space with its public unveiling and the release of the sidechains whitepaper. You may have also noticed that beyond being co-authors of the paper, Jorge and myself are co-founders of this new company. I’ll avoid mentioning it by name because I want to speak to the Freicoin community here, not people finding this thread through Google. Why are Jorge and myself proponents of sidechains? Why have we joined up with an ostensibly bitcoin-focused company? What does this mean for Freicoin? I hope to answer these questions.

The promise of sidechains is simple: by pegging asset value across chains, users are given the freedom to apply functionality of one chain (e.g. privacy offered by monero, or p2p markets provided by freimarkets) to assets originating on another (e.g. bitcoin or freicoin). Want to send your coins anonymously? Send them to a chain that supports ring signatures or zerocash protocol. Want to participate on a peer-to-peer marketplace? Send your coins to a chain that supports native asset extensions, such as freicoin with the freimarkets extensions.

Sidechain is a new word for a rather old concept -- we had an early semi-trusted version of it in our first freimarkets proposal. Certainly the concept pre-dates bitcoin itself, as payment network gateways fulfill a similar role in the legacy financial system. However the trustless setup invented in whole by Greg Maxwell and independently in pieces by numerous others allows the gateway role to be fulfilled without trusting anything other than correct operation of a mechanical system. No longer is there a service in the middle able to steal funds or operate on fractional reserve, or the systemic risk which arises from such behavior being commonplace.

So, sidechains are exciting because they allow permissionless innovation. The two-way peg allows innovation in the space of block chain applications without fragmenting the marketplace with a new free-floating p2p currency for each project. The return peg is, in a way, the last major change that need ever happen to bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, the one change to rule them all.

Some people have over-hyped sidechains as “the death of altcoins.” I don’t like this language, but if sidechains harold the death of any coins, it is clone coins which have no differentiating characteristics from bitcoin. There is no longer any reason for native currencies to exist on namecoin, monero, zerocash, or other such “feature chains.” But worry not: freicoin is different species of currency which behaves different from bitcoin: the fixed inflationary or demurrage currency. Because such a currency is fundamentally compatible with bitcoin and able to exist side-by-side, freicoin holders need not fear that their niche will someday be displaced by bitcoin.

Rather than be threatened by sidechain technology, freicoin stands to benefit greatly. Freicoin need no longer be isolated in its own ecosystem, or limited by its poor adoption. By introducing desired features, in particular issued assets, privacy enhancing technology, and larger dynamic block sizes, the freicoin block chain could very likely see an influx of users bringing their bitcoins to our chain to do business. Open for business is the motto of the new freicoin block chain containing two-way pegged assets such as bitcoin.

Jorge and myself are particularly motivated to work on sidechain technology because it makes deployment of block chain technology innovation easier. Freicoin, freimarkets, and republicoin: these are all innovative applications of cryptocurrency technology which could not or would not ever be deployed to the main bitcoin block chain. But they can become accessible to the bitcoin ecosystem by means of the freicoin block chain, if and when freicoin is given sidechain features.

Not only does this bring new users, but freicoin users also stand to benefit from greater integration. By having more services track and support the freicoin block chain, it becomes easier for these services to support freicoin as a transactional currency. Instead of bringing freicoin to the market, we bring the markets home to freicoin.

In summary, by fixing longstanding issues in the bitcoin ecosystem, freicoin stands to gain new users and strengthen its position. And unlike other potential sidechains, freicoin has a perpetual mining subsidy through its native demurrage currency that gives our block chain mining incentives that are known to work, providing security buffer other sidechains would be lacking. Even if these new users primarily transact in bitcoin, this remains a tremendously good thing for holders of freicoin currency.

That’s the vision. But to get from here to there requires quite a bit of work, much more than is possible to be done by a few volunteers. By founding a company around sidechains and getting funded, we have been able to secure the resources necessary to make sure that not only sidechain technology gets implemented and deployed, but also all the cool extensions to bitcoin (e.g. freimarkets) that inspired us to propose sidechains in the first place.

Our employment contracts were specifically constructed such that the company has no claim to the intellectual property underlying freicoin, the freicoin code base, the freicoin branding, or anything else about the freicoin project, now or going into the future. Furthermore we have a specific moonlighting exception that allows us to continue contributing to freicoin moving forwards, including merging into freicoin of open-sourced code written for the company’s own products. And while I cannot be specific about what the company is working on right now, needless to say Jorge and I were brought in because of our work on freimarkets and other extensions of the bitcoin protocol we originally proposed to be implemented on the freicoin block chain. As such open source technology matures within the company, we will be regularly merging such features that are desired by the freicoin community into the freicoin reference client.

I'm drafting another post detailing what I foresee as a potential freicoin development roadmap, including both ideas for rebranding and hard fork features that might make it in 2015. In the mean time, I'd be happy to entertain any questions about sidechains and their impact to freicoin. Additionally, barring any technical glitches I'll be participating in the Freicoin Alliance meeting as well.

There are a couple of things you could mean by this, so I'll address
the ones I can think of. If you meant something else, let me know.

1. Within the sidechain paper we talk of the bitcoin mainchain and an
indefinite number of sidechains which share the bitcoin currency as an
imported asset. What this actually means is that on each of the
sidechains there exists an issued asset native to that chain, whose
issuance mechanism involves verifying that a corresponding number of
bitcoins were sent to a locking script of a particular form. Those
bitcoins are unlocked by provably undoing the issuance (locking or
destruction) on the sidechain side. We use bitcoin in the paper as an
example, freicoin could just as easily be the currency involved, so
long as demurrage is accounted for correctly.

This means that there are two assets on two different chains, the
bitcoins on the bitcoin chain, and the sidechain-bitcoins on the
sidechain, which are guaranteed to have approximately the same
value. This is because if there is any change in valuation due to
swings in supply and demand, someone somewhere will arbitrage away the
difference using the two-way peg. However since the proofs involved
are quite large the peg has a cost in terms of transaction fees, and
it takes a significant amount of time to execute a peg transfer. As a
result there will be a market for doing more efficient cross-chain
transfers by matching supply and demand parties, then executing
e.g. an atomic swap protocol.

That is to say, even though bitcoins and sidechain-bitcoins (or
freicoins and sidechain-freicoins) are nominally equal valued,
friction in the transmutation process will still ensure that there is
a spread between bids and asks in a market offering faster exchange
between the two. There will be room in this space for both exchange
operators and liquidity providers.

2. The prime justification for implementing sidechains is to achieve
permissionless innovation -- the ability to create new features on a
new block chain while reusing an existing digital scarcity, such as
bitcoin or freicoin. One of the features oft requested, and one which
Jorge and myself have spent considerable time investigating, is the
ability to self-issue redeemable assets, and to exchange these assets
in a p2p, decentralized marketplace. We have called this proposal
freimarkets, and intend to implement it on the freicoin block chain,
with the permission of the community of course.

Freimarkets represents the future of exchanges in general: a protocol
for exchanging bids and asks over a peer-to-peer network, with miners
matching orders in a truly decentralized marketplace. So the answer to
your question might be that the freicoin block chain, with freimarkets
extensions for issued assets and freicoin as a native fee currency, is
the future of digital asset exchanges, replacing current centralized
"trust me" models.

3. It occurs to me that by "current exchanges" you might be talking
about the asset pairings on existing exchange markets, e.g.
BTC/LTC or BTC/DOGE. I hesitate to give forward-looking
statements. Markets are ultimately psychological, and assets are given
value because people value them (and that is not a recursive
statement). However speaking on purely technical grounds, it is hard
to imagine what value is left for just about every altcoin out there
once its technical innovations (if any) can be accessed with bitcoin
via a sidechain.

Thankfully freicoin is excluded from this analysis, and not because
I'm biased Freicoin's demurrage keeps it from competing with
bitcoin from either the bitcoin or freicoin perspective. But likewise
it could be said that network effects prevent litecoin from having any
utility in a sidechain universe, neither would clones of freicoin.



I certainly support these efforts: I've contributed to the android
wallet bounty. I'm not sure how the existence of sidechains could be
expected to impact the viability these wallet efforts, other than
requiring some work down the line to add sidechain feature support.

Once there exist sidechains, there will need to be effort invested in
making alternative wallets support these sidechains. This may involve
code being written for Electrum, bitcoinj, Green Address, and other
wallet software. Hopefully this work can be easily ported to their
freicoin versions.



Depends on the application I suppose. Kinda hard to answer without
knowing what you had in mind :\



There is plenty of room for bridge services to operate on top of a
sidechains enabled freicoin with freimarket extensions. Such service
providers would use more trustless technology to achieve the bridge,
holding customer funds for the smallest period of time possible, or
not at all. Neither sidechain technology nor freimarkets removes the
need for such players in the ecosystem.



Deployment of sidechain technology will require changes to
freicoin. By staying observant to the changes that we are proposing,
and evaluating them yourself you both keep us honest and make sure
that the changes get sufficient review and are safe to deploy.

Deployment may involve adoption of merged mining. In this case we need
alternative mechanisms in place to maintain the community during the
transition period. There have been talks on IRC about a curecoin
approach of spending some of the foundation's 80% on subsidy for
folding@home work units, thereby enabling GPU "mining" issuance which
helps cure cancer rather than secure the network.

Those who have bitcoin coding skills can help us directly in writing
code. Please contact me or Jorge if you think you fall in this
category.

There are a couple of things you could mean by this, so I'll address
the ones I can think of. If you meant something else, let me know.

1. Within the sidechain paper we talk of the bitcoin mainchain and an
indefinite number of sidechains which share the bitcoin currency as an
imported asset. What this actually means is that on each of the
sidechains there exists an issued asset native to that chain, whose
issuance mechanism involves verifying that a corresponding number of
bitcoins were sent to a locking script of a particular form. Those
bitcoins are unlocked by provably undoing the issuance (locking or
destruction) on the sidechain side. We use bitcoin in the paper as an
example, freicoin could just as easily be the currency involved, so
long as demurrage is accounted for correctly.

This means that there are two assets on two different chains, the
bitcoins on the bitcoin chain, and the sidechain-bitcoins on the
sidechain, which are guaranteed to have approximately the same
value. This is because if there is any change in valuation due to
swings in supply and demand, someone somewhere will arbitrage away the
difference using the two-way peg. However since the proofs involved
are quite large the peg has a cost in terms of transaction fees, and
it takes a significant amount of time to execute a peg transfer. As a
result there will be a market for doing more efficient cross-chain
transfers by matching supply and demand parties, then executing
e.g. an atomic swap protocol.

That is to say, even though bitcoins and sidechain-bitcoins (or
freicoins and sidechain-freicoins) are nominally equal valued,
friction in the transmutation process will still ensure that there is
a spread between bids and asks in a market offering faster exchange
between the two. There will be room in this space for both exchange
operators and liquidity providers.

2. The prime justification for implementing sidechains is to achieve
permissionless innovation -- the ability to create new features on a
new block chain while reusing an existing digital scarcity, such as
bitcoin or freicoin. One of the features oft requested, and one which
Jorge and myself have spent considerable time investigating, is the
ability to self-issue redeemable assets, and to exchange these assets
in a p2p, decentralized marketplace. We have called this proposal
freimarkets, and intend to implement it on the freicoin block chain,
with the permission of the community of course.

Freimarkets represents the future of exchanges in general: a protocol
for exchanging bids and asks over a peer-to-peer network, with miners
matching orders in a truly decentralized marketplace. So the answer to
your question might be that the freicoin block chain, with freimarkets
extensions for issued assets and freicoin as a native fee currency, is
the future of digital asset exchanges, replacing current centralized
"trust me" models.

3. It occurs to me that by "current exchanges" you might be talking
about the asset pairings on existing exchange markets, e.g.
BTC/LTC or BTC/DOGE. I hesitate to give forward-looking
statements. Markets are ultimately psychological, and assets are given
value because people value them (and that is not a recursive
statement). However speaking on purely technical grounds, it is hard
to imagine what value is left for just about every altcoin out there
once its technical innovations (if any) can be accessed with bitcoin
via a sidechain.

Thankfully freicoin is excluded from this analysis, and not because
I'm biased Freicoin's demurrage keeps it from competing with
bitcoin from either the bitcoin or freicoin perspective. But likewise
it could be said that network effects prevent litecoin from having any
utility in a sidechain universe, neither would clones of freicoin.



I certainly support these efforts: I've contributed to the android
wallet bounty. I'm not sure how the existence of sidechains could be
expected to impact the viability these wallet efforts, other than
requiring some work down the line to add sidechain feature support.

Once there exist sidechains, there will need to be effort invested in
making alternative wallets support these sidechains. This may involve
code being written for Electrum, bitcoinj, Green Address, and other
wallet software. Hopefully this work can be easily ported to their
freicoin versions.



Depends on the application I suppose. Kinda hard to answer without
knowing what you had in mind :\



There is plenty of room for bridge services to operate on top of a
sidechains enabled freicoin with freimarket extensions. Such service
providers would use more trustless technology to achieve the bridge,
holding customer funds for the smallest period of time possible, or
not at all. Neither sidechain technology nor freimarkets removes the
need for such players in the ecosystem.



Deployment of sidechain technology will require changes to
freicoin. By staying observant to the changes that we are proposing,
and evaluating them yourself you both keep us honest and make sure
that the changes get sufficient review and are safe to deploy.

Deployment may involve adoption of merged mining. In this case we need
alternative mechanisms in place to maintain the community during the
transition period. There have been talks on IRC about a curecoin
approach of spending some of the foundation's 80% on subsidy for
folding@home work units, thereby enabling GPU "mining" issuance which
helps cure cancer rather than secure the network.

Those who have bitcoin coding skills can help us directly in writing
code. Please contact me or Jorge if you think you fall in this
category.

There are a couple of things you could mean by this, so I'll address
the ones I can think of. If you meant something else, let me know.

1. Within the sidechain paper we talk of the bitcoin mainchain and an
indefinite number of sidechains which share the bitcoin currency as an
imported asset. What this actually means is that on each of the
sidechains there exists an issued asset native to that chain, whose
issuance mechanism involves verifying that a corresponding number of
bitcoins were sent to a locking script of a particular form. Those
bitcoins are unlocked by provably undoing the issuance (locking or
destruction) on the sidechain side. We use bitcoin in the paper as an
example, freicoin could just as easily be the currency involved, so
long as demurrage is accounted for correctly.

This means that there are two assets on two different chains, the
bitcoins on the bitcoin chain, and the sidechain-bitcoins on the
sidechain, which are guaranteed to have approximately the same
value. This is because if there is any change in valuation due to
swings in supply and demand, someone somewhere will arbitrage away the
difference using the two-way peg. However since the proofs involved
are quite large the peg has a cost in terms of transaction fees, and
it takes a significant amount of time to execute a peg transfer. As a
result there will be a market for doing more efficient cross-chain
transfers by matching supply and demand parties, then executing
e.g. an atomic swap protocol.

That is to say, even though bitcoins and sidechain-bitcoins (or
freicoins and sidechain-freicoins) are nominally equal valued,
friction in the transmutation process will still ensure that there is
a spread between bids and asks in a market offering faster exchange
between the two. There will be room in this space for both exchange
operators and liquidity providers.

2. The prime justification for implementing sidechains is to achieve
permissionless innovation -- the ability to create new features on a
new block chain while reusing an existing digital scarcity, such as
bitcoin or freicoin. One of the features oft requested, and one which
Jorge and myself have spent considerable time investigating, is the
ability to self-issue redeemable assets, and to exchange these assets
in a p2p, decentralized marketplace. We have called this proposal
freimarkets, and intend to implement it on the freicoin block chain,
with the permission of the community of course.

Freimarkets represents the future of exchanges in general: a protocol
for exchanging bids and asks over a peer-to-peer network, with miners
matching orders in a truly decentralized marketplace. So the answer to
your question might be that the freicoin block chain, with freimarkets
extensions for issued assets and freicoin as a native fee currency, is
the future of digital asset exchanges, replacing current centralized
"trust me" models.

3. It occurs to me that by "current exchanges" you might be talking
about the asset pairings on existing exchange markets, e.g.
BTC/LTC or BTC/DOGE. I hesitate to give forward-looking
statements. Markets are ultimately psychological, and assets are given
value because people value them (and that is not a recursive
statement). However speaking on purely technical grounds, it is hard
to imagine what value is left for just about every altcoin out there
once its technical innovations (if any) can be accessed with bitcoin
via a sidechain.

Thankfully freicoin is excluded from this analysis, and not because
I'm biased Freicoin's demurrage keeps it from competing with
bitcoin from either the bitcoin or freicoin perspective. But likewise
it could be said that network effects prevent litecoin from having any
utility in a sidechain universe, neither would clones of freicoin.



I certainly support these efforts: I've contributed to the android
wallet bounty. I'm not sure how the existence of sidechains could be
expected to impact the viability these wallet efforts, other than
requiring some work down the line to add sidechain feature support.

Once there exist sidechains, there will need to be effort invested in
making alternative wallets support these sidechains. This may involve
code being written for Electrum, bitcoinj, Green Address, and other
wallet software. Hopefully this work can be easily ported to their
freicoin versions.



Depends on the application I suppose. Kinda hard to answer without
knowing what you had in mind :\



There is plenty of room for bridge services to operate on top of a
sidechains enabled freicoin with freimarket extensions. Such service
providers would use more trustless technology to achieve the bridge,
holding customer funds for the smallest period of time possible, or
not at all. Neither sidechain technology nor freimarkets removes the
need for such players in the ecosystem.



Deployment of sidechain technology will require changes to
freicoin. By staying observant to the changes that we are proposing,
and evaluating them yourself you both keep us honest and make sure
that the changes get sufficient review and are safe to deploy.

Deployment may involve adoption of merged mining. In this case we need
alternative mechanisms in place to maintain the community during the
transition period. There have been talks on IRC about a curecoin
approach of spending some of the foundation's 80% on subsidy for
folding@home work units, thereby enabling GPU "mining" issuance which
helps cure cancer rather than secure the network.

Those who have bitcoin coding skills can help us directly in writing
code. Please contact me or Jorge if you think you fall in this
category.

By this point I assume that everyone here has heard about the new venture capital funded startup that is making waves in the Bitcoin space with its public unveiling and the release of the sidechains whitepaper. You may have also noticed that beyond being co-authors of the paper, Jorge and myself are co-founders of this new company. I’ll avoid mentioning it by name because I want to speak to the Freicoin community here, not people finding this thread through Google. Why are Jorge and myself proponents of sidechains? Why have we joined up with an ostensibly bitcoin-focused company? What does this mean for Freicoin? I hope to answer these questions.

The promise of sidechains is simple: by pegging asset value across chains, users are given the freedom to apply functionality of one chain (e.g. privacy offered by monero, or p2p markets provided by freimarkets) to assets originating on another (e.g. bitcoin or freicoin). Want to send your coins anonymously? Send them to a chain that supports ring signatures or zerocash protocol. Want to participate on a peer-to-peer marketplace? Send your coins to a chain that supports native asset extensions, such as freicoin with the freimarkets extensions.

Sidechain is a new word for a rather old concept -- we had an early semi-trusted version of it in our first freimarkets proposal. Certainly the concept pre-dates bitcoin itself, as payment network gateways fulfill a similar role in the legacy financial system. However the trustless setup invented in whole by Greg Maxwell and independently in pieces by numerous others allows the gateway role to be fulfilled without trusting anything other than correct operation of a mechanical system. No longer is there a service in the middle able to steal funds or operate on fractional reserve, or the systemic risk which arises from such behavior being commonplace.

So, sidechains are exciting because they allow permissionless innovation. The two-way peg allows innovation in the space of block chain applications without fragmenting the marketplace with a new free-floating p2p currency for each project. The return peg is, in a way, the last major change that need ever happen to bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, the one change to rule them all.

Some people have over-hyped sidechains as “the death of altcoins.” I don’t like this language, but if sidechains harold the death of any coins, it is clone coins which have no differentiating characteristics from bitcoin. There is no longer any reason for native currencies to exist on namecoin, monero, zerocash, or other such “feature chains.” But worry not: freicoin is different species of currency which behaves different from bitcoin: the fixed inflationary or demurrage currency. Because such a currency is fundamentally compatible with bitcoin and able to exist side-by-side, freicoin holders need not fear that their niche will someday be displaced by bitcoin.

Rather than be threatened by sidechain technology, freicoin stands to benefit greatly. Freicoin need no longer be isolated in its own ecosystem, or limited by its poor adoption. By introducing desired features, in particular issued assets, privacy enhancing technology, and larger dynamic block sizes, the freicoin block chain could very likely see an influx of users bringing their bitcoins to our chain to do business. Open for business is the motto of the new freicoin block chain containing two-way pegged assets such as bitcoin.

Jorge and myself are particularly motivated to work on sidechain technology because it makes deployment of block chain technology innovation easier. Freicoin, freimarkets, and republicoin: these are all innovative applications of cryptocurrency technology which could not or would not ever be deployed to the main bitcoin block chain. But they can become accessible to the bitcoin ecosystem by means of the freicoin block chain, if and when freicoin is given sidechain features.

Not only does this bring new users, but freicoin users also stand to benefit from greater integration. By having more services track and support the freicoin block chain, it becomes easier for these services to support freicoin as a transactional currency. Instead of bringing freicoin to the market, we bring the markets home to freicoin.

In summary, by fixing longstanding issues in the bitcoin ecosystem, freicoin stands to gain new users and strengthen its position. And unlike other potential sidechains, freicoin has a perpetual mining subsidy through its native demurrage currency that gives our block chain mining incentives that are known to work, providing security buffer other sidechains would be lacking. Even if these new users primarily transact in bitcoin, this remains a tremendously good thing for holders of freicoin currency.

That’s the vision. But to get from here to there requires quite a bit of work, much more than is possible to be done by a few volunteers. By founding a company around sidechains and getting funded, we have been able to secure the resources necessary to make sure that not only sidechain technology gets implemented and deployed, but also all the cool extensions to bitcoin (e.g. freimarkets) that inspired us to propose sidechains in the first place.

Our employment contracts were specifically constructed such that the company has no claim to the intellectual property underlying freicoin, the freicoin code base, the freicoin branding, or anything else about the freicoin project, now or going into the future. Furthermore we have a specific moonlighting exception that allows us to continue contributing to freicoin moving forwards, including merging into freicoin of open-sourced code written for the company’s own products. And while I cannot be specific about what the company is working on right now, needless to say Jorge and I were brought in because of our work on freimarkets and other extensions of the bitcoin protocol we originally proposed to be implemented on the freicoin block chain. As such open source technology matures within the company, we will be regularly merging such features that are desired by the freicoin community into the freicoin reference client.

I'm drafting another post detailing what I foresee as a potential freicoin development roadmap, including both ideas for rebranding and hard fork features that might make it in 2015. In the mean time, I'd be happy to entertain any questions about sidechains and their impact to freicoin. Additionally, barring any technical glitches I'll be participating in the Freicoin Alliance meeting as well.

By this point I assume that everyone here has heard about the new venture capital funded startup that is making waves in the Bitcoin space with its public unveiling and the release of the sidechains whitepaper. You may have also noticed that beyond being co-authors of the paper, Jorge and myself are co-founders of this new company. I’ll avoid mentioning it by name because I want to speak to the Freicoin community here, not people finding this thread through Google. Why are Jorge and myself proponents of sidechains? Why have we joined up with an ostensibly bitcoin-focused company? What does this mean for Freicoin? I hope to answer these questions.

The promise of sidechains is simple: by pegging asset value across chains, users are given the freedom to apply functionality of one chain (e.g. privacy offered by monero, or p2p markets provided by freimarkets) to assets originating on another (e.g. bitcoin or freicoin). Want to send your coins anonymously? Send them to a chain that supports ring signatures or zerocash protocol. Want to participate on a peer-to-peer marketplace? Send your coins to a chain that supports native asset extensions, such as freicoin with the freimarkets extensions.

Sidechain is a new word for a rather old concept -- we had an early semi-trusted version of it in our first freimarkets proposal. Certainly the concept pre-dates bitcoin itself, as payment network gateways fulfill a similar role in the legacy financial system. However the trustless setup invented in whole by Greg Maxwell and independently in pieces by numerous others allows the gateway role to be fulfilled without trusting anything other than correct operation of a mechanical system. No longer is there a service in the middle able to steal funds or operate on fractional reserve, or the systemic risk which arises from such behavior being commonplace.

So, sidechains are exciting because they allow permissionless innovation. The two-way peg allows innovation in the space of block chain applications without fragmenting the marketplace with a new free-floating p2p currency for each project. The return peg is, in a way, the last major change that need ever happen to bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, the one change to rule them all.

Some people have over-hyped sidechains as “the death of altcoins.” I don’t like this language, but if sidechains harold the death of any coins, it is clone coins which have no differentiating characteristics from bitcoin. There is no longer any reason for native currencies to exist on namecoin, monero, zerocash, or other such “feature chains.” But worry not: freicoin is different species of currency which behaves different from bitcoin: the fixed inflationary or demurrage currency. Because such a currency is fundamentally compatible with bitcoin and able to exist side-by-side, freicoin holders need not fear that their niche will someday be displaced by bitcoin.

Rather than be threatened by sidechain technology, freicoin stands to benefit greatly. Freicoin need no longer be isolated in its own ecosystem, or limited by its poor adoption. By introducing desired features, in particular issued assets, privacy enhancing technology, and larger dynamic block sizes, the freicoin block chain could very likely see an influx of users bringing their bitcoins to our chain to do business. Open for business is the motto of the new freicoin block chain containing two-way pegged assets such as bitcoin.

Jorge and myself are particularly motivated to work on sidechain technology because it makes deployment of block chain technology innovation easier. Freicoin, freimarkets, and republicoin: these are all innovative applications of cryptocurrency technology which could not or would not ever be deployed to the main bitcoin block chain. But they can become accessible to the bitcoin ecosystem by means of the freicoin block chain, if and when freicoin is given sidechain features.

Not only does this bring new users, but freicoin users also stand to benefit from greater integration. By having more services track and support the freicoin block chain, it becomes easier for these services to support freicoin as a transactional currency. Instead of bringing freicoin to the market, we bring the markets home to freicoin.

In summary, by fixing longstanding issues in the bitcoin ecosystem, freicoin stands to gain new users and strengthen its position. And unlike other potential sidechains, freicoin has a perpetual mining subsidy through its native demurrage currency that gives our block chain mining incentives that are known to work, providing security buffer other sidechains would be lacking. Even if these new users primarily transact in bitcoin, this remains a tremendously good thing for holders of freicoin currency.

That’s the vision. But to get from here to there requires quite a bit of work, much more than is possible to be done by a few volunteers. By founding a company around sidechains and getting funded, we have been able to secure the resources necessary to make sure that not only sidechain technology gets implemented and deployed, but also all the cool extensions to bitcoin (e.g. freimarkets) that inspired us to propose sidechains in the first place.

Our employment contracts were specifically constructed such that the company has no claim to the intellectual property underlying freicoin, the freicoin code base, the freicoin branding, or anything else about the freicoin project, now or going into the future. Furthermore we have a specific moonlighting exception that allows us to continue contributing to freicoin moving forwards, including merging into freicoin of open-sourced code written for the company’s own products. And while I cannot be specific about what the company is working on right now, needless to say Jorge and I were brought in because of our work on freimarkets and other extensions of the bitcoin protocol we originally proposed to be implemented on the freicoin block chain. As such open source technology matures within the company, we will be regularly merging such features that are desired by the freicoin community into the freicoin reference client.

I'm drafting another post detailing what I foresee as a potential freicoin development roadmap, including both ideas for rebranding and hard fork features that might make it in 2015. In the mean time, I'd be happy to entertain any questions about sidechains and their impact to freicoin. Additionally, barring any technical glitches I'll be participating in the Freicoin Alliance meeting as well.

By this point I assume that everyone here has heard about the new venture capital funded startup that is making waves in the Bitcoin space with its public unveiling and the release of the sidechains whitepaper. You may have also noticed that beyond being co-authors of the paper, Jorge and myself are co-founders of this new company. I’ll avoid mentioning it by name because I want to speak to the Freicoin community here, not people finding this thread through Google. Why are Jorge and myself proponents of sidechains? Why have we joined up with an ostensibly bitcoin-focused company? What does this mean for Freicoin? I hope to answer these questions.

The promise of sidechains is simple: by pegging asset value across chains, users are given the freedom to apply functionality of one chain (e.g. privacy offered by monero, or p2p markets provided by freimarkets) to assets originating on another (e.g. bitcoin or freicoin). Want to send your coins anonymously? Send them to a chain that supports ring signatures or zerocash protocol. Want to participate on a peer-to-peer marketplace? Send your coins to a chain that supports native asset extensions, such as freicoin with the freimarkets extensions.

Sidechain is a new word for a rather old concept -- we had an early semi-trusted version of it in our first freimarkets proposal. Certainly the concept pre-dates bitcoin itself, as payment network gateways fulfill a similar role in the legacy financial system. However the trustless setup invented in whole by Greg Maxwell and independently in pieces by numerous others allows the gateway role to be fulfilled without trusting anything other than correct operation of a mechanical system. No longer is there a service in the middle able to steal funds or operate on fractional reserve, or the systemic risk which arises from such behavior being commonplace.

So, sidechains are exciting because they allow permissionless innovation. The two-way peg allows innovation in the space of block chain applications without fragmenting the marketplace with a new free-floating p2p currency for each project. The return peg is, in a way, the last major change that need ever happen to bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, the one change to rule them all.

Some people have over-hyped sidechains as “the death of altcoins.” I don’t like this language, but if sidechains harold the death of any coins, it is clone coins which have no differentiating characteristics from bitcoin. There is no longer any reason for native currencies to exist on namecoin, monero, zerocash, or other such “feature chains.” But worry not: freicoin is different species of currency which behaves different from bitcoin: the fixed inflationary or demurrage currency. Because such a currency is fundamentally compatible with bitcoin and able to exist side-by-side, freicoin holders need not fear that their niche will someday be displaced by bitcoin.

Rather than be threatened by sidechain technology, freicoin stands to benefit greatly. Freicoin need no longer be isolated in its own ecosystem, or limited by its poor adoption. By introducing desired features, in particular issued assets, privacy enhancing technology, and larger dynamic block sizes, the freicoin block chain could very likely see an influx of users bringing their bitcoins to our chain to do business. Open for business is the motto of the new freicoin block chain containing two-way pegged assets such as bitcoin.

Jorge and myself are particularly motivated to work on sidechain technology because it makes deployment of block chain technology innovation easier. Freicoin, freimarkets, and republicoin: these are all innovative applications of cryptocurrency technology which could not or would not ever be deployed to the main bitcoin block chain. But they can become accessible to the bitcoin ecosystem by means of the freicoin block chain, if and when freicoin is given sidechain features.

Not only does this bring new users, but freicoin users also stand to benefit from greater integration. By having more services track and support the freicoin block chain, it becomes easier for these services to support freicoin as a transactional currency. Instead of bringing freicoin to the market, we bring the markets home to freicoin.

In summary, by fixing longstanding issues in the bitcoin ecosystem, freicoin stands to gain new users and strengthen its position. And unlike other potential sidechains, freicoin has a perpetual mining subsidy through its native demurrage currency that gives our block chain mining incentives that are known to work, providing security buffer other sidechains would be lacking. Even if these new users primarily transact in bitcoin, this remains a tremendously good thing for holders of freicoin currency.

That’s the vision. But to get from here to there requires quite a bit of work, much more than is possible to be done by a few volunteers. By founding a company around sidechains and getting funded, we have been able to secure the resources necessary to make sure that not only sidechain technology gets implemented and deployed, but also all the cool extensions to bitcoin (e.g. freimarkets) that inspired us to propose sidechains in the first place.

Our employment contracts were specifically constructed such that the company has no claim to the intellectual property underlying freicoin, the freicoin code base, the freicoin branding, or anything else about the freicoin project, now or going into the future. Furthermore we have a specific moonlighting exception that allows us to continue contributing to freicoin moving forwards, including merging into freicoin of open-sourced code written for the company’s own products. And while I cannot be specific about what the company is working on right now, needless to say Jorge and I were brought in because of our work on freimarkets and other extensions of the bitcoin protocol we originally proposed to be implemented on the freicoin block chain. As such open source technology matures within the company, we will be regularly merging such features that are desired by the freicoin community into the freicoin reference client.

I'm drafting another post detailing what I foresee as a potential freicoin development roadmap, including both ideas for rebranding and hard fork features that might make it in 2015. In the mean time, I'd be happy to entertain any questions about sidechains and their impact to freicoin. Additionally, barring any technical glitches I'll be participating in the Freicoin Alliance meeting as well.