SOTU Sep 2016
6 months ago, I was asked by Victor and the community, to look after the codebase of project bitmark, 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, acitve 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. The coin itself is relatively unique in the crypto currency world in that it has done thing 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). Much preferable is steady and consistent mining which has started to happen, more recently, since we are thankfully more recently not on 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 recieved by its user base which is going from strength to strength. As I write 5777 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 small contriubtions 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 timeline. 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 enironment, namely poloniex. The next step from this proof of concept it so take that winning formular, and entend it to a wider audience.
For myself, I have been working on a number of application layer projects that will enable marking. Far too many 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. Additionally I have built a layer on top of webcredits, named quantum payments, which enables arbitrary modular use cases such as decentralized deposits, withdrawals and much more.
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 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 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, with a clear roadmap of what can be achieved in each cycle.
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!