Is there a way to experiment with new features - eg committed coins - that doesnt involve an altcoin in the conventional sense, and also doesnt impose a big testing burden on bitcoin main which is a security and testing risk?

eg lets say some form of merged mine where an alt-coin lets call it bitcoin-staging? where the coins are the same coins as on bitcoin, the mining power goes to bitcoin main, so some aspect of merged mining, but no native mining. and ability to use bitcoins by locking them on bitcoin to move them to bitcoin-staging and vice versa (ie exchange them 1:1 cryptographically, no exchange). Did anyone figure anything like that out? Seems vaguely doable and maybe productive. The only people with coins at risk of defects in a new feature, or insufficiently well tested novel feature are people with coins on bitcoin-staging. Yes I know about bitcoin-test this is not it. I mean a real live system, with live value, but that is intentionally wanting to avoid forking bitcoins parameters, nor value, nor mindshare dillution. In this way something potentially interesting could move forward faster, and be les risky to the main bitcoin network. eg particularly defenses against It might also be a more real world test test (after bitcoin-test) because some parameters are different on test, and some issues may not manifest without more real activity. Then also bitcoin could cherry pick interesting patches and merge them after extensive real-world validation with real-money at stake (by early adopters). Adam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development