SOTU Sep 2016
6 months ago, I was asked by our project manager, Victor (aka medic), and the community, to look after the bitmark code base, and in the process, becoming lead developer. I was in two minds, as the project was at a relative low point, due to the vacuum left by the original founder leaving the project. It has turned out to be a good decision. While the project has had its ups and downs in the last 6 months, I would say that the good has squarely outweighed the bad, and project bitmark is not only back on its feet again, but is starting to reignite the promise and potential many saw at the start of the project.
I will expand in more detail below, talking about the last 6 months, where we are now, and what the future holds.
Disclaimer: while the price is one important aspect of any crypto currency, I would encourage anyone interested in the project to judge it primarily by other metrics. Namely, number of users, active users, project activity and actual code. As not everyone can be expected to know all of these things, I will try and give a summary. Please do fact check anything and everything I write, and come to your own conclusions!
Over the past 6 months we have seen a general increase of both price and market cap. In terms of the latter, regaining previous highs, and passing the $1,000,000 market cap milestone, for the first time! The coin itself is relatively unique in the crypto currency world in that it has done things the hard way. Namely, no Initial Coin Offering, no premine, no big hype, just organic growth and word or mouth. The advantage of this is that it's a fair way to allow as many people to become early adopters as possible. With still less than 10% of the free float on the market, there is still room for a wide distribution.
Mining has been also been quite healthy. Having gone from long periods with no blocks mined, something that I think no one was happy about, bitmark has achieved varied mining, and at one point in the cycle being the #2 coin in the Scrypt category. While that is something to cheer about, it is also slightly illusory. Mining has also been inconsistent. And there is one main reason for this. Coinwarz.
For those that do not know, coinwarz is a market based system that tries to optimize mining profitability. Bitmark has very often been the #1 coin on coinwarz which is a mixed blessing. Sometimes the site will send huge amounts of mining to us, and at others very little. This plays havoc with the difficulty, which for us, relative to other coins, rebases relatively infrequently (once per day or 720 blocks). More preferable is steady and consistent mining which has started to happen, more recently, since we are thankfully less featured in the coinwarz algorithm. We encourage miners to mine for the long term in a steady way. Almost all miners that have taken this strategy have seen profit. It's good for miners, and it's good for bitmark!
The base crypto currency has remained relatively stable with just the occasional network seed update. The reason is that the volume of bitmark is nowhere near filling up blocks so we have the luxury of a coin that can handle all the volume we are doing right now. As the user base increases more work can be done on scalability, but it would need to increase orders of magnitude before this becomes urgent. A nice problem to have!
The Poloniex exchange has been a great partner to bitmark, and marking has been well received by its user base which is going from strength to strength. As I write 6137 users are online, which is a fraction of their total user base. The prominent troll box on the front page continuously features marking. In a sense every marking is a micro advert for the project.
Over the last 6 months several people have come to the project. There has been renewed investment interest, new ideas and new work. Many people from the community have made contributions, large and small, here and there, and things have definitely picked up. Id like to thank everyone that has taken an interest, and encourage that to continue!
The stated goal of bitmark is:
Project Target: To become a daily use currency that runs parallel to Bitcoin and the alternative currencies, identifying and maturing candidate features before rolling them out to an extensive user base on a quicker time line. This target will mainly be facilitated by the roll out of Marking.
I think it is fairly safe to say that goal has been achieved, all be it in a limited environment, namely poloniex. The next step from this proof of concept it so take that winning formula, and extend it to a wider audience. We would like to position the project as a leader in next generation identity and reputation systems on the web.
For myself, I have been working on a number of application layer projects that will enable marking. If you're a coder you can follow my check ins which happen on a daily basis. The individual items are too numerous to name, but I will mention version 0.1 (early alpha) of webcredits, which aims to be a highly scalable API for marking. And the slack and IRC bot, klaranet, which enables realtime marking over IM.
We are currently, IMHO, the coin best placed to take advantage of the next generation features of the web, such as the semantic web, linked data, and social linked data. A lot work has been done with the W3C in order to create a standardized framework that can scale to billions of users and trillions of devices. We will continue to standardize with the Web Payments Community Group and the Block Chain Community Group.
Bitmark has always been remarkable in the top 100 coins in that it is the only coin not to have a website! The community took it upon itself to autonomously rectify this, which is awesome.
The ultimate long-term goal of bitmark is to enable universal marking and micro payments on any device and in any browser. While this might sound far fetched, I think it is a more achievable goal than many realize. The browser is missing a layer that allows easy micro payments and hopefully through an easy to install proof of concept browser, vendors will realize the value add that is possible to users. These proofs of concept are already working in early stages.
Having monitored several successful projects in the open source world. One stands out as procedurally of very high class. Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the most successful linux distribution but the process is one that works very well. Namely, a release cycle every October and April, a code of conduct, and with a clear road map of what can be achieved in each cycle.
Additionally I have built a layer on top of webcredits, named quantum payments, which enables arbitrary modular use cases such as decentralized deposits, withdrawals, streaming media (currently being prototyped on the testnet) and much more. Part of this is a bot that is able to crawl the web and look for content that is suitable to be marked. Preliminary tests tell me that it is possible to crawl 20 pages per second which equates to around half a billion per year, on a mid range home PC. The aim is to make this into a distributed content search engine.
We would also like to extend outreach via social media and form more partnerships with communities that might like to try marking. Volunteers on this front are most welcome, and we will try to lay out a set of guidelines as to how it is possible to contribute.
We feel that the project has gone from uncertain to stable in the last 6 months, and we would like to consolidate that in terms of price and mining, so that we can be in the Scrypt tier around 2nd place behind litecoin, with a long term goal to compete with litecoin on hashing.
After the website goes live, roughly 2 weeks later will see the release of the marking API and klaranet v2.0. After that everyone in the community is invited to help plan the next 6 months of releases. Roughly culminating around the equinox of April next year, in a 6 month cycle. Many different pieces will be on the table. Developers are invited in early November to help shape the future of bitmark technology!
If you are interested in learning more about bitmark, please visit our community on slack!