Future of Freicoin

[Rik8119 242]

Interesting Paper (though i did not read it completely). But for my understanding we could burn a high amount of Freicoin to lets say 1Freicoineater... and use this address to have an "anchor of trust" that guarantees for one ledger.

 

About the "common vision": What is aimed at is to establish a constant circulation of the money which is very hard to achive with donation matching.

 

I try to test as much as i can though i dont know how a script for testing should look like.

 

About the "neat features" of Bitcoin: Bitcoin will stay what it is (a very volatile asset) independent of how many features there are, which is what we dont really want with FRC. So i think we should not focus to much on technology but on conception and circulation ;-).

 

Rik

[jtimon 36]

The last sentence of the paper: "We showed that by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value."

That doesn't mean that proof of stake cannot be useful for other things different from securing the chain (for example, republicoin).

About rebasing...it's not just about getting "neat features" from bitcoin upstream. It is also about getting important security and privacy improvements. For circulation, we have demurrage: the donation matching is only about initial distribution (instead of using all the seigniorage as subsidies to miners), and also about experimenting on ways to distribute the 5% perpetual seigniorage (that comes from the demurrage) in case that turns out to be too much subsidy for miners. I mean, if matched donations program can also help with development, adoption, etc. why not use it like we're doing? But the initial concern was not giving it all to miners as subsidies.

[Arcurus 331]

hi all,
for detail discussion of proof of stake / proof of stake combined with proof of work we have this topic:
 
https://freicoinalliance.com/topic/64-discussion-of-proof-of-stake-pos/
 
So please post detail discussion about that here, of course general discussion relevant to the future of Freicoin could be posted here, as long as it goes not into an detailed discussion.
 

The last sentence of the paper: "We showed that by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value."

 

That said I just want to mention, that I was not speaking about using 100% proof of stake I was speaking of an combination from proof of stake with proof of work that solves the nothing of stake problem / the history problem.  Coins would simulate miners, but would not replace hard wired miners fully.
 

 

 

 

 

[Bicknellski 276]

On 11/5/2015 at 4:16 AM, jtimon said:

The last sentence of the paper: "We showed that by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value."

That doesn't mean that proof of stake cannot be useful for other things different from securing the chain (for example, republicoin).

About rebasing...it's not just about getting "neat features" from bitcoin upstream. It is also about getting important security and privacy improvements. For circulation, we have demurrage: the donation matching is only about initial distribution (instead of using all the seigniorage as subsidies to miners), and also about experimenting on ways to distribute the 5% perpetual seigniorage (that comes from the demurrage) in case that turns out to be too much subsidy for miners. I mean, if matched donations program can also help with development, adoption, etc. why not use it like we're doing? But the initial concern was not giving it all to miners as subsidies.

Can we look into the possibility of having Foundation funds and part of the transaction fees after initial dispensing of the coin to be LOANED out at 0% or at negative interest as micro credit for people in underdeveloped countries?

Kiva style:  https://www.kiva.org/

Kiva Microfunds (commonly known by its domain name, Kiva.org) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization^[2] that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in over 80 countries. Kiva's mission is “to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.”

[Skaro 129]

I can do some testing. My computer skills are not so great as to be able to build a wallet without a dummy's guide, but Im willling to learn and put in the time.

[Arcurus 331]

6 minutes ago, Skaro said:

I can do some testing. My computer skills are not so great as to be able to build a wallet without a dummy's guide, but Im willling to learn and put in the time.

great to have you!

Best is to coordinate directly with fedde, he has the overview and the direct contact also to maaku.

[sunicoin 2]

is freicoin died??

[Arcurus 331]

14 hours ago, sunicoin said:

 

is freicoin died??

 

not yet!

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/freicoin/#markets

[sunicoin 2]

5 hours ago, Arcurus said:

not yet!

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/freicoin/#markets

i like freicoin but I don't see movements. When starts the party? anothers coins with + 3000%.

[Rik8119 242]

Just wait..

[jtimon 36]

> i like freicoin but I don't see movements. When starts the party? anothers coins with + 3000%.

Forget about the price. Freicoin is not about speculation.

[Skaro 129]

Freicoin was almost dead and has recently come back through grass roots efforts: Fedde built a new exchange, and a new explorer was built showing demurrage paid. There was a wallet update last August.

These efforts are continuing. In the works are updating p2pool software, updating wallets, and Fedde's exchange will be expanding to include other crypto-currencies all trading relative to FRC. 

 

The demurrage aspect of the currency means the coin is designed for spending and not speculating. Nevertheless, the present potential for value rise far exceeds the annual 5% demurrage fee. For this to be attractive, crypto-currencies need to find wider acceptance and circulation. Compared with 2008 and 2013, this appears to be happening now. Freicoin's developers are active and founding partners of Blockstream, and Freicoin is known for innovation (and not being a get rich quick scheme) since 2013.

[Arcurus 331]

1 hour ago, Skaro said:

since 2013.

since 2012

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

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:

Quote

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.

This is already in bitcoin, and will be in freicoin as soon as we upgrade the reference client to a more recent upstream version.

Quote

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.

Likewise! Freicoin will get the same segwit that bitcoin is about to lock-in.

Quote

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.

Still want this for Freicoin, but:

Quote

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.

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.

Quote

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.

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.

[Skaro 129]

I would like to help with the testing. 

[Skaro 129]

Is there something that can be done so that the blockchain cannot be copied with a hardfork like BCC? It seems to me now, BCC has proven that Bitcoin is not a trustless system. Am I wrong in my perception of this? 

 

But I realize I am asking to make a hardfork that won't allow hardfork ...

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

No solution, I'm afraid. Anyone can fork bitcoin, or freicoin, or any other crypto currency at any time and try to get people to use the new spinoff coin over the old one. This isn't the first time that it has happened to bitcoin either, just the first time that it had any significant (albeit minority) support from miners, users, developers, etc. There is not some crypto magic that would save us from this outcome -- I can think of generic approaches to replay prevention that would work no matter the underlying crypto system (e.g. XOR the signature with fixed data).

[Rik8119 242]

14 hours ago, Skaro said:

Is there something that can be done so that the blockchain cannot be copied with a hardfork like BCC? It seems to me now, BCC has proven that Bitcoin is not a trustless system. Am I wrong in my perception of this? 

 

But I realize I am asking to make a hardfork that won't allow hardfork ...

Of course there is a solution to that, its called: closed source! Just add some stinky unnecessary features that makes it impossible to read the blockchain without your client and you got it... But that was the world before Bitcoin, so i guess no one (well, excepting Roger and Jihan) wants to go back there..

Its not a bug, its THE feature!

And yes, you can still run the software from 2009 and refuse to update. But again who wants that? In the end its a consensus that is reached by following the chain with enough marketcap to make it work..

[Bicknellski 276]

Gobsmacked. You really buried the lead for the most interesting possible updates. 

Quote

 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.

This is most interesting aspect of what you are planning for FRC. If you can help crack that and get FRC in that arena and at the forefront maybe there is hope for wider adoption. Personally when I first came to bitcoin it was a huge liability I saw where those with technical skills, resources, lower power costs would eventually 'control the coin'. Centralized mining in the hands of only a few corporations or organizations and a lot fraud has happened as a direct result of this race to centralization. Everyone has a phone. Everyone. 

I always hoped to see something where POW mining was on every hand-phone on the planet and it was not a massive warehouse requiring coal fired plants being fired up in Inner Mongolia securing the network. I will be following that thread closely and I hope there is a potential to bring mining back to the small scale really individuals rather than a collective entity with massive resources. I will read up on the link you posted. 

Quote

Cuckoo Cycle aims to be an “egalitarian” proof-of-work, that is, to minimize performance-per-dollar differences across hardware architectures, and make mining—the process of looking for proofs—on commodity hardware cost-effective. This is to be achieved by making main memory latency a bottleneck, since DRAM latencies have remained relatively stable while cpu-speed and memory bandwidth vary highly across hardware architecture and process technology. Our aim of a memory bound PoW translates to the following desirable properties:

MB1 a target memory footprint that exceeds a single memory chip

MB2 a pattern of necessarily random memory accesses

MB3 minimal computation per random memory access 

MB4 no feasible trade-off of memory for time

Quote

When even phones charging overnight can mine without orders of magnitude loss in efficiency, not with a mindset of profitability but of playing the lottery, the mining hardware landscape will see vast expansion, benefiting adoption as well as decentralization.

[Skaro 129]

Back to basics. Please endulge me:

Why can't something like this work instead of POW? 

1) Master clock starts at 0

2) At a special viewing area, a number is randomely chosen and put in a closed "box" and put in central viewing area (but number remains nonvisible). 

3) for 10 minutes, nodes compile block. When they are ready to submit, they announce they have a block and submit it with another randomly produced number.

4)At the end of the 10 minutes, the random number is revealed, and the node that submitted closest number wins.

A variation is, a node is selected at random to be the 'viewing area' and selects the first random number. This node cannot contribute a block.

Oh! And nodes submitting a block submit a fee that will be reimbursed unless their block is bad, then it goes to the winner.

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

After the random value is released, I go back and make up a proposed block that's even closer. 

[Skaro 129]

But the time is over. And their first declaration was already recorded.

i could be completely wrong here. But I value the 'back to basics' thought process to see what exactly is meant or required to happen. After a few ego 'releases' it is actually fun.

it seems to me the POW essentially does 3 things: (1) choose a unique person to issue the block; (2) maintaing the 10 min pace (allowing time for transactions to be transmitted accross the network and for people to assemble blocks); (3) third 'to have skin in the game' to not cheat. The second can be achieved by a clock, the first through a lottery, and the third with a deposit. I am purposely not going back to do research here to make sure I am not just being a parrot but creating a reasoning. but I could be wrong, that's the thought excercise. Tonight I will go back to Satoshi's white paper.

Oh. The fourth is to ward off DOS attacks. 

Added later:

I think part of the answer to my question is that my scenario uses essentially a usenet. Where as Satoshi says POW is needed to establish a time stamp server on a peer to peer network. 

[kieranf 26]

Hello, just the forum stalker popping up to have a say  

So all these future additions will obviously require a lot of work by people like mark. With only a couple of people who can actually write all this code and implement it in this community, don't we really need to try and get more expertise on board?

Look at all these zillion ICO's that are popping up. They have a small core group, come up with the white paper then pre-sale the shit out of their coin to finance the actual help that they need. I know Freicoin is an old coin in the crypto world now, but is there some form or some way to do a hard fork with all of the planned features and somehow offer an ICO style re-launch/fork. Get a new "white paper 2.0" written up and someone implement a way to work in Freicoins for liquidity (BTC, ETH, DASH, ect...) to pay the hired help. The easiest would be to start Freicoin 2.0 but there goes the history of the first crypto demurrage coin.

I know that its probably not possible, but in reality nothing is going to happen because the core team is so small. We dont even have enough members to fund a kitty to help pay for hired help. Anybody have any ideas on that side of it? 

 

Righto, going back into stalker mode unless theres heaps of talk and excitement 

Kieran

 

[Mark Friedenbach 92]

I can't agree enough that we are currently limited by developer time. We need more developers.

However I'm very cautious about the ICO craze. ICOs are securities offerings, and doing or promoting an unlicensed securities offering is a serious offense punished by massive fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban of working in the industry. People haven't been burned ... yet. But it's just a matter of time. It can be frustrating to watch developers with nearly zero experience raise huge sums of money for poorly defined projects, and even more frustrating to see the biggest offenders get a pass by regulatory authorities as they are grandfathered in under the new regime. However I'd still rather do this the right way, the morally and legally justifiable way, even if that road is a little harder.

The situation is not so dire though. The features I would like to get into this new freicoin are mostly already written -- it's just a matter of polish and integration.

[Rik8119 242]

10 hours ago, Mark Friedenbach said:

I can't agree enough that we are currently limited by developer time. We need more developers.

However I'm very cautious about the ICO craze. ICOs are securities offerings, and doing or promoting an unlicensed securities offering is a serious offense punished by massive fines, jail time, and a lifetime ban of working in the industry. People haven't been burned ... yet. But it's just a matter of time. It can be frustrating to watch developers with nearly zero experience raise huge sums of money for poorly defined projects, and even more frustrating to see the biggest offenders get a pass by regulatory authorities as they are grandfathered in under the new regime. However I'd still rather do this the right way, the morally and legally justifiable way, even if that road is a little harder.

The situation is not so dire though. The features I would like to get into this new freicoin are mostly already written -- it's just a matter of polish and integration.

Thanks for your thoughts on ICOs. I share this opinion to 100%.