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Core Bitcoin Devs Leave Project, Create New Currency Called Decred (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Core developers in the Bitcoin project have left and started a new currency called Decred. Developers are citing a lack of transparency and a conflict of interests between the group that funds the actual Bitcoin software development, and the decisions taken inside the project. Jacob Yocom-Piatt, CEO at Company 0, who has funded development of Bitcoin since early 2013: "This is in part due to a lack of mechanisms and pathways for funding development work directly from the community, and as a result Bitcoin development is funded by external entities that create conflicts of interest between the developers and the representative power of the community that uses Bitcoin."
"We can't make any more money off Bitcoin, so we decided to create our own currency."
... into yet another currency. Nah, that won't happen, the Decred founders will say.
But it can and will, if Decred ever amounts to anything. See, the best thing Bitcoin has going for it is that it was the first to make it work.
That's how open-source projects handle differences in philosophy, transparency, coding direction, etc.
Reserving billions of dollars worth of digital coin for yourself isn't.
let's see if they do a better job than Bitcoin in this regard.
*or dogecoin or the various other derivatives*
E
What's the conversion rate to Dogecoins?
To avoid any confusion it should be clear that these are the developers of btcd not bitcoin core. As far as I know the only bitcoin core developer working on an altcoin is gavin andresen.
This is not an exodus of core developers from the Bitcoin project. This is a small group of developers, some of whom have contributed to Bitcoin, who are creating a new cryptocurrency to address some of the governance problems cryptocurrency projects have faced. "Decred" stands for "decentralized credits" and will employ both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake in a novel way to secure the blockchain while avoiding centralization pressures.
They're just hoping that their 'new' cryptocurrency will take off, then they can 'cash' all of the initial currency they generated when it was easy.
They talk about using proof of stake and proof of work instead of one or the other. But doesn't PoW imply PoS in most cases? In other words, would people with no stake in the currency be doing work on it very often?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... the linked article is just a press release disguised as a story, quoting only the subject of the article without any independant analysis or rebuttal of any kind
And this is nothing new for modern journalism, its a very common practice.
This is in part due to a lack of mechanisms and pathways for funding development work directly from the community
Someone should come up with a system to send other people money, even in small amounts.
Please help metamoderate.
sounds a lot like taxes.
The trick with any ponzi / pyramid scheme is to be at the top. In the case of a digital currency, that means mining out the easy coins and hoping to convince waves of rubes to buy them off you.
Oooo Softpedia is down... somebody hit a sensitive point I see... apparently somebody else doesn't want others to read this story. #bookmarked
It is not very effective.
It is, arguably, closer to trying to ensure that such seigniorage as exists has a cut kicked back to the developers; but more broadly it sounds like a "yeah, welcome to convergent evolution" situation.
So long as their is nonzero, usually nontrivial, work involved in keeping a currency(or an exchange service layered on top of a currency, like credit/debit/paypal/etc.) up and running, the people doing that work(as well as any opportunists available) will try to get their cut, whether in seigniorage, taxes, interest charges, transaction fees, or some other term.
Bitcoin itself is supposed to incorporate this as well: most of the attention is on largely speculative mining operations; but the point of 'mining' having a payoff is that it is the computing needed to incorporate additional transactions into the blockchain verifiably; and being paid to facilitate transactions is the theoretical end-state as mining's ROI gets lousier. Whether that will happen remains to be seen; but it was the plan.
These people are complete unknowns and are NOT core developers at all. They've never done anything on Bitcoin.
At least they're sorry of honest about their new venture: a new scam altcoin called discredit.
Good riddens to trolls.
I'm not sure if this is a factor, a consequence, or unrelated, but... ... when I read stories like this, I try and apply a simple question, "Who benefits?" as an attempt to dig out deeper motives. Bitcoin has the potential/has proven to be a significant market disruption of the existing, traditional banking model. In one single step it has leapt past existing banking models and thus threatens portions of the current global banking model.
Specifically, one of the most lucrative forms of revenue for banks today related to "foreign currency transactions". When you are a tourist or traveller and getting stung to the tune of anywhere between 1-3% of the value of each foreign-currency transaction, or whether you are a company engaged in international trade that therefore has to convert some receipts back to your native currency in order to bank profits, there are huge, huge fees available to those who facilitate ForEx transactions. Bitcoin and equivalent cryptocurrencies have the potential to disrupt this market: convert your local currency to Bitcoin and then, overseas, simply convert your Bitcoin to *that* local currency...
Obviously banks are only too well aware of this and all of them will be working to implement an alternative solution of their own. This alternative will be "approved" and of course will come with fees and charges. But we should all hope that the presence of Bitcoin or equivalent in the ForEx market can actually help to drive down prices. The simple truth is that multinational banks either maintain foreign currency accounts for themselves, or have deals with in-country partner banks, such that the cost to them for a currency swap is going to run to thousandths of one percent.
This takes us back to the reason to follow this story - because *anything* that disrupts or dilutes the strength of emerging crypto-currencies - i.e. in a "divide and conquer" or similar methodology, is only going to benefit those who make an awful lot of money in this space at the moment...
I'm not saying that the quoted motive relating to governance is in any way invalid or bogus. I'm just pointing out that certain groups will benefit more from this change than others, and one group that seems unlikely to benefit significantly are the users of Bitcoin. That, if nothing else, makes me just a tad suspicious...
Still $50 million is traded daily in Bitcoin.
While it's hard to pin down the size of the secondary market in baseball cards, the daily "trading volume" in baseball cards is similar in size if not bigger most likely. (Sales of new cards are around $200 million/year and the secondary market is considerably larger) I know $50 million sounds like a lot but it really isn't even if the $50 million figure you cite is true.
As an investment, Bitcoin might still end up being a scam.
No need for the qualifier. Even if we accept that Bitcoin itself isn't a scam, Bitcoin routinely is used for scams and even when it is used honestly it's generally a terrible investment positively dripping with risk.
You do run a bit of currency risk but if you make many small transactions you'll lose some and win some, it's a quite okay facilitator of trade.
"A bit of currency risk"? Presumably you mean exchange rate risk and it is WAY more than "a bit" (no pun intended). Bitcoin is terribly volatile compared with traditional currencies so anyone who plans to hold it for any length of time is taking a LOT of exchange rate risk. If you hold it in an exchange you also are taking on agency risk, counterparty risk, and several other types of risk each of which is larger than for large traditional currencies like the dollar, yen or euro.
Even with in the US, whether through malice or apathy, transferring money between accounts with different banks can take an absurd amount of time
How are you doing the transfer? Check? ACH? Wire Transfer? The faster you want the money moved the more it will cost. I can wire money to basically any account around the globe nearly instantly via Wire Transfer. If you send a check there is back end transaction processing (including security) to that method of money transfer - far more than most people appreciate. If you are a small customer writing a check and dealing with banks from different states then they might put a 7+ day hold on money transfers because of security reasons. Other money transfer methods have different transaction times but security and processing time will generally make it substantially longer than a few seconds.
Fans of bitcoin are under the delusion that bitcoin is cheaper but that's only true if you don't account for risk and availability. Bitcoin carries a lot of risk and it isn't widely accepted. To be widely accepted there would have to be a LOT of expensive infrastructure built up and a lot of regulatory burden which would evaporate any cost advantage it might have achieved by using the internet as a transaction backbone.
It worked out; but it seems as though banking is one of those things that gets more customer-hostile the lower you go.
If you are a small customer in ANY industry you are going to get worse customer service than big customers. You cost more to serve on a unit cost basis so you will get charged more for the same services. It's nothing personal it's just basic economics. It costs roughly the same to serve a $1million account as it does a $1,000 account. It's cheaper to serve one large customer than 1000 small ones.
'nuff said.
"Core developers in the Bitcoin project have left .."
Can someone tell me the single most prominent such developer?
Let's face it, we know why they forked it . . .
Decred is no different then teslacoin, karmacoin, bytecent, rubycoin and other worthless virtual currencies.
Altcoins are a complete joke, and a waste of time.
Stick with bitcoin, and you wont regret life.
The developers that left were weak willed and felt they would cave to special requests from the funders.
or
The developers could make more money manipulating the startup of another crypto currency.
Indeed. However, USD has gained value and remained strong over the past two years (witness the withering prices of oil and gold), which shows BTC has increased even more in the past three months than its price in USD indicates. You can compare the gold prices of each to get another perspective: BTC vs. USD.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Doesn't necessarily mean Windows. Most developers I know (ballpark figure from ass: 90%), including myself, code on Linux or OS/X. The only thing that would make me code on Windows is taking a C# project.
By using Linux, I can run our full application stack on my dev box without deploying it to a server. Sure, I could use a VM on Windows to do the same thing, and one developer in my company does, but that creates occasional headaches.
If the developer desktop market were at all big enough to be important to Microsoft, they would maintain their own binaries for the most common tools such as PHP, Subversion, Git, etc. It is a huge pain in the ass to get these to work on Windows. Microsoft could ease that pain with a trivial amount of investment and developer resources, but they don't because it wouldn't make sense to their bottom line.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
The Bitcoin block chain will be taken over by BitcoinXT once its clients detect the 75% hashing power mark and one larger block gets added to the chain. Any existing Bitcoin clients will be unable to read the larger block and no longer participate in the network because you can't add blocks mid-chain.
However, the ethereal coins themselves are unchanged. Anyone still running the old client can at any time install a BitcoinXT client and continue using their wallet. You won't have to exchange one coin for another. That to me makes the term "altcoin" completely inapplicable.
Note: I'm merely an observer as I find the intersection of coding, cryptography, and currency intriguing.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
A "fiat" currency depends on someone that can be trusted, who has a lot of assets AND a major income stream giving a promise.
Well, it was my understanding that anyone could have used bitcoin to buy drugs on Silk Road, and supposedly you still can still do so on various successor sites. It seems to me a big reliable drug dealing organization meets all your qualifications.
OK, granted, this only works for certain values of "trust," but still... You'd essentially have a currency pegged to a known commodity, one with as much if not more intrinsic value than any precious metal.
I'm sorry, if the names of the peoples involved aren't on the list of bitcoin/bitcoin contributors with at least 3 commits, then they're probably not anywhere near core developers of Bitcoin. That doesn't make them not Bitcoin developers, but in that same capacity, I'm just as a much of "Bitcoin developer". Hell, at least I've got a commit in Bitcoin Core.
This appears to be a press release from a company that got some of the btcd implementors to join it. btcd is an implementation of bitcoin in Golang.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM