Some of you here may be familiar with Ed Wood and his famously so bad it's good movie Plan 9 from Outer Space especially if they are fans of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Ed Wood also will know a little more of the back story.
Still fewer are likely to be aware that there was an advanced networked computing operating system project called Plan 9 from Bell Labs - sadly like Ed's movies, underfunded and famous for its cute cashmere bunny Glenda.
Now, you might recognise something about that little space bunny, if you are a programmer (hails to my brothers in the trenches!) as being from the same artist as this more recent, famous little rodent:
Yes, the little fella is the product of the same artist, the brilliant artist wife of Rob Pike, Renée French, and is the mascot of Go, the best programming language for building scalable distributed systems.
Well, we are huge fans of all of these things here in the Plan 9 from Crypto Space lab, and in tribute to Ed's brilliantly bad movie, you can see at the head of this post (and in the preview) a poster based on one of the Plan 9 from Outer Space movie posters done by the founder of the ParallelCoin Community Takeover project that has now become Plan 9 from Crypto Space after quite some time working with him.
In the two and a bit years Marcetin (his last name and bitcointalk legendary user account) and I have developed a sense of brotherhood (neither of us have brothers) and we have rolled through way too many punches and we're a bit bruised but as we have been saying since very early, "Parallelcoin or Death".
Well, hopefully it won't get that far but it's been pretty rough at times, the coin has been listed on 4 different exchanges in the time I have been in the project, Cryptopia, Nova, Altilly and now Dex-trade.com - if you know of some of these names you will know that two were hacked, the second one was suddenly opened and then suddenly shut down, and the last one, which you can buy DUO and trade, is highly suspect and after misbehaviour from their representatives we did some checks and discovered they are running on fraudulent corporate registration... in Estonia... and this was a huge blow for us recently, I mean, me and Marcetin practically basketcases for about 4 days after all the stress.
Plan 9 from Crypto Space, tl;dr version
We will be resurrecting ParallelCoin (stay tuned for updates when our new landing page/wiki/forum/blog site is ready) from the almost-dead, and the plan is to take over the world and make sure everyone can mind their own business in peace, and not set the galaxy on fire.
First step is nearly complete, the website upgrade and chain upgrade, which contains the following features:
CPU-oriented Proof of Work algorithm based on long division and the Blake3 hash
9 parallel block intervals with power-of-2 sequence starting from 18 seconds up to 38.4 minutes and with a total timespan of 96 days for calculating difficulty through 5 different sampling patterns
Setting up a mining farm for ParallelCoin after the fork will be like setting up a wireless network. Choose a password, and make the USB stick with it preconfigured, plug it in, and in moments you will be crunching hashes and getting a shot at winning DUO tokens
Exponential decay block reward that eliminates halvenings and provides a continuous reward to maintain mining forever and ever amen
Last but not least, a simple, intuitive user interface that runs on all major platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux (and BSD), Android and iOS
Phase two: Distributed Applications Development for All!
The core work of what is planned (see the white paper draft here) is about creating an in-wallet scripting/programming console that a child could use and make simple chain queries and user interfaces, all the way up to a multi-functional all-in-one anything application to do all the things, tentatively called the Pod Console.
The Pod Console will be built at first in the usual Go development environment but as soon as it has enough pieces will be re-implemented (mostly automated but also lots of copy/paste) in its own log-based data structure, and will enable peer to peer, distributed hosting of user developed applications, integrated with distributed name services like ENS with your own domain or a subdomain rented from a domain owner, hosted peer to peer on IPFS.
In addition, the blockchain protocol will be upgraded to allow the creation of notary records and mineable masternode tokens to distribute the work of notarising and providing an IPFS archive (something a bit like the wayback machine, but for useful business data like price feeds from exchanges, other distributed applications, and other data sources so they can then be incorporated in blockchain applications.
From this base our first and simplest proof of concept will be creating a one-stop-shop for all cryptocurrency information, from history, source code, documentation, and so on, something like a distributed version of coinmarketcap.
Second planned project is a market, regulatory compliance and inventory calculation tool and showcase for construction industry operators, at first here in Serbia where we have a man in the business who is keen to build a system that reduces the friction of the costs and time spent getting government approvals for various aspects of the construction projects the system will host and facilitate.
If you are interested in following our work, or joining in, email me at [email protected], use this discord invite: https://discord.gg/yB9sYmm3cZ, or if you are old school hardcore like most of us in the team currently, find us at the #plan9crypto chatroom at Freenode, and let's see what we can build together.
-loki