Hey Everyone,

So, I’ve been telling you all about TurtleCoin (TRTL) for what seems like the past two weeks, but since my first post about it, the coin’s price has gone down by 60 percent despite it having been listed on its first official exchange. But I still believe in Turtle, have been active in its community, and attended their dev AMA tonight.

Here’s a more comprehensive look on TurtleCoin and the top questions from tonight’s AMA:

What Is TurtleCoin?

TurtleCoin is a fork of ByteCoin (BCN) created by RockSteady and Bebop. It’s more than just a cryptocurrency – it’s more of a fun, open source project that’s accessible to everyone. The devs have said multiple times that one of TurtleCoin’s purposes is to create a coin that anyone can feel they can contribute to despite their skill set.

Both devs say that one of TurtleCoin’s original goals is to create one of the fastest coins on a blockchain without overcomplicating everything such that people feel intimidated about contributing. TurtleCoin also uses ring signatures to create privacy when transacting.

TurtleCoin also strives for a short blockchain that reaches for a time when users can perform transactions without even having to sync.

But behind all of this, the devs stress that TurtleCoin promotes a fun environment for everyone. You can see this in their choice of their domain’s website: Turtlecoin.LOL. Interacting with TurtleCoin should be easy and fun – everyone should be having a fun time while contributing to the TRTL open source project.

And this fun, light-hearted nature is apparent in the past few months’ TurtleCoin events. TurtleCoin has both an official TRTL Twitter account and a TRTL memes twitter account. During the TurtleCoin celebration party last weekend, the devs and higher-level community members gave away millions of Turtles just for posting memes and answering trivia questions.

The biggest mainstay of TurtleCoin is to have a truly, free open source project that rebels against the current fake landscape in crypto. Both devs have voiced their distaste with fake inflation and hype that ICOs and other coins promise in order to secure millions of funding for a coin that suddenly stops or slows its development significantly. TurtleCoin wants to be real – $0 funding and $0 spent on marketing – it’ll only be successful if its true, inherent value and philosophies appeal to supporters who start contributing to it.

What Are Some Ways TurtleCoin Can Be Potentially More Competitive Than Other Cryptocurrencies?

As the devs would say, TurtleCoin is only as strong as its community. Sure, Rocksteady and Bebop spend hours a day coding Turtle, and it could still be super great with just the both of them considering that litecoin and ethereum started out with just Charlie and Vitalik solo coding their coins to greatness. But in the evolving crypto landscape, one or two devs won’t cut it unless they’re geniuses or pioneers.

But if more people happily pour into TurtleCoin the two cents they’d like to give, the project is potentially limitless. TurtleCoin isn’t about attracting forced workers, but attracting people who want to contribute. Just consider that with $0 marketing and without a Bitcointalk ANN thread, TurtleCoin gained 5,000 members in its discord! That’s probably a lot more than some coins with millions of dollars raised. And most of these members want to contribute to the project and have created mining pools, web miners, logos, Woo Commerce WordPress Turtle integration, and many more undisclosed projects. They’ve contributed to the core wallet updates and developments on GitHub.

In a sense, TurtleCoin has a decentralized development compared to centralized coins with core devs who strictly control their projects’ growth. You can see the potential of Turtle’s decentralized development when you consider how XVG is so slow to churn out updates and complete milestones, which can be delayed by years. Now, I’ve said in the past that XVG is great and has the potential to surpass monero – and it’s still true. But would that have already happened had XVG been an open source project? Would XVG’s Wraith have been fully released a few years ago as opposed to a month ago?

That’s one potential Turtle has going for it – with a strong community, it can have an exponentially quicker development progress.

And Bebop also brings this insight about Turtle’s decentralized development: If Rocksteady and him die to Shredder and his minions, TurtleCoin would still be going strong. It’s not their project, it’s the project of everyone who cares about TurtleCoin. Could you say the same for coins with centralized development? This adds a sort of stability for TurtleCoin – the project dies only if the community dies.



Top Questions From the Discord TurtleCoin Dev AMA

With all that said, I chimed into tonight’s official discord TurtleCoin dev AMA held by /biz/cord and bring you the most intriguing questions and answers so far by Rocksteady and Bebop:

Q: The first question comes from @milsorgen
What realistic things would like to see happen over the next month or two to help ensure TRTL can achieve some measure of success?

Bebop: @milsorgen We’re very focused on community. We want TurtleCoin to be a project that makes the blockchain accessible for everyone, new comers and experienced folks alike. This is two fold.
First we want to improve our tooling and user experience so that it is easier to use. We want to see more projects that leverage TurtleCoin, like games and fun stuff, payment integrations ,etc…
2nd we want to expand our development community. We envision TurtleCoin as an ecosystem where developers and contributors, regardless of their skill level or background, can easily collab or start their own projects, get feedback and help, and are able to make a difference on the first day. To do this we want to continue refining our dev process, our mentoring, and get up top-notch documentation.
I believe that answers that
Also more memes 😉

Q: Is there a way to add a proof of stake element to TRTL like Cloakcoin (6%)? Is this something worth considering? maybe 30% POS, 70% POW split.. then over time shift it to POS… an evolution. Monero is currently king, Cloakcoin has a good POS with an active dev team like TRTL

RockSteady:

@Richie Hodlsson Hello Richie, good to see you here. :slight_smile: Great question that I was hoping someone would ask. Proof of Stake, as well as other consensus methods are always up for consideration. We have a meta forum for these types of proposals so that the community can take a look at the idea from all angles and give their two shells on the issue.

About proof of stake consensus itself in the context of TRTL, it’d be interesting to see how that would play out this early in the emission schedule, and what type of constraints would be necessary to keep everything on a level playing field.

Let me make a wild assumption though, assuming the chain keeps moving and thins remain egalitarian for all, would you settle for a way to generate passive income? I believe a few other questions go into this so I’ll reserve the bulk of my answer for those, from a technical perspective, but we have somethings planned soon that can give someone a way to generate TRTL passively by helping the network without mining, so that adds another way to gain TRTL by chipping in without having to go to an exchange or buy hardware.

A proof of work and staking split would be cool, I’d love to see some ideas on that, btw.

While we appreciate the comparison to Monero, they are on another level compared to us and other privacy coins, from a technical and mathematical perspective. If someone asked me what turtle is today, I wouldn’t say that it’s the #1 end-all-be all solution to privacy, because that would be disingenuous. We are a coin with a lot of things going for it, and privacy via ring signatures happens to be inherent to the codebase, so it’s a great added bonus, but it’s not necessarily something we currently are the 100% best at out of the entire world.

Q: We’ve heard you mention, in passing, in discord chat that you two have worked as devs in other cryptocurrencies. Can you tell us, besdies Aeon, which other coins and did you hold key dev positions in those coins?

RockSteady: To clarify, a subset of our team worked on the rebase for Aeon. This was before the current rebase bounty between the three teams. While I’ve personally contributed to several projects, and I know of others who have as well, I would never call myself or anyone I know a “key dev” in any of them, and I don’t think we’ve deliberately misrepresented ourself as “key” anything.

Q: Can you talk more about your Möbius and Karai development milestones?

RockSteady: Hey there @Zpalmtree! I was hoping someone would ask this. This is going to be a long answer, so I’ll describe the gist of mobius and then move on to karai
The goal of the mobius milestone is to be able to have fast blocks with a shorter chain. The end goal being that a normal user can board the network, form transactions, and go about their business, without worrying about syncing transactions that happened 10 years ago at 30 second block speeds. If you look at how big the chain is from a size perspective, compared to bitcoin, not only are fast blocks works against us, but our security features make us a little bit more beefy when it comes time to broadcast a transaction.
From a technical perspective, there are several ways we can accomodate this
The first way that I explored was Pruning. This is a concept that is employable on many networks, of interest are Bitcoin, Aeon, and BoolBerry. I’ve got a short synopsis written by Monero dev contributor Smooth that goes into detail, from a technical perspective, so I won’t try to front, but the gist of it is that in cryptonote projects you can prune two ways: one is from a network level, like in BoolBerry, and the other is two have a multi-tiered daemon system, where you have full reference daemons, or historical daemons as some people call them, and they have the full unabbreviated chain, and then you have light nodes that carry a trimmed version of the chain that has some of the non essential data removed.
For Mobius, our initial intention was to pick u where CZ and Aeon team left off, but I couldn’t help but wonder about other methods
One method that we’ve been exploring lately is “churn” for old coins, meaning coins on the network would have a shelf life, and as you approach the end of this shelf life, the coins need to be rebroadcast, and be closer to the beginning of the chain. This cuts the expansion of the chain from a length perspective, and shifts the momentum growing your chain from being a time based growth, to being transactional volume based.
We have a finite amount of coins, and those coins do no good just sitting somewhere, and some day in like 2140 they’ll stop being produced, and to for old money to earn their keep on the network they need to move and provide a miner’s incentive to process ongoing transactions.
This ongoing process of sending the guys at the back of the pack back to the front sounds simple, but there are many considerations, but there would also be many gains
So for mobius we’re overall set on a few different solutions to cut the chain sync time right away
if I publish what I use right now, which is a rigidly checkpointed daemon, you can sync the entire chain on modest hardware in less than an hour.
This helps those that may be just boarding the network now who technically don’t care what happened 4 years ago in the blook chain, and they should not have to care. They should not bare that burden, so why not have a build process that automatically integrates our transaction milestone checkpoints natively into the checkpointed daemon
This reduces the time-to-spend as I call it. I don’t want you waiting outside. That only works at the club. I want you inside transacting and filling blocks.
There’s more to mobius, but let’s move on to karai
In bitcoin, there’s a field for extra transactional metadata called OP_RETURN
it allows you to embed arbitrary bits of data, I think up to 80 bits, and it allows you to do things like embed messages.
Check out something like EternityWall.it for an example
In the cryptonote world, you see this most often in Monero, where there is the field TX EXTRA, which if you look closely at the block chain is where Minergate likes to stuff secret missile launch codes or something, who knows whats really in the stuff they send, but the fact of the matter is, a smart person could stick things in there that reference a pointer to other locations
In the beginning I imagined this could be something like a distributed hash table or even a side chain, but every day the idea evolves more to incorporate other concepts.
Youll notice on our roadmap that we do not list completion dates, because you’ve already been let down by those. We list start dates because new developers arrive every day and contribute new concepts and skills. This particular item should have started in 2nd quarter of 2018, but just from a usability perspective, I’m already poking and prodding to see what makes forknote/bytecoin’s TX Extra different than monero’s and what exactly we can do with it, whether it be on the main chain or on a side chain.
morpheus = faster sync, karai = dapps.
Done

Q: WIll you integrate the future development of Monero (like buletproof and mimblewimble) ? If yes, will Mimblewimble be compatible with Möbius and Karai ?

RockSteady: If the community wants it, and our abilities allow it, we will always give the people what they want so long as it doesnt break anything. This is people’s time and effort, and every day we’re finding the balance between respecting that value and adding new cool things.

Q: Where do you see TRTL in six months? In a year? Do you plan to cultivate partnerships in that timeframe, if so with who and why?

Bebop: @GT3000 Great question! In terms of user growth metrics, in six months we’d like to see ~20,000 members on the discord. In a year, we want turtle memes on the nasdaq reports. We’d also like to see over the next year development of service integrations, for example in the form of micropayments, perhaps for pay-to-play games or in-app purchases.
I think this is a good time to shout out the xbox mining project and the folks working on that. Being in the gaming and small payments ecosystems in various ways is great for TurtleCoin

In terms of partnerships, I think we would be open, but it is important to ensure the community and the network would not be negatively impacted or compromised by any outside interests. This is an open source project, driven by the community, and we consider each member of the community a partner already.

Also, we have woo-turtle, which is a community developed adaptation of the woo-commerce extension for wordpress, so let’s say you have some Turtle-y merch for sale, you can set up a wordpress and be accepting payments in TRTL in less than an hour.

^^ to that point, it’s a doer’s market, we like to say. The only stake we control is the turtle obtained the same way as everyone else.
I think we’ve covered that one

Q: (Asked by @Ace)Any other new exchanges in plans?

Bebop:: @Ace We want to see turtlecoin on many exchanges, but our motto is slow n steady. Additional exchanges put strain on the liquidty, but we see an immediate benefit from being on a decentralized exchange that does not hold funds and is not subject to SPoF issues traditional exchanges have. To that end, we have done some work to be added to Bisq (https://bisq.network/). Their process requires implementing some key validation methods and corresponding unit tests (Java, JUnit) along with some modal dialog features to help users. Their process is a ‘1 shot’ pull request that is either accepted or rejected, no 2nd chances, so we want to make sure we have it just right before we submit a PR.

Q:

This question is from @onewalleee
What is the elevator pitch for TRTL? Meaning, how do you distinguish yourself from other privacy coins and the coin you forked?

My best answer so far as a HODL’r is to distinguish it by way of the community. I’ve noticed some sustained, surprisingly passionate community interest and see folks sort of embracing it as part of their identity (ala raiblocks or dbc).

But both of those offerings had a distinguishing hook (“fast, zero fees”, “muh ai”) that helped with initial recruitment.

Rocksteady:

I think our special sauce is the community and our short path from entry to production, meaning, there is often a selection of dev-turtles willing to review your pull request or even teach you how to find documenation and contribute spelling corrections. We want everyone to be a developer contributor, and that takes a little bit of learning, and we’re here to facilitate that, which so far has resulted in a lot of hard working turtles stepping forward and giving their time to just make their ideas happen. It’s been crazy seeing people walk in overnight asking about an image license and then cranking out a GUI wallet the next day. That happened, and it happens almost every week that a new person comes in “Hey guys, love the project, I’m not sure what you need but I can do X, Y, and Z, and I’m interested in learning this other thing too” and 9 times out of 10 we have several places to present to you where you could be really useful and even those that show up with what they claim to be “no skills” we still find places for them. It takes many different types to run this community, and every day we add more people to this team, soon you wont have to choose us, you’ll just be us.

THE Q&A SESSION IS STILL GOING ON: JOIN HERE.