What’s the point? Why bother?

Well, who would have thought that coding a crypto currency would be so time consuming and such hard work?! Most of the work over the past couple of months has been finding time, and re-coding the same functions over and over again. All the time thinking about continuously better ways to do things that scale into the future.

Also, finding the purpose of the coin and balancing that with peoples expectations. The main problem being that peoples expectations are to get rich, which statistically is highly unlikely and does nothing to change the status quo of crypto.

So, we arrive at a few decisions. I’ve detailed the technical changes that are being made to the codebase before, but the why has never really been fully realised.

Now, for people who judge crypto by its difficulty/reward/emissions and supply then the next section is going to be pretty unpleasant reading, but I urge you to stick with it.

So crypto is actually useless and pointless?

Inspired by a humanitarian talk of John Gilbey (https://twitter.com/John_Gilbey) a few weeks back, something that I always knew, but ignored was spelled out. His talk was, “Can good code save the world?”, and yes I think it can. And i’m not talking about in the Skynet kind of way and the wiping out of the human race.

If you stand back and take a hard look at crypto, the whole point of wasting electricity and compute power to solve a problem with no purpose, just to be rewarded with something that is scarce only through deliberate restriction, is entirely bonkers.

I mean, really, you have to almost be entirely sociopathic to want to be so harmful and wasteful to the environment for such pointless activity.

How is Veldspar any different?

Without wishing to run the risk of being a total hypocrite I think it’s time to come clean about the future plans for this project and how this will change the dynamic.

Firstly, this initial release and what everyone has been effectively testing has been the principal of mining ORE. This is moderately unique to this particular project, but has the same wasteful attributes as other systems in production.

So, the ORE at the moment is randomised data, in which miners try to find patterns of bytes and the network awards value based on the finds.

But ….

What if, given the fact that Veldspar can have unlimited blocks of ORE and algorithms, the ore was in fact DNA data from cancer patients, and the miners searched that block of data to try and find correlate-able similarities between patients, maybe even trying to break a cipher or processing meteorological data.

This would still be PoW, but with actual value to humanity.

But won’t someone please think of the economics?

The keen eyed amongst you may have noticed that multiple ore’s solving different problems would in fact increase supply randomly and dramatically , as more and more problems are added to the network to be mined.

So, things would have to change to judge this system on different metrics. Not least the fact that even with more opportunity, the work would still be hard and the scarcity still significant.

The play here, would be that organisations such as cancer research orgs would in fact find it beneficial to buy coin from exchanges listing Veldspar, because they would want to attract miners to solve their problem and if there was no reward, no-one would actually bother doing the work anymore.

But (and this has been my feeling from the outset), I just don’t care about the economics, because I consider them broken anyway. I don’t see valuations continuing on the way they have been in the future, it just makes no sense in a physical world.

Don’t get me wrong, although I don’t care about economics per se, I will not ignore them altogether and reward will always be proportional to effort as that is a founding principal. It’s just that you will not be able to create a spec sheet and box up the numbers in a spreadsheet to work out any future valuations. In fact the constant change of supply will probably drive people nuts, and I would suggest that if you are mining purely for profit then this is unlikely to be the coin for you, at least not to begin with.

So what will be referred to online and in code as V0 will in fact be a traditional pointless and wasteful PoW system, but it will only have a supply of 100MM Veldspar. Then we will introduce additional ORE to be mined with slightly more human benefit.

To that end, i’ve already reached out to contacts at several charitable organisations to establish working possibilities for the data processing and the reward structure.

Progress

Well, it’s been a hard slog, but the codebase is starting to look a bit more like a project again.

It’s hard to give exact timings as we will most likely try to link it up with a move to multiple seeds and far bigger boxes which all takes time.

Also, we welcome `mattypants` as a former colleague of mine who has a casual interest in crypto, some mad coding skills and almost as little time to spare as me. So we have a handful of devs, working on differing areas and from different projects, but we will be reaching out for more once time has been taken to create a detailed development plan.

Notes

We are looking good to reduce the load of all the miners and wallets on the nodes to practically good.

Ubuntu 18.04 should be working now on the new codebase.

Updated to Swift 4.2, which incidentally, some of the core Apple team have started to get versions compiling on Windows.