Future of Freicoin

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

If you came here expecting an authoritative declaration of where Freicoin is headed, prepare to be disappointed. Freicoin is not led from above, it is and must be organized from the grassroots--the user base. It is you that sets the direction of Freicoin and my intention in posting this is to rekindle an open discussion about where freicoin is headed, and what our priorities should be.

Updated Freicoin Core

There are a few consensus bugs that freicoin is currently exposed to. The most egregious bugs can be fixed by backporting fixes to the 0.8 branch and doing an emergency release. This is presently Jorge and my highest priority, and you should expect a soft-fork release implementing these fixes very soon.

There are a lot of other security bug fixes that are not so easily back ported however, as well as valuable new features and performance updates in the latest Bitcoin Core releases. It is our intention to finish the 0.9 port, then move quite rapidly to 0.10 and then 0.11, and having Freicoin keep up with the Bitcoin release schedule thereafter.

There was a while in the past where we kept up a good release cadence, sometimes having freicoin releases the very same day as bitcoin. While I accept responsibility for letting this slide over the past 12 months, one of the difficulties we encountered while we were keeping up was a lack of testing by the freicoin community of our release candidates. It would be absolutely irresponsible of us to do an official release from a code base that had not been adequately tested by multiple individuals in a variety of deployment environments. This is what held up the 0.9 release and what will continue to hold up future releases of Freicoin Core.

We need testers. Please consider volunteering a few hours of your time around each release downloading & building the Freicoin Core wallet, and taking it for a test drive. This is a way in which anyone can give back to freicoin development without requiring any specific skillset.

New features

As you may know, a good chunk of the code Jorge and I work with on a daily basis is now open-source as part of the sidechain elements project. We have explicit permission from our employer baked into our work agreements to allow us to port these features to freicoin as they are released. Many of the features that have already been released we feel freicoin would benefit greatly from, and intend to integrate into freicoin in due time. These features include:

• Lock-time improvements. Written by Peter Todd and yours truly, these are soft-fork enhancements which improve the utility of lock-time (allowing trustless micropayment channel setup, for example). These are soft-fork changes and ready to deploy today, although they are presently receiving review by the bitcoin community.
   
• Native assets. Also known as: freimarkets. Adds explicit asset coloring and corresponding accounting rules, and makes the transaction format more expressive so as to support pre-signed offers and other financial contracts necessary for a peer-to-peer exchange. Only the most basic version is implemented so far, and it is a hard-fork change.
   
• Segregated witness. Eliminates malleability concerns entirely, as well as yields significant performance enhancements to syncing the historical block chain. This is a hard-fork change, and currently undergoing minor improvements.
   
• Confidential transactions. Allows selective disclosure of an output's value. Observers watching the chain have limited information about the values being transacted, thereby achieving an increased level of privacy. This is a hard-fork change, and currently undergoing major improvements.
   
• A non-disclosed method for non-interactive CoinJoin. This is a hard-fork change, and presently still on the drawing board. More details to emerge as this is released as part of sidechain elements.

There are other features being worked on for the sidechain elements project we feel freicoin would benefit greatly from. For example, script replacement. However these are large multi-year projects and I'm confining this update to things which could be deployed to freicoin in the relatively short term.

 

Merged mining

The freicoin initial issuance is almost paid out. At some point after the initial issuance is complete, we would like to hard-fork freicoin to allow an improved form of merged mining -- allowing a single proof of work to secure both bitcoin and freicoin at the same time. This will at long last eliminate the difficulties we have had in building and maintaining a stable and secure hash rate.

This will unfortunately have a devastating effect on the grassroots freicoin mining community that presently exists. Although investments in mining ASICs will not be recoverable, it may be possible to restart, for a while, a "GPU mining" initiative by using foundation funds to pay for work performed for reputable scientific distributed compute project, e.g. Folding@Home. More on that in a moment.

The Foundation

Finally, the contentious point that most people want clarity on. What is going to happen with the foundation funds, now that they are almost entirely generated and almost entirely undistributed? And once they are distributed, what is the plan for the foundation afterwards? Let's take these in turn, starting with what has gone before:

The past

When it was first decided that there would be a foundation to distribute a portion of the initial issuance, there was no plan for distributing the coins. Rather, there was a preference to NOT distribute the coins entirely to a subset of early adopters via mining, and a requirement that these funds be distributed in a decentralized way, although no decentralized alternatives to mining had been proposed yet. Ultimately two fair decentralized distribution mechanisms were discovered, and work has begun to start issuance via those methods.

The first approved distribution mechanism was the community and non-profit donation matching program presently being run on freicoin.org. This achieves decentralization because donors select the recipients of foundation funds via their own contributions. It however requires some oversight to prevent emptying of the foundation funds by a bad actor. So far approximately 150k freicoins have been distributed via the donation matching program, and a further 900k is obligated. However the obligated funds have been delayed until such time as the donation matching program can be re-implemented to prevent theft of Foundation funds.

The second approved distribution mechanism was the payment of opt-in participants of a volunteer-compute projects for the social good, such as Folding@Home. Participants would opt-in to running a daemon on their computer which injects payment invoices into the completed work units submitted to the @Home project. Foundation servers then scan these work units for invoices and pay out to the addresses contained within in proportion to the points earned by the submitting user over some interval. This has not been deployed yet simply due to time constraints in getting the code written.

The present

There is need for a programmer to re-write the donation matching script. This requires only rudimentary computer science knowledge. If you or someone you know meets these qualifications and would like to contribute their time (unpaid), please let me know.

There is a need for a programmer to write the @Home issuance mechanism. This requires a moderate amount of computer science knowledge, including an ability to scrape and parse information from HTML sources. If you or someone you know meets these qualifications and would like to contribute their time (unpaid), please let me know.

We are open to approving new distribution mechanisms in the future, but the mechanism for distribution must be fair and decentralized. Alternatively, we may approve a series of prizes for the funds, but only if awarding of the prize purse is done in a provably fair and unbiased manor, e.g. by smart contract.

The future

There seems to be two major concerns regarding the future of the Freicoin Foundation:

1. What happens at the end of the 3-year issuance period? Nothing out of the ordinary. It was a hope, but never an expectation that the foundation funds would be fully issued during this time period. The foundation will continue to operate as long as funds are available.
    
2. What happens when the foundation funds are exhausted? The foundation will cease to exist, having completed its only purpose of carrying out its portion of the initial issuance. There is no expectation that the foundation will continue to exist as an active entity after its original goals are achieved.

 

Conclusion

 

Freicoin belongs to the people who use it. Jorge and I have some ideas for where we would like the project to go -- expanding scope, and pulling in new users. But it is you, the people using freicoin, who hold the ultimate authority over its direction. I open the floor for discussion.

[Arcurus 331]

Hi Mark,

thank you for your answer.

 

• What happens when the foundation funds are exhausted? The foundation will cease to exist, having completed its ownly purpose of carrying out its portion of the initial issuance. There is no expectation that the foundation will continue to exist as an active entity after its original goals are achieved.

How do you / the developer see the future of coin issuing in Freicoin once the Foundion funds are distributed?

Is there any plan of developing something like republicoin, which would allow alternatives to mining for coin distribution?

If so how could that look like?

Best regards,

Martin

[Arcurus 331]

here are some more practical questions according to coin issuing / the Freicoin Alliance / the Basic Income Experiment:
Currently with the Freicoin Alliance we have currently only one entity / project which distributes some serious amounts of coins from the coin matching.
Therefore most likely bought coins on exchanges will come at least partially from the Freicoin Alliance at some point in the near future if not more projects will join soon.
This would lead to the situation, that donors cannot be sure if they donate to the Freicoin Alliance that their coins are matched if they bought their Freicoins on exchanges.
How could we handle that?

Second:
Some projects like the Basic Income / Citizens Project like suggested here would be much easier to plan if at least some part of coins would be distributed to projects through some form of coin voting.
How does the Lead Freicoin Developer / Foundation think about distribution though coin voting?



 

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

Republicoin solves a problem that doesn't yet exist -- what to do when the subsidy is so large in real dollars that it more than secures the network and then some. Republicoin is an unfinished outline of a solution for how to spend that "and then some" in a socially beneficial way.

It's a problem I would like to have. But doing any more than theorizing a this stage is frankly putting the cart before the horse or counting your chickens before they hatch -- pick your metaphor. We don't know what the long-term value of 1 freicoin will be, so it's kinda hard to guess how much security 97 freicoins per block will provide. If freicoin really does have a very high velocity, as expected, then maybe it will be too little!

I will note in passing that the situation has improved somewhat in terms of the viability of republicoin. We had previously considered proof-of-stake voting schemes, although these suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem (being able to vote for multiple proposals) and miner censorship of the vote. By instead making votes part of the transaction format and weighting votes by freicoin-days-destroyed, it may be possible to at least have an economic cost to miner censorship. It's not a complete solution as of yet, but it is outline of something better.

 

Regarding the Freicoin Alliance, perhaps consider breaking up your projects and soliciting donations separately for each? This is not ideal and I would have to confer with Jorge and r000n to see if this would be acceptable, but if it is indeed the case that the donations are mostly going through Freicoin Alliance then it would make sense.

 

Regarding voting, that could be done in a rudimentary way using signed messages. I guess I would have to delve deep and understand the requirements better before giving advice (sorry it's late here and I've caught some sort of fever that is making it hard to concentrate).

[Bicknellski 276]

I will review this... thanks for the heads up Mark.

 

My only question really is that the 80% of foundation funds not distributed by December 2015 will they be 'destroyed' as per the original commitment?

 

As it was stated clearly initially that the 80% was to be redistributed completely within 3 years of launch and if that failed to happen the funds would be simply destroyed if I am not mistaken. 

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

My only question really is that the 80% of foundation funds not distributed by December 2015 will they be 'destroyed' as per the original commitment?

 

As it was stated clearly initially that the 80% was to be redistributed completely within 3 years of launch and if that failed to happen the funds would be simply destroyed if I am not mistaken. 

 

You are mistaken. I'm sorry but that was never the plan.

[Arcurus 331]

For me it looks like there is a different perception between the main Freicoin developers and the Freicoin community.
As far as I understood the main goal of Freicoin is to create a fair money system for the people.
It looks like the developers have more a focus on the demurrage itself, while the community has more a focus on a fair coin issuing / distribution of the demurrage.

First of all we should come together and outline a clear vision, in what direction we want to go with Freicoin.

Because later on it becomes more diffcult to change things, and also it creates uncertainty about Freicoin and Freicoin related projekts like an basic income experiment.
How to secure the network is more an technical problem then an economic problem and should be handled seperate from an discussion about alternative coin issuing to mining.

Back to the Freicoin Foundation:
The github version of the website says (freico.in seems to be down)
Q: When, in the future, will all the coins have been distributed?
A: About 3 years after the project launched (December 2012), which means sometimes in 2015 or 2016.

would be good to clearify the faq.



For programming the coin issuing is an  is a alliance bounty that could be used for that.
If needed we could also increase the bounty. See:
https://freicoinalliance.com/topic/55-developer-bounty-advancing-the-freicoin-issuing-24-freihours-120000-freicoins/

Also for testing the alliance could give out bounties. What is mainly needed is someone to coordinate the development / testing.

I think what we need most currently is doing the basics:
- We need a clear vision about the Future of Freicoin / coin issuing
- We need a website with clear information / faq
- We need a website with an functioning easy to use freicoin desctop client, an  mobile client and the core freicoin client.
- We need someone to coordinate the Freicoin development.

 

Best regards,

Arcurus












 

[Bicknellski 276]

Back to the Freicoin Foundation:

The github version of the website says (freico.in seems to be down)

Q: When, in the future, will all the coins have been distributed?

A: About 3 years after the project launched (December 2012), which means sometimes in 2015 or 2016.

 

 

Sorry Mark... I was not mistaken. Obviously if you want to change the PLAN go right ahead. But to be honest this is not good for the coin to now break that promise. There are other points posted in several threads where the 3 years after launch the distribution was to take place http://freicoin.freeforums.org/demurrage-should-it-all-go-to-miners-t20-60.html. If the foundation was unable to meet it's projections then an alternative was stated that it could be destroyed. I don't want to go through all the forums and track it down but I will just stand on the github declaration and expect that the foundation does SOMETHING about distribution to meet the obligation to 'distribute' ALL the coins before Q1 in 2016.

 

Semantics aside. Distribution must happen at least by early 2016 as promised unless someone is waiting for the value of the coin to magically increase and make a windfall the current value of the foundation frc is minimal and is not worth the time to distribute at this point. If destruction doesn't happen it is well within the rights of the current user base of 10 or so miners left, that keep the coin alive today, to hard fork the coin.

 

Re: Demurrage - should it all go to miners?

by maaku » Sun Aug 19, 2012 12:00 am

It is not a strong argument, but my gut instinct is that it would be impossible to come up with something better and significantly different.

No matter what we do, some decision has to be made about distribution of demurrage funds. Right now we've inherited from Bitcoin the position that the decision is made by dictatorial decree by us, the core developers, with a roadblock written in so that a hard-fork would be required if we change our minds about how to do it.

But for any of the ideas talked about in this thread, we'd fundamentally be talking about giving up control over distribution of demurrage to some body of individuals. Some proposals require simply lifting the hard-fork protection so the we, the benevolent dictators can specify the distribution plan. At the other extreme, the demurrage is sent to some external body (a foundation, perhaps) and they decide what to do with it. In either case you can ask the question: what's preventing us (the developers) or them (the foundation) from making poor decisions? Answer: nothing.

What I proposed above was a mechanism for decentralizing this decision-making process, and creating a sort of frei-zone “economic congress”. What was it that is said about democracy--that it's the least-objectionable option? “The worst system out there, except for all the others.” I know there's a famous quote to that effect. The proposal for a frei-zone economic congress to manage demurrage is, I think, with all its checks, balances, and weighted franchise the worst option... except for all the others that have or might be proposed.

I find it odd and more than a little ironic to be weighing the pros and cons of various political frameworks traditionally employed by coercive states (being a pacifist libertarian/anarchist/individualist myself). But in this case we are talking about the management of a community-owned collected resource, which makes the problem domain very similar to that of a tax-supported state (except that in our case the community resource is collected non-coercively and therefore morally). So I'm not surprised to find a similar solution space.

By the way, I forgot to mention that there would remain an ultimate check on the power of the economic congress: the hard-fork option. The a majority of individual users could decide this whole deliberative process isn't working and revert to the original rule: demurrage goes to the miners, or some variant thereof. The miners would obviously support this, and it is probably what would happen if the stakeholders were obviously corrupt.

Send me some kria: 135p91ruUUVwX6WEBSPHwFb4ycr9DaZFpX

maaku   Posts: 370 Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2011 9:36 pm

 

 

 

 

Maybe destruction and the END of the foundation is the best course of action as this would free up Mark and others from the needless burden of overseeing the impossible distribution since this debate is over nearly 4 years old now what makes anyone think there is a viable solution? Again the goal was 3 years distribution... to carry out another 3 years or 10 years or etc seems to me to be a waste of time and effort given there is no 'community' at this stage willing to engage in distribution / liberation of Foundation funds. Time to cut the losses and simply destroy the coins and focus on the coin development after Q4 2015 or before the end of Q1 2016. The best option would be to take the decision out of Mark's hands and hard fork to kill that 80% used by the foundation ending the debate and pushing the foundation and distribution question to the graveyard where it belongs. Retain the demurrage and move on as Arc says looking for solutions to other issue plaguing the coin like poor numbers in the USER end of things.

 

Seems to me a waste of resources currently to even bother with a foundation that really doesn't exist other than on paper and has done little or nothing since 2013 to solve the distribution problem as they originally mandated. Any solution admittedly requires a healthy and functioning coin with a large stable user base which we have never really seen at all on FRC. At this stage how many actual users of Freicoin are there? 100? 10? 1? I suggest it is in the teens not even hundreds at this point and as such the foundation has no user base to query or ask help from or to even distribute the little value which is somewhat less than $90,000 USD from that 80% at current exchange rates. We need to be honest the coin is limping along barely as it is and resources need to be focused on problems that have solutions. Foundations and distribution issues could easily be resolved with destruction in December 2015. 

 

 

 

Re: Demurrage - should it all go to miners?

by cipherpunk » Fri Apr 19, 2013 9:45 pm

Hello folks (my first post here).

A little bit of background: I'm a long-time BTC user who initially heard about it due to involvement with the I2P project crew. I have always been worried about the effects of deflation on the Bitcoin ecosystem (even foreseeable deflation at the time when inflation is still occurring). I am happy to notice that other people are concerned about this too.

I was informed about this project by an acquaintance at a local autonomous social centre, and so I came, read the introduction, and immediately wanted to offer criticism.

- First, I fully support the idea of implementing a cryptocurrency which involves a demurrage fee. I don't see a particular difference in whether it should be distributed to only to miners, or to all accounts, or to accounts meeing certain criteria, as long as it is not distributed to any central authority.

 

- Secondly, I totally oppose the idea of tasking *any* foundation with the distribution of 80% of the initial money supply. I consider this proposal (found here: http://freico.in/how/ ) shortsighted and would not dare to invest my computational resources into a system which empowers a third party so heavily. I recommend that people consider altering this feature of the project, even if it means backing down from many plans. A currency system should not be based on trust towards a central authority, even during the initial phase of its deployment. With this move you would make yourself a target of great suspicion (in addition to real attacks (hacking, regulation), if your project should be going well and Freicoin should be developing a market value).

 

by Bicknellski » Tue Apr 23, 2013 3:19 am

Too late.

On both points.

So now will you work with us to distribute the coin from the foundation? Or should we just simply destroy the coins and let them run back only to the miners?

My argument for having some sort of autonomous and democratic distribution that is not mining stems from the wholly undemocratic nature of mining and the consolidation in few hands that it is evident in most if not all coins. If you have a better version of distribution that can reach more people more equitably then please offer it up as far as I can tell most bitcoin true believers have one major blind spot and that is mining is a fair system of distribution. It is not.

A "central" authority that is able to distribute Freicoin more efficiently and more equitably even if flawed is far superior in my mind given the fact the majority of people on the planet will never have access to mining. I strongly feel that distribution of ANYTHING requires some human involvement at this point in time until there is some universal technology in the hands of billions (Handphones?).

"Kria" Me: FRC 133CM8oGe2xybSkeh8fLvpn5FNtdeDDzDe 

THE FREICOIN ALLIANCE Join us today, to promote Freicoin into the future!

 

[jtimon 36]

 

Regarding the Freicoin Alliance, perhaps consider breaking up your projects and soliciting donations separately for each? This is not ideal and I would have to confer with Jorge and r000n to see if this would be acceptable, but if it is indeed the case that the donations are mostly going through Freicoin Alliance then it would make sense.

 

Sounds reasonable to me. I'm not even sure why you think it's not ideal, I think I prefer separated projects so can donors have more freedom to chose.

 

@Bicknellski , the goal of distributing everything in 3 years was ambitious and we admittedly failed at it. Although that doesn't necessarily mean we have to destroy the coins, destroying the remaining foundation coins is always a possibility at any point if we think it's necessary. In fact, miners could do it against the freicoin foundation wishes with a relatively simple softfork (spending from foundation addresses is no longer permitted after the softfork).

The reason why the subsidy only lasted 3 years (and why we wanted to distribute all foundation funds in 3 years) was to reduce inflation to 0 as soon as possible leaving only the 5% demurrage (currently freicoin is way less inflationary than bitcoin, even if you count the 5% demurrage as inflation).

1) If we destroy those funds it will take much longer to get to 0% inflation.

Another possibility maaku came up with the other day would be to distribute all remaining coins proportionally between all current holders (leaving them with the same % of the total issued coins, so it would be perfectly fair).

This wouldn't need a softfork (although doing it with a hardfork would have some advantages over doing it with the foundation's wallet directly) and it also lacks the disadvantage 1.

 

A third possibility would be to turn them back into mining subsidies (say, to be fully distributed to miners in the next 3 years).

 

All these actions would share the following disadvantages though:

 

2) We lose the opportunity to make more good with the matching donations program (specially if freicoin rises in price).

3) We lose the opportunity to subsidize folding@home (ala curecoin), which would be a good way to not harm current GPU miners that much when we move to merge mining.

 

My personal preference would be not to take any of these actions (for now, maybe later I change my mind if we take too long to reach 0% inflation) and just continue with the matching donations and also implement the folding@home subsidy program, but if I have to chose between one of them I would clearly chose to second option.

It's up to the whole community though, not just me or maaku.

Whatever we do should ideally be uncontroversial among the community.

[Arcurus 331]

2) We lose the opportunity to make more good with the matching donations program

I agree to that.

Would be good to bring the donation matching to run.

Would also be great if we can also distribute some coins though voting with coins.

 

And as said, good to outline an clear vision for Freicoin and the Coin Issuing.

[jtimon 36]

I agree to that.

Would be good to bring the donation matching to run.

Would also be great if we can also distribute some coins though voting with coins.

 

And as said, good to outline an clear vision for Freicoin and the Coin Issuing.

Yes, voting with coins could be a first prototype for a future "republicoin" (even if t's centralized at first) in case we need it in the future.

Of course, yes, we should fix https://github.com/maaku/coinmatchto retroactively give a higher percentage than 10% first (which is also much simpler).

The voluntary computation subsidy (ala curecoin) should be simpler than a republicoin draft as well.

Unfortunately we don't have that many developers around to do all these things and my time has been more focused lately on bitcoin development (which will directly benefit Freicoin as we rebase), sidechains developement (specifically freimarkets features that will be integrated in Freicoin) and some rebasing work from 0.9 to 0.10.

We haven't released Freicoin-0.9 because it hasn't been tested, please help test: https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/commits/0.9

We also need to backport BIP66 back to 0.9 and 0.8. It should be relatively simple to make, but there's a potential attack that could be done against Freicoin while we don't deploy the BIP66 softfork.

I'm personally much more worried about that last thing than about the foundation coins being demurraged instead of distributed to the matched donations and other mechanisms but if anyone else wants to code (or pay someone else to code) these other things, they are certainly important too (the fact that the foundation is going to run that code doesn't mean that it can't be written by someone else).

The rebasing work it's very important too. For example, the user experience will be much more pleasant after rebasing on top of 0.10 with headers first. Wallet developers would benefit from a libfreicoinconsensus as well.

0.11 has pruning to not require that much storage space, etc. There's many Bitcoin improvements we're not enjoying yet because we've not rebased (and because what is rebased [ie 0.9] is not tested).

[Arcurus 331]

with testing or coding, i think the alliance could support that with some coins if needed, but it would be good if one of the main develpers could coordinate it.

[Bicknellski 276]

I think given the lack of support inflation to 0% is weak argument given now we have only a few machines even mining FRC.

 

At this point no action might be best given there is no real activity mining or otherwise on the coin.

[Samuel 23]

What happened to the BasicIncome idea as a distribution mechanism? I kind of liked that concept, and got into some hard thinking
So here a proposal for the first 2 steps:

1.Step
Add for the beginning (until a better solution is found) Facebook verify and identity check via f.e. skype by appointed core members (every verify to be stored transparently on a website)  
2. Step 

Redistribute every second the demurrage fee as a basic income equally to all verified members (this is the fun part, watching your account magically grow)

 
I will try (with my really basic beginner knowledge) to prototype a website with the basic income redistribution mechanism and a Facebook login over the next days and will present my results here

Anyhow, I would love to bring this project forward and invest time and money over the course of the next 3 months to get things going. 

By the way, what is the best option at the moment to buy FRC's ?
I would like to get a bunch, in order to start bounties and pay people on different tasks bringing forward the FreiCoin project. 

Best from Munich
Sam

[Samuel 23]

I have setup a test/prototype page here at mangos.meteor.com

Discussion to be continued here:
https://freicoinalliance.com/topic/140-test-group-basic-income-world-citizens-project-alpha-test-example/

[Arcurus 331]

I have setup a test/prototype page here at freicoinwcd.meteor.com

Discussion to be continued here:

https://freicoinalliance.com/topic/140-test-group-basic-income-world-citizens-project-alpha-test-example/

 

that sounds great. I am little bit buissy these days, I hope to reply soon more in detail. Thx for your efforts!

[Samuel 23]

I updated it, now it is available at mangos.meteor.com
Looking forward to your feedback. 

[Samuel 23]

I am planning to finance a 3 months Hackerspace to work deeper on this, have a look at it here:
http://forum.ucoin.io/t/a-3-months-hackerspace-who-where-and-when-i-pay/475

[Rik8119 242]

Hi Marc,

 

with a strong Bitcoin in the back maybe we can get some traction again. To be the first o start, is there anything i can do, testing etc.? How far is the sidechain project?

 

Greetings Rik

[Arcurus 331]

I think the best would be if we have someone who directly communicates with marc and jorge what testing needs to be done and then can coordinate it.

[Rik8119 242]

I never talked to them, do you know anyone?

[Arcurus 331]

I never talked to them, do you know anyone?

yes, personally only jorge, marc only though mails

 

I wrote to them and jorge already answerd:

¨Jorgeminator is currently testing freicoin 0.9 and reporting on #freicoin (IRC). I'll take a look at the freicoin allince threads I'm receiving

notifications from¨

[jtimon 36]

with a strong Bitcoin in the back maybe we can get some traction again. To be the first o start, is there anything i can do, testing etc.?

Hello Rik!

We desperately need help with testing.

Development and trouble-shooting things are usually discussed on IRC (server: freenode channel: #freicoin )

We don't really use it much, but there's also a mailing list for announcements that I think we could recycle into a dev mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/freicoin

We used to use http://freicoin.freeforums.org/technical-f17.htmlfor that, but we prefer to use the freicoin alliance forums now for several reasons.

I'm sorry that I cannot be very responsive on the alliance forums, but I now would like to focus on development only. I will probably be more responsive on IRC or the mailing list - specially if we change it from announcements [which can be done here] to development only), but I try to catch up here from time to time (I still always have too many unread stuff). 

 

Anyway, where to start?

We probably should have a developer/tester guide analogous to https://bitcoin.org/en/developmentin freico.in but something you can do is just clone the main branch, which contains  0.8.3-1 (the "officially deployed" version):

https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/

Compile it. Test it (maybe synchronize on main and/or testnet, confirm some transactions on regtest and/or testnet?)

But we're really behind when it comes to rebasing on top of the main bitcoin codebase (and getting its improvements and new features).

So it would be much more useful if you compiled and tested 0.9, the next version, which has been coded for a long time, but hasn't been released yet due to lack of testing. Mark and I believe we have most of the work to rebase to 0.10 done as well, but it depends on the validity of 0.9.

Some things we're re-architected from 0.9 to 0.10 (more risk), but we believe this will simplify rebases for future versions (ie 0.11 and 0.12 for now).

I'm having problems compiling 0.9 right now myself, so if you have the time and the will to put together a document with instructions for "how to test the next rebased version of freicoin" from your experience, that would definitely be very useful.

You will get help on #freicoin or the mailing list for any problems you may encounter in the process of testing (either testing 0.8 or 0.9): you want to test and we love you for it.

 

How far is the sidechain project?

I'm really excited with the assets feature/element that follows the basic design in freimarkets and will be part of elements/beta-0.12. Currently the branch is in https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements/commits/alpha-0.10-multi-asset being reviewed and tested by other members of the team

as part of the elements beta development cycle (although external review and testing is welcomed too).

It is coded on top of alpha and therefore it's compatible with

confidential transactions, but it changes the transaction

serialization and therefore it's incompatible with alpha itself (it's

a hardfork).

You can only test it in regtest mode.

The wallet functionality has not been adapted to handle multiple

assets, but you can use the rawtransaction RPCs or alpha-tx.

You can also ask on the sidechains mailing list:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/sidechains-dev

Thanks for your interest!

If the community wants, we can eventually deploy these are more features from elements in a hardfork to freicoin (the community seemed to liked at least the features described in freimarkets), but we first have to rebase to 0.10 and then to 0.12!

Re Foundation:

Although I'm sad for not having the time I used to have to develop and promote freicoin, I am very glad that the community has grown and has taken over some things I used to spend a lot of time on, like moderating the old forums (thanks freicoin alliance!) or make the freicoin foundation still interesting (thanks freicoin allience and specially Arcurus!). Then again, I'm sad that we're behind on development there too, since https://github.com/maaku/coinmatch/commits/mastershould have been adapted/replaced to support 100% donation matching retroactively instead of the initial choice 10% long ago (at the same time I'm glad we're regretting having started with 10% instead of regretting a start on 100%, plus the price was and still is unpredictable: better safe than sorry). Anyway, I don't think anybody has complained about 10% or 100% donation matching being too much or about applying the change retroactively (not to discourage people to donate now), rather about the change from 10% to 100% not happening. So it's just a matter of someone adapting or replacing coinmatch. And of course continue working on reucruiting more non-profits and projects to receive the matched donations like the basic income experiments.

[Arcurus 331]

Hi Jorge,

thx for your reply and the great outline what we can do to help to test!

I think the most important for us Freicoiners right now is bringing the basics to function:

Basics are:

 

1. Functional client auf freico.in

the last time I tested the current client on freico.in it did not have the current peers, so it could not connect

then we also have an android wallet and an electrum freicoin clon which would be great to have at freico.in

please inform us if we could help with that.

 

2.Then we need one main point of communication like for example the alliance blog.

at least freicoin.org and bitcointalk.org should link to right stuff (does someone know who is in charge of freicoin.org?)

 

3. ¨So it's just a matter of someone adapting or replacing coinmatch.¨

Isnt this more or less adding an 0 behind the 10? ok the old donations we could run with 90%, because they have already got  10% and the new with 100%

For me it would also be ok to give all 100%, also those who had 10%, because so or so the value dropped dramatically and the sums are currently so small, that it is not worth to program something complicated extra for that. the only bigger sum as far as I currently know has the alliance. In case if needed the alliance could transfer 10% (something around 100K freicoins which is currently < 100 dollar) back.

 

4. It would be great to outline more an vision which the community and the freicoin core developers share/

As said, currently it looks more like the devs are more focused on the demurrage aspect itself, while the Freicoin community is more focused what we could to with the demurrage like supporting non profits, or making basic income experiments.

 

It would be good if we for example could agree, that if these experiments go well, a certain part of the demurrage (for example 80%) will continue to be used for common good projects.

also it would be good to outline in which direction we want to go with freicoin, for example if we want to have something like coin voting (republicoin).

And if we want to include proof of stake to secure the blockchain (this could solve security problems and the coin voting problem with miner blocking)

 

Just a very basic roadmap would be great!

 

 

All the good and thx for all, so lets start happy testing

MArtin

[jtimon 36]

1) Yes, having the android wallet in freico.in downloads is probably a good idea. Please someone code the change (should be really simple) for https://github.com/freicoin/freico.in

2) freicoin.org is managed by Roman Mindalev (r000n). Not sure what bitcointalk.org has to do with this... I think this forum is nice for the main point of communication, but it would be nice to use the mailing list for developement and testing.

 

3) It would be as simple as adding a 0 if it wasn't because we want to apply it retroactively (ie the donations that where matched only with 10% will be completed with the remaining 90%).

4) Let's focus on distributing the foundation funds first and then about taking a part of the perpetual 5% for miners and use it somehow else in a p2p fashion (republicoin): the latter is much more difficult.

About "a common vision", the fact is that different volunteers are interested in different things. I don't think that can (or should) be "fixed".
I think it's very hard to agree on what we will do after some experiments "have gone well" until we actually see the results of the experiments.
I think republicoin is interesting but I see it as a much longer term thing (after distributing the foundation funds, and after adding issued assets and stuff like that).

I think using proof of stake to secure the blockchain is a terrible idea and it will introduce more security problems than it will "solve", see https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
Of course, the people using proof of stake to promote their altcoins with fallacious arguments will disagree (just like litecoin users used to disagree on Scrypt being implementable on GPGPU and then on being implementable as an ASIC)...