Welcome to SuperNET!

As the end of the year approaches and the launch of v1 gets closer, developments are gathering pace – and so is interest in SuperNET. Once again, we have lots to report.

First up, a brief announcement that people have been asking about:

BTer has finally sent the last two dividends, SkyNET and Pangea, and they have re-enabled UNITY withdrawals. We recommend that anyone keeping UNITY on BTer withdraws to a NXT wallet – ideally the v.0 SuperNET wallet available from Multigateway.org. This not only gives you full control over your assets, but enables more reliable distribution of dividends.

You may also be aware of rumours of a pump and dump ring that has been operating on BTer, with some unpleasant accusations about threats made against other parties. Whilst it is not clear who is involved, it is always safer to keep your funds off-exchange. Now let’s talk SuperNET.

Topics

New CORE coin: VPN
SkyNET
- The early bird SkyNET SALE
Remember tradebots?
InstantDEX
- BTCD: Reference currency
- JLH: Reference asset
- Market making JLH
MMatrix
OPAL
- Wallet update
- OpalTKN
- OPAL/jl777 teleport project
VRC update
BTCD revenues
Coinimal
Development update
- Infrastructure update
- Sportsbet
- Bug hunters required
- SuperNET compiled on Windows
SuperNET related links

NEW CORE COIN: VPN

A new core SuperNET coin has been added: VPN. James writes: ‘The new coin is not like any other I have seen. In fact it only runs on Windows, of all things, but this adds Windows expertise to SuperNET. More importantly it is a coin that is the doorway to China as it is done by a Chinese dev team. Now, have you heard about the Great Firewall of China? People there aren’t supposed to be able to use Google but there is a technical trick to allow for this. Yes, it is called a VPN. The new coin is vpncoin, also bitnet. This is a doorway to the China market for SuperNET. Do not underestimate this.’ See further here:

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Here is VPNcoin’s ANN from bitcointalk. James’ commentary below:

###
I am not sure the marketing distinction, but we will be porting the vpncoin GUI to ride on top of the SuperNET API for comms. which they currently just use the bitcoin messaging
now with some help, it should be possible to get this VPN functionality for unix/mac

Oh, did I mention that as part of this deal, SuperNET will be handling a 50 million VPN rewards fund? This will be for the supernet slackers who are helping the bitnet and probably a dividend to SuperNET/NXTventure holders.

Did I mention that 600M VPN (that is 60% of current supply) will be burned this weekend? And SuperNET also receives for its acct 47M VPN.

60% of total supply burn + 10% being assigned to superNET = 70% out of market

The bitnet team is small and we need to help them fully integrate into SuperNET. To complete the deal the bitnet team will be getting 1000 SuperNET assets, so the SuperNET it is receiving a big discount and the expectation is that we will help them.

they have TOR / voice / chat / video / irc / VPN / HTTP Server

currrently 1 billion, 600M burnt, 97M to SuperNET with 47M long term HODL and 50M for SuperNET slackers that are helping integrate VPN, dividends, promotions, dev team has about 50M, and 60M is a long term reward for nodes. There is only ~200M public float now, but the 50M for the improving and 60M for node rewards will take time to hit the market. So to preserve marketcap it is 2.5x being price neutral, but probably a bit more due to the extra 50M that would reduce the basis. Like I said, this one is not easy to do, need to evaluate based on market cap and of course the CMC number is all wrong…
###

SkyNET

SkyNET (asset id: 6854596569382794790) has made a deal with FinHive (blockchain agreement txids 17121561730737863232 and 8809916241760899104):

FinHive has made an agreement with SkyNET to become a wholly owned subsidiary of SkyNET
In exchange for 45% of SkyNET and 4.5 million NXT, FinHive will work on the referenced plans
All future revenues from FinHive operations will flow through SkyNET
Revenues in excess of operating costs will be distributed as dividends to SkyNET assetholders
Referenced plans: http://finhive.com/roadmap.html

‘FinHive intend to develop efficient trade-strategies and algorithmic-trading, by utilising the full depth of all generated analytics and AI results. It makes sense for FinHive not only to share but also to use new detected (unknown) market patterns, formations and other unique entry/exit signals for algorithmic-trading… It isn’t discussed how this will be organised later but the first step now is to generate the analytics at full depth and form a solid subscriber base. Information advantages will be monetized right after.’

This is a highly ambitious and exciting project, and it is no surprise that the asset has already gained a lot of interest. The concept is to reach out into the world of real-world trading as well as crypto, bringing revenues back into the crypto economy. Developer nexern writes: ‘As far as I know, no one has built something like this on this large scale before. There is a pretty big market for financial analytics/algorithmic trading and the goal is to enter this external market, generating a constant revenue stream for SkyNET and its shareholders. Merging crypto and traditional finance resources is promising.’

‘The tech and data is available and tested. Dev resources are already allocated and I don’t expect any real problems developing this beast. Sure, the workload is huge, because nearly all components are custom-built at low level but that’s all been taken into account. It is quite clear to us, we are building something big and unique here.

‘On the roadmap, sorry for the laborious English but as a non-native speaker it is difficult sometimes to express as precisely as desired. In case you have any questions or suggestions for improvements, I am here to do my best to answer them.’

Project preparation is under way and regular updates will be provided. ‘A dev blog is set up to provide general status information and updated progress details on each dev section. The first one, as seen in the roadmap, is the data-cluster and data aggregation. To make the development transparent, shareholders can not only monitor the progress but also view and test completed components. A webdesigner will take care about a shiny layout later.’

This happens to be an area of interest and expertise for James, who writes: ‘I spent 4+ years optimizing SVM [Support Vector Machines – pattern-recognition algorithms], and making useful features from forex price time series. nexern is proven dev, also proven ethics. Combining his NN [neural net] stuff, which would have been decent, with my SVM, well… I expect to have some quite profitable signals being created and transmitted to the Tradebots. Also, the space for SkyNET is not limited to crypto markets. I put in 3 million NXT of SuperNET funds, I also bought in the open market.’ (see below)

The early bird SkyNET SALE

An early bird SkyNET sale was announced on the forums (NXT price speculation thread, BTT SuperNET thread and SuperNET forum) as well as Slack. SkyNET assets were available to medium-to-large investors (typically 50,000 NXT and upwards). The minimum investment was specified to avoid the administration of many – perhaps hundreds – of transactions being required. In response to questions from those who missed out (the offer was oversubscribed very quickly), James writes:

‘I did post all the details. This was a fringe benefit for the most active SuperNET fanboys as I really appreciate all the hard work they are doing in constructing the SuperNET. SuperNET made 3 million NXT investment at 15 NXT each. As a reward to SuperNET contributors I allowed them to piggyback at same price. (yes, I know I am basically giving away free money, probably a few millions NXT worth, but gotta reward the fanboys dont I?)’

Therefore a total of:

300,000 SkyNET have been sold at 15 NXT
75,000 SkyNET were dividended out to SuperNET assetholders
75,000 SkyNET were dividended out to NXTventure assetholders.

Of these last 75,000, InstantDEX received about 30,000 (since it owns about 40% of NXTventure). These were passed through to InstantDEX assetholders, since InstantDEX has no specific need of them.

Remember Tradebots?

SkyNET/FinHive’s tech will be used for tradebots (NXTcoinsco). The tradebots asset manages tradebot ‘leasing’. The idea is that individuals create tradebots and allow others to invest in them on a profit-sharing basis – if the tradebots are successful, investors will receive a slice of their income. This operates like PAMM (Percentage Allocation Management Module), where investors allocate money to specific traders and share in their successes.

Tradebot creators can choose to pay for SkyNET data, and SkyNET itself is expected to be behind many, many different bots. Investors will look at the historical performance of a bot, meaning that the best strategies rise to the top; unlike normal forex markets, the tradebots will only make a charge to investors if they produce profits.

The incentives are therefore in place for designers to create successful bots, not simply convince investors to back them. Bots and designers with a strong track record will naturally attract greater investment.

InstantDEX, BTCD and JLH

Work on InstantDEX, the system that will enable near-realtime crypto trading, continues.

Generally in cryptocurrency trading, prices are quoted relative to BTC; Bitcoin is still the ‘reference currency’ since so many people use it. It is like the USD of crypto. The idea is to make InstantDEX look and feel like a regular exchange so that traders see something familiar, but under the surface, something very different will be happening.

BTCD: reference currency

Instead of using BTC as a reference currency for InstantDEX, James is using BTCD. There are various reasons for this, ‘some technical, some financial’. Key to trading of any kind, and to InstantDEX’s aims, is liquidity.

‘So all the SuperNET core coins they will have liquidity and low spread conversions between each other (and BTC) and be priced by default against BTCD. Of course, anybody can set things up however they want but the default for the orderbooks will be BTC for “normal” trading and if you are wanting telepods or best conversions between them, it will be BTCD. This I think solves the transition for traders and gets them into the SuperNET trading.’

In other words, all trades will go through BTCD: a DOGE -> LTC trade will really be DOGE -> BTCD -> LTC. One reason for this is that it requires liquidity for far fewer trading pairs; instead of ensuring that DOGE <-> LTC has liquidity directly, so long as DOGE <-> BTCD and BTCD <-> LTC have liquidity, the trade can be carried out with a BTCD stage in between (invisibly).

This has significant implications for BTCD, over and above the 5% revenues from SuperNET – since it will be in constant use. James writes, ‘I prefer not to make any specific price predictions, but it makes sense for BTCD price to track the price of SuperNET, not in lockstep as that is not how markets work, but rising in tandem.’

JLH: reference asset

The same problem with creating all trading pairs with sufficient liquidity also exists for assets, only it is worse as there are typically larger spreads for assets. ‘It is just not practical to support direct orderbooks for a full matrix of all asset pairs. What is needed is a reference for assets that is like the “DOW Jones” index, something that represents the overall asset market and not anything else.’ jl777hodl (JLH) will be used as the reference asset, in the same way that BTCD is the reference currency for InstantDEX.

‘I expect JLH trading volumes to go up, a lot, and the spread around the NAV to shrink, so this is not a “moon” thing, but a liquidity thing and liquidity is quite important. Once we can maintain small spreads like 0.1 with volumes for JLH orderbooks, that would mean going from asset <-> asset will also have much better spreads than now.’

Spreads are currently anything from 5-20% for some assets, and trading can entail significant losses through this alone. High liquidity with BTCD and JLH will mean any coin and asset pairs can be traded efficiently. It also enables an ‘autoconvert’ feature that enables users to view their portfolio denominated in whatever currency they want to view it (BTC, BTCD, USD, UNITY, JLH…) without the actual conversion incurring major losses.

‘At this point, crypto becomes much more useful as a medium of exchange and store of value and then the Tradebots will be able to find many more ways of squeezing out more satoshis. I am envisioning a realtime display of the account balance and with tradebots active, you would be able to see it change in value as it is happening. Imagine a wallet, you denominate it in EUR, unleash the tradebots and it starts showing more and more EUR in your account. It is this vision in my head and just needing to get it all debugged, all the pieces are pretty much there, but so many pieces the connection points aren’t quite right, but it is just a lot of debugging and all of this comes to life at the core of SuperNET, with all the other stuff on top.’

Market making JLH

In order to give JLH adequate liquidity, libertynow has taken on the role of a market maker. He is regularly calculating the NAV and placing buy and sell walls to reduce the spread to < 5%.

New assets are periodically added to JLH, and since these have not been announced and/or do not have a market price, the fund is generally undervalued.

MMatrix

Ensuring liquidity is key to the smooth operation of InstantDEX and, therefore, SuperNET.

‘I am currently working on market maker support for InstantDEX,’ writes James. ‘There will be a limited number of spots available to be a MM, prioritized by the amount of fees paid, so naturally the best market makers rise to the top of the list. At first, maybe just a small donation payment will be enough to get to the top of the list. Then 32 (or 64?) of the market makers will make a matrix, I call the MMatrix. The InstantDEX users would contact the first market maker in their sorted list for their offers, so the higher on the list the market maker is, the more orders it has the pick of.

‘For the orders the MM doesn’t want to immediately fill, they broadcast to all the other market maker nodes. This gives advantage to the MM at the top of the list as they get to cherry pick the best orders, but ignoring this incentive to pay fees, as far as users are concerned, all the market makers have the same orderbook (other than the one packet delay).’

MMatrix will be very fast. ‘It should have less than 1 second round trip to any point in world, so all the nodes query the selected MM, who can cherry pick the offers they like, that is how they make extra money in addition to normal market making. Anybody can register to be a market maker by posting an AM. The priority to order resolution will be the first MM with acceptable price, searched in order of past business levels, so the MM with the best spreads will naturally rise to the top of the list. This is only for orders between the NXT AE bid/ask – otherwise just go direct to the AE orderbook.’

OPAL

Wallet update

MANDATORY WALLET UPDATE
UPDATE ASAP SO YOU DON’T FORK:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=778720.msg9839574#msg9839574

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OPALTKN

OPAL coin has issed an asset on the Nxt Asset Exchange. OPALTOKEN will receive 25% of revenues from the OPAL market. The standard fee is 1% of sales. This is still in beta and trades are denominated in OPAL, so the dividends will likely be in terms of mgwOPAL. You can keep up with developments here.

A total of 15 million OPALTOKENS (OPALTKN) will be distributed and dividended out as follows:

10% to SuperNET
10% to NXTventure
5% to jlh777hodl
25% to the OPAL team
50% to faucets

This is in addition to the recent OPALTKN giveaway that took place via Slack and the forums. These tokens came from the faucet allocation.

OPAL/jl777 teleport web project

What: James would like the OPAL team to develop a ‘telepathy web’ on top of his basic html site pushing mechanism. Telepathy is BTCD and the SuperNET’s private communication system. Opalcoin will develop an easy-to-use publishing GUI, as well as help develop integration with privacy servers. This will be considered an OPAL contribution to supernet, and OPAL will be credited.

Why: To address the flaws in TOR and create a more decentralised web mechanism. James has already developed the basics; as the technology progresses, more functionality will be released.

How: Interfacing with SuperNET, the OPAL team will add and build in qt features with C++, while James develops the backend in C.

VRC update

effectstocause writes, ‘Almost done with major components of supernet integrated vrc wallet. Then focus will move more so to DHT storage. We will discuss differences and similarities of Storj with Opal for optimal impact. We actually had a lengthy conversation with Storj at btc Chicago. Cool guys.’

BTCD revenues

People have been asking for some clarification about the role that BTCD will play in SuperNET and the revenues that will be paid to it.

BTCD is at the core of SuperNET. To reflect this, 5% of SuperNET revenues will flow to BTCD stakers. (Periodically a snapshot of stakers will be taken and BTCD purchased using SuperNET revenues to distribute to them, pro-rata.) At this point, this has no direct impact on BTCD value. However, ‘long term it should dominate the value of BTCD as there are only 1.2 million of them.’

This also provides a safety net for BTCD. Unlike other coins, which can theoretically plunge in value, ‘it will always have a nice floor due to the 5% of SuperNET revenues, which is actually 10% of what SuperNET assetholders get, since SuperNET holders get 50%, NXT core devs 5%, BTCD stakers 5%, SuperNET core coin communities 20%, overhead and expenses 10%, TBD 10%’.

Teleport and Telepathy papers (core BTCD technology) can be found at http://209.126.70.170/DarkPaper.pdf and http://209.126.70.170/Telepathy.pdf.

Coinimal

Coinimal is to launch very soon. This SuperNET-integrated service will allow fast Euro-crypto purchases. Twinwinnerd writes,

### I am looking for Beta-Testers of Coinimal!
If you are from a country below and have access to a bank account, I need you to
Buy: BTC, NXT, LTC
Sell: BTC

Buy side:

SOFORT: Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain.
EPS: Austria
Skrill OBT: Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, France

Sell Side:
All Europeans with a Euro Sepa Bank Account.

Reward: 100 NXT per Tester!

PM me for Beta Key!
###

‘Localbitcoins is maybe now the fastest but in 9 days Coinimal will be. And we offer more coins than BTC…’ You can sign up here, to receive a Lanch Announcement: https://www.coinimal.com Find out more here.

Bitcoin Shanghai Expo

SuperNET was introduced at the Chinese conference (28/29 November). Salsacz writes: ‘During my speech on day 2 I presented SuperNET as a solution for using any anonymous technologies without the need of exchanges and risks of revealing your IP, email or freezing account or getting it stolen. In the brief summary during the speech I introduced James as a dev, his assets and also explained the diagram and the story about the Pirates. I brought all whitepapers, even the chinese versions.’

Read Salsacz’ article about the event here: http://test.nxter.org/nxt-supporting-the-student-revolution-in-hong-kong/

Development Update

Infrastructure

SuperNET’s infrastructure is a network of servers running around the world – many on users’ home computers and cheap VPSs, but also a series of high-quality nodes that will provide the backbone of the service. James: ‘It is boring compared to SkyNET, but still quite important. As we get closer to initial release with core functions, we need to have the infrastructure, especially MMatrix.

‘So SuperNET contracted for 10 mega servers to start and will probably get a lot more. For people concerned about the “Instant” of InstantDEX and core capacity of DHT this solves that, as the best software running on snotkitten class hardware will just not provide the performance people will expect.

‘Boring compared to new asset, but quite a nice foundation for the network to run on. Most people won’t have any such servers, but most won’t be running a MMatrix node, so, need to make sure MMatrix node capability is known, tested and then the monetization it will generate can be calibrated.’

SportsBet

The sports book is nearing completion. However, James needs ‘someone that understands the different events and enough XML syntax to make templates. Then the code can automate the sportsbook creation. This would then plug into InstantDEX for peer-to-peer betting.’

Bug hunters required

There are big bug hunting rewards (https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=301.0) available for anyone who can identify significant bugs in the SuperNET API. Rewards of UNITY will be paid out to anyone who can find problems, with a sliding scale of amounts. The API is largely untested, so there should be lots of bugs to find!

Rewards will be paid out at the end of each week to bug-finders and will continue for 5 weeks (until early January 2015).

Last week’s payout: Cassius: 33.33 UNITY, Longzai 33.33 UNITY, Cryptosleuth 33.33 UNITY.

If you find a bug please make sure to post it on Slack (in the API channel and to Azeh) and on the SuperNET forum here: https://forum.thesupernet.org/index.php?topic=296.0

At this point, it is question of finding as many people as possible to issue API calls manually and seeing whether it acts as expected. However, l8orre has a more advanced setup – a scripting and testing controller in built in Python3. ‘Right now it has a facility to plug in controller classes. What does work is using this as a relay which sort of is the same as using curl. The scripting class exists, but I need to extend it a little bit. Schedulers are also provided… i.e. timers that check back regularly for pre-registered actions every 4 seconds, do ‘settings’, then loop over the whitelist and ping every IP in the whitelist, then do GUIpoll and see if there is a pong, but it may need some honing to streamline it a bit… In its simple form, it does the same as curl…’ If you’re interested in helping, contact l8orre.

SuperNET compiled on Windows

BTCDdev writes, ‘Some great news today! I finally managed to successfully compile SuperNET on Windows! This will have a VERY great and immediate effect on our community! Once jl777 and I knock out a few minor kinks in it, anyone running Linux or Windows will be able to become a SuperNET tester and begin using its awesome services! With a nice GUI doing very well under development by longzai1988, hundreds of people in slack and more joining every day, and now this, we can rest assured that our community has some great days ahead!’