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I recommend an AGS-style fundraiser be used to get money for this project and allocate part of the initial supply.

For those that don't know, AGS are the "virtual" shares represented by addresses of people who sent money to special fundraising addresses for the bitshares ecosystem. It is similar to how Mastercoin raised money, except that instead of fixing a price per BTC and letting the supply be variable, the supply is fixed and the price per share is determined by splitting the fixed shares-per-day among all the donators from any particular day. (Personally I think you should count time in terms of blocks instead of days, but whatever).

Of course if we're going with bitshares_toolkit we should allocate 10%/10% AGS/PTS.
There is also value in dropping a fraction onto BTC or MSC/XCP.
Maybe 30%-50% allocation for "Proto-Truthcoins" (the virtual TC fundraiser share)?

I do *not* recommend distributing shares to miners. Mining has not been "fair" or "decentralized" for like a year now. Even if you go with POW, their rewards should be paid explicitly from the network's income rather than implicitly via coin/share dilution. Miners are subcontractors for your network.

I do *not* recommend a dev premine. That's the point of this type of fundraiser.

There is also a question of coin distribution vs share distribution. Whichever is the one that pays fees is the one that should be preallocated to AGS/PTS/"PTC".

Source: https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin

Whitepaper and FAQ: https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/README.md

[Advantages]

Typically *coin projects extend the Bitcoin source. I'd like to make the case for building on the bitshares toolkit instead. I've talked to James and Paul about this and they seem mostly on board, but some extra public discussion can't hurt.

BitShares is a project to help build Decentralized Autonomous Companies, which is a metaphor for describing blockchains+cryptequity that provide a service. Truthcoin is a DAC. bitshares_toolkit provides a "shell" DAC, basically a bitcoin clone. Several other projects are already being built with this toolkit, which you can read about on bitsharestalk.org

Advantages

* bitshares_toolkit is specifically designed to be extended with custom business logic. Bitcoin's "input/output" style transactions get pretty hairy for complicated functionality compared to what is essentially traditional transactional DB transactions in the toolkit.
* The feature set is a strict superset of Bitcoin's functionality. Named stealth addresses, forced client-side best practices, and functionality from any of our other DACs (most significantly the Truthcoin <-> Truthshares embedded exchange) will be available *right from the start*. All that's left to develop is your PMs.
* There is not much collaboration between Bitcoin core devs and altcoin developers. Bitcoin devs do what is best for them and then altcoin devs adopt it if it is helpful. In the bitshares ecosystem, "core bitshares devs" do not have their own DAC and are specifically maintaining the toolkit on behalf of all the DACs derived from it.
* Our GUI wallet and block explorer also follow the same philosophy and so it will be much easier to get up and running from the end user's perspective.

Non-disadvantages
* "DPOS is not a proven security model!" -> We can use POW. The toolkit makes it easy to swap out parts as you see fit. POW is very easy to implement. Alternate POS models aren't too bad either. (I also think POW has already been proven to be dangerous especially for blockchains with markets, but we can discuss that when we get there).
* "Truthcoins aren't shares, they're coins!" -> facepalm... not being facetious, I've actually heard an argument like this before IRL
* "You'd be forced to preallocate 10%/10% to AGS/PTS!" -> Read this: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=2876.0

Actual disadvantages
* Bitcoin has obviously had much more time to become battle-hardened simply by being older. We don't know about bugs we don't know about. (However, only bugs related to stuff outside of the "hard parts" matter for this - the rest is up to you anyway).

So what's with the pitch?
I'm part of the Bitshares team, we are working full time on getting as many DACs bootstrapped as possible. We align our incentives by giving DAC devs good reason to honor AGS/PTS. I own AGS/PTS, and so I want to make TC succeed and give a share to the bitshares community in exchange for our enthusiastic support on all levels (development, marketing, anything in between).


Happy to discuss concerns and suggestions about the toolkit here.