Dragonchain Public Proposal TL;DR:

Dragonchain has demonstrated twice Reddit’s entire total daily volume (votes, comments, and posts per Reddit 2019 Year in Review) in a 24-hour demo on an operational network. Every single transaction on Dragonchain is decentralized immediately through 5 levels of Dragon Net, and then secured with combined proof on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Binance Chain, via Interchain. At the time, in January 2020, the entire cost of the demo was approximately $25K on a single system (transaction fees locked at $0.0001/txn). With current fees (lowest fee $0.0000025/txn), this would cost as little as $625.
Watch Joe walk through the entire proposal and answer questions on YouTube.
This proposal is also available on the Dragonchain blog.

Hello Reddit and Ethereum community!

I’m Joe Roets, Founder & CEO of Dragonchain. When the team and I first heard about The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off we were intrigued. We believe we have the solutions Reddit seeks for its community points system and we have them at scale.
For your consideration, we have submitted our proposal below. The team at Dragonchain and I welcome and look forward to your technical questions, philosophical feedback, and fair criticism, to build a scaling solution for Reddit that will empower its users. Because our architecture is unlike other blockchain platforms out there today, we expect to receive many questions while people try to grasp our project. I will answer all questions here in this thread on Reddit, and I've answered some questions in the stream on YouTube.
We have seen good discussions so far in the competition. We hope that Reddit’s scaling solution will emerge from The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off and that Reddit will have great success with the implementation.

Executive summary

Dragonchain is a robust open source hybrid blockchain platform that has proven to withstand the passing of time since our inception in 2014. We have continued to evolve to harness the scalability of private nodes, yet take full advantage of the security of public decentralized networks, like Ethereum. We have a live, operational, and fully functional Interchain network integrating Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and ~700 independent Dragonchain nodes. Every transaction is secured to Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Ethereum Classic. Transactions are immediately usable on chain, and the first decentralization is seen within 20 seconds on Dragon Net. Security increases further to public networks ETH, BTC, and ETC within 10 minutes to 2 hours. Smart contracts can be written in any executable language, offering full freedom to existing developers. We invite any developer to watch the demo, play with our SDK’s, review open source code, and to help us move forward. Dragonchain specializes in scalable loyalty & rewards solutions and has built a decentralized social network on chain, with very affordable transaction costs. This experience can be combined with the insights Reddit and the Ethereum community have gained in the past couple of months to roll out the solution at a rapid pace.

Response and PoC

In The Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off post, Reddit has asked for a series of demonstrations, requirements, and other considerations. In this section, we will attempt to answer all of these requests.

Live Demo

A live proof of concept showing hundreds of thousands of transactions

On Jan 7, 2020, Dragonchain hosted a 24-hour live demonstration during which a quarter of a billion (250 million+) transactions executed fully on an operational network. Every single transaction on Dragonchain is decentralized immediately through 5 levels of Dragon Net, and then secured with combined proof on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Binance Chain, via Interchain. This means that every single transaction is secured by, and traceable to these networks. An attack on this system would require a simultaneous attack on all of the Interchained networks.
24 hours in 4 minutes (YouTube):
24 hours in 4 minutes
The demonstration was of a single business system, and any user is able to scale this further, by running multiple systems simultaneously. Our goals for the event were to demonstrate a consistent capacity greater than that of Visa over an extended time period.
Tooling to reproduce our demo is available here:
https://github.com/dragonchain/spirit-bomb

Source Code

Source code (for on & off-chain components as well tooling used for the PoC). The source code does not have to be shared publicly, but if Reddit decides to use a particular solution it will need to be shared with Reddit at some point.

Scaling

How it works & scales

Architectural Scaling

Dragonchain’s architecture attacks the scalability issue from multiple angles. Dragonchain is a hybrid blockchain platform, wherein every transaction is protected on a business node to the requirements of that business or purpose. A business node may be held completely private or may be exposed or replicated to any level of exposure desired.
Every node has its own blockchain and is independently scalable. Dragonchain established Context Based Verification as its consensus model. Every transaction is immediately usable on a trust basis, and in time is provable to an increasing level of decentralized consensus. A transaction will have a level of decentralization to independently owned and deployed Dragonchain nodes (~700 nodes) within seconds, and full decentralization to BTC and ETH within minutes or hours. Level 5 nodes (Interchain nodes) function to secure all transactions to public or otherwise external chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. These nodes scale the system by aggregating multiple blocks into a single Interchain transaction on a cadence. This timing is configurable based upon average fees for each respective chain. For detailed information about Dragonchain’s architecture, and Context Based Verification, please refer to the Dragonchain Architecture Document.

Economic Scaling

An interesting feature of Dragonchain’s network consensus is its economics and scarcity model. Since Dragon Net nodes (L2-L4) are independent staking nodes, deployment to cloud platforms would allow any of these nodes to scale to take on a large percentage of the verification work. This is great for scalability, but not good for the economy, because there is no scarcity, and pricing would develop a downward spiral and result in fewer verification nodes. For this reason, Dragonchain uses TIME as scarcity.
TIME is calculated as the number of Dragons held, multiplied by the number of days held. TIME influences the user’s access to features within the Dragonchain ecosystem. It takes into account both the Dragon balance and length of time each Dragon is held. TIME is staked by users against every verification node and dictates how much of the transaction fees are awarded to each participating node for every block.
TIME also dictates the transaction fee itself for the business node. TIME is staked against a business node to set a deterministic transaction fee level (see transaction fee table below in Cost section). This is very interesting in a discussion about scaling because it guarantees independence for business implementation. No matter how much traffic appears on the entire network, a business is guaranteed to not see an increased transaction fee rate.

Scaled Deployment

Dragonchain uses Docker and Kubernetes to allow the use of best practices traditional system scaling. Dragonchain offers managed nodes with an easy to use web based console interface. The user may also deploy a Dragonchain node within their own datacenter or favorite cloud platform. Users have deployed Dragonchain nodes on-prem on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, MS Azure, and other hosting platforms around the world. Any executable code, anything you can write, can be written into a smart contract. This flexibility is what allows us to say that developers with no blockchain experience can use any code language to access the benefits of blockchain. Customers have used NodeJS, Python, Java, and even BASH shell script to write smart contracts on Dragonchain.
With Docker containers, we achieve better separation of concerns, faster deployment, higher reliability, and lower response times.
We chose Kubernetes for its self-healing features, ability to run multiple services on one server, and its large and thriving development community. It is resilient, scalable, and automated. OpenFaaS allows us to package smart contracts as Docker images for easy deployment.
Contract deployment time is now bounded only by the size of the Docker image being deployed but remains fast even for reasonably large images. We also take advantage of Docker’s flexibility and its ability to support any language that can run on x86 architecture. Any image, public or private, can be run as a smart contract using Dragonchain.

Flexibility in Scaling

Dragonchain’s architecture considers interoperability and integration as key features. From inception, we had a goal to increase adoption via integration with real business use cases and traditional systems.
We envision the ability for Reddit, in the future, to be able to integrate alternate content storage platforms or other financial services along with the token.

LBRY - To allow users to deploy content natively to LBRY
MakerDAO to allow users to lend small amounts backed by their Reddit community points.
STORJ/SIA to allow decentralized on chain storage of portions of content. These integrations or any other are relatively easy to integrate on Dragonchain with an Interchain implementation.

Cost

Cost estimates (on-chain and off-chain) For the purpose of this proposal, we assume that all transactions are on chain (posts, replies, and votes).

On the Dragonchain network, transaction costs are deterministic/predictable. By staking TIME on the business node (as described above) Reddit can reduce transaction costs to as low as $0.0000025 per transaction.
Dragonchain Fees Table

Getting Started

How to run it

Building on Dragonchain is simple and requires no blockchain experience. Spin up a business node (L1) in our managed environment (AWS), run it in your own cloud environment, or on-prem in your own datacenter. Clear documentation will walk you through the steps of spinning up your first Dragonchain Level 1 Business node.
Getting started is easy...

Download Dragonchain’s dctl
Input three commands into a terminal
Build an image
Run it

More information can be found in our Get started documents.

Architecture

Dragonchain is an open source hybrid platform. Through Dragon Net, each chain combines the power of a public blockchain (like Ethereum) with the privacy of a private blockchain.
Dragonchain organizes its network into five separate levels. A Level 1, or business node, is a totally private blockchain only accessible through the use of public/private keypairs. All business logic, including smart contracts, can be executed on this node directly and added to the chain.
After creating a block, the Level 1 business node broadcasts a version stripped of sensitive private data to Dragon Net. Three Level 2 Validating nodes validate the transaction based on guidelines determined from the business. A Level 3 Diversity node checks that the level 2 nodes are from a diverse array of locations. A Level 4 Notary node, hosted by a KYC partner, then signs the validation record received from the Level 3 node. The transaction hash is ledgered to the Level 5 public chain to take advantage of the hash power of massive public networks.
Dragon Net can be thought of as a “blockchain of blockchains”, where every level is a complete private blockchain. Because an L1 can send to multiple nodes on a single level, proof of existence is distributed among many places in the network. Eventually, proof of existence reaches level 5 and is published on a public network.

API Documentation

APIs (on chain & off)

SDK Source

Nobody’s Perfect

Known issues or tradeoffs

Dragonchain is open source and even though the platform is easy enough for developers to code in any language they are comfortable with, we do not have so large a developer community as Ethereum. We would like to see the Ethereum developer community (and any other communities) become familiar with our SDK’s, our solutions, and our platform, to unlock the full potential of our Ethereum Interchain. Long ago we decided to prioritize both Bitcoin and Ethereum Interchains. We envision an ecosystem that encompasses different projects to give developers the ability to take full advantage of all the opportunities blockchain offers to create decentralized solutions not only for Reddit but for all of our current platforms and systems. We believe that together we will take the adoption of blockchain further. We currently have additional Interchain with Ethereum Classic. We look forward to Interchain with other blockchains in the future. We invite all blockchains projects who believe in decentralization and security to Interchain with Dragonchain.
While we only have 700 nodes compared to 8,000 Ethereum and 10,000 Bitcoin nodes. We harness those 18,000 nodes to scale to extremely high levels of security. See Dragonchain metrics.
Some may consider the centralization of Dragonchain’s business nodes as an issue at first glance, however, the model is by design to protect business data. We do not consider this a drawback as these nodes can make any, none, or all data public. Depending upon the implementation, every subreddit could have control of its own business node, for potential business and enterprise offerings, bringing new alternative revenue streams to Reddit.

Costs and resources

Summary of cost & resource information for both on-chain & off-chain components used in the PoC, as well as cost & resource estimates for further scaling. If your PoC is not on mainnet, make note of any mainnet caveats (such as congestion issues).

Every transaction on the PoC system had a transaction fee of $0.0001 (one-hundredth of a cent USD). At 256MM transactions, the demo cost $25,600. With current operational fees, the same demonstration would cost $640 USD.
For the demonstration, to achieve throughput to mimic a worldwide payments network, we modeled several clients in AWS and 4-5 business nodes to handle the traffic. The business nodes were tuned to handle higher throughput by adjusting memory and machine footprint on AWS. This flexibility is valuable to implementing a system such as envisioned by Reddit. Given that Reddit’s daily traffic (posts, replies, and votes) is less than half that of our demo, we would expect that the entire Reddit system could be handled on 2-5 business nodes using right-sized containers on AWS or similar environments.
Verification was accomplished on the operational Dragon Net network with over 700 independently owned verification nodes running around the world at no cost to the business other than paid transaction fees.

Requirements

Scaling

This PoC should scale to the numbers below with minimal costs (both on & off-chain). There should also be a clear path to supporting hundreds of millions of users.
Over a 5 day period, your scaling PoC should be able to handle:
*100,000 point claims (minting & distributing points) *25,000 subscriptions *75,000 one-off points burning *100,000 transfers

During Dragonchain’s 24 hour demo, the above required numbers were reached within the first few minutes.
Reddit’s total activity is 9000% more than Ethereum’s total transaction level. Even if you do not include votes, it is still 700% more than Ethereum’s current volume. Dragonchain has demonstrated that it can handle 250 million transactions a day, and it’s architecture allows for multiple systems to work at that level simultaneously. In our PoC, we demonstrate double the full capacity of Reddit, and every transaction was proven all the way to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Reddit Scaling on Ethereum

Decentralization

Solutions should not depend on any single third-party provider. We prefer solutions that do not depend on specific entities such as Reddit or another provider, and solutions with no single point of control or failure in off-chain components but recognize there are numerous trade-offs to consider

Dragonchain’s architecture calls for a hybrid approach. Private business nodes hold the sensitive data while the validation and verification of transactions for the business are decentralized within seconds and secured to public blockchains within 10 minutes to 2 hours. Nodes could potentially be controlled by owners of individual subreddits for more organic decentralization.

Billing is currently centralized - there is a path to federation and decentralization of a scaled billing solution.
Operational multi-cloud
Operational on-premises capabilities
Operational deployment to any datacenter
Over 700 independent Community Verification Nodes with proof of ownership
Operational Interchain (Interoperable to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic, open to more)

Usability Scaling solutions should have a simple end user experience.

Users shouldn't have to maintain any extra state/proofs, regularly monitor activity, keep track of extra keys, or sign anything other than their normal transactions

Dragonchain and its customers have demonstrated extraordinary usability as a feature in many applications, where users do not need to know that the system is backed by a live blockchain. Lyceum is one of these examples, where the progress of academy courses is being tracked, and successful completion of courses is rewarded with certificates on chain. Our @Save_The_Tweet bot is popular on Twitter. When used with one of the following hashtags - #please, #blockchain, #ThankYou, or #eternalize the tweet is saved through Eternal to multiple blockchains. A proof report is available for future reference. Other examples in use are DEN, our decentralized social media platform, and our console, where users can track their node rewards, view their TIME, and operate a business node.
Examples:

Transactions complete in a reasonable amount of time (seconds or minutes, not hours or days)

All transactions are immediately usable on chain by the system. A transaction begins the path to decentralization at the conclusion of a 5-second block when it gets distributed across 5 separate community run nodes. Full decentralization occurs within 10 minutes to 2 hours depending on which interchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Ethereum Classic) the transaction hits first. Within approximately 2 hours, the combined hash power of all interchained blockchains secures the transaction.

Free to use for end users (no gas fees, or fixed/minimal fees that Reddit can pay on their behalf)

With transaction pricing as low as $0.0000025 per transaction, it may be considered reasonable for Reddit to cover transaction fees for users.
All of Reddit's Transactions on Blockchain (month)
Community points can be earned by users and distributed directly to their Reddit account in batch (as per Reddit minting plan), and allow users to withdraw rewards to their Ethereum wallet whenever they wish. Withdrawal fees can be paid by either user or Reddit. This model has been operating inside the Dragonchain system since 2018, and many security and financial compliance features can be optionally added. We feel that this capability greatly enhances user experience because it is seamless to a regular user without cryptocurrency experience, yet flexible to a tech savvy user. With regard to currency or token transactions, these would occur on the Reddit network, verified to BTC and ETH. These transactions would incur the $0.0000025 transaction fee. To estimate this fee we use the monthly active Reddit users statista with a 60% adoption rate and an estimated 10 transactions per month average resulting in an approximate $720 cost across the system. Reddit could feasibly incur all associated internal network charges (mining/minting, transfer, burn) as these are very low and controllable fees.
Reddit Internal Token Transaction Fees

Reddit Ethereum Token Transaction Fees
When we consider further the Ethereum fees that might be incurred, we have a few choices for a solution.

Offload all Ethereum transaction fees (user withdrawals) to interested users as they wish to withdraw tokens for external use or sale.
Cover Ethereum transaction fees by aggregating them on a timed schedule. Users would request withdrawal (from Reddit or individual subreddits), and they would be transacted on the Ethereum network every hour (or some other schedule).
In a combination of the above, customers could cover aggregated fees.
Integrate with alternate Ethereum roll up solutions or other proposals to aggregate minting and distribution transactions onto Ethereum.

Bonus Points

Users should be able to view their balances & transactions via a blockchain explorer-style interface

From interfaces for users who have no knowledge of blockchain technology to users who are well versed in blockchain terms such as those present in a typical block explorer, a system powered by Dragonchain has flexibility on how to provide balances and transaction data to users. Transactions can be made viewable in an Eternal Proof Report, which displays raw data along with TIME staking information and traceability all the way to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other Interchained network. The report shows fields such as transaction ID, timestamp, block ID, multiple verifications, and Interchain proof. See example here.
Node payouts within the Dragonchain console are listed in chronological order and can be further seen in either Dragons or USD. See example here.
In our social media platform, Dragon Den, users can see, in real-time, their NRG and MTR balances. See example here.
A new influencer app powered by Dragonchain, Raiinmaker, breaks down data into a user friendly interface that shows coin portfolio, redeemed rewards, and social scores per campaign. See example here.

Exiting is fast & simple

Withdrawing funds on Dragonchain’s console requires three clicks, however, withdrawal scenarios with more enhanced security features per Reddit’s discretion are obtainable.

Interoperability Compatibility with third party apps (wallets/contracts/etc) is necessary.

Proven interoperability at scale that surpasses the required specifications. Our entire platform consists of interoperable blockchains connected to each other and traditional systems. APIs are well documented. Third party permissions are possible with a simple smart contract without the end user being aware. No need to learn any specialized proprietary language. Any code base (not subsets) is usable within a Docker container. Interoperable with any blockchain or traditional APIs. We’ve witnessed relatively complex systems built by engineers with no blockchain or cryptocurrency experience. We’ve also demonstrated the creation of smart contracts within minutes built with BASH shell and Node.js. Please see our source code and API documentation.

Scaling solutions should be extensible and allow third parties to build on top of it Open source and extensible
APIs should be well documented and stable

Documentation should be clear and complete

For full documentation, explore our docs, SDK’s, Github repo’s, architecture documents, original Disney documentation, and other links or resources provided in this proposal.

Third-party permissionless integrations should be possible & straightforward Smart contracts are Docker based, can be written in any language, use full language (not subsets), and can therefore be integrated with any system including traditional system APIs. Simple is better. Learning an uncommon or proprietary language should not be necessary.

Advanced knowledge of mathematics, cryptography, or L2 scaling should not be required. Compatibility with common utilities & toolchains is expected.
Dragonchain business nodes and smart contracts leverage Docker to allow the use of literally any language or executable code. No proprietary language is necessary. We’ve witnessed relatively complex systems built by engineers with no blockchain or cryptocurrency experience. We’ve also demonstrated the creation of smart contracts within minutes built with BASH shell and Node.js.

Bonus

Bonus Points: Show us how it works. Do you have an idea for a cool new use case for Community Points? Build it!

TIME

Community points could be awarded to Reddit users based upon TIME too, whereas the longer someone is part of a subreddit, the more community points someone naturally gained, even if not actively commenting or sharing new posts. A daily login could be required for these community points to be credited. This grants awards to readers too and incentivizes readers to create an account on Reddit if they browse the website often. This concept could also be leveraged to provide some level of reputation based upon duration and consistency of contribution to a community subreddit.

Dragon Den

Dragonchain has already built a social media platform that harnesses community involvement. Dragon Den is a decentralized community built on the Dragonchain blockchain platform. Dragon Den is Dragonchain’s answer to fake news, trolling, and censorship. It incentivizes the creation and evaluation of quality content within communities. It could be described as being a shareholder of a subreddit or Reddit in its entirety. The more your subreddit is thriving, the more rewarding it will be. Den is currently in a public beta and in active development, though the real token economy is not live yet. There are different tokens for various purposes. Two tokens are Lair Ownership Rights (LOR) and Lair Ownership Tokens (LOT). LOT is a non-fungible token for ownership of a specific Lair. LOT will only be created and converted from LOR.
Energy (NRG) and Matter (MTR) work jointly. Your MTR determines how much NRG you receive in a 24-hour period. Providing quality content, or evaluating content will earn MTR.

Security. Users have full ownership & control of their points.

All community points awarded based upon any type of activity or gift, are secured and provable to all Interchain networks (currently BTC, ETH, ETC). Users are free to spend and withdraw their points as they please, depending on the features Reddit wants to bring into production.

Balances and transactions cannot be forged, manipulated, or blocked by Reddit or anyone else

Users can withdraw their balance to their ERC20 wallet, directly through Reddit. Reddit can cover the fees on their behalf, or the user covers this with a portion of their balance.

Users should own their points and be able to get on-chain ERC20 tokens without permission from anyone else

Through our console users can withdraw their ERC20 rewards. This can be achieved on Reddit too. Here is a walkthrough of our console, though this does not show the quick withdrawal functionality, a user can withdraw at any time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNlTMxnfVHw

Points should be recoverable to on-chain ERC20 tokens even if all third-parties involved go offline

If necessary, signed transactions from the Reddit system (e.g. Reddit + Subreddit) can be sent to the Ethereum smart contract for minting.

A public, third-party review attesting to the soundness of the design should be available

To our knowledge, at least two large corporations, including a top 3 accounting firm, have conducted positive reviews. These reviews have never been made public, as Dragonchain did not pay or contract for these studies to be released.

Bonus points
Public, third-party implementation review available or in progress

See above

Compatibility with HSMs & hardware wallets

For the purpose of this proposal, all tokenization would be on the Ethereum network using standard token contracts and as such, would be able to leverage all hardware wallet and Ethereum ecosystem services.

Other Considerations

Minting/distributing tokens is not performed by Reddit directly

This operation can be automated by smart contract on Ethereum. Subreddits can if desired have a role to play.

One off point burning, as well as recurring, non-interactive point burning (for subreddit memberships) should be possible and scalable

This is possible and scalable with interaction between Dragonchain Reddit system and Ethereum token contract(s).

Fully open-source solutions are strongly preferred

Dragonchain is fully open source (see section on Disney release after conclusion).

Conclusion

Whether it is today, or in the future, we would like to work together to bring secure flexibility to the highest standards. It is our hope to be considered by Ethereum, Reddit, and other integrative solutions so we may further discuss the possibilities of implementation. In our public demonstration, 256 million transactions were handled in our operational network on chain in 24 hours, for the low cost of $25K, which if run today would cost $625. Dragonchain’s interoperable foundation provides the atmosphere necessary to implement a frictionless community points system. Thank you for your consideration of our proposal. We look forward to working with the community to make something great!

Disney Releases Blockchain Platform as Open Source

The team at Disney created the Disney Private Blockchain Platform. The system was a hybrid interoperable blockchain platform for ledgering and smart contract development geared toward solving problems with blockchain adoption and usability. All objective evaluation would consider the team’s output a success. We released a list of use cases that we explored in some capacity at Disney, and our input on blockchain standardization as part of our participation in the W3C Blockchain Community Group.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-blockchain/2016May/0052.html

Open Source

In 2016, Roets proposed to release the platform as open source to spread the technology outside of Disney, as others within the W3C group were interested in the solutions that had been created inside of Disney.
Following a long process, step by step, the team met requirements for release. Among the requirements, the team had to:

Obtain VP support and approval for the release
Verify ownership of the software to be released
Verify that no proprietary content would be released
Convince the organization that there was a value to the open source community
Convince the organization that there was a value to Disney
Offer the plan for ongoing maintenance of the project outside of Disney
Itemize competing projects
Verify no conflict of interest
Preferred license
Change the project name to not use the name Disney, any Disney character, or any other associated IP - proposed Dragonchain - approved
Obtain legal approval
Approval from corporate, parks, and other business units
Approval from multiple Disney patent groups Copyright holder defined by Disney (Disney Connected and Advanced Technologies)
Trademark searches conducted for the selected name Dragonchain
Obtain IT security approval
Manual review of OSS components conducted
OWASP Dependency and Vulnerability Check Conducted
Obtain technical (software) approval
Offer management, process, and financial plans for the maintenance of the project.
Meet list of items to be addressed before release
Remove all Disney project references and scripts
Create a public distribution list for email communications
Remove Roets’ direct and internal contact information
Create public Slack channel and move from Disney slack channels
Create proper labels for issue tracking
Rename internal private Github repository
Add informative description to Github page
Expand README.md with more specific information
Add information beyond current “Blockchains are Magic”
Add getting started sections and info on cloning/forking the project
Add installation details
Add uninstall process
Add unit, functional, and integration test information
Detail how to contribute and get involved
Describe the git workflow that the project will use
Move to public, non-Disney git repository (Github or Bitbucket)
Obtain Disney Open Source Committee approval for release

On top of meeting the above criteria, as part of the process, the maintainer of the project had to receive the codebase on their own personal email and create accounts for maintenance (e.g. Github) with non-Disney accounts. Given the fact that the project spanned multiple business units, Roets was individually responsible for its ongoing maintenance. Because of this, he proposed in the open source application to create a non-profit organization to hold the IP and maintain the project. This was approved by Disney.
The Disney Open Source Committee approved the application known as OSSRELEASE-10, and the code was released on October 2, 2016. Disney decided to not issue a press release.
Original OSSRELASE-10 document

Dragonchain Foundation

The Dragonchain Foundation was created on January 17, 2017. https://den.social/l/Dragonchain/24130078352e485d96d2125082151cf0/dragonchain-and-disney/

https://preview.redd.it/s6uu8g27ul331.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=115d0f1152d66546ee5aa61e1acd23c4c8dfb7b8

It was two years ago, June 11, 2017 at 2:40:26 AM EST, when delegate arkmoon officially registered on the ARK mainnet.
It had been roughly 4 years since I'd even looked at anything crypto-related, considering the fall of Mt. Gox had shaken investors to the core. Back then, crypto was still mostly the Wild West. You could only get Bitcoin through sites like Virwox after losing 20-40% in fees as you transferred from PayPay to Second Life Linden to Bitcoin... or shady sites where you had to use Dwolla or mail someone a money order and pray they didn't rip you off... or try your luck mining some of the new Bitcoin forks (e.g. Vertcoin, etc.) but odds are you weren't going to break even for at least 6 months, and I was too poor to buy and hodl long term.
When I heard "bitcoin" mentioned on a mainstream radio station in May, 2017, I scrambled to dig out old hard drives, CD-R's, laptops. Anything I might have had an old wallet on, but alas, I had sold it all in 2013 at a loss (anything that hadn't been stolen already).
Ethereum. "Hmm, that's new," I thought. And so, down the rabbit hole I fell, trying to decide now what to invest in. Bitcoin, yes, and some Ethereum. Ok, but the blockchains for these took days and weeks to download before I could even use them. There were new exchanges, such as Kraken and Bittrex. The fees were lower, and so I got started.
Then, one night in June, I found ARK. I'm not sure exactly how. Going through the list of coins available, ARK stood out in the fact that you didn't need to download an entire blockchain to start using it. You just downloaded the desktop wallet, and you had coins transferred in 8 seconds. So easy, it was something your grandma could do.
And then I continued to read about it. What it was built on, and how it worked. "Delegated Proof of Stake", definitely more affordable and environmentally friendly than running GPUs and ASICs with thousands of watts for mining POW coins.
"ARK, then."
I registered arkmoon delegate in an effort to solve a problem. Back in June, 2017, Ark delegates had a problem with pool hoppers. Delegates would schedule manual payouts either once per day or once per week. And right before a payout would happen, these pool hoppers would jump in and vote, essentially stealing potential rewards from loyal voters.
My initial delegate proposal was simple. Vote for me; I want to create a system that credits voters at the block-level, so they earn only if are voting for you, and you'll never have to worry about blacklisting pool hoppers again. I got virtually no support, which was frustrating. It got to the point where I simply removed myself from Ark from about June till September since no one had been voting for me. I'd like to take a second here to give a shoutout to delegate jarunik, who offered words of encouragement during this stressful time. Eventually, in October, 2017, a mysterious benefactor with over a million Ark decided to give me a chance by voting for me. Eventually, they slowly backed away while I gained my own voters organically through my dedication and higher share rate. For this chance, I am eternally grateful.
Around this time, the first biz delegate was created from 4chan, fat-fingered his payout and was begging for my solution. biz or the person behind it lasted a week, then was voted out in favor of the much more responsible GoldenPepe and his team biz_classic, who were able to release the first block-level payout script that was eventually adopted by (most) delegates. I say most, because there were several who never adopted it, and suffered as a consequence.
As time went on, we had our fair share of scammers; people who would write decent proposals, and would run off with their forging rewards. Delegates who had zero technical skill who doubled forged on the network. We've had a delegate publish their private passphrase on the blockchain. But all-in-all, things continued forward, and dedicated delegates appeared to mostly where we are today.
Then, we hit the big bull run in December, 2017 and everything was peachy. I had only been a delegate for less than 2 months, and really didn't have anything accumulated, but 2018 looked promising, so I kept working hard on building e-commerce and tax assistance sites to support the Ecosystem. As we all know now, we've been full bear mode for the past two years, but I have stuck with Ark in spite of it all simply due to the dedication I've consistently seen from the core Ark team and its delegates.
The Ark team has been consistently improving the stability and security of the blockchain, even as the price has fallen as low as it's been. Delegates such as alessio are dedicated solely on making sure the blockchain is secure, and delegates such as goose and I have been trying to develop useful tools to help both delegates and potential ARK users alike. We have cams_yellow_jacket producing professional videos, and thegoldenhorde continually impressing the community with their merch and awesome designs. Delegate arkland has amazing raffles. I can honestly say that I am proud to be part of this community.
Now, with the Ark Deployer, we are starting to see new people pop up in the Slack channels, asking how they can start up their own blockchains. The first person to start up their own chain is an accountant by profession, with little server-side experience and was able to get an Ark sidechain running in less than 24 hours. The true Ark Ecosystem is starting to form, and I am hopeful for the future.
I'd like to just take a moment to thank all my voters, and to all of you in the Ark Ecosystem for your continued support. I don't know what the future holds for us, but I am thankful for how far we've come.

https://preview.redd.it/y1nyrhkmoj731.png?width=298&format=png&auto=webp&s=93a62ae0fa7614dcc538e1ace8756a0857fae63f

Bitgrin is a privacy focused cryptocurrency on a protocol level based on MimbleWimble and a fork of GRIN coin.
This is about freedom from censorship and the banker regime.
The technology of Grin meets the economics of Bitcoin, for the worlds first
- private,
- scalable,
- decentralized currency with sound economic model (limited supply)

If you're not clear on what i mean by scalability: Bitcoin has a 240 GB blockchain. Ethereum has a 1TB blockchain. BitGrin will stay below 1GB due to the way old transactions get compressed and pruned
that means i can put a full node on your phone, not just a light wallet but a true full node

Bitgrin mainnet launched the 8th of February 2019

Ticker: XBG
Block time: ~60s
Block reward: 4.5 XBG
Next Halvening: Block 2,102,400
Supply: 21,000,000

==========================================================
LINKS
We dont need a central authority declaring stuff official, we need grass-roots support

Website: https://bitgrin.dev/
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5104608.0
Github: https://github.com/bitgrin/bitgrin
Emission Schedule: https://bitgrin.dev/comparision-of-emission/
Latest Kingfish releases : https://github.com/bitgrin/kingfish/releases
Explore : https://explorer.bitgrin.dev/

Discord : https://discord.gg/Nd5BazK
Twitter : https://twitter.com/Bitgrin
Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/xbg

==========================================================

Purpose of MimbleWimble is that no one can see your coins or who you sent them too, while still knowing coins are valid.
This is a huge deal in privacy, and we wish that Bitcoin had that from beginning.

But looks like we have a 2nd chance now. Grin failed that in our eyes with horrible economics

==========================================================
TEAM

Our team is anonymous that won't change
We've got a small team who has been in blockchain dev since around 2011 as well as application developers, good at making things user friendly.
This all started because we were working on the Kingfish wallet which was a Grin wallet, and some miner software for Grin. The tech was very cool, but then this emission schedule and the attitude of the core devs made us realize their priorities wrong.
So Kingfish partners joined bitgrin team. Many of us on the original team were not happy with the economic decisions.
We're actually pretty active in Grin Core team chat.

==========================================================
WHAT IS BITGRIN

BitGrin is a store of value, designed to be easy to use
Bitgrin share the same halvening schedule as BTC. Half as many rewards every 4 years. 4.5 coins per block, and then 2.25 after halving, and so on.

So theres really 3 things we bring to the table

We create an economic incentive for folks to hold there coins with halvenings. This means the coin acts more as a store of value.
We create a dev fee so we don't have to be like the Grin team and beg for donations. We'll take modest salaries to keep things running clean
We are building super simple user friendly tools on top of the protocol so that in time the average user can simply pull out a phone and work with XBG coins

BitGrin makes transactions completely private, hiding the amount of coins a user owns, how many have been sent, and to whom they were sent.

Transactions are blinded, which means no-one can prove that coins have been sent at all!

BitGrin is private by design, even the developers don't know who is sending or receiving coins.

But how does it all actually work?
BitGrin is governed by the laws of mathematics, exploiting some very simple properties of addition and multiplication.
Elliptic curve cryptography is at the root of what keeps BitGrin (and Bitcoin) secure. The standard is also used by countless military, banking, and even government operations. Elliptic curve cryptography is a method of utilizing a secure curve to produce privately known numbers These extremely large numbers are nearly impossible to guess, but can be proven to have been generated by someone with knowledge of their private key.

Let me walk you through the process.
First, a user picks a really, really, really large number. Then they multiply it with the starting point on the curve.
The resulting coordinates on the curve are your public key and that really, really big number is your private key!
You can now securely encrypt values utilizing your private key, and publicly share your encrypted messages along with your public key. Other users in the world can *prove* that you must have knowledge of the correct private key, without them knowing what it is.

And this is the bedrock of almost all cryptography. It keeps the whole world secure!
The trick here is that it's pretty easy to get the coordinates of your public key, but it's nearly impossible to discover another user's private key.

A simple analogy for elliptic curve cryptography
Knowing just the public key is like knowing the location of an indestructible box, with the world's most complicated lock. Without the private key, it is impossible to access it's contents.
This is where, for example, Bitcoin's security model ends.
BitGrin, on the other hand, goes a few steps further.
BitGrin hides your even your *public* key. So now no one even knows *where* your indestructible box is.
This means that no one can see how many coins you have, who you are sending coins to, or how many you have received.
All of this is accomplished using just a few additional mathematical tricks.

How Bitcoin transactions work
To further explain, let's first talk about how Bitcoin transactions work.
Lett’s say you, a Bitcoin user, want to send some funds to another user. You would announce publicly to the network your public key, the amount of coins you would like to send, and proof that demonstrates you are indeed the owner of these coins.
You can see the problem here.
If someone goes through the history of the blockchain, they can clearly see who you received the coins from, who you are sending them to, how many were sent, and even how many you have.
You don't really want people knowing all of that information, do you?
Do you share your bank statements with everyone? Of course not.
Now... How can we fix this? How can we make transactions more private?

How BitGrin transactions work
Let's go over a BitGrin transaction...
BitGrin transactions are completely different than Bitcoin transactions, You can think of them as just a blank credit card with no name, just the number, and everyone who knows this number can spend money with it.
What the blockchain holds is just a list of these "cards", while obscuring the amounts in them, and who is in possession of them, or even who had contents in them prior.

Let's say for example I want to send you three BitGrin.
What we need to do now is prove that I own a credit card (or multiple cards) with the total of at least 3 coins.
We also need to create a new card for you. One whose number is only known by you.
First, I send you a message via a secure channel in between our wallets.
"Hey, I want to send you 3 coins. Here's proof I own at least 3. I'll also pay the fee."
You receive the message and you can compute your part of what it takes to make a new card. Then you send me back the proof that you know the new credit card number,
while not revealing the number to me, by using a special type of encryption.
Next, you send me a very very big number you choose to obscure the amount of coins by moving them by this amount on the elliptical curve.
Then, add to it a public key of the credit card number, made with another operation on the graph.
This will prove you own the coins, without either user revealing their private keys.

Finally, I add the number of coins to the very big number you chose.

We can prove the number of coins didn't change because 5-5 is 0. This is validated by the network to prevent coins from being created out of thin air.
And 5 plus the BigNumber, minus 5 plus the BigNumber, is also zero. By adding a hidden big number known only to us, we hide the amount from everyone else.
I combined all these details together into one large commitment, and then submit it to the BitGrin network.
Now the network needs to validate that no new coins were created and that your new card is valid. This is all done with simple mathematics, and is completely secure.
You now received your money! While it may sound like a long process, all of it is done within less than 1 second from the BitGrin wallet.
Want to spice things up? Generate invoices, transact using QR codes or send it by pigeons!

We're not done yet. This is not all that BitGrin improves.
As you may know, BitCoin transactions can take a very long time to be confirmed, and running a Bitcoin node is a very computer-intensive process.
BitGrin on the other hand is both fast, and extremely scalable! The majority of spent transactions get removed, making the blockchain much smaller than traditional blockchains.
This is done by miners in every block, as well as the entire blockchain over time.

Soon, everyone will be able to download the entire blockchain and synchronize it within seconds or minutes, even on a low powered mobile device or a payment terminal at the local checkout.

With further work and research, BitGrin will improve even more, enabling truly private, scalable digital cash to see mass adoption.

==========================================================
TEAM VISION

- Goal to be simple for end user
Crypto is super hard to use, keeping your money private is impossible. Bitgrin solves those problems making the latest scientific breakthroughs in cryptography, usable by everyone, all while being built on robust bitcoin economics. Bitgrin paves the road to mass adoption
there is a lot of confusion about what crypto is for many folks think it is a way to make money by buying new coins and selling as they mature
ignoring the central idea of decentralized money.
Grin folks invented a better BTC, and then proceeded to apply infinite inflation for reasons I can't explain it's decentralized, lightweight, and fast
but you can't just mint 1 new coin every second, thats not sound monetary policy even USD doesnt do anything that extreme
and yet the buying power of USD falls, even with their small inflation schedule and we already know a schedule that seems to work: the Bitcoin schedule
so why not use this in combination with the lightweight blockchain approach of Grin?
Lightning Network doesnt solve BTC problems, because settlement is important, and scale means fees.
Bitgrin solves all of these problems by offering a truly lightweight settlement layer, with no arbitrary P2P layer on top

__________A few words about others MW coins_____________
Grin has Grin economics: infinite coins forever which is kind of insane, Grin could have easily just limited their supply but they refuse to do that.
Our key differentiator is our economically sound emission schedule
Beam and BitGrin are working towards the same kind of thing, or at least our goals are more in line than they are with the Grin team. Our approaches are pretty different, from a technology perspective though. I fully expect all three projects to coexist and hopefully make each other better
Being “non corporate” isn’t necessarily good. To some degree it’s useful to have profits, a core team, etc
But if it’s too corporate (Beam) then your whole organization is susceptible to issues of centralization such as being shut down by the government.
The decentralized nature of the software prevents that to some extent, but nothing beats being driven by a team of anonymous contributors. That is true censorship resistance. It’s a feature, not a bug.
But we don’t need them to lose for us to win, we can win together, I believe a symbiotic mutually beneficial relationship is ideal with the Grin team.

==========================================================
PREMINE

1M coins are put in to height-locked contracts
about 20k released per month, starting next March 2018
so at launch, dev team has 0 coins
10% for 4 yrs, which amounts to 4% of total supply over time
Just a reminder that the dev fee is quite modest. It’s not like we are holding 90% of the supply like ICOs like to do
1mln pub const DEV_FEE_TOTAL: u64 = 1_000_000; // 1M coins to match Satoshi's Bitcoin holdings >> line 58 https://github.com/bitgrin/bitgrin/blob/mastecore/src/consensus.rs
Payouts are staggered over 4 years by the smart contract
I think as far as the community goes, what you would WANT is developers who are paid for success in the same terms they would expect success as buyers/miners.

==========================================================
FUTURE

It took a lot of work to know what to change, and to understand GRIN codebase and then the generatioin of the genesis block wasnt documented
or it was, but it was incorrect.
Getting seed nodes up and running, making the miners work thousands of little details
BitGrin in particular also has rollback protection
Uses block hash checks to make sure the chain stays stable
BitGrin in particular also has rollback protection
Uses block hash checks to make sure the chain stays stable
Also worth noting this is something added by us. Grin doesn’t support block hash checking
It’s not possible to rewrite any meaningful amount of the chain through a 51% attack. Those attacks are quite limited in exclusively abusing double spend
The team is currently working on porting the entire codebase to be web friendly for web wallets, and offline/non-interactive transactions using BitGrin addresses
basically we want to include a tx pool so users dont need to share ips/files, and can simply use disposable "addresses".
A major improvement with we call XBGJS. This will include tools for other devs to make working with BitGrin easier
Adding non-interactive transactions will be a major improvement

==========================================================
MINING
It's compatible with all grin miners
so any grin miner that works with Grin will also work with BitGrin

==========================================================
ASICS
Community will make those decisions when it comes to it, there is time till end of 2019.
We can fork in to a different PoW, as needed.

There are ongoing discussion about it on discord

==========================================================
COMMUNITY
We dont need a central authority declaring stuff official, we need grass-roots support

Website: https://bitgrin.dev/
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5104608.0
Github: https://github.com/bitgrin/bitgrin
Emission Schedule: https://bitgrin.dev/comparision-of-emission/
Latest Kingfish releases : https://github.com/bitgrin/kingfish/releases
Explore : https://explorer.bitgrin.dev/

Discord : https://discord.gg/Nd5BazK
Twitter : https://twitter.com/Bitgrin
Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/xbg

=========================================================

There is no coin other than bitgrin that has true privacy, scalability, and limited supply it doesn't exist.

I say the more the merrier, this is about growing MW and it’s ecosystem, not about one coin “beating” the other.

But either way competition is healthy, let’s see where this road leads.

Competition is needed for innovation to keep up at a high pace.

Aren't you as excited about that as we are? Join us. Let's change the world !

Pool Website: https://itnspool.net

Stratum Addresses

pool.itnspool.net:3333 (1,000 starting diff)
pool.itnspool.net:5555 (5,000 starting diff)
pool.itnspool.net:7777 (10,000 starting diff)
pool.itnspool.net:9000 (Claymore SSL)

Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/KSX5Ghu
Note: Use "workername:[email protected]" as your miner's password if you wish to take advantage of the email alert system or set custom payout thresholds.
Configuration

Pool Fee: 0.5%
Reward System: PPLNS
Minimum Payout: 5 ITNS (Wallet) / 25 ITNS (Exchange)
Payout Schedule: Hourly

Features

Email alerts if workers stop hashing
Personal hash rate graph of your workers
Ability to set higher custom payout thresholds
Support for xmr-node-proxy to allow efficient rig mining
Ability to set static difficulty
Run by a sysadmin/programmer who has been working in the hosting industry for 13 years.

Hey folks. CryptoNight currencies have really taken my interest in general and are the reason I initially dipped my toes into cryptocurrency. The public ledger of BitCoin and friends concern me with their information exposure.
I've been watching Monero, AEON, Electroneum, Sumokoin, and others intently. Only recently has Intense Coin come across my radar. Eventually, I'd like to contribute towards one of these currencies in the form of development work.
In the meantime, I'm leveraging my extensive system administrator history to deploy a new pool for Intense Coin. I've noticed how worryingly centralized mining is for Intense Coin at the moment. I have been looking to setup a pool for a CryptoNight coin, and this seems like a perfect fit.
While I know it seems like opening a pool with a temporary 0% fee is the "thing to do", I wanted to start it up with a straight up honest low 0.5% fee that won't change. The only reason I'd ever consider raising this fee is to encourage use of other pools if this pool starts to gain a monopoly in hash rate. I believe this pool is the only pool offering email alerts and xmr-node-proxy support. So, if you've been looking for that, take a look.
While I obviously won't be available 24/7, feel free to hit me up here or in the pool's Discord Server (link on the site) if you run into any issues.

In slightly over a day, the 300,000th block will be mined and the mining rewards for Dogecoin will halve from their current levels. As of 300,001, miners will get 62,500 DOGE per block; you can see the full mining schedule in the README file https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/blob/masteREADME.md This is a normal part of the process of reducing the Dogecoin rewards over time, as we move from a mining-heavy design to a functioning economy with coins being earned more through exchange of goods and services.
The lead developer, langer_hans, wrote an excellent post on this last halvening, and I'm going to simply cut and paste much of it below with just minor updates. You can read the original at http://redd.it/2443w9
Should I be worried?
No, you don't need to be. Everything happens automatically. Also you won't lose coins.
I'm a X, what does it mean for me?
Miner: For the same hashing power, you will get half as much Ð. If you got 1000 per day before, you'll now get 500 per day, presuming the difficulty stays the same. That said, with the drop in rewards, we may see a temporary dip in difficulty as miners move between coins, which should balance back out quickly.
Trader: It's generally developer policy not to give trading advice, however looking back at the previous halvenings might provide some insights. The first halvening provided a dramatic price rise, but one which ultimately proved unsustainable and led to the current price correction. While reducing the rate of coin creation inevitably have an effect on supply, adoption of the coin likely to be the more significant factor. As always, you should be comfortable with your own trading decisions, and consult an expert if unsure.
Shibe: Wow. Such halvening. Much excite. Very hype.
Will this affect Multipools mining us?
This remains to be seen. Multipools are profit switching pools. If you receive half the coins and in the same time their price in exchange to the pool's payout currency doesn't rise, the profit will be cut half too. That would probably make other coins more profitable to mine by them. If suddenly our price rises by 100%, I'd guess we see multipools again. Not really easy to predict.
What does all that mean for the long term?
Well, seeing how this halvening goes gives us some valuable insight of how the network reacts to this cut in profitability. This information should be helpful towards our decision what to do about the PoW/PoS/Merged mining/xyz discussion.
Some more news
The first 1.7.2 beta should be out tonight. We remain the fastest altcoin for merging in new patches from Bitcoin Core, as well as having one of the stablest clients. 1.7.2 primarily brings in bugfixes, although payment protocol is also enabled in 1.7.2 (it was taken out of 1.7 for further testing). I'll post more about payment protocol once the beta is out.
The dev fund has passed the three million mark, which will primarily be used to support development of 1.8. Thanks to everyone who contributed!
Edit: Dev fund, for those who asked, or I'll roll tips into the fund tonight for those who prefer to tip here: https://chain.so/address/devfund
Edit 2: Corrected reward, was off by 250Doge

Dear friends, we are working hard on fixing bugs and implementing new features, so we don’t always have time to keep you updated 💔. Here is the news of the last week and some plans for the nearest future:

We have added an option to choose mining algorithms in Kryptex v2.1! This version is currently available only for users participating in beta testing.
We’re still experiencing problems with the Equihash mining pool. If you have a GPU which most likely uses this algorithm (e.g., GTX 1070/1080), the following problems might occur: — calculated and actual earnings don’t match; — earnings are occasional, but large; earnings chart consists of rare spikes; — mining restarts from time to time; The problem lies in the fact that our Equihash pool uses a PPLNS reward scheme with a low N. It finds blocks rarely, hence the wide fluctuations. We are very sorry about the situation 😔. We’re working hard on fixing this. We have reached a certain stability level, though it’s not quite satisfactory. A temporary solution (manual selection of other algorithms) is available in the beta version of the desktop app. The complete server-side solution of the problem will take about 1-2 weeks to implement.
Bitcoin network fees have increased significantly, so we had to raise both the minimum payout threshold and the tx fee. The minimum payout now is 0.0006 BTC, and the tx fee is 0.0005 BTC. We hope that this is a temporary measure. Please note that the fee is not taken by us, it is taken by the Bitcoin network, and we are keeping the tx fee is low as possible. We are considering adding altcoin withdrawals if BTC fees won’t go down.
Several days there was a bug due to which actual tx fees could be higher than stated on the site. By the end of week we will reimburse all affected users.
We have noticed an increase in hacking activity. Hackers are distributing malware that steals your account credentials. Don’t download programs that promise to increase Kryptex performance, to "patch Kryptex", or to "speed up your hardware". These are viruses! Also, make sure to use different passwords for Kryptex and your email.
We’re working on advanced monitoring and statistics on the website.

P.S: We are hiring! We look for a social media manager and support team superheroes to join our team. These are remote positions with a flexible schedule requiring ~20 hours per week. We’ll announce details later, but if you can't wait to join us, please write a short letter about yourself: [email protected] 😉
P.P.S.: If you have any questions, problems or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team: https://www.kryptex.org/support/support

Argument of Bitcoin centralization: Bitcoin is a fascinating story; its mysterious origins combined with an open source, revolutionary method of distributing and securing information make it a really unique and promising technology the entire world can benefit from. When Satoshi began the first blockchain in January 2009 they envisaged a truly decentralized, secure network protected not by steel and concrete but by mathematics, combined with geographic diversity, so that anyone could use, contribute and be rewarded for securing the global decentralized fledgling blockchain.
As time went on industrious miners sought ever more efficient and powerful methods of cracking blocks. The financial reward for the development and implementation of; at first specialized software for GPUs, and later specialized hardware, massively increased the difficulty of finding new blocks. The average home user could no longer compete with their peers, turning instead to pool mining in an attempt to maintain profits and keep the Bitcoin flowing. It was at this point, where miners started pooling resources, centralizing mining efforts and entrusting their precious profits to pool operators that Bitcoin in its original concept began to fail.
The days in which anyone could download the wallet, contribute to network security and be rewarded for their efforts were over. As mining pools grew so did their total hash rate, bringing with it the threat of 51% attacks and chain forking; today the peace kept by pools artificially keeping their hashing power below 51% - a far cry from the mathematically secured, globally distributed system Satoshi envisaged at Bitcoin's inception. In recent months there has been an ongoing argument over block size. Back in the days when Bitcoin mining was highly distributed the community would vote as to which version they would run by running the code of their choice. As centralization wormed its way into the core of Bitcoin the large pools were given more power to decide over the direction development should take - leading to the impasse Bitcoin now faces broadly between miners and users.
All of the above has led to the inescapable conclusion that Proof of Work (PoW) no longer provides the highly distributed, ubiquitously inclusive security model that technology such as Bitcoin requires. This is not a failure of the technology behind PoW, but a failure of the humans (myself included) that employ it to turn a profit and drive the blockchain forward.
Proposal for change: One of the key benefits of Bitcoin in comparison to traditional monetary systems is decentralization. By removing a central issuing authority and placing the generation of new money and processing of transactions in the hands of the majority consensus, Bitcoin has provided hope to those seeking a fair monetary system that isn’t gamed by a controlling minority.
Due to some unforeseeable developments occurring after the launch of Bitcoin, the ugly head of centralization has made an appearance and some changes are necessary if we care to correct it. No longer can an individual run the Bitcoin software on their PC and participate in the Bitcoin network in an influential manner. Mining pools and farms have taken the average individual out of the equation and allowed big players to become the owners of blockchain transaction confirmation and the generation of new coins. Again we encounter control in the hands of the minority with all others forced to follow along, left without a voice. Sound familiar?
To fix this problem, I would like to propose an alternative to PoW for discussion as a solution, Proof of Stake (PoS). Not the traditional PoS you find in Peercoin and its clones, but an evolved and improved version that also addresses and corrects the problems found in traditional PoS. Proof of Stake Participation (PoSP) which is not just and idea, but is a tested and proven product currently employed in an alt coin, Crypto Bullion (CBX). The PoSP white paper can be found here http://cryptobullion.io/white-pape for further details.
Traditional PoS as employed in Peercoin (white paper can be found here https://peercoin.net/whitepaper) was created as an attempt to address some of the issues in PoW, primarily the vulnerability to attack, or manipulation that can occur resultant to centralized majority control. (Peercoin actually employs a hybrid system, which uses both PoW and PoS, but I am just going to discuss PoS.) Additional to this, PoS offers a far more energy efficient solution than PoW for generating new coins and confirming transaction.
Where PoW requires a high hashrate for security, PoS instead requires a high volume of coins being held online in the network to confirm and enforce honest transactions. The idea being that those with larger investment into the network, reflective by their ownership of coins, are most inclined to act honestly as nefarious activity hurts the value of the network and therefore their investment.
The problem however in the traditional implementation of PoS is that it rewards for behavior detrimental to network security. Coin owners are rewarded by interest that is paid on the coins that are held stationary in their wallet for a minimum of 30 days or a maximum of 90 days. Basically, if implemented in Bitcoin, you would have to hold your Bitcoin in your wallet for at least 30 days at which point you could connect to the network and compete to claim interest on the coins you own. A slightly higher interest rate reward would be paid to those who held their Bitcoin stationary for 90 days before connecting and claiming their interest. So instead of mining as we find in PoW, the creation of new coins in PoS occurs via interest payments used as an incentive to encourage coin owners to bring their coins online to the network to validate honest transactions. However since security is dependent on coins being held online at all times, the reward structure of traditional PoS is actually detrimental because it rewards for coins being held off-line.
In contrast, PoSP encourages and rewards for coins for being held online. In fact, only coins held online are eligible for earning the reward and those that are held offline forfeit their share to coins active on the network. This is accomplished first by changing the reward structure to a fixed amount per block instead of a variable based on percent of coins staked. PoSP takes a set annual rate of growth in money supply, divides it by the number of blocks set to be generated in a year and establishes that value as the block reward that is doled out to network participants at the generation of each block. So in order to compete and earn a block reward, one must a) own coins, b) have their coins online and c) accumulate 1-hour of coin age (time their coin is held stationary in their wallet – the 1-hour time requirement helps smaller wallets to compete with larger wallets). The reward encourages people to keep their coins online, and since all coin owners will not do this, it allows for an interest earnings rate that surpasses the annual inflation rate further benefiting those who secure the network and confirm transactions and encouraging more people to participate in the network and further enhance security. As an example, PoSP implementation in CBX averages payouts of about 8-10% per year to network participants while the overall inflation rate remains at 2%.
If employed in Bitcoin, this would allow everyone who owns Bitcoin and an Internet connection the opportunity to participate in the Bitcoin network confirming transactions and generating new coins – reviving the realization of decentralization.
The reward structure could be matched to Bitcoin’s current schedule for growth in money supply and once the 21 million-coin cap is reached, the block reward would transition to be composed solely of transaction fees. Therefore no change is necessary in Bitcoin’s scheduled money supply.
Regrettably, since centralization has already occurred to a certain extent, making this change now means it would have to be agreed upon by those who currently control the blockchain. These are unfortunately the beneficiaries of the centralization that has occurred so they of course will be hesitant to make this change. However, the push for a fair decentralized system is one of the keys that spurred the growth of Bitcoin to begin with, so to ensure longevity of Bitcoin through loyalty of the majority, centralization has to be dealt with and corrected.
edit: added argument to outline Bitcoin centralization claim, courtesy of FiniteRed

This won't be a guide so much, as more as me just sharing the tax realities of the US government when it comes to cryptocurrency, and my feelings on the matter. I will be linking to a number of references and articles however. I encourage you to read further.
Ultimately what you do is between you, your conscience, and your government.
My personal perspective:
My understanding of the matter is that mining creates an absolute nightmare from an accounting perspective relative to tax reporting. So much so that the administrative "cost" of tracking what is needed, completely removes the incentives for me. This is expressly and even more of an issue for new altcoins, as online services set up to try to help with this problem have a delay in supporting less popular, or new coins, wallets, and exchanges.
I started getting into crypto in late December as it's a slow period at the office, and friends and family were starting to ask me about crypto. I was aware of crypto, but not the full intricate details. It took me a few hours to get mining, and a week to learn in depth knowledge of optimization. For me this was a hardware tweaking nerds dream, so I immediately understood the appeal. I got involved in this community, and wanted to share my knowledge. With only a few exceptions, the info that I was finding out there was quite fragmented, or poor quality. I created 2 Tutorials here in that time:
Tutorial: Mining and Wallets - A comprehensive guide for new miners
Tutorial: How to improve your Hash Rates with xmr-stak
Happy New Year! It's tax season
With the new year comes tax season. This is something that was on my mind, but I hadn't yet looked into as I was just becoming satisfied with the technical aspects of cryptocurrency and mining. Prompted by a post on /personalfinance and relevant to the surge in popularity with Bitcoin and others being in the news, I ran across this fantastic post:
Crypto-Currency: A Guide to Common Tax Situations
I'm going to barrow and expand on what this means specifically to mining here, but please read the above post, as well as it's reference links and discussions.
The United States IRS, and Cryptocurrency:
The US IRS considers cryptocurrency to be a property, and is taxed as such. This makes selling, exchanging, mining, and even using it in some cases to be taxable events. Buying and holding it forever may not even avoid you a taxable event, should the currency fork (BTC to BCH).
In 2014 the IRS published IRS Notice 2014-21 on crypto currency to provide guidance on the usage of virtual currency. It is done in Q&A format.
Specific to mining it states:

Q-8: Does a taxpayer who “mines” virtual currency (for example, uses computer resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency resulting from those activities?
A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable income.
Q-9: Is an individual who “mines” virtual currency as a trade or business subject to self-employment tax on the income derived from those activities?
A-9: If a taxpayer’s “mining” of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the “mining” activity is not undertaken by the taxpayer as an employee, the net earnings from self-employment (generally, gross income derived from carrying on a trade or business less allowable deductions) resulting from those activities constitute selfemployment income and are subject to the self-employment tax. See Chapter 10 of Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business, for more information on selfemployment tax and Publication 535, Business Expenses, for more information on determining whether expenses are from a business activity carried on to make a profit.

What this means is that depending on the amount of effort you put into mining, it is either considered a hobby or a self-employment (business) activity. The IRS provides the following list of questions to help decide the correct classification:

The manner in which the taxpayer carries on the activity.
The expertise of the taxpayer or his advisors.
The time and effort expended by the taxpayer in carrying on the activity.
Expectation that assets used in activity may appreciate in value.
The success of the taxpayer in carrying on other similar or dissimilar activities.
The taxpayer’s history of income or losses with respect to the activity.
The amount of occasional profits, if any, which are earned.

As a rule of thumb, randomly mining crypto on an old computer is probably a hobby; mining full time on a custom rig is probably a business.
What does this mean for me and my mining??
Most of you are likely to fall under mining as a hobby, so you'll have to report your earnings Schedule A on line 21 of your tax return. If you have a multi GPU rig mining full or mostly full time, you're going to be classified as a business, you will report on Schedule C (and have more options for deducting costs), but I will strongly recommend those individuals consult a CPA.
Mining in a pool isn't well defined, but I generally consider the pool payout and coin sent to your wallet to be the point where your income is realized. Since this is to be reported as income (often referred to as "other income").
You then need to find what the value your virtual currency was relative to USD at the time that it was mined. This will mean you will have hundred, potentially thousands of transactions. From Dec 20 to the end of the year, I had over 100 payments from my mining pools. And will have to track the conversion prices for each time you were paid by your pool. This works very similar to shares of a stock acquired through ESPP or dividend reinvestment, except you are now the one that has to do all the accounting, as there is no brokerage firm to do that work.
Reporting the income is actually the easy part, once you've at least obtained the value for your currency at the point of being mined. Add up the total and add it to line 21 of your Schedule A and you're done, at least for now until you sell, trade, or spend.
Selling the coin to an exchange for FIAT is a taxable event for the calendar year in which it is sold. For each of the above shares you tracked as stated above, you will take the difference in value to when it was sold, and that difference is your profit, or loss, and you are taxed on that value as capital gains tax. You will also be listing each "share" sold on your return, I again group these as each transaction paid out. For example if your pool paid you 10ETN on 12/24/2017, you would have a line on your return reporting the USD value for 10ETN on 12/24/2017, and then the USD value of 10ETN for the date it was sold. You can consider it like owning 10 shares of stock in ETN, and each transaction or grouping of shares would be reported. If you received a faction, such as 0.4ETN as the entirety of the transaction, that would still have it's own line when reporting capital gains.
Swapping your ENT for BTC is also a taxable event, even if you don't cash out. This is subject to the same rules as cashing out.
Buying goods and services is also considered a taxable event, and the same as cashing out.
You can give ETN to someone, and it is not considered taxable, but may be subject to gift tax depending on the value of the amount gifted.
Conclusions
I am not a CPA, and thus not an expert, please do your own research. I wanted to bring this topic up as it is important, and for me it creates so much of a administrative barrier that I have stopped all mining completly. Reporting capital gains (especially for ESPP) can be a lot of work even with all the accounting done by your brokerage and employer. It may be possible in the future that software can automate a lot of this, high frequency trading has a lot of similar issues but since brokerages are still involved there's a lot of tracking already. I've looked at solutions like CoinTracking.info, however importing from ETN wallets is not currently supported, and so current options are just as manual as keeping a spreadsheet at the moment. Buying and selling through an exchange can be more easily automated for the generation of tax forms, should your exchange be supported (and Cryptopia is). And in general buying is done in larger blocks of ETN, so it is less lines to deal with, and values in USD at the time of inquiring to track. Mining on an pool with a high pay out may help a bit, but could also distort the IRS definitions since some of those coins would have been "mined" day's earlier and just held for payout. This is very much grey area.
Cryptocurrency Facts has a great article on this topic that provides a wonderful and simple break down of things.
If you're considering not reporting, or just not reporting your earnings and only doing capital gains, be warned. The IRS is increasingly looking at cryptocurrencies, and if you get audited, you will be in a world of hurt. Only reporting your capital gains can be problematic if you did not report your earnings. You will also have a hard time showing your profits if you do not track the value of the coin at the time you acquired it. Exchange information may be requested by the government, and you could get audited based on that. Random audits can and do happen and it may not even be for many years, but the can and will look at your past returns, and you will pay penalty fee's for under reporting.

What's this?
We are, to my knowledge, the first to offer such a service. It's very straight forward and the concept is easy to grasp.
We run the pool on a PPLNS payout schedule. There is a 12% fee structure which I will explain how that works and how it incentivizes the mining pool.
In a traditional pool, you would be paid 100% or maybe 97 to 99% (depending on the pools fees for upkeep/maintenance.. sometimes more.)
Out of the 12% fees, 10% is taken and set aside for the random winner. If you're actively mining with eCurrency.io, every single miner has a chance to win 2.5 BTC or 10% of the pool's income for the block that is found. You will still get paid your regular PPLNS even if you win or do not win, that's the huge incentive right there is the large randomized payout that we run through Random.org
1% is taken and is saved or until a certain goal is met where we can give away a single prize or multiple prizes to the active miners through mining gear, gift cards, direct Bitcoin payouts. The community will decide!
1% is taken out for upkeep of the server, upgrades, maintenance, etc..
So by mining with us, you're giving up 12% of your regular payouts to in turn get a chance to win 2.5 BTC along with that you'll also get your regular PPLNS reward AND there will be other types of prizes that go on throughout any period of time depending on how much the pool collects for giveaways.
The faster we find blocks, the better the odds are that each of you will win. No single miner can win back to back, if they are chosen on the following drawing, the runner up is the winner.
It doesn't matter how little or how much hashing power you have, because it's a community effort to achieve these rewards and there is no house edge. We WANT to give you these prizes, to help build our miner's, mining farms. We want to give away prizes and keep our miners engaged in our community. We care about helping other build their dreams and increase their mining capabilities.
This pool was designed by a miner for the miners so that collectively we can all be successful. I really hope to see some Reddit BitcoinMining users join. No email confirmation is required, though, having a valid email address is recommended incase we need to contact to you in the event we need to communicate to you if you won a prize.
Hope to see you all around! Adaryian http://www.eCurrency.io/

Good morning! A few thoughts for today:

Another Internet rebellion is needed

The last piece of legislation that was this important to Internet freedom was the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), in 2012. Back then, activists were able to get major websites to "black out" their pages to draw attention to the problem, and even asked questions of Presidential candidates in a debate. Eventually, they made the bill so poisonous that nobody was willing to have their name attached to it and the bill was shelved.
SOPA demonstrates that Internet activism can defeat bad laws. If this law is to be defeated, people need to start organizing ways to get attention. The problem faced here that SOPA did not face is that these regulations are being created by unelected bureaucrats, rather than elected representatives. Lawsky and people like him have little incentive to act appropriately because they can't be voted out of office or recalled directly. Instead, members of the other party would have to be elected to the legislature, an effort that requires huge resources across many districts.
Another issue is that the regulations here are purported to be aimed at bitcoins, so ignorant people may not read further into how they will affect all areas of their lives. They may believe that the restrictions in open source software development are fine because they are limited to bitcoins, but won't make the connection that Linux contributors will be forced to exclude bitcoin from their package distribution sites to be in compliance. They may also not recognize that it becomes easier to add more types of software to these restrictions once a precedent is set that financial software development is limited.

Why we won't do business in New York

Some contributors are theorizing on what the most harmful consequences of the legislation will be in regards to "undercapitalized" (that word was used in an article yesterday) businesses. I thought it would be helpful to provide a case study of our pool will withdraw from New York if these regulations are passed.
Note that the reasons why we would withdraw are different than the most dangerous aspects of the law. Here's why we will withdrawal:

Compliance costs outweigh risks: The costs of compliance with the regulations far outweigh the risks that we face. Our primary method of reducing risks is to mandate payouts at regular intervals, so that users cannot hold balances in our custody. As a result, it is unlikely we will exceed $10k in user balances at any time. However, we estimate that filing all the paperwork and spending all the time to be certified will cost at least $100k, which is absurd considering that the amount of money at stake is 10 times less.
Cannot hold profits in bitcoins: While we could theoretically get enough money to deal with the compliance costs, this is a dealbreaker that there is no way around. We are in business to earn bitcoins, not dollars. I don't want dollars as payment, and neither does any of the other employees. What's the point of going into business other than to get rewarded for your trouble?
Requirement to back up reserves in dollars: Altcoins fluctuate in value too much for us to have a viable business with a reserve in dollars. It makes sense to back up balances in the currency they are denominated, but to require dollars behind that is absurd. If a bubble happens, we would go bankrupt immediately.
Market is not large enough to justify cost: The number of people who live in New York is not large enough to justify complying with these regulations. 92% of the country can still be reached otherwise, and 100% of the rest of the world. In order to justify compliance, the amount of profit to be made in New York alone would have to exceed the compliance costs, not just the amount of profit to be made anywhere.
Not willing to take VC money: Assuming any VCs would care about a mining pool, becoming compliant would require us to accept money from venture capitalists. The whole point of the business is to grant us freedom to work on our schedule and our own terms. VCs impose conditions like moving to a big city, writing status reports, working standard hours, renting an office, and so on. How is that any better than working for someone else?
No way to advertise: All ads in New York are required to include a lengthy disclaimer. Banner ads are ineffective, but Google AdWords ads and inline text ads don't have enough space to actually advertise the product when this extra text is included. That effectively rules out New York businesses from advertising on Google.
Competitive disadvantage: These regulations place any business registered in New York at a competitive disadvantage. The committee that is responsible for approving feature requests is likely to become overloaded. While other pools add new innovative features, we would not be able to release them without completing them and then waiting 90 days for a review. If the new feature is rejected, then a huge amount of effort was wasted. This allows non-New York businesses to jump ahead technologically.
Not willing to store personally identifiable information: Storing personally identifiable information is a legal quandry that requires many safeguards and procedures and encryption. We aren't willing to expose ourselves to liability in the case that a passport photo was leaked. The amount of information being requested here is unprecedented, and is too dangerous for us to have to store.

Effect of regulations on price

The effect of these regulations on price is likely to be positive, because the people who move the markets are the people for whom this regulation is designed. I rarely, if ever, make recommendations, but I would recommend that anyone who was considering creating a bitcoin product to instead buy bitcoins and hold them until this situation is more settled. The profit potential of simply buying bitcoins is higher than working on a product, at least for now.

Other

I'm not going to post the number of days remaining until July 24 because I don't really care anymore. Why does it matter if bitcoins rise in price if this is the future? Maybe I'll change my mind in a few days and start posting the number of days since July 24.

I am currently earning 15% each month on my mining contracts, paid to me daily. This cloud mining is working well for me.
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The company currently manages a total of 19,300 cryptocurrency mining computers operating in data centers which are located in China, Mongolia and Paraguay. Two new facilities that will house nearly 50,000 computers are scheduled to go online before the end of this year.
How AWS Mining Cryptocurrency Mining Pool Contracts Work
As soon as we receive your payment, your contract will be added to your account. Then you can start mining right the way. You can also reinvest your earnings by purchasing more mining power. As soon as your mining commissions are confirmed through the Blockchain network your funds become available for you to withdraw to your digital wallet. AWS Mining marketing strategy is to reward our customers with as much as possible and as soon as possible. The calculation is based on current difficulty and price. Difficulty increases from time to time and may vary based on global hashrate and value.
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They currently accept only bitcoins as payments. Payouts are generated daily. Withdrawals can be made every day and must be a minimum of $30 USD. This minimum payout is set in order to avoid having customers pay excessive fees for receiving small payouts in their digital wallets.
Crypto Mining Power (CMP)
Crypto Mining Power is the unit to measure the contracted mining power from AWS Mining. Currently, 1 CMP is equivalent to USD 400. The processing power of 1 CMP is allocated by AWS Mining for crypto-coin mining. It is the company's responsibility to determine the best coins to be mined. The result of 1 CMP can be observed in the Mining Panel of any customer.
There are various plans ranging from 0.1CMP ($40 USD) to their most popular plan worth 10 CMP ($4,000 USD).
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Hello everyone! It took me a bit longer than last week due to family obligations but here’s the transcript for the third WeTrust Slack AMA! Like last week the majority of the questions were collected through Sli.do and not everyone left their username.

Anonymous When do you plan to start marketing and more social media outreach?
Patrick.WeTrust As we near the rollout of the TLC, we plan on increasing marketing and social media outreach. This is necessary since it is important that we get the word out of what we are building.
Anonymous Are you still on track with the roadmap? When can we see/play with the alpha app?
Patrick.WeTrust The dApp is currently being worked on by our engineering team and is scheduled to be released in a few weeks. The features have been locked down and the team is working hard on building out the many features.
Aakeelr Whitepaper is a must and it shouldn't be delayed. Whatever revised version needs to be done should happen and be visible on the site asap if possible.
Patrick.WeTrust We have an older version of our whitepaper (pre-crowdsale) here: https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/Whitepapers/WeTrustWhitePaper.pdf Our top priority is building out and delivering on the Alpha Release of the TLC and resources are focused on that. Once this is complete and more resources are available, we will update the whitepaper.
Anonymous As a large holder of TRST - how can I be assured recent pushes from the SEC and Trex (theyre cleaning house) will not impact TRST? Do you have legal counsel?
George.WeTrust We're not aware of any changes on Bittrex side, and we've just reached out to them to see if there's any information they need from us. We are very conservative in our approach towards regulatory/ compliance issues, and we will continue as such by working with our legal counsel.
Aakeelr Need more exchanges listing TRST to safeguard the token value from today's incident of Bittrex....
Patrick.WeTrust We stand firmly that delivering a quality product that will impact the lives of many as our prime mission and goal. If we are successful, I believe the exchange issue will be small as many will want to list our Token.
Anonymous Any update on getting the whitepaper back on the website?
Patrick.WeTrust We are working on a new landing page of our Trusted Lending Circle page which will feature a new experience of what our app will be like. This is just a temporary page: https://tlc.wetrust.io/, but the new site will be at this domain soon! (hopefully, next week!)
Jeald Are you going to complete your TLC Alpha build mid-October as per your roadmap?
Patrick.WeTrust Yes, this is the current target. Running 1 week or so behind, but we are trying to push to squeeze for lost time. There will be an update in the next community blog post.
Anonymous The Trusted Lending Circles product due for release in December. Where will it be released? Is it an app for the pc? Will it be accessible on mobile devices?
Patrick.WeTrust Correct. The TLC is slated to be released in December. This first iteration will be a Chrome Web App. In the future, mobile definitely will be on the horizon as a large portion of the world uses mobile and do not have computer.
Dgut Do you guys have any plans to revamp the current wetrust.io design and logo? Some projects like Waves have recently "upgraded" to "professional" design and copy-writing, I think that's the way to go because good design is crucial for user adoption today.
Patrick.WeTrust We have updated the website and will look into the current design of the logo. Thanks for the feedback.
Dgut Updating doesn't equal improvement though. :slightly_smiling_face: The current design has too many flaws. See stripe.com and fleep.io for kick-ass designs. Is this something you guys are taking seriously? Other well designed sites: standuply.com and elev.io ... see the difference?
Patrick.WeTrust Fair enough - I will loop in our designers @hailey.wetrust and @yutai to take a look at what these sites have and takeaways we can make.
Yutai.WeTrust We are very focused on the user experience and adoption. The design team is currently working on make sure we have a smooth UX in the TLC dApp. But we love community feedback and if there is anything else, please don't hesitate to let us know.
Patrick.WeTrust Thanks for chiming in @Yutai!
Anonymous When are you going to do anything besides amas?
George.WeTrust We have a diverse list of channels of communication available -- slack, telegram, bi-weekly updates, bi-weekly AMAs -- let us know if you all think there are any that we should drop and any we should be adding and we're all ears.
Jcga :) Despite hardwork are you guyz ready for the new NBA season via Golden State Warriors, I little feel you dont really care about NBA ;) Go WeTrust !
Patrick.WeTrust Golden State Warriors is our local team :)
Jeald Do you have a roadmap for 2018 available for general viewing? Patrick.WeTrust See answer below.
Boghiumd How i can get to your telegram channel? As i don’t see any links on your website
Patrick.WeTrust Telegram isn't as active yet. I recommend Slack/ Reddit/ Bitcointalk.
BalengiVision Can you send steph curry and kevin durant WeTrust gear when you release TLC?
patrick.WeTrust We can try. They would need to fill out the WeTrust Tshirt Request Form though :)
BalengiVision Lol cool. Do you mind if we tweet at them?
Patrick.WeTrust We can do that sure!
Anonymous Will you be providing a roadmap that covers some part of 2018? It helps investors understand the company's vision.
Patrick.WeTrust Yes, we are working on this and have had some internal discussions already. Our VP of Product, @tomd is working on this now and we will have a few iterations for internal discussions and debate before it is released to the general public.
BalengiVision Release timeframe?
Patrick.WeTrust I will follow up on Tom, and he shared with me a preliminary draft yesterday. We want to have something that is actionable and something we can hold ourselves accountable for. Thus, it will require some work internally before we can release something to the public. Rest assured, it is being worked on and each date is carefully thought about.
BalengiVision Totally understandable!
Patrick.WeTrust Thanks. Cheers, @BalengiVision - thanks for all your support and activity in our Slack.
Aakeelr 2) While planning the TLC has the team reached a point and zeroed on it where the TRST token should claim its value. How will TRST derive its value.
George.WeTrust We are building out a sequence of Financial dApps and will use a "Freemium" model. Essentially, there will be basic features that will be free for our users (e.g., TLCs charge no fees up to 10 users in the circle), but more premium services -- will require some TRST tokens to use (these are currently being planned, and will be included in the roadmap). The main goal is to drive user adoption first, and then monetization after there is a critical mass.
Secunoid What happens when somebody collects their payout and stops contributing after that?
Patrick.WeTrust To thwart bad actors, WeTrust will have four deterrents: 1. Reputation risk/ Reviews: ROSCA groups will be limited to "trusted associates" - family, friends, co-workers, fraternal groups, and professional/ religious organizations. Defaulting on payments could mean social shame and loss of reputation amongst an individual's closest associates. The idea is that for ROSCAs with small enough dollar amount commitments, reputation risk will be sufficient enough to keep participants honest. Reviews may also be left by other members to show how they felt about any participant. 2. Legal risk: ROSCA formation will allow trusted associates to e-sign and bind each other to a legal contract which requires faithful adherence and payment to the ROSCA. Defaulting on payments and stealing could mean legal repercussions. Legal recourse will only be used if individuals are participating in a "high-stakes" ROSCA and legal action would be worthwhile. I've spoken to our legal advisor and she believes it will be possible to create auto-populating templates that will be tailored to each person's ROSCA terms. 3. Collateral risk: Collateral commitments may be required prior to joining a ROSCA. The collateral will be entered into a smart contract which will surrender the property to the ROSCA group if the ROSCA agreement is breached. Collateral can be liquid-cash like assets like Bitcoin or even less liquid assets such as auto/ home titles. Our system will benefit significantly from the ability to accept less liquid assets, since the majority of middle classes’ net worth is locked in real estate. Collateral would allow capital to be used more efficiently. 4. Smart contract bounty (self-enforcement): If a ROSCA participant violates the terms of the ROSCA, the ROSCA group may start a “Bounty” on the retrieval of funds. If the funds are retrieved, the “Bounty” is paid out to the person who enforces the terms of the ROSCA. These deterrent options will be on an "opt-in" basis and participants will be able to choose the level of security they want.
Aakeelr 4) We saw the last update where product functionality has frozen and bugs are being fixed. When do we expect the alpha release precisely?
George.WeTrust We will have an update next week on the status -- we're working hard to hit the initial targets.
Boghiumd Is there a chance to have a discussion with Vitalik that he would somehow confirm directly may be via tweeter post that he actually is suporting this project?
George.WeTrust We met with VB during the early phases of the project, and soon after also brought on Bo Shen (VB's partner at FenBuShi Capital) as an early supporter and advisor. We have a number of advisors and they all provide some help in their own specific capacities. For example, Benedict Chan the Director of Engineering at BitGo is nearby and he often drops by, Emin Gun also checks up on us regularly. We engage with all of advisors as needed and ask them for help if it can materially help the progress of our development or user adoption. As such, we will consider reaching out to him when our product is ready for testing.
BalengiVision That'd be great. Then everyone won't think we have been making stuff up :) Not you guys, but we the people. I tell peeps Vitalik advises early in the project, and people say we are making things up.
Secunoid And how do you manage the risk of delinquent payments?
damo Hey @Secundoid this was answered in the last AMA. Lemme see if I can track it down real quick.
Patrick.WeTrust Here it is: To thwart bad actors, WeTrust will have four deterrents:

Reputation risk/ Reviews: ROSCA groups will be limited to "trusted associates" - family, friends, co-workers, fraternal groups, and professional/ religious organizations. Defaulting on payments could mean social shame and loss of reputation amongst an individual's closest associates. The idea is that for ROSCAs with small enough dollar amount commitments, reputation risk will be sufficient enough to keep participants honest. Reviews may also be left by other members to show how they felt about any participant.
Legal risk: ROSCA formation will allow trusted associates to e-sign and bind each other to a legal contract which requires faithful adherence and payment to the ROSCA. Defaulting on payments and stealing could mean legal repercussions. Legal recourse will only be used if individuals are participating in a "high-stakes" ROSCA and legal action would be worthwhile. I've spoken to our legal advisor and she believes it will be possible to create auto-populating templates that will be tailored to each person's ROSCA terms.
Collateral risk: Collateral commitments may be required prior to joining a ROSCA. The collateral will be entered into a smart contract which will surrender the property to the ROSCA group if the ROSCA agreement is breached. Collateral can be liquid-cash like assets like Bitcoin or even less liquid assets such as auto/ home titles. Our system will benefit significantly from the ability to accept less liquid assets, since the majority of middle classes’ net worth is locked in real estate. Collateral would allow capital to be used more efficiently.
Smart contract bounty (self-enforcement): If a ROSCA participant violates the terms of the ROSCA, the ROSCA group may start a “Bounty” on the retrieval of funds. If the funds are retrieved, the “Bounty” is paid out to the person who enforces the terms of the ROSCA. These deterrent options will be on an "opt-in" basis and participants will be able to choose the level of security they want.

Secundoid k
damo nice thanks @patrick.wetrust One of our community members had a really interesting idea about using a voluntary community pool as an opt-in insurance option that would pay a small percentage of the ROSCA pool to the community pool. An interesting "staking" option for TRST holders! We're looking to provide insurance products anyway right? ;)
Patrick.WeTrust Yes, we are as an evolution of the TLC. @damo
beef Majority of PPL here are selfish enough to admit that they want to see the TRST token become more and more valuable. I've read that it will be used for Premium features, but are there other use cases for the token itself? Does it power dApps in the environment? Can I supply X amount of TRST and use that to fund ROSCA circles?
Patrick.WeTrust That is correct. Another way to think of Trustcoin is that it is the gas that will power various interactions on our network. The current use case we have in mind are premium features (e.g. sort of like a redemption ticket), but please keep in mind that... the mission of WeTrust is to build movement toward financial inclusion/ empowerment and the token will be a core piece of that.
beef The more we are able to cycle TRST through the ecosystem the better. Thanks Patrick
Patrick.WeTrust That is correct. We will be keeping this in mind as we roll out our dApps and other initiatives. Cheers, @beef!
Boghiumd Binance has started to do monthly voting, can you submit a request to them so on next voting wetrust coin will participate as well?
Patrick.WeTrust Is this something the community can request?
Boghiumd @patrick.wetrust actually someone from the team have to submit a request, this is what i read on their website
Patrick.WeTrust Can you email me the link? patrick[email protected]. I'll look into it.
Boghiumd @patrick.wetrust https://binance.zendesk.com/hc/zh-cn/requests/new I presume this one is
Dgut Trustcoin's success is glued to Wetrust. But Wetrust's success is glued to the success of humankind. Any application that simplifies and makes practical the use cryptocurrencies are not only necessary but crucial for the survival of the tech and ideology. Therefore @george.wetrust and @patrick.wetrust should care more about design. (y)
Patrick.WeTrust Thanks for all your feedback and involvement @dgut
Thomas Trustcoin's success is glued to Wetrust. how? i dont get it.. for me it looks like TenX.. they have a token but dont realy need one for the Company... same on Iconomi ... good Projects but they dont need realy a token... i dont get it on TRST ... for me it looks like you dont need realy a token to build this system.. Can you help me to understand this? I am wrong ?
Patrick.WeTrust Another way to think of Trustcoin is that it is the gas that will power various interactions on our network. The current use case we have in mind are premium features (e.g. sort of like a redemption ticket), but please keep in mind that... the mission of WeTrust is to build movement toward financial inclusion/ empowerment and the token will be a core piece of that.
Thomas hmm ok thx
BalengiVision Can you elaborate on the premium features?
Patrick.WeTrust Premium features: lending circles above a certain size (>10 individuals), reporting data to a Credit Agency, accessing a WeTrust ATM to redeem lending circle proceeds, etc... More features will come in due time as we continually iterate and learn from each version of our product.
BalengiVision So credit agencies will accept ROSCA data? Sounds intriguing though I've never heard of that before!
Amazongirl Have you spoken to Ripio (formerly BitPagos) yet about how they handle crypto-fiat exchange risk over a loan's lifetime? https://ripiocredit.network/#benchmarks * *George.WeTrust** We haven't, and will read into how they are able to do this. We are working on some ideas of our own which may bring about stability for users.
Aakeelr @george.wetrust @patrick.wetrust we have some good suggestions from @amazongirl. Would love you guys to actually take a view om that.
Patrick.WeTrust I will take a deeper dive into her suggestions and if I have any questions, will follow up with her.
Aakeelr Thanks for this. You will love her idea
Dgut @patrick.wetrust Are you familiar with https://klart.co/pixels ?
Patrick.WeTrust I am not, but these sites look beautiful.
Dgut Yeah, I hope you guys aim for something like that. It's not rocket surgery either :)
Secunoid Which country/area are you targeting when you go live first?
Patrick.WeTrust Local, immigrant communities within the Bay Area. (SF, CA)
Dgut Hopefully global. The nature of this whole environment and tech is global.
CowMooFlage It definitely is global but they want to be testing close to home.
Dgut It think westerns might be inclined to use the app if it's sufficiently well designed and works well.
damo @dgut see above. Aiming for local immigrant communities
CowMooFlage The biggest issue I see is Westerners not understanding it's purpose because it's not embedded in our culture.
damo Right For that i think there are other permutations of the platform that could take off quicker and be stickier to the global north.
Dgut that's the cool part, it's a completely new thing for them.
Patrick.WeTrust There are pockets of immigrants from Mexico, India, etc. that have used this in the past back home. In fact, my grandmother and father was part of a lending circle back home in Vietnam. We will go after this crowd and do a pilot test in these communities.
BalengiVision I think if the idea is explained well, westerners will love it. I never heard of it until I joined this group.
Dgut Exactly. The reason westerners don't use it is because they never heard of such a concept. When I heard of it I thought... why the f aren't we doing the same? I see it being used among students
Anonymous AmazonGirl from the Slack community as an advisor? She has freely been an amazing one. We need to keep this happening with fair compensation.
George.WeTrust We will reach out to her to gauge her interest -- I think generally we can continue improving our engagement with our community, and leveraging our supporters so we can move faster. We already have a good number of referrals for potential partners, potential pilot groups, folks who would like to work for us, etc... and please do keep them coming!
CowMooFlage George, Patrick, can Damo be listed on the site as a "community manager" or similar position? He's in this channel day in day out answering questions and we love him to bits. By far one of the best people you could ever have doing such a job; humble, cheerful and honest.
Patrick.WeTrust We can have this happen - wonder why this hasn't happened sooner!
CowMooFlage Awesome :) thanks Patrick :D
*Patrick.WeTrust * I will ping @damo for his blurb, picture and get that to @hoang.wetrust as soon as possible. Thanks!
CowMooFlage @damo pink wig? :thinking_face:
damo Lol i have waaay better pictures ready to go lol
damo Thanks for such kind words @cowmooflage! I’m seriously blushing over here.
Patrick.WeTrust Thanks! both of you :D Bradicle Yeaaaa agree. Damo has been the face for We Trust in this chat since day one for me. Answering all the hard hitting questions day in and out <3 :B
Anonymous When are you ditching slack? The phishing is out of control!
George.WeTrust We have been testing with Rocket Chat internally, and are currently working towards migration. We will have more information on the timing, next week, but we want this to be as soon as possible, in the balance of our product development focus.
CowMooFlage Can't wait to check out the new home.
Jcga That a pity, Slack is nice compared to the others. I do believe the myetherw... phishing mail notification have decreased, they "collect" nothing. Slack is beautifull with cool features that others dont. Anyway security is super important and with time we will get used to the new place :slightly_smiling_face:
CowMooFlage @jcga Slack is a decent platform but it lacks certain control features and flexibility that others have (e.g. the moderation tools were not made to support thousands of users).
Jcga Yes sure I understand the priorities.
BalengiVision I definitely see US college students being a great test group!
Patrick.WeTrust Yes! There are lots of community college, Stanford, Berkeley... all within 20-30 miles of our office.
BalengiVision Exactly. Remember, facebook started off with colleges...now look at it. Once they all graduated, they took the idea with them and BOOM!
CowMooFlage Plus, didn't you go there yourself @patrick.wetrust? You could have a professor introduce it to students even? They might be open to it as you're an ex-grad?
Patrick.WeTrust Yes, I went to UC Berkeley and @george.wetrust was at Stanford. @U2M8H6DUJ also went to Berkeley and @shinelay to Davis. Definitely will be rekindling some old connections with my old professors :)
CowMooFlage @patrick.wetrust It's always nice to come back with something to show off! :>
Dgut @BalengiVision absolutely ... there is no reason for this to be immigrant-communities only. WeTrust can become a lot stronger if adopted by those groups (students) ...
Kimutai @BalengiVision . Good idea In fact @patrick.wetrust . Students will show us all the flaws and a good number of unheard of issues. All their diversity of ideas is an untapped Gold mine.
CowMooFlage Students can be very bold and open about expressing their opinions. Might be a fun brain storm session.
Patrick.WeTrust As long as there is a good mix of supply and demand for credit - there is a potential opportunity there. An idea we have been bouncing around... if we could somehow match students (seeking credit) with alumni (that have the wherewithal to contribute to a loan), we could have a large user group here!
BalengiVision Interesting concept
Patrick.WeTrust yes, it is :slightly_smiling_face:
damo I like this. Another connect for Westerners is in auction ROSCAs where they intentionally take the money last as a way to earn a modest return providing capital to the developing world. I'll definitely be doing this.
Thanks to everyone for participating in this week's AMA.

Seeing how this Subreddit is lacking any sort of info on Feathercoins and the lack of community support we have, I have decided to start a post that would inform newbies about Feathercoin and seasoned vets on the best places to trade.
Feathercoin:
It is a Crypto Currency that was started by Peter Bushnell. It is a clone of Litecoin (This coin was inspired by Bitcoin). The Feathercoin network generates coins at a decreasing rate. It will generate about 336 million coins which is 16 times more than that of Bitcoin and 4 times more than that of Litecoin. Currently about 25 million coins have been generated.
Network hashrates, Pools, Solo mining:
Currently a mid end system comprising of 7870 or 7970 will get you abot 400 to 700 kh/s. That means that in a given day you will be mining about 7 to 13 Feathercoins on current difficulty level. However If you mine alone that is solo mining, the probability of you finding a block is hard and it may take a while before you make a coin. To counter this people have started making pools to increase the chances of finding blocks. There are many pools that allow you to have multiple workers so you can setup multiple systems and mine at your leisure. Currently some of the popular pools are:
http://www.fcpool.com/
http://give-me-coins.com/
http://www.wemineftc.com/
http://fc.ltcoin.net/
https://ftc.d2.cc/
For a full list of mining pools: http://coinpools.sdfg.org/ftc
It is highly recommended to join a pool to make mining profitable. Look at the pools posted above, look at their fee structure, their payout and make an informed decision on which pool to join.
Hardware and Mining:
Feathercoin utilizes scrypt based mining that is you can use your GPU (the Graphics card inside your system) to mine them. AMD Cards are highly recommended as they output higher hashrates as compared to Nvidia. To give you an idea of the difference a 7870 ghz edition mines at about 375 kh/s whereas a Nvidia 780ti would mine at about 224 to 300 kh/s. If you are seriously considering in investing in this venture it would be best to buy a rig that supports 6 GPU's and buy either the 7950 or the 280x as they have considerably higher hash rates and are affordable to say the least. Something one should be aware of is that mining produces a lot of heat as your system is basically running at full capacity and therefore needs a lot of cooling. People usually build rigs in the open (no case) and use household fans to cool them. Also another thing that is common is to use PCIe risers as they allow greater spacing between GPU cards and effectively help in dissipating heat. Mining uses a lot of electricity so it is best to use a schedule to mine or if electricity is cheap then 6 7950's running 24 hours a day would cost you about 12 to 18 dollars in electricity a month, maybe more depending on where you live. The software to use for mining are Cgminer (https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=6925.0), guiminer scrypt (http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=961.0) and cudaminer for Nvidia cards. I would advise against Cpu mining as that is not profitable and will simply weigh you down. Invest 250 to 350 dollars in a good AMD GPU and you will be mining much more effectively.
Trading:
There are many places where one can trade Feathercoins but only a few of them offer FTC/USD exchange. Btc-e (https://btc-e.com/exchange/ftc_btc). Is one of the biggest cryptocoin trading exchanges, it does not offer USD exchange for Feathercoins as of yet but allows you to exchange for Bitcoins. Crypto-trade (https://www.crypto-trade.com/trade/ftc_btc), this trading exchange allows you to trade against the USD making it more favourable to miners however there is currently a lack of volume for FTC as of writing. Other exchanges like Cryptsy, Bter and coins-e are all good but they are heavily dependent on Bitcoins and Litecoins for now.
My thoughts
Feathercoin is fairly new and its gaining momentum, once big exchanges start listing it against the USD, the venture will become more profitable. For now it is advisable to mine as many as you can and sit on them till value improves or if you have a mining rig that is mining at 22000 kh/s (this will get you about 500 feathercoins a day) then mine the shit out of them and trade them for Btc for profit although I would recommend against this as it it reduces the value of feathercoin. Many exchanges allow you to deposit money via international wire transfers however the minimum is 2000 dollars so keep that in mind before investing real money into this venture. There are alternatives like paypal and okpay that are also accepted but not a lot of people have accounts on those so signup for a website that suits your situation.
One last ting we all need to do is spread awareness about Feathercoin, It is a miners coin and the difficulty right now makes it so much more interesting to mine. I will update this page with more information and will answer questions if any to the best of my knowledge. Happy mining
My FTC wallet deposit thingy address : 6v1VuL41xGuLG1Bd8usJsuUEkZyac8jKbe
EDIT : I realized some of you might have NVIDIA GPU's and are hesitant on getting AMD. Never fear for there is a solution. If you have a motherboard that supports two or more GPU's that is you have more than one PCIe slots than follow these instructions:
If you intend to game on your system while you are mining then put the NVIDIA card in PCI slot one and buy an AMD card and put it in slot 2. Now install the drivers in the order Nvidia first reboot and then Amd second reboot. You do not need to plug in HDMI to your AMD card just leave it as it is. Now download gpu miner scrypt and select from the list your AMD card and start mining, its that easy. At night if you want to squeeze in more kh/s then run cudaminer and let it mine alongside your AMD. The best part about this is that you can be mining 24/7 on your AMD card and you will not experience any system slow down while gaming or watching movies. Remember to have atleast two workers workers created so you can mine parallel. If you already have an NVIDIA card then just install your AMD card and install AMD drivers and reboot and run guiminer scrypt. At times you might run into the issue of guiminer not starting, just delete it and re install it and it should work fine in 98% of the cases. This is for those who do not want to invest in a completely new system and would rather use their existing system. You can use cgminer as well but remember the order in cgminer starts from 0 not 1 so if NVIDIA is in slot 1 then it is -d0 -g0 and AMD will be -d1 -g1

I've contemplated posting this for a while now in fear of wrecking my karma on this subreddit, but screw karma(not really i love you please don't leave me). But to the point:
Should teams that get fed up with ESEA just not compete in the games anymore? Yes, I know that ESEA does have a payout along with CEVO and Faceit, but couldn't pros afford to drop ESEA? This is going along with the scheduling problems and such, and also if FACEIT and CEVO became larger with teams only competing in those leagues CEVO and FACEIT could increase the prize pool for the end-of-season matches(playoffs) giving even more reason for players to stay with FACEIT and CEVO and ditch ESEA. Just a thought, because since this whole scheduling thing where ESEA is forfeiting team's games because they're in a match that is run by anther league is absurd(as we all know), we could also give ESEA credit for mining bitcoins on our computers, and for in general having a bad service for new players and pros. My real question here is: Why aren't pros just boycotting ESEA?
EDIT: I'm not referring to a certain match,

Blockware Pools — Blockware Solutions - Bitcoin Mining

Dragonchain Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off Public Proposal

Dragonchain Public Proposal TL;DR:

Hello Reddit and Ethereum community!

Executive summary

Response and PoC

Live Demo

Source Code

Scaling

Architectural Scaling

Economic Scaling

Scaled Deployment

Flexibility in Scaling

Cost

Getting Started

API Documentation

SDK Source

Nobody’s Perfect

Costs and resources

Requirements

Scaling

Decentralization

Usability Scaling solutions should have a simple end user experience.

Bonus Points

Bonus

TIME

Dragon Den

Other Considerations

Conclusion

Disney Releases Blockchain Platform as Open Source

Open Source

Dragonchain Foundation

Two Years in Ark - A Brief Retrospective

Bitgrin - WHO I AM - introduction for new miners & investors

ITNSpool.net - New 0.5% Fee pool (email alerts, xmr-node-proxy support, worker graphs, dedicated server, Central USA)

Pool Website: https://itnspool.net

[Dev] Halvening; what, when, why, and what it means

News from the Kryptex Team

Suggestion for correcting Bitcoin's centralization problem

US Taxes, and Mining - How it affects and complicates your tax return.

Bitcoin Incentivized Mining Pool

A few thoughts - Saturday, July 19, 2014

Another Internet rebellion is needed

Why we won't do business in New York

Effect of regulations on price

Other

A Cloud Mining Company That Always Pays Me Well

WeTrust AMA - October 6 (Originally in Slack, formatted to Reddit)

Informative post about Feathercoin

Boycott ESEA, stick with FACEIT and CEVO?

What is the difference between PPS and PPLNS?