#coding has turned into a fascinating interest of mine... using scraps of code and coding things entirely myself out here

[duskgryphon]

fun? update on my neocities i've been figuring out how to implement modals the way i want them which means a little pop-up post type thing ^ both for information about each individual piece that isn't utilising alt text (not what it's for) and also to separate the thumbnail image and modal's image to reduce loading time issues.

which means i've finally learnt css! initially i implemented the pop-ups solely using html but that doesn't work very well in the end ^^". significantly faster this way and different images simply use different class tags (? what is this called) to set them in correctly.

this whole thing has so much of me butting my head against little issues in the code and digging around for solutions (nightmare!) but it's a lot of fun. the modal itself needed adjusting the same way as the pop-up for it to sit in the centre of the viewport but that i sorted out first thankfully.

i still have to figure out how to get the images in the pop-up itself to sit centred and have them take into account the fact that none of the images are exactly the same which is... hopefully possible. it's also incredibly broken with any screen on portrait mode (or at least phones....) but there's not much i can do about that (for now?)

[gold-from-straw]

Frozen Heart - ch5

Loki has a bad morning, but on the plus side, now Tony is well rested, he's able to recognise some accidental culture clash and resolve their awful misunderstanding! TW for panic attacks, blood, and accidental self-harm caused by a nightmare.

Read from the beginning on AO3 if you prefer! I’m tagging anyone who left a note on the previous chapter here as well, hope that’s OK!

Loki woke with a jolt, his heart pounding, nightmares of a frozen world and evil red eyes lingering in the fringes of his mind. He lifted trembling hands to cover his face, and nearly screamed.

He stumbled out of bed, his heart thumping, trying to get away from the vicious black claws, the blue skin that had haunted his nightmares since his childhood. He scratched at his arm, tore at the pale lines raised in the skin, whimpering and panicking, the quiet, calm voice inside now drowned out by the storm, and he couldn’t find himself, couldn’t dig himself out from under this hellish mask, this curse, this…

“Hey! Hey, Loki, please, calm, will you? Hey, look at me? I’m not going to touch you, alright? I just want you to look at the lights, can you do that? Can you breathe in with the light as it gets brighter? That’s great, keep going… OK, and now out. Like you’re whistling, purse your lips, yeah, just like that. Now in, feel it… feel it filling you up or… yeah, this is good. That’s great, buddy. OK, I’m just gonna… can I see your arms?”

Stark came closer, still holding his hands out in front of him and looking as unthreatening as possible. Logically Loki could see that he was veryunthreatening, a small mortal in soft clothing, hair still sleep-mussed and face pillow-creased, but with his heart still hammering inside his own chest, he couldn’t handle logic at all. He tugged his arms closer to himself, fingers slick with his own blood.

Then he looked down. The blood was indigo. He whimpered and pushed his arms out as far from himself as he could, staggering backwards, his breathing speeding up again.

“Hey, hey, it’s OK! I’ll get them fixed up, no worries.” Stark cupped his hands around Loki’s wrists, making a surprised hum. “Wow, you’re cold.”

Loki let out a burst of hysterical laughter that very nearly turned into a sob. How utterly pathetic. To have been reduced to a scared child, cowering in someone else’s room, terrified of his own appearance after a nightmare… Loki turned his face and closed his eyes. It was almost unbearable.

Stark tugged him gently over to the bed, encouraging him to sit. He left him there, staring down helplessly, hatefully, at his blue, bleeding arms. “Here we go,” Stark said a moment later, setting a bowl of water down by Loki’s feet. He took Loki’s wrist in his hand and started dabbing the blood away, staining the water an inky blue. Loki stared at the colour diffusing through the water and tried not to despair.

“There we go,” Stark said with a grin. Loki looked at his forearms, wrapped in pristine white bandages. He felt emptied out, like his heart had been excavated from his chest, leaving him dull and hollow. Stark’s smile slowly slipped from his face and he bit his lip. “Ah, do you… do you want to talk a bit?”

Loki blinked at him.

“Like, uh… do you maybe want to… were you trying to, um. Were you trying to hurt yourself? Is this, like, a self-harm thing? Because I won’t judge, I just…” He scruffed his hair. “Yeah, I’m not very good at this shit. Are you… OK?” He winced and looked at Loki sideways, almost as if he thought Loki would strike him for his question.

“No, Stark,” said Loki, his voice sounding very distant. “I am not OK.”

“Yeah, I kinda… got that.” Stark sat on his haunches and rubbed his face. “You know what? We need a load of breakfast. I’m thinking pastries and donuts, something that won’t go cold or soggy, and then I think you should tell me all about it. I mean, I can’t promise I’ll be any help.” He winced again. “Honestly, I’ll probably be shit. Like, worse than nothing. I’m not… the best listener. Or the best friend. But…” he shrugged and looked away like he didn’t care at all. “Yeah, croissants! JARVIS, could you order us, eh, I dunno, one of everything from Belle Maison?”

“Of course, Sir,” JARVIS replied.

Loki looked up in the direction of the voice. He had been introduced to JARVIS the night before, but this morning, after a night of somewhat effective sleep, he could cling to the fascination sparking in his chest, distract himself. “Is your companion made of magic?” he asked.

“What, JARV? Nah - or, well, he’s an AI - artificial intelligence. He’s made out of computer code and electronics and… stuff.”

“I blush, Sir,” said JARVIS dryly.

Stark just smirked. “I’ll show you the bots in a minute, it might make a bit more sense then. Assuming you’re still up for a bit of research in a while?”

Loki felt the cold flood through his system once more, ridiculous for a Frost Giant. He had forgotten during Stark’s treatment of him this morning that he was little more than a prisoner here. He was Stark’s research project, and nothing more - this had not been kindness, but a care for one’s tools. Loki summoned up a professional mask and nodded.

Stark blinked, his own smile faltering. “OK… OK, if you’re sure? Anyway. For now, do you want a coffee or something? I need coffee, I’m not human without the first one of the morning.”

Loki narrowed his eyes at him. “Hyperbole?” he asked.

Stark winked at him. “Only just. C’mon, Billy Goat Gruff, let me hook you up with the good stuff.”

Loki had hoped that the distraction of breakfast and coffee would make Stark forget his demand that they talk, but once they’d eaten a couple of the sweet treats, he tapped his fingernails on the polished stone of the high table he called a breakfast bar. “So, Loki-Doki, you wanna tell me your story? How did you end up in a crater on another planet causing snow in the desert?”

Loki closed his eyes for just a moment, put his pastry down on the plate and clenched his hands into fists under the table. “As you wish,” he said, his voice strained.

Stark frowned. “Hey, no, it’s fine if you don’t wanna tell me, you know? I just… thought it might…” He scrubbed his hair again. “I dunno, help? People are always asking me if I want to talk, I just thought it was the done thing, or something. You don’t have to.”

“No, I am yours to command.”

Stark made a face. “Not really, though.” His eyes suddenly widened. “Holy shit. Holy… did I say something? Was there a culture clash here? Have I like… I didn’t sign you up to be my indentured servant or some bullshit, did I?”

Loki peered up at him, surprised at himself that his head had ducked so low, that his shoulders were so hunched over. “You said you would give me sanctuary in exchange for experiments…”

“I did?”

“You did imply something along those lines, Sir,” JARVIS interjected.

Stark pressed his hands to his cheeks. “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me, JARV?”

“I didn’t realise that Master Loki would take the combination of words in such a literal way. My apologies, Sir. And to Master Loki.”

Loki frowned. “You did not… but why would you take me in if not to-”

“I mean, sure, I wanted to study you,” Stark wailed. “But only if you wanted to find stuff out too, or like, show off… I don’t want you to be here against your will, holy shit, have I kidnapped you? Oh my god, I’m so sorry, shit!”

Loki blinked, shocked. Stark was apologising? To him? And in such distress! But Loki was nothing to him, here he was not even a prince, why would Stark care about whether or not Loki would choose to be with him? “I don’t… you do not have to…”

“I mean, I thought we were just gonna do some cool science together, I had no idea I was dragging you here like some sort of a threat, am I SHIELD in this situation? Oh my god, I’m basically Agent, guh, I’m gonna be sick, JARVIS!” He turned to Loki with wild eyes. “I am really, really sorry.”

Loki stared at him. There was a warmth in his chest, a spreading feeling he barely recognised. When was the last time someone had apologised to him? Someone of consequence, not a servant or a subject - and even then, they would always do so with gritted teeth. Loki knew he was unpopular. He’d never attempted to change that - it had always seemed so immutable a fact. Loki the trickster, don’t trust him, don’t listen, don’t spend any time near him in case he turns you into a goat.

“I would… I would like to stay,” he said, and he tried to hide a wince at how vulnerable his voice sounded. “I am interested in your science. In our differences.”

“Really?” Stark said, freezing in his distressed motions. “Are you sure, though? You’re not just saying that because I’ve, like, activated some hospitality clause I didn’t know about? You’re choosing to--”

“I am choosing, freely,” he said, swallowing and looking up at Stark. “If I am welcome, still?”

Stark’s face broke into a wide grin. “Hell, yeah, you’re welcome!” He let out a long breath. “Phew, god, that was awful!”

Loki’s lip quirked up. “Why was it so awful?”

“Well, I don’t know what life’s like on your planet or whatever, but we humans don’t like coercing other people.” He made a face. “Well, the non-assholes don’t. Yeah, actually, scrap that? I don’t like coercing people. I can’t talk for the rest of them.”

Loki grinned. “Your realm is not so different from mine, in that case. It sounds as if there are plenty of assholes in both.”

“I mean, honestly, I probably count as one of the assholes most of the time.” Tony shrugged. “Hey, do you want to go down to the lab now? I can show you the bots, and we can find out what your alien biology looks like on my holos.”

And just like that, Loki was reminded what he was, his freakish blue skin, the horns, the demonic red of his eyes. He held himself still, trying not to wince, trying not to react, for how could he explain this? He would just have to control his expressions, focus on the science. Because perhaps there would be something in Stark’s ‘lab’ which would help him to find his way back to his old - no, his true form.

But Stark stopped mid-sentence. “No? What? What is it? We won’t do anything you don’t want to,” he said, biting his bottom lip again.

Had he always been this obvious? No-one in Asgard would ever have noticed, but Stark had spotted his reticence at once - and Loki had been actively trying to hide it. Had his masks ever been as strong as he had believed? Or had nobody ever been truly looking? Loki stared at Stark, amazed at the perceptiveness of this small, sparkling mortal. “It’s…”

“I’m serious, Loki, we won’t do anything you don’t want to, OK?” Stark said, holding his gaze. “If there’s anything you don’t like, we’ll stop, no matter how far through the process we are, if there’s anything you don’t even like the look of, we won’t do it. And of course, I’ll put myself through everything you do - like, except for actually doing magic, ‘cause I can’t. Oh, and I can’t go into an MRI because of this,” he added, tapping the centre of his chest over the odd glow. “But you don’t have to do that either.”

Loki searched his face for any hint of a trick, any lie, and found only compassion. He swallowed hard. “I do not look like this,” he said, his voice nothing more than a croak. “I mean… not usually.” He looked down at his hands, clenching them into fists and feeling the sharp, obsidian nails digging into his skin. “I was Aesir - I am Aesir. I must be. But… during my brother’s coronation, I just… this happened. I turned into this… this monster, and now… now my magic is different, cold…” he took a deep, shuddering breath, the fear sending icy tendrils through every nerve. He looked at the table and gasped. Frost swirled out from every contact point with his skin, and he jerked his hands back in horror.

“Hey, hey, it’s OK,” Stark said, holding his hands out, placating the beast once more. “It’s OK.” He took a deep breath. “Hey, I know we said we didn’t have to talk, but do you want to tell me about it? And then… maybe we can get you back to normal?”

Tags from last chapter: @aformingsiren, @sketch953, @massivelandthingdonkey, @angrysockpuppetnoises, @ultra-rare-pegacorn, @redramzi, @senpaiweird, @giggling-breeze, @rarepair-collector, @saturnjuice, @kuree06 <3

[trainerv]

Astroforce

More on the Astroforce because someone @saki-noir was curious and I really needed to work more on them, anyhow. It’s kinda long with individual facts on each one, so I’m putting it under the cut. Subject to edits.

The Astroforce are five earth-made trains under Astrotrain’s command and care.

-At least 2 out of 3 of their alt modes were possibly based off of train models that, in reality, had been retired long before the 1980’s, when the first 2 season of G1 took place. This in mind, I imagine that the trains Astro had used to make the Astroforce were either off in a corner somewhere, waiting to be turned into scrap metal, were being preserved or were completely forgotten. With this in combination with the water damaged caused by the flood left the five a complete disaster when brought in. Dirty, damaged and uncared for, there was little hope for actually bringing them online. Then, the Decepticons found the key to vector sigma (the episode The Key to Vector Sigma part 1 actual premiered only a few episodes after Triple Takeover). Once it successfully brought the Stunticons to life from regular cars, it was used on the Astroforce because Megatron wouldn’t pass up the chance to have something Optimus doesn’t. Their bodies were still in terrible shape, but it was a start.

-While work was being done on the Stunticons on Earth, they were moved to the head Cybertron base and put under Technis’ care.  It took a lot of time to get them functioning “properly” – even now they still show numerous defects and parts of them were completely outdated, but can’t be replaced without overhauling their entire frames. Plans are being made to give them proper Cybertronian bodies, but this will take some time. Until then, they are given frequent check-ups. It is done before the 20 year gap between seasons 2 and 3. Possibilities of a combiner have been thrown on the table.

-None of the members of the force have any real memory of their “lives” as actual trains. Their first memory, albeit as drones, was of Astrotrain and, in a way, they sort of imprinted on him. They follow him around and really only listened to him, at first. They can communicate with each other via a sort of Morse code that consists of blinking their lights and whistle-blowing.

-They’re much smaller than Cybertronian train-based transformers typically are, given that they’re from earth. Their robot modes are based only of the first one or two cars of their original train forms, as the rest were needed for spare parts to make some repairs or were too damaged to work with. New cargo holds for energon/weapon storage are attached to them when making rounds.

-They share their own room and enjoy a big cuddle pile when recharging Astrotrain included whether he likes it or not, telling stories of their individual jobs, and playing board games together. Some of Trackside’s stories may or may not be slightly not true

Injector is the only steam engine of the crew, her alt possibly being based off a DRG 01 1102 or possibly some form of Pendolino model (though I don’t think there are any close enough in design that were built at the time).

-She’s considered the oldest of the 5 given that she was the first to be brought online. She was frightened and overwhelmed and didn’t know who those strange people poking her where and why they were asking her all these questions. She panicked and hid behind Astrotrain, the only familiar bot in the room. After being “ordered” to let the doctors do whatever they need to do, she was more docile, though visibly nervous; her answers to questions were simple head nods or shakes and a ‘mhmm’ or ‘mm mm’. Once she was cleared, she returned to Astrotrain’s side and waited quietly for the others. Seeing them be as calm as they were by comparison, she felt embarrassed and promised to be a better example next time.

-Her boiler was the most damaged part of her (it wasn’t in the best of shape to begin with and the flood and years of not being used didn’t help) and had to be replaced with a new one. While still able to consume energon, her body is still fully capable of running solely on coal and water. Her steam engine makes her the warmest and the center of nighttime cuddle piles.

-The dual antennae on the side of her helm are very sensitive to vibration and she hates having them touched. They can make only minor movements.

-When angry or flustered, she’ll blow steam out of her chimney. She’s very sensitive about it. Don’t laugh! It’s not funny! She also has a habit of holding people’s hands when nervous.

-The metal making up her body isn’t particularly durable and needs to be checked on often, so she spends almost as much time in the med bay as Switchman does.

-What looks like a visor is actually a part of her face and can’t just be removed, though she has two optic scanners behind it, like a regular face would. She has the best vision and is capable of seeing little details and movements that might go unnoticed by others.

-She feels sympathy for any abandoned trains or other vehicles she sees. While she can’t take every one home and get them fixed up like she was, she does quick sketches of how they look then redraws them all fixed up when she has the time later. She keeps them in a little secret drawer and lets no one see them.

-Given her ability to run on alternative fuels, she’s spent the most time on the tracks of the 5. It also helps that she is the fastest. She – and sometimes the others – helps bring energon from mines to bases on earth.

Switchman was the second. Possible Alt: ETR 401 [which had actually been in use at the time] or the M-10000 [which would be the oldest model on here]

-He was much calmer than Injector was when brought online, though opted to stay close to her and Astrotrain. He watched curiously as the doctors worked on the others, though he’d pretend not to be when asked if he wanted to get a better look.

-During his stay in the med bay, an issue with his back strut was found, causing him to occasionally slouch and minor pain. A brace was put on to help it, but he finds it uncomfortable and hard to transformer with, so he’ll loosen it or will take it off completely when he’s out. He’s slightly taller than Rail Grinder when standing straight.

-Like Injector, he’s actually very insecure. The others can run and jump and do things so easily, and he’s in the back, having trouble doing sometimes the simplest physical tasks given his bad back. He uses most of his energy trying to stay up straight and ignore the pain, but he tires himself out quickly.

-He finds himself fascinated by how things work, and will watch curiously as other do things. 

-Being the passive type who prefers to watch and listen, he tends to remember the little things people say and do. Example, he knows that when Injector’s antennae stick up and/or twitch, she’s about to have one of her anxiety attacks and will hold her hand to calm her down. If one of the others is closer, he’ll signal them to do it.

-He enjoys movie nights with a few of the other cons. He’s fond of film noir and mystery movies. He usually figures out who-done-it before long, but enjoys them none the less. He also has a small collection of mystery novels.

-He can and will sleep just about anywhere. Don’t underestimate his ability to find a nice groove or hole in the middle of a battlefield to rest in. He’s also the best cuddler. Watch out when he gets tired.

-I’m aware he’s the only one without a headlight. I have no excuse. I forgot it.

Rail Grinder is the third and has the same alt mode as Switchman.

-Rail Grinder was the calmest, letting the doctors do whatever to him. Nothing bad happened to Switchman and Injector, so what did he have to worry about? 

-The doctors weren’t too fond of having him around, though, given he wouldn’t stop touching everything and asking questions. He almost took off one of the nurse’s hands messing with a laser scalpel.

-Testing showed most of his body is surprisingly sturdy; however, the joints are very weak. Too much heavy physical activity at once can result in, at worst case, the breaking of a joint and the possible loss of a limb. A bit of rest during work and constant maintenance is all that’s really needed prevents this until his new body is ready.

-He stays with the Cybertron crew going around and helping everyone in the base. He hangs around with the grunts and “drones” (like the vehicons), mostly, having a good chat and doing menial tasks, like unloading energon cubes. He can carry quite a lot, as it turns out, and likes to paint things on the vehicons to help tell them apart.

-Second to Switchman, he spends the least amount of time in alt mode.

- He’s a curious child and can’t help himself from doing whatever his impulses tell him to. The world is new and there’s so much to explore and do. While his enthusiasm for life and living is much more subdued than the likes of High Rail, he’s made a habit out of trying everything at least once. Often the two will go out and find trouble to get into something interesting to do or he’ll partner with Trackside on one of her schemes.

- His catchphrases ‘it’ll be fine’ and ‘I got this’ have gotten him and others into more trouble than you’d believe. He’s not the master of everything he believes he is, but he tries. He doesn’t always succeed, but, still, he tries.

-He’s one of the few mechs, if there are any, who can handle gross, squishy, human gore (he doesn’t enjoy it, but can stomach it) and stuff and loves horror movies, black/dark comedies especially. No one gives him the remote at movie night, anymore; not after the Zombieland incident. He also enjoys slapstick and likes most comedies in general. He’s a big fan of Groucho Marx and the Three Stooges.

High Rail is the fourth. Her and Trackside’s alt mode are based off of the Pioneer Zephyr. [I’m retconning some things from my 8-facts post]

-High Rail was the most eager to get out of the med bay and get to living, upon hearing all the great things being explained to her and the others. It took a while to get her to stop bouncing and sit still for her checkup. Once cleared, she practically ran out of the med bay. She wouldn’t stop asking questions – much to everyone’s annoyance – and ran ahead of the group, touching everything they passed and greeting they met. No one knows where this energy came from, but it’s there.

-While her vision is less than perfect, the sensory organs hidden under the series of finials under her helm are highly sensitive. She can hear even the faintest of whispers from several feet away. She’s highly aware of other’s EM fields and can become overwhelmed when around too many other mechs. When this happens, the finials clench up to lessen the effects. Conversely, when under-stimulated, they’ll puff up in an attempt to pick up any sort of feedback. It’s pretty adorable. She, like Switchman, can tell when Injector is going to have one of her attacks, but is much less subtle about the matter and will try to talk to her to calm her.

-In fact, subtle is one of the many things High Rail is not. She wears her emotions on her figurative sleeves and doesn’t understand when people try to hide them or when they can’t tell how others are feeling as well as she can, sometimes forgetting her own hypersensitivity to others’ emf is an anomaly.

-She’s not particularly sensitive about her single optic, but will become offended if it’s mentioned as being anything odd or unusual and, naturally, her siblings will defend her. There’s nothing wrong with her face at all; she’s beautiful and they will fight you.

-She spends the most amount of time in alt mode of the five. Usually she’s seen alongside (or just behind) Injector on deliveries around earth if she’s not racing Trackside to see who’s faster. So far, Trackside has her beat 10-13. She wants her new body to be faster than ever.

-She’s the only one who knows of Injector’s hobby and has tried, more than once, to get her to show the others and while out on her own routes, will takes pictures of broken down vehicles for Injector to draw. She also takes photos of other things that capture her interest while she’s at it.

-She strongly dislikes high grade as the resulting overcharge messes with her senses and confuses her.

-She’s a sucker for sappy ‘kids’ movies and anything that pulls at the heartstrings.

Trackside is the youngest of the crew, but only by so much, so don’t mention it. She shares her alt mode with High Rail.

-Trackside was very vocal of her dislike of being touched and questioned by the doctors and would complain and push them away before being told to knock-it-off. She put on a fake smile and begrudgingly let them work. Once finished, she was more than happy to get away, but not before swiping a few extra treats that are usually given to the good little bots after checkups. She shared some with the others, but not all of it.

-Her body is surprisingly sturdy, but can cease up from time to time, causing her joints to tighten and making movement difficult. Constant lubrication and bolt loosening are required.

-Her large, flat optics aren’t just for show. Similar to Injector’s, they’re very adept at picking up movement. This – combined with her quick reflex and fast processor –makes her great at both firing projectiles and taking out moving targets. Of course, she uses this more for firing paint balls at people via slingshot than doing anything on a battlefield.

-Meeting Uncles Blitzwing and Octane for the first time, she questioned whether or not she had “to pretend to like these ones, too”, though she claims she was only joking and does she look like the type to lie?

-Of the five, she’s probably the most cunning, or, at the very least, the most likely to take advantage of any given situation. If it means getting something she wants, she’s more than willing to play dirty and doesn’t get why her siblings (who know her well enough not to be caught in her lies) don’t more often. Sure, she’s the cute one, but they’re not too bad. She tends to stick closer to Octane after having once assisted him in one of his lies and being called his ‘favorite’.

-Unlike her favorite uncle, though, she’s not afraid to be out on the battle field; in fact, of the 5, she’s the most likely to deck someone in the jaw for insulting her family. Only she can do that. She also has an interest in baseball and has a killer swing, something most anyone who knows her well enough, knows not to be on the wrong end of.

-She is a member of a Deception sports club, one that started up recently. A few of the cons had gotten into earth sports after having seen them on tv or while out on earth and decided it would be fun to give a few a try. It’s more a way to boost morale and practice team-building, something the cons could use.

-Trackside’s name comes from the actual term, Trackside, but is also a play on the phrase “side track”/”side-tracked”; fitting given her tendency to distract others while pulling pranks. I’ll be honest, that was an accident, but it works, so…

[click2watch]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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The post Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

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Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

source https://www.initialcoinlist.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users/ source https://initialcoinlist1.blogspot.com/2019/05/florincoin-2014-altcoin-you-dont.html

[initialcoinlist1]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

source https://www.initialcoinlist.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users/

[abckidstvyara]

Nintendo Labo review

Nintendo Labo review

I’m here to tell you first-hand: Nintendo Labo is no joke. I’m a grown-up human person, who has spent many hours of his life building things: office furniture, websites, a model of the Batmobile from the 1989 Tim Burton movie. In the fourth grade, I attempted to build Mission Santa Barbara out of sugar cubes. It didn’t go great, but the point (I’m told) is that I tried.

We’re talking multiple decades of building things. Following instructions, backtracking, trying again. I’m sure there are all sorts of valuable lessons I learned along the way; self-discipline, patience, teamwork, why sugar is not a structurally sound building material. But event with all of that building under my wisened belt, Nintendo Labo is no walk in the park.

It’s literal child’s play. It says right there, on the box, “6+.” I’ve been six-plus for — let’s just say… a while now. And yet, it took me around two hours this morning to build a cardboard piano. Now I’ve got a table full of scraps, a small paper cut on my ring finger and a surprise sense of accomplishment. Oh, and the piano is pretty cool, too.

Labo is one of the most fascinating products to come across my desk in recent memory. It’s unique, bizarre and as frustrating as it is fun. In other words, it’s uniquely Nintendo — not so much out-of-the-box thinking as it is the actual box. It’s a product that’s built entirely around the premise of making kids sit still, follow instructions and fold the heck out of some cardboard. And, strangely, it totally works.

Hook, line and sinker

I wouldn’t have been my first choice to review Labo, but I was uniquely qualified, if only for the half a day I spent getting walked through the construction kit with a room full of brightly dressed and infectiously enthusiastic Nintendo employees. That experience served as the foundation for our hands on, as we were broken up into small teams and walked through a pair of increasingly complex projects.

We started with the race cars, the box’s introductory project, which is really as much about getting you used to the strange world of Labo. But even that small starter is a glimpse of the cleverness contained throughout, as the cardboard-wrapped Joy-Cons use their own haptic feedback to propel forward, as you control its speed via the touchscreen. Because there are a pair of Joy-Cons for every Switch, you can use them to race against one another.

The second hands-on project felt like a considerable step up. Nintendo puts the fishing rod’s build time at one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours, versus the cars’ 20 minutes total. In other words, find a comfortable spot, maybe put on some music and make sure you’re hydrated. When it’s done, however, you get a working reel with a string and a rod that vibrates when you catch a fish on screen. Pretty neat.

Having accomplished those in a well-supervised room full of Nintendo employees a few weeks back, I naturally took on the most complex project of the bunch.

Keys to the kingdom

The piano should take two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half hours, by Nintendo’s estimates. I built the thing in about two hours — an accomplishment of sorts for a grown-up person who was supposed to be working. Even so, it reflects just how large of a time sink these projects are. That’s certainly good news for parents looking for the ideal project for a rainy day. It’s a clever little play that leverages a video game system to get them to do something other than play video games. Neat trick, Nintendo.

The primary set is a big, flat and heavy box with 28 cardboard sheets, comprising six different projects. There’s a plastic bag inside, too, containing a random assortment of knick knacks — rubber bands, reflective stickers, washers — all of which will come in handy down the road. There’s no real instruction booklet, because the Switch is going to do all of the heavy lifting there.

The screen walks you through the process of building, one patient step a time. The touchscreen instructions are superior to paper in a number of ways, including a number of animated videos showing off the motions of properly working components, and the ability to pivot the camera angles to get a full 360-degree view of the build. You can rewind if you need to back up, or fast-forward when things get repetitive — like they did with the piano’s 13 keys.

Cardbored?

Don’t go too fast, though. The kit tosses some curve balls at you — as in the case of some tabs that are folded inward, to double as springs. That, however, is the one constant. Folding. So, so much folding. Honestly, it gets pretty tedious on the longer projects. The instructions actually make light of this fact, from time to time, with little quips about the repetition. It also recommends stepping away before a particularly grueling section — probably the right move for both your sanity and health.

Once you get into the rhythm, however, it’s strangely meditative. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold. Tap, fold.

Congratulations, you’ve completely 1/6 steps.

I’d say it’s not the destination, it’s the journey, but honestly, it’s really about the destination here. The most satisfying part in all of this was how seemingly abstract shapes lock into place and create a fully formed object. These little kits are truly remarkable feats of engineering in their own right, and in the case of the piano, it’s incredible satisfying to see the object completed — and actually get to play the keys, recognizing the role each individual piece plays in the whole creation.

There are so many smart touches here, from the incorporation of the Joy-Cons, to the use of reflective tape, which triggers the Switch’s built in cameras. It’s that functionality that makes the piano keys play notes through the Switch itself. It also triggers the arms and legs on the robot through a set of pulleys.

It’s equally relieving the moment you realize you did everything right. Though I still had a few instances where I found myself having to backtrack multiple steps, because I’d missed a fold or turned something the wrong way. Also, as the instructions note, folding is at the heart of the project. A bad or incomplete fold can lead to heartbreak at the end. So fold, children. Fold like your lives depend on it.

Building stories

Companies that make coding toys will usually tell you the same thing: it ultimately doesn’t matter that they’re not built in some universal programming language, so long as they teach the fundamentals. The jury is still out on all that, as far as I’m concerned, but I think there’s a lot to be said for a product that’s capable of fostering curiosity and love in some bigger idea. That, I think, is the biggest appeal of Labo. It encourages kids to step outside the console for a minute and build something with their hands.

Does building a Labo piano or fishing rod make you any more qualified to create the real thing? Not really, but it does help foster a genuine interest in the way things work. A maker friend of mine recently related a story to me about how she got into the culture. Her parents came home one day and she had disassembled and reassembled a computer, in order to install a component. From then on, she told me, they came to her for computer help.

Every maker has a story like that — a first step that often involves tearing down a computer or clock or toaster, piece by piece. Labo potentially affords the ability to explore that path without destroying some antique clock in the process. (Though, if it’s successful with your kids, I’d keep a close eye on your piano, if you have one at home.) Parental guidance is also recommended for the more complex projects, making for a great opportunity to bond with kids through creation with a side of frustration. And when you’re done, you’ve got a lovely object that looks like it stepped out of the panels of Calvin & Hobbes.

If your kids don’t have the passion to build — they’ll also learn that lesson pretty quickly. Many kids simply won’t have the patience to sit still and fold for hours on end. It’s also worth pointing out that the objects, when finished, are fragile. They are cardboard, after all. Water is their mortal enemy, and rowdy kids are a close second — pieces can easily rip or tear, even accidentally during the building process. Thankfully, the company has started selling pieces individually.

Of course, $70 isn’t an insignificant amount to pay to find all of that out. And by just about any measure, it’s a pretty steep premium for what amounts to a cardboard box full of cardboard. And, of course, that doesn’t factor in the price of the Switch itself.

But what the kit does afford is continual discovery. From there, kids can graduate to the massive Robot Kit (saving that one for a rainy weekend), which runs $80 and features a complex pulley system and a fun little game where you’re a mech trampling some poor, defenseless city. Even more compelling (and significantly less expensive), however, is Toy-Con Garage.

Built into the variety pack, the portal lets kids remix and hack creations, offering a breaking down of the technologies involved. If there’s a gateway to the wonderful world of making in this box, it’s this. The pre-determined kits are as much a lesson in following instructions as they are building. Toy-Con Garage, on the other hand, opens the door to true creativity.

Labo is the most bizarre, creative and uniquely Nintendo product since the Switch itself. It’s not for every kid — that much is certain. And the $70 fee will make it cost prohibitive for many parents. But those who take to it will do so like ducks to water — and hopefully won’t get that cardboard wet in the process.

[click2watch]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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The post Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

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Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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BinBot Pro – Safest & Highly Recommended Binary Options Auto Trading Robot

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9.5

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