Bitcoin Forum

Why not Merge Mine FRC? If demurrage is going to work it should have at least the security of the bitcoin hash-power. Why not start a bounty to get someone to Merge Mine it?

I only have about 100FRC at the moment to put towards that, but gladly!

Wait, I'm not done solo mining yet.

LOL!

You mean pumping? :-)

Thank you for your support on the currency! I'll add 1000 FRC to the bounty.

Actually I wanted to have merged mining from launch, but Mark (and others) convinced me that it would be very dangerous at the beginning since bitcoin miners could use the their hashing power to attack the new currency at no costs.
There was a consensus that merged mining feature should be added later when the hashing power was enough for the transition to be secure. By the way, I have no idea what that hashing rate could be, so please, Namecoin historians, enlighten me.

applying the MM patches should do the trick, altough everyone would have to upgrade to work (otherwise it will only produce orphans).

Besides a few coin-crushings in the past, Bitcoiners really need an incentive to bother with destroying alt-coins. Most of them die on their own, and people know this. When you want to merge-mine doesn't really matter. You could start any time.

That's over my head to do, but someone should be able to do it without much trouble!

Any marge-mined variant of FRC would be a fork, and the blocks mined would be orphaned from the main chain, and anyone transacting on both chains would be in danger of having their coins stolen.

There has been discussion on IRC, our forums, and elsewhere on the subject of merged mining, and do intent to fully support at the appropriate time. Here is the current plan for merge-mining, accepted by most of the core contributors (jtimon being an outlier):

A generalized merge mining patchset will be applied, with merge mining disabled. In parallel, a system will be implemented for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake voting (something we want for other purposes anyway). A trigger will be coded into the codebase such that if a majority of miners and a sufficient plurality of stakeholders vote for merged mining, it will be enabled. This is similar to the proof-of-stake voting for the rollout of P2SH in the bitcoin network (another hard-fork).

If you want merge mining enabled for freicoin, I suggest devoting your efforts to this path. It would allow input from miners and stakeholders, and prevent unilateral action that might further divide the community.

When is the appropriate time? Why not do it sooner rather then later- you run less risk of a costly error, and you secure the network early on. Make sense no? Can't see any negatives.

You also make it trivially easy (no-cost) for any large mining pool operator to kill the coin, and completely change the economics of coin minting. This is something which requires understanding and approval from the relevant stakeholders (everyone currently using the currency).

Why would anyone care to kill it? At that point BTC miners would just be accumulating coins, like Namecoin.

"This is something which requires understanding and approval from the relevant stakeholders (everyone currently using the currency)"

So FRC requires every person using the currency to get anything done? Wow. That's horribly inefficient.

lol the same reason bbqcoin and others have been attacked

Yes FRC is already highly vulnerable to being attacked, so whats the difference? The difference is that you can have big bitcoin miners PROTECTING the chain at the same time. Sounds like there might be some other reasons why people wouldn't want to merge-mine. Perhaps pump and dump??!?!?!?!?!

I say lets Merge Mine! It's security and stability.

I want to merge mine as soon as possible as well. But the attackers could attack while mining bitcoin, so is basically free for them. Now they can attack, but at the opportunity cost of not mining bitcoin. If you're a pool operator, you don't have to tell your users you're attacking another chain with your hashing power (yes, you could get keep all the coins to yourself too), but you can't make your users stop mining bitcoin only to make your attack.

Yes but at the same time, the attackers would have to contend with all the other bitcoin miners-  and there are a lot of them. You gain more security from Merge Mining then not. Even though it would be technically 'free' to attack the chain if it were merge-mined, you would have the protection of the ENTIRE bitcoin network FREE as well. And that's a lot more then FRC has now. All you need right one is one disgruntled pool owner or someone with a serious grudge....

At the moment Merge Mining is the best.

No you're missing the point. We're talking about someone like Deepbit, Slush, BTC Guild, etc. attacking freicoin. Without having to tell any of their miner. How do you compete against that?

Bitcoin has to deal with that every day. None of these juggernaughts of BTC mining are large enough to overpower all the others together. That's why you NEED merge mining to protect it. Otherwise a botnet could take out FRC. Far more realistic then Slush or someone doing it.

Not really. Namecoin only has 1/3rd of the bitcoin network hash rate merge mining it. None of the other merge mineable coins (ixcoin, i0coin, devcoin, etc) has any large pool merge mining it. Some of the big pools are grumbling about including namecoin and I wouldn't be surprised to see it dropped at some point. Just because it can be merge mined doesn't mean any pools will actually bother.

Unfortunately merge mining is a double edged sword. Namecoin showed it can be used to protect a coin. Coiledcoin showed that it can be used to attack one. It also seems to make the coin mostly worthless as people see it as a by product of bitcoin mining. I haven't seen any merge mineable coin gain much in the way of usage outside of "sell immediately" as a result.

When an alt-coin gains traction Luke-Jr will often attack it with his pool if he thinks it is what he considers a scam-coin. There are a few defences like not enabling merged mining, but if you default to using tonal numbers in the standard client he'd probably leave you alone. Then you'd have to deal with trying to sell people on a currency predominantly denominated in tonal units though, ugh.

The economic argument seems to be the one I find most convincing, the most successful alt-coin so far is LTC and its only real distinction is a different hash algorithm, thus it can not be merge-mined with BTC.  I think that it is quite possible that merge-mining acts as a valuation cap because of the 'sell immediately' mentality.  Miners who sacrifice nothing to mine an alt-coin naturally value it less and can dump it on the market for a pittance.  I think their is a good argument for never merge mining.

I'd rather see freicoin more secure at a lower price than it at a higher price but less secure. Merged mining will increase the hashing rate without necessarily increasing the demand for it, so be it. I don't buy this argument, I'm only concerned with the security risks of merge mine too early, which I think are very real.

Since the minting phase of a coin is supposedly merely a convenient mechanism for getting coins out there preparatory to real use, the fact that the initially minted coins sell for a pittance should be seens as a good thing not a bad thing, and the fact that the miners actually do therefore put it on the market at all instead of hoarding it is also presumably a good thing. Tons of coins available dirt cheap should presumably allow more people to be able tp pick up a few so that once the minting phases is over hopefully lots and lots of people will have some of the coins, which is supposedly the purpose of handing them out by mining in the first place...

-MarkM-

They will be selling it at a profit. Nothing inherently bad with that, but why not give that profit to non-profits (sorry for the redundancy) instead?

Also, let me challenge you with a thought exercise...Imagine bitcoin2 appears tomorrow and it needs no mining to be secure, in fact, there's no fair way to hand it to the p2p nodes validating transactions (without hashing)...How would you distribute the initial coins?
You could only distribute them centrally, what's so wrong about our proposed method?

After thinking about that...say you know you only need 5% annual to miners to warranty security, maybe a little more for bootstraping. Why through away more resources to hashing? Why over-secure the network only to distribute the initial base on a p2p fashion?
Is that really that important? Must we waste real resources only so that the distribution is not centralized through a foundation and an opne granting process?

Then ask the same question to a random granny or another technology illiterate. Should we create the initial monetary base by wasting electricity and the opportunity costs of expensive computing hardware or give it away to *good causes ?

* Good causes undesrtood as whatever most people consider good causes through an open process.

That's my reasoning, but maybe I'm just a tyrant for not wanting to waste resources as so many miners are suggesting...

If there's a better idea to distribute coins without mining we still have time to change it, please, tell us about it.

Well here is one idea then... put them up for sale with the buyer not only specifying how many they will buy for how much each but also the charity to which the fiat they buy them with is to be donated. Still some kind of vetting of purported "charities" is probably needed though so people who have thoughtfully set themselves up nice cushy jobs as employees of self-created "non profit corporations" can't just use it as a faucet to help feather their nice little "non profit" nests.

-MarkM-

Or Participatory Economics... or better yet PURE DEMOCRACY. Why would we want that? Imagine a world where you can have real representation about decisions that effect you? How about getting involved in the foundation and help with ideas as it seems you use FRC we need you to take part.

The key stumbling block is setting up a system that is democratic and limits fraud?

Re: Freicoin Foundation development thread
by Bicknellski » Sun Jan 06, 2013 4:38 am

This idea is interesting, I've posted it on freicoin forums. The main problem I see (besides preventing fraud) is how would you set the prices. Would the charities negotiate the selling price?

Here's my 2 bits....  I would like to see this merge mined, and an option in bitparking merged mining, BUT I cannot support the system with 80% going to a foundation, that is far too excessive centralization of economic forces, the idea of a funded "foundation" is not foreign and not necessarily a bad thing but 80% needs to drop significantly, something on the order of 10% is much more reasonable to tolerate...  long story short, drop the foundation contributions to 10% (or less) and make it merge minable with doublec onboard with bitparking and then I'll help support the security with hashing.  Get vircurex/cryptostocks on board to trade them and I'll even offer up the same simple investment opportunities I have available on the other coinses that fit these descriptions giving a little avenue for starting the use of this coin base.

Please recreate your currency and reset the blockchain for me too, I'm sure that's easy right? /sarc

Either you want FRC merge-mined, or your don't. I don't think changing the coin is going to happen, so which is it? You are a year and change late to the party on this one, it's not a new idea, they are looking for help though.

Personally I'd like to see it remain independent until the foundation is fully funded and the funds disbursed (or maybe 1 year of disbursing all available funds.) Enabling merged mining will be a virtual guarantee of perpetual operation of the coin, sounds like a good carrot  to dangle until the foundation does their job...

Didn't say it needed a reset, just drop ongoing foundation contributions to a much more tolerable level at say 10% (or less), this update should be a relatively simple change and if the code is of good quality it would be a 1 or 2 liner change at best to be released and coordinated to start at some block in the near future to minimize orphans and chain conflicts.  I do support the system just not 80% of the economic power of the coin going to a sole source, outside of that I think this coin shows a lot of promise and has very ingenious ways to solve some of the problems which are inherent in most capped crypto's without being uncapped themselves.

If you look at the evolution of some recent coin systems my proposition here is not unwarranted as they are just begging for the same turn of events with this "feature" i.e. -->
Tenebrix (Massive pre-mine which was disliked enough to --> ), Fairbrix (No pre-mine but a debacled release conjoined with tenebrix supporter fanaticism attacks --> ), Litecoin (A by much account better released and more supported alt chain, which is proving to be one of the top dog alt currencies out there at this time)

At minimum (and already see the forum discussions/work taking place) you'll get Freicoin (disliked 80% economic centralization --> ), Freicoin 2.0 (No economic centralization) ..... but if they drop the economic centralization to a more tolerable level by many/most then we'll still get Freicoin 1.0 and the benefits of a funded foundation where the drive to fork a newer version is less strong.

If I have any say at all (which is an if, as it's now a community project and what follows is just my opinion), it will be some combination of proof-of-stake and proof-of-work voting (a plurality of both) to enable merged mining if/when that functionality is added to the reference client, and the foundation won't take a position with its coins. I think it likely that most people currently using the currency would be against merged mining while it is in its early growth stage, unless faced with an imminent and credible attack, but in the long run merged mining obviously makes sense.

Thinking a bit more about it, keeping it unmerged during the early stage does allow better tracking of interest levels, once it's merged you lose that visibility and independence because you have miners that could care less about FRC right along with the ones that do.

I also think that merged mining should be a bit of a "graduation" or a promotion to the big-leagues. It gets you the best possible security, and you are willing to give up the visibility for that when there is real value being generated. Ideally the coin should have a non-mining-related value that is somewhat self sustaining before subjecting the market to a horde of  bitcoin/profit focused miners that are apathetic about FRC.


+1

Newb question... When could you tell if Freicoin simply could be mined on it's own without ever needing a merge? What indicators would be present?

It could be mined on its own forever. But merged mining is more efficient. It gives more security to both currencies for less energy.