Show HN: Ampercoin – a consumer friendly alternative to Bitcoin

I'm skeptical to make a payment to reserve a username for a service that's not yet completely functional. In BTC no less despite being hailed as an alternative?!?

Would you mind explaining (as it isn't explained on either github page, nor on the main page)

1)How "Proof of Plant" works. (Both what it is, and why it is secure. What prevents a long range attack?)

2)How is the value tied to the value of a dollar? Is there an exchange between this and dollars in some way? Or is the price supposed to be tied to the dollar because everyone knows the price is supposed to be tied to the dollar? (In a schelling-point-like way?) I don't think that would be sufficient to keep the price approximately a dollar, but I'm not sure.

suppose for some reason, I want the price of Ampercoin to go up beyond a dollar. Lets say I want an Ampercoin to be worth 10 dollars. Further, suppose I am rich. If I say to everyone "hey, I will buy Ampercoins at a price of $10/&1 ." Then people would do better to sell Ampercoin to me than they would to sell it to someone else at a lower price. Of course, just doing this I will eventually run out of money, but if I am sufficiently rich, I don't see why I couldn't affect the price.

Similarly, if I had a lot of Ampercoin, couldn't I sell it for &1/$0.10 ? As long as I was doing this, it would not make sense to buy it at a higher price. If there was always another entity willing to pay $1/&1 , then I suppose that might always keep the value of it at least one dollar? (and people could use that to get all my money)

This is not to say that I don't think a fixed exchange rate is achievable, just to say that I don't think a "its fixed at $1 because everyone knows its supposed to be fixed at $1" is stable against malicious attackers.

So of course, you are probably using some other method.

3)"Addresses come preloaded with 10 Ampercoins each." How does this work? Where do these &10 (supposedly worth $10) come from? Looking at /lee it says "Anonymous sent &10.00 to &lee 10 days ago" I assume this is an initial transaction which is made when the account is made, after the user sends a number of bitcoins to an address in order to buy the account.

This makes me skeptical of the security. How do those Ampercoins get there? It doesn't look like its meant to be proof of burn (if it is, that could be made more clear). If you have access to these bitcoins, and these bitcoins are all that are necessary to create an address with some coins, it seems like you would be able to give yourself very large amounts of Ampercoin. This is of course assuming that the bitcoin transaction are even necessary for the Ampercoins to be created, and that you aren't able to create however many accounts you want each with &10 (i.e. this is assuming that you are not trying to create a system where you have the ability to essentially print Ampercoins whenever you want, and where Ampercoins have a value of $1.)

In conclusion: I am skeptical that this is secure.

edit: I feel that perhaps I have been overly aggressive in this comment. I suppose I should add that if you have accomplished what you say you have accomplished (or if you accomplish what you are setting out to accomplish), then that is(/would be/will be) quite impressive, and congratulations (in advance)