Bicknellski

It's time to re-start this thread. As mentioned in another thread, I've been professionally busy non-stop for some months on a couple of different projects. That is currently slated to change with my new responsibilities including the maintenance of the Elements codebase, which includes most of the new features we would like to add to Freicoin. So there's a little bit of double-dipping there. Plus since I'll be traveling less and working normal hours I'll be able to spend 8-10 hours a week, evenings and weekends, working on the basic plan outlined at the top of this thread.
So let's revisit this thread. We did back-port some consensus bug fixes to the freicoin client and issued a new release of the 0.8 node software in 2015. Also included in that release was a soft-fork that changed the rules for demurrage calculation, in a way that will potentially make the client easier to maintain. We have not made good on our promise to update the client to newer versions of upstream Bitcoin Core, and that will be my first priority. The soft-fork change to demurrage calculations means that a little bit of up-front work is required to re-write those patches, but afterwards the total maintenance cost should be reduced.
The call for testers still stands. We need to develop some sort of test plan for new releases that gives us some assurance we aren't releasing bad code. Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Now looking at the specific features I suggested adding:
This is already in bitcoin, and will be in freicoin as soon as we upgrade the reference client to a more recent upstream version.
Likewise! Freicoin will get the same segwit that bitcoin is about to lock-in.
Still want this for Freicoin, but:
In the time since I wrote this, Jorge and I along with our co-workers and a partner company implemented confidential assets, which is an extension of confidential transactions that blinds the asset being transacted as well as the amount. This was a significant amount of work, and basically occupied 12-14 months of my professional career, as well as that of my colleagues.
Part of why my enthusiasm for bringing CT to Freicoin waned after writing the above words is that as soon as Andrew Poelstra invented the necessary crypto component to make confidential assets work, it became clear that we would want to wait until this new CA was finished. Proper asset support has always been an essential part of my vision for Freicoin as it is necessary to construct other forms of decentralized money (e.g. classic ripple) as well as interesting smart contracts.
Confidential assets was released this year, and made more polished in the last few months in preparation for the BC2 conference, where the necessary features for distributed exchanges were also written. It's now in a state where we can talk about brining it into production on Freicoin.
This was Mimblewimble!
No, I'm not secretly Voldemort, nor does Voldie work at my employer as far as I'm aware. However we were working on some similar ideas for non-interactive CoinJoin using confidential transactions and one-way aggregatable signatures. Voldemort independently invented the same tricks, and to his/her credit realized that it allowed A LOT more than just non-interactive CoinJoin.
It also turns out that it doesn't have to be a hard-fork change, other than the introduction of confidential transactions itself. Mimblewimble can be implemented on Elements Alpha without any changes. However it does need some work to reconcile with confidential assets, so some basic research here might be required. It is however high priority research at my employer and I am hopeful that we can see production-ready results on a relatively short timeframe.

The only other features not mentioned here are a bunch of little improvements to bitcoin script that makes writing smart contracts much easier or allows more powerful contracts. That might be a good topic for another post. Many of these are already implemented in the elements codebase, but just need some review and testing before production use.

Finally, a word needs to be said about merged mining. In fact this deserves its own post and I will make one in time, but the short TL;DR is that Jorge and I differ on our views about this. Given what we have seen happen in the Bitcoin space with respect to mining, ASICBOOST, and segregated witness, I no longer have faith that SHA256 mining can be used to secure a high-value network. And as bad as the situation is for bitcoin, it would likely be even worse for a merged mined coin, as in practice merge mining sees higher rates of centralization. I think there is a strong argument for switching to a new proof of work entirely, one which is not ASIC resistant (that's a unicorn that doesn't exist), but rather tries to minimize the performance gap between high-end general compute ad specialized hardware. Cuckoo Cycle is an example of one such PoW algorithm. In any case, I'll post my thoughts regarding this in another thread.

I hope others are as excited about bringing these new features to Freicoin as I am. I think the applications that can be built on top will do a lot to bring utility to freicoin as a medium of exchange for a generally useful block chain platform.

Wow, what a thread!
Jorge told me of his intention to post this, and I told him that although I had some feedback to give he should post anyway and I will provide my own thoughts as a comment. Now that I've wrapped up being a block chain trainer at the BC-2 workshop in Japan, I actually have time to do so.
First, I'm very thankful to see that most of the community are of the same mind regarding this issue (also, hi galambo!). The foundation was created for the purpose of solving a problem we perceived with the two competing requirements of the distribution mechanism: we wanted it to be fast so that the monetary base stabilized quickly and we could test Gesell's theory of money, but we also wanted to avoid plausible allegations of pre-mining. Sadly we must recognize that we accomplished neither -- the inflation rate of freicoin is unclear so long as the future of the foundation funds is undetermined, and the "foundation" has been misconstrued by many to resemble other foundations with more centralized purposes.
Really all we did was punt the issue. We hoped that we could come up with another fair, decentralized mechanism for distribution of the foundation funds. In reality that task proved nearly impossible, and certainly not doable with the manpower available. Republicoin remains on the drawing board as we were unable to come up with a suitably decentralized version that didn't compromise privacy and fungibility goals, let alone implement any of the half-working solutions. The charity matching program is technically still live but hasn't been operational as the backend suffers some major exploitable flaws.
So reason number 1 to kill the foundation is that it seems we are unable to meet the technical goals for distribution, and arguably we should all prefer to see those funds destroyed in a publicly verifiable way rather than compromise on those ideals and do something that could be construed as an actual pre-mine.
The second reason is regulatory.
Coin Center released in 2016 a good legal brief for deciding whether a cryptocurrency offering should be considered a security or not, which has grave regulatory implications. You can read the report here:
https://coincenter.org/entry/is-bitcoin-a-security
https://coincenter.org/entry/framework-for-securities-regulation-of-cryptocurrencies
That's how people in bitcoin space were hoping the issue would be handled. Just a few weeks ago any uncertainty about what regulators are thinking was cleared up when the SEC announced that they would use basically the same rules for deciding whether a crypto token is an unlicensed security offering. Notably they say that the DAO was a security, and presumably so was most if not all of the ICOs. You can read that report here:
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2017-131
What would it mean if the SEC decided that freicoin was a securities offering? Well, in the frightening worst case it could mean that those responsible for creating the currency (gulp, me and a few others) could be forced to pay exorbitant fines AND go to federal prison for decades of our lives, as well as prevent us from ever working in the financial industry ever again. Conceivably it might not even matter if those involved are US persons given the way the US uses extradition treaties to enforce its laws around the globe. So please, let's take this seriously.
(In case I frightened anyone too much, note that the SEC decided not to take action on the DAO, presumably because the regulatory situation was not clear at the time it was created. Now there's no excuse. The legal advice I received is that as long as we take proactive action to to make maximally sure we're in complicance, we should be okay. So as long as we take the actions I mention here, I'm still in this for the long run )
The gold standard for whether an offering is a security is the Howey test. Quoting the Coin Center page: "An investment contract for purposes of the Securities Act means a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person . . .
  invests his money in   a common enterprise and is led to   expect profits   solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party Invests his money? Well people can buy freicoin on exchanges, does that count? Unclear. Certainly it would be bad if the Foundation (a kinda-sortof pre-mine) sold its coins to investors. If this were a regular proof-of-work mined only currency the answer would be no, but honestly the existence of the foundation complicates this in hard to determine ways. Whether freicoin meets this test is really up to the prejudices of the SEC, which I have no insight into. So let's assume yes, but things would be much better if the foundation ceased to exist and the coins it managed were destroyed (this precludes, for example, directly giving out the coins to existing holders).
A common enterprise? We're all here for demurrage money, right? Check.
Expects profits? Let's be honest, everyone expects the freicoin price to rise if/when it sees significant usage. I would like to say that as demurrage money the freicoin price will be stable and only used as a medium of exchange. But while that might happen in the future, we are not there yet. Someone investing in freicoin today is probably expecting a return, not actually using it themselves (yet).
Finally, expects those profits to come solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party. Here again the foundation rears its ugly head. I'm happy to say that since freicoin was created we ALWAYS had an idea of the foundation only being involved in the initial issuance and then disbanding, and not doing anything else. The foundation doesn't even pay for the official freicoin website -- I pay out of pocket for those negligible hosting costs. However the SEC will be judging not based on what the foundation does but what a reasonable investor might think they do. And I'm sorry to say there's a lot of misinformation out there. Would a reasonable investor think that the Freicoin Foundation is like, say, the Litecoin Foundation or Ethereum Foundation, both of which pay for both development work and promotion of the coin itself? I don't know.. and that worries me.
Both points (1) and (4) would be made SIGNIFICANTLY clearer if the foundation was unequivocally disbanded, and the funds it controls destroyed.
I think there are some concessions that can be reasonably made. Namely we promised 1:1 matching of charitable contributions, which we haven't delivered on. In fact, those donations are still sitting on keys controlled by the foundation. We can forward those funds and do a retroactive 1:1 matching, before destroying the rest of the coins.
The foundation has a few non-charitable causes listed on it. We'll have to figure out what to do with those. The original donations can obviously be forwarded, but I'm not sure we can reasonably match the contribution. We'll also have to figure out what we do with donations to the foundation itself -- both foundation and the freimarkets bounty fund.
I think we CAN'T do anything like distribute the coins to current holders. Destroying the coins is the same economically anyway, and much clearer intent in the eyes of regulators.
Finally, my own vote is for option number 1 (sorry!), but with a twist. I will separately be making some posts on this forum about my intention to release an elements-derived sidechain to freicoin that is proof-of-work mined (Rik, this addresses your comment from page 2, but is off topic for this thread). It is possible that we could, for example, allow pegs into this sidechain to be doubled in quantity 2:1 so that up to 50M freicoins can be moved from the old chain to the new chain, resulting in 100M on the other side. The new chain would also have its own subsidy so, if all goes well, there is a period of coexistence where both chains are used, until the peg pool is exhausted and the old chain is archived. We can quibble the details, but something LIKE this would allow us to maintain 100M total freicoins and achieve full issuance more quickly without the complications of a miner-incentive-reducing soft-fork.
In any case, the option 4 is just option 1 followed by a soft-fork. So can we at least say that we are in agreement to finish the donation matching, destroy the funds, then start a conversation about the best way to handle the mis-match between subsidy, demurrage, and the total monetary base? Even if you guys want to go with the soft-fork, which I respect, the coins can be destroyed first whereas the soft-fork requries some development and testing.

YAY!
 Yes on option #4,
 
 

YAY!
 Yes on option #4,
 
 

Well, that's as official as things get here. We got a majority of 'Yays' agreeing that Option 4 represents the communities choice for ending the foundation. So its done, decided. LET'S DO THIS!

YAY!
 Yes on option #4,
 
 

Shocking 1.2 bln people are living on 2$ a day.. With a SLR price of 30 000$ we could pay everybody on the world 60$ basic income! #double #keepdreaming!
http://www.twodollarsaday.com/

Hi there, @Adilado has already pointed out that a cool website is very useful to promote a coin, so i am looking for someone who can help me to find a good theme and set up the site the Site Solidar.it is under construction atm but i wanna make it look great again ;-). Maybe someone has some idea or links?

Oh me too. Just updating the wallet for a couple of weeks takes longer that the initial load a month ago. I think this has to do with the denial of service attacks. 
Apperently there is a 'fast load' method, but I don't think this makes a difference for recent attacks. I too gave up.
I will try 'fast load'. We have to figure this out so we can put Ethereum on the exchange. Honestly, I'm not sure how Ethereum can even function right now. I mean, my lap top has 12G of RAM and it can't update the wallet! To me, it's like Rick's animation ^^, a total car wreck.

Welcome to the worlds 1st super computer on the blockchain!

It's not visable on the network so it is still stuck from my knowlege?

GURLS & GUYS, i have to say: BTC looking very bullish atm IF it breaks ATH the next week we will see an Altcoinparty like never before, fasten your seat-belts and hold your keys tight, its gonne be rough... PURE PUMP!

Hey Kieran welcome back bud.

I just borrow Freicoin from these fools for 0% interest that is my game.

A plan moving forward please. Seems we have agreed to some things. And again somethings like POS vs POW have already been discussed before Arc and I would defer to what Mark and Jorge have said on this issue we don't need POS. As for freimarkets colored coins etc... what are the developers willing to do? I think 1 and 4 seem agreeable to most. Let's see that done and maybe we can see a more concrete plan moving forward. If everything now is going to be run through the forum and discussed great. But what is the agenda? What do we need etc. The foundation question seems mostly solved. Someone write it up and lets vote and then move forward.
 
Note: Fab. Well I have said my piece and it needed to be voiced. As for attendance and the community? Really? A lot of those past options and plans were debated within a larger community and assumed that would be acted on. If we want to keep discussing things already discussed and posted then in reality it is a waste of time and it is a delaying tactic at best. I am not asking for anything other than following up on what the devs want to do with their established plans and they were discussed at length in the past I don't see how things have change demonstrably since 2014 or 2015. I am not asking for the devs to make this their job and put in 40 hours a week and cut everyone out of the process. I just want them to engage with us in a reasonable way so we can expect some sort of progress. Have a look at the old forum you will see what I mean on that. It would be worthwhile for those two to put their vision on paper and get us the community to sell that with our input. But you can't keep limping along with no one leading this thing. Someone needs to step up and moving things forward.
 
 

Will try and test this weekend.

Hey Kieran welcome back bud.

I just borrow Freicoin from these fools for 0% interest that is my game.

Is this a suicide pack Rik. KRIA OR DIE!
 
 

Or happy they dumped this dog of coin now before it completely implodes.

LOL! J/K KRIA TO THE MOON!

A plan moving forward please. Seems we have agreed to some things. And again somethings like POS vs POW have already been discussed before Arc and I would defer to what Mark and Jorge have said on this issue we don't need POS. As for freimarkets colored coins etc... what are the developers willing to do? I think 1 and 4 seem agreeable to most. Let's see that done and maybe we can see a more concrete plan moving forward. If everything now is going to be run through the forum and discussed great. But what is the agenda? What do we need etc. The foundation question seems mostly solved. Someone write it up and lets vote and then move forward.
 
Note: Fab. Well I have said my piece and it needed to be voiced. As for attendance and the community? Really? A lot of those past options and plans were debated within a larger community and assumed that would be acted on. If we want to keep discussing things already discussed and posted then in reality it is a waste of time and it is a delaying tactic at best. I am not asking for anything other than following up on what the devs want to do with their established plans and they were discussed at length in the past I don't see how things have change demonstrably since 2014 or 2015. I am not asking for the devs to make this their job and put in 40 hours a week and cut everyone out of the process. I just want them to engage with us in a reasonable way so we can expect some sort of progress. Have a look at the old forum you will see what I mean on that. It would be worthwhile for those two to put their vision on paper and get us the community to sell that with our input. But you can't keep limping along with no one leading this thing. Someone needs to step up and moving things forward.
 
 

what i still see lacking, is a basic incentive to hold some Grantcoin, if i would be them i would require to have a certain amount of grantcoin to get the full universal dividend. or to volunteer x lets say 10 hours each month to comon good projects.

Hi, sorry there is no working windows wallet atm. I have made a few changes to the client that needs a new wallet for me to compile but my windows is broken/ not able to boot. I will try again to get windows running and compile the new client..
Rik

Thank you both!
@fedde if you have the time the code is now at https://github.com/wincev/bitcoin-abe-slr
PS: I can pay you some SLR for hosting the explorer if you like.

Rik, if you need hosting, let me know, i'll hook it up on a server.

Yeah you mentioned that before, the merge mining and the explorer. I believe you, but I don't really understand it. The way I see it, the explorer reads and parses in info from the wallet block chain files. as long as the block is valid it should read? But it's true that ABE  also surmises the current longest chain ...
 

Though there are no dates to fix the progress i like to announce what is planned/going on and a short explanation also to #Solidar:
TOPIC: Port Solidar to Version 14, this will be a hard one, because Merge mining and demurrage has to be ported.
TOPIC: I like to make deposits possible and i am thinking about an easy to use/ effective (automated with no further interaction) way to prevent multiple accounts.
TOPIC: With the porting to V14 there is an easy way to compile windows clients on ubuntu what makes it a whole lot easier for me to compile new wallets for every version.
TOPIC: Marketing, make a short describing video.
TOPIC: Get the dnsseeder running again.
TOPIC: Get an own Forum for Solidar.
TOPIC: Program SolidarPay plugin to accept split payments with the merchant bot.
DONE: There is no explorer atm and the most convenient way seems to me to use an electrum server to query addresses, because most alternatives don't work for Solidar.
DONE: I like to advance the facebook messenger on-line wallet to increase merchant compatibility.
DONE:  @fedde is working hard to implement it into freiexchange.com, thanks a lot for that. Other exchanges are not planned atm as it is very costly to get Solidar on, there is no demurrage implemented and exchanges like to cut support when something is not as expected (mostly profits).
Here a short description what the concept is about:
When you just wait with your account (just check balance monthly to get an income) at some point you get as income what the demurrage cost you, so there is a stable redistribution system in place. So, at a certain point there is nothing to win by hoarding. As the higher balanced addresses are stronger degraded than the smaller even the basic income can not save those, so that sooner or later all look the same (excluded the mining addresses).
But as capitalism (the concentration of wealth) is an ongoing mechanism there will always be richer peoples that loose money to demurrage, so the monthly income is thought for those that can not save any money. They have to spend it and they profit the most because they get an unconditional income.
Demurrage money is meant to be spend for quality food, clothing, technology and social improvements (e.g. donations to open source developments/free music). Those who tend to hoard will not profit but most important dont take away opportunities from other people!
Of course the association have to use some funds to finance development marketing and organizations if there are not enough donations, but we try to keep the profile as low as possible and every coin spend will be transparent, so everybody can participate in keeping the costs low.
Most likely fedde will include Solidar first but i keep it updated..
Rik