Freecoin

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Freecoin is a fork of the original BitCoin client, developed by DYNDY

Description

1. From the project homepage:

"Freecoin is born as a fork of bitcoin (on 18 May 2011) and its main goal is not that of preserving the Bitcoin currency or servicing its circulation, but that of continuing the development of P2P currency software as an educational experiment and a free reference implementation for further innovation. Freecoin is not a currency, but a suite to create P2P currencies."


2. Jaromil:

"Freecoin is our toolkit to build social wallets, one of the free and open source software we are developing as a result of the D-CENT project. We call it a toolkit because anyone can adopt it to design his or her own application to record value transactions within small or mid-sized groups of participants. The resulting ledgers are distributed and authenticated: they do not only exist on one or more databases, but also on peer-to-peer distributed blockchains. This way we hope to provide easy peer-validation of authenticated records that are tamper proof and exist beyond the actual Freecoin installation. We are not aiming at the sort of trust less peers scenario in Bitcoin: we assume that trust is abundant within an organization (that can be helped also by other democratic and decentralized tools in D-CENT) and that the main challenge is to share such trust outside the organization, with other organizations." (http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/freecoin-blockchains-and-future-money-interview-jaromil)


Discussion

"Freecoin is born as a fork of bitcoin (on 18 May 2011) and its main goal is not that of preserving the Bitcoin currency or servicing its circulation, but that of continuing the development of P2P currency software as an educational experiment and a free reference implementation for further innovation.

Freecoin is not a currency, but a suite to create P2P currencies.

What can be considered naïve in Bitcoin is a premature investment of time and resources in it. Bitcoin has been linked too fast to the already problematic world of existing physical currencies, especially considering its stage of development and its usability.

While it is fun to see it works, it is also obvious to many that this technology needs more development and that we cannot be concerned about the integrity of a network of stakeholders while at the same time adding features and correcting bugs.

In these regards, Freecoin can be seen as consolidated playground for experimentation on P2P crypto currencies and further growth of this technology, still open to the use people will make of it in future.

Additionally, one of the main points of Freecoin is that to make the genesis code configurable at runtime, meaning it will be possible to use the same technology that circulates Bitcoin today for new and diverse currencies in future, relying on a shared code-base and a set of configuration files that represent the “unique genetic code” for each currency." (http://freecoin.ch/)