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Alternate cryptocurrencies => Altcoin Discussion => Topic started by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:09:47 PM



Title: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:09:47 PM
Let's brainstorm.

Litecoin added a legitimate feature and utility that bitcoin did not have -- a different proof of work, replacing SHA256 with Scrypt.  Allowing for defense against established hashing power in the SHA256 networks.

It also added faster block times, but there is no change to the fundamental security of the network by doing this.  Security and confirmation confidence is related only to the length of time since the transaction first was broadcast, and the amount of hashing power during said time.  Faster block times should not be considered a legitimate reason to use litecoin vs bitcoin.  It should also not be a legitimate reason to use a 'faster' coin over a slower one.

Since then, I have seen dozens, maybe even 100+ "altcoins" launched which have been absolutely embarassing and essentially transparent get rich quick schemes.


Things which are not new features and pretty much just certify that you're making a scamcoin to mine and get rich quick if these are the only things your coin changes

* Changing block time
* Changing difficulty
* Changing the # of blocks per retarget
* Changing reward
* Changing reward change [i.e. block rewarding halving/etc]
* Using Scrypt or SHA256
* Incentives for early adopters
* Not announcing your launch at least several days in advance
* Any mining before announcement
* Launching earlier than stated -- later is fine.
* Setting starting difficulty extremely low.  At this point there are way too many people with way too much has power ready to jump on every single new coin even if it's an obvious fucking scamcoin.  Set your difficulty so 10Mhash will take several hours to mine the genesis block


Some things which would be good to have in an alternate coin

* Replace ECDSA with a Lattice-based asymmetric algorithm.  All cyrptocoins currently are theoretically vulnerable to Quantum computers capable of implementing Shor's algorithm.  A lot of things are indeed broken by this, including systems used by governments, banks, everyone.  But only crytpocoins have direct ownership and control of the coins based ENTIRELY on the knowledge of the private key.  Using the hash of the public key for the address may offer some defense, but it is still a massive security breach.  It is generally believed that if these quantum computers exist, they are classified information in the hands of governments.

*Non-SHA256/Scrypt POW.  Scrypt was originally intended to be a CPU only POW, and it was. for a while.  Then someone figured out how to make cgminer work with it.  There was some controversy as to who did this first and if they abused it for a while to get a massive hash advantage.
Any new POW should either be fundamentally secure against this sort of thing (i.e. someone could figure out how to use GPU or FPGA/ASIC SHA256 hashers on it while everyone else is using CPUs) or several days/weeks prior to coin launch - release a cgminer so that everyone in the community can use GPUs.  However at this point, you might as well just use scrypt.  
On one hand, this may be hated because the vast majority of altcoiners are GPU miners who would howl if they couldn't use GPUs.  On the other hand -- you can use those idle CPUs on your GPU miners to mine said coin while your GPUs mine another coin. a _TRUE_ cpu-only POW would have great promise.

* Low reward at start to offset 'premining' and early hash power consolidation which leads to orphan-mania.  Based on how much hash power gets thrown at basically any coin when it launches, you probably cannot combat the orphan rate, but you can minimize the absurdity of how many coins  they can farm.  Also reduces problem of mining large numbers of coins early to bribe people with bounties unfairly.  Bounties should require honest work and hashrates to achieve, just like on a mature network like current BTC/LTC

* Replace the "retarget at X time" / "retarget at Y block" with a "retarget if average time between blocks for the last A blocks exceeds Z seconds".  This prevents a situation like FTC where the mining rate SKYROCKETS, difficulty lags slowly and then skyrockets, and then all that hashing power moves off, leaving a miniscule hashing rate to fight a massive difficulty and find noblocks.

* Different network paradigm.  One possible way might be to run the network by default, or even by requirement, on a network like Tor.  I believe some of this is built into bitcoin but i think it is only used to hide individual people by connecting through the network and using the exit nodes of tor.  A better method would be to do everything within the onion network, no exit nodes.

Generally Bad Items(tm) Which You Shouldn't Do

* Centralize and/or close source anything (Ripple).  Cyrptocurrency means P2P and open source

* Offering exchanges coin to put your coin on them.  Obviously this will be next to impossible to actually discover.  Exchange should pick up coins because said coins have become popular based on their own merit.  Hopefully merit based in technology, not because it's the flavor of the week.

* Jumping directly to the livenet.  There's a testnet for a reason.  Use it.  Completely skipping the testnet, or doing testnet things in secret, only makes you look like an incompetent scamcoin

--

I will add to this post as (if?) more ideas are proposed

With any luck, developers of new coins can use this as a reference or a guide to making a useful alternative cryptocurrency.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:10:13 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new and novel, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Novel Proof-of-work:
Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin) -- 1/3/09 -- SHA2-256 originator and novel in nearly every regard.  Gold standard
Tenebrix (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0) -- 9/26/11 -- Scrypt originator. Was premined and thus died off.
Fairbrix (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46528.0) -- 10/2/11 -- Scrypt.  Initial launch crippled by bad config.  Second launch attacked.  These problems led to its demise.
Litecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0) -- 10/9/11 -- Scrypt  Current Gold standard for scrypt and altcoins.  Avoided problems of Tenebrix and Fairbrix
PPCoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101820.0) -- 8/19/12 -- Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake
YAC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196196.0) -- 5/5/13 -- SHA3-512 instead of SHA2-256.  Cacha replaces Salsa.  scrypt(N,1,1), N increases over time.

Distributed P2P DNS
Namecoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin) -- Apr/2011

Coin redistribution to open source projects and developers
Devcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.0) -- 8/5/11 -- Redistributes 90% of block rewards to open source projects chosen by the developers of Devcoin(?)
Freicoin (http://freico.in/) -- Dec/2012 -- 4.89% fee on any coins held per year to developers. 80% of block rewards to developers over 3 years.


Infinite Coin supply
Devcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.0) -- 8/5/11 -- Constant block reward.  Until this point all coins had a geometrically decreasing block reward with a finite ultimate sum
There may have been another coin prior to devcoin that did this, i will update if informed of one

Random block rewards
Junkcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=194756.0) -- 5/4/13 -- Small % Chance to get 3x or 20x regular block reward

Ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:
Nibble (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209035.0) -- 5/18/13
Digicoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209508.0) -- 5/18/13


Multiple coins launched with a feature nearly concurrently are listed with their approximate dates

Bitcoin wiki list of altcoins (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_alternative_cryptocurrencies)
PPCoin's History of cyrptocurrencies on github (https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/History-of-cryptocurrency)


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: sonihr on May 21, 2013, 09:11:56 PM
Great post!


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:13:46 PM
Namecoin actually implemented a P2P domain system, another innovative and possibly useful design


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Yurizhai on May 21, 2013, 09:14:18 PM
Come on, there hasn't been 100+ alt coins.. yet. Give it another 2 weeks.

Also you're really not going to mention PPC?  What about Namecoin? I don't even understand what it does but I know it's cool. That's innovation worthy of being up there for sure.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:15:21 PM
There have been a handful of coins which attempted either an inflationary or an unlimited currency supply, i do not recall these offhand.  they were not met with success [well, none except BTC and LTC have thus far].

I suspect inflationary or unlimited currency coins will never succeed in the cyrptocoin world, the community generally hates these things.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:15:59 PM
Come on, there hasn't been 100+ alt coins.. yet. Give it another 2 weeks.

Also you're really not going to mention PPC?  What about Namecoin? I don't even understand what it does but I know it's cool. That's innovation worthy of being up there for sure.

I made the thread as a spur of the moment thing, frankly i am adding the other coins as I think of them, i will edit and add them to OP and 2nd post.

I count at least 42 coins listed on the OP of https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0 - and I dont know how many awful scamcoins were skipped.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: 1Peter on May 21, 2013, 09:19:51 PM
I like this!

Nibble passed me by but I have seen the effect of low initial rewards with Digicoin and there has been a marked absence of the usual pre-mine accusations, flaming ..etc.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:34:28 PM
I think non-ECDSA and non-SHA256/Scrypt POW are by far the best 2 features.

Are there any coins that use a different POW?


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: BrainShutdown on May 21, 2013, 09:40:34 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


+1

Great thread  8)


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: fenican on May 21, 2013, 09:52:44 PM
Junkcoin introduced the concept of "random" (albeit still deterministic) bonus blocks for miners.  I think it deserves an honorable mention for that


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Balthazar on May 21, 2013, 09:55:33 PM
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
TBX is scrypt originator, LTC is just a copy.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Praxis on May 21, 2013, 09:56:17 PM
Litecoin - Scrypt originator

False.

Tenebrix is the Scrypt originator. See thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0 (ArtForz is apparently the programmer behind it)



Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 09:57:11 PM
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
TBX is scrypt originator, LTC is just a copy.
Really?  I wonder why TBX has died off and LTC has taken its place.  Perhaps the faster block time motivated people to use it (not that it is actually inherently better, but people like it.)
Litecoin - Scrypt originator

False.

Tenebrix is the Scrypt originator. See thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0 (ArtForz is apparently the programmer behind it)


ArtForz.. did he have something to do with cgminer getting --scrypt?  the name sounds familar

i'll edit my post to add TBX and a disclaimer to LTC


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Praxis on May 21, 2013, 09:58:34 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


Devcoin & Freicoin both tried something fundamentally new. Those two should be in your list, while Litecoin shouldn't be there.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:02:40 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


Devcoin & Freicoin both tried something fundamentally new. Those two should be in your list, while Litecoin shouldn't be there.
Devcoin redistributes 90% of block rewards to open source developers which are earmarked by the devcoin developers themselves, right?

Freicoin.. what do they do again, take coins from people with them and redistribute?

I added tenebrix and a disclaimer to litecoin.  also dates & thread links, but i used the OP of their threads, genesis block would be more accurate.  if anyone has those i will add.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: wachtwoord on May 21, 2013, 10:02:55 PM
Really?  I wonder why TBX has died off and LTC has taken its place.  Perhaps the faster block time motivated people to use it (not that it is actually inherently better, but people like it.)


Wasn't TBX premined?


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:06:48 PM
Really?  I wonder why TBX has died off and LTC has taken its place.  Perhaps the faster block time motivated people to use it (not that it is actually inherently better, but people like it.)


Wasn't TBX premined?
OP of litecoin thread indicates that.

I will also add a list of premined coins


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Hibero on May 21, 2013, 10:10:11 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


Devcoin & Freicoin both tried something fundamentally new. Those two should be in your list, while Litecoin shouldn't be there.

I do not agree. Devcoins and Freicoins are novel but i feel they were going the wrong way. With Devcoins you were pretty much mining for 10% profitability. I would say that Devs deserve some payment for their work but 90%? With Freicoins I feel that the economic philosophy is quite worthless (as the coin) when you need buy something to keep its value. In the beginning there would be virtually nothing to buy and there is no easy way to save money.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:12:18 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


Devcoin & Freicoin both tried something fundamentally new. Those two should be in your list, while Litecoin shouldn't be there.

I do not agree. Devcoins and Freicoins are novel but i feel they were going the wrong way. With Devcoins you were pretty much mining for 10% profitability. I would say that Devs deserve some payment for their work but 90%? With Freicoins I feel that the economic philosophy is quite worthless (as the coin) when you need buy something to keep its value. In the beginning there would be virtually nothing to buy and there is no easy way to save money.

For the list in the second post, I want to only list coins either with a novel invention, or a coin which used that novel invention and is the popular version of it (like litecoin and scrypt, because TBX was premined for 7.7M coins by Lolcust

Feel free to discuss/debate if the novel invention is actually a good,great,bad,awful idea, but i'd like to organize them at least


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: mr_random on May 21, 2013, 10:13:29 PM
Alt-topics and scam-topics, know the difference.

Why don't you apply your own logic to Litecoin I wonder...


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: bitdwarf on May 21, 2013, 10:14:06 PM
YAC's POW innovations:

  • SHA3 (Keccak512) instead of SHA256
  • Chacha instead of Salsa in scrypt
  • scrypt(N,1,1) instead of scrypt(1024,1,1)


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Hibero on May 21, 2013, 10:18:43 PM
You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:26:06 PM
You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.
Which bounties though?  I am not as familar with them

I mean, anyone can put a bounty down for any purpose.

I think if the developer puts a bounty for an exchange this is bad

bounty for services which use the coin.. maybe also bad

bounty for pools or block explorers or things like that.. maybe not as bad

In my opinion, any altcoin launch now needs to use a low reward for the initial day or two of mining to prevent absurd # of coins and to combat the massive sudden influx onto the mining network that all coins get.

this means that sure, the developer could put a bounty up, but the only way he would have a bunch of coins is if he legitimately had some 10,20,50 MH/sec running on the network for a day.  And that is going to be worth coins and $ no matter what network you have it on.

This is what i put at the moment

Quote
* Low reward at start to offset 'premining' and early hash power consolidation which leads to orphan-mania.  Based on how much hash power gets thrown at basically any coin when it launches, you probably cannot combat the orphan rate, but you can minimize the absurdity of how many coins  they can farm.  Also reduces problem of mining large numbers of coins early to bribe people with bounties unfairly.  Bounties should require honest work and hashrates to achieve, just like on a mature network like current BTC/LTC


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:31:43 PM
YAC's POW innovations:

  • SHA3 (Keccak512) instead of SHA256
  • Chacha instead of Salsa in scrypt
  • scrypt(N,1,1) instead of scrypt(1024,1,1)
Interesting, i will add it as novel

However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Hibero on May 21, 2013, 10:33:01 PM
You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.
Which bounties though?  I am not as familar with them

I mean, anyone can put a bounty down for any purpose.

I think if the developer puts a bounty for an exchange this is bad

bounty for services which use the coin.. maybe also bad

bounty for pools or block explorers or things like that.. maybe not as bad

In my opinion, any altcoin launch now needs to use a low reward for the initial day or two of mining to prevent absurd # of coins and to combat the massive sudden influx onto the mining network that all coins get.

this means that sure, the developer could put a bounty up, but the only way he would have a bunch of coins is if he legitimately had some 10,20,50 MH/sec running on the network for a day.  And that is going to be worth coins and $ no matter what network you have it on.

This is what i put at the moment

Quote
* Low reward at start to offset 'premining' and early hash power consolidation which leads to orphan-mania.  Based on how much hash power gets thrown at basically any coin when it launches, you probably cannot combat the orphan rate, but you can minimize the absurdity of how many coins  they can farm.  Also reduces problem of mining large numbers of coins early to bribe people with bounties unfairly.  Bounties should require honest work and hashrates to achieve, just like on a mature network like current BTC/LTC

Sounds good to me. I feel the best way to have a bounty is to have a large donation driven bounty. That way the community as whole can set the bounties that it wants. Of course there will be freeloaders but if you want your coin that you are mining to succeed you may need to invest in it. Pools and block explorers can fall under this.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Tobius on May 21, 2013, 10:33:38 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new and novel, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin -- 1/3/09 -- SHA256 originator
Tenebrix (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0) -- 9/26/11 -- Scrypt originator. Was premined and thus died off.  Don't premine.
Litecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0) -- 10/9/11 -- Scrypt  Gold standard for scrypt coins as Tenebrix was premined
PPCoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101820.0) -- 8/19/12 Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coin redistribution to open source projects and developers

Devcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34586.0) -- 8/5/11 -- Redistributes 90% of block rewards to open source projects chosen by the developers of Devcoin(?)

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209035.0) -- 5/18/13
Digicoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209508.0) -- 5/18/13

Bad Coins that were premined, but otherwise worthy of note
GeistGeld, Lolcust premined 7.7M(?)
Tenebrix, Lolcust premined 7.7M(?)


Multiple coins launched with a feature nearly concurrently are listed with their approximate dates

How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:34:13 PM
How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>
this is very much a work in progress.  i'm adding it next

...
edit: does anyone have a link to an official bitcointalk on freicoin?  I haven't found one thus, just one on the crowdfunding and some other pre-release work.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Tobius on May 21, 2013, 10:40:32 PM
How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>
this is very much a work in progress.  i'm adding it next

...
edit: does anyone have a link to an official bitcointalk on freicoin?  I haven't found one thus, just one on the crowdfunding and some other pre-release work.

Not sure if they have one, just link to their homepage/coin fourm


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: justabitoftime on May 21, 2013, 10:44:13 PM
I'm a projects guy, so I might see this from a different perspective.  If people took  40 percent of the energy spent discussing the same nonsense on this forum and applied it to the coin they actually supported, I wonder what the value would look like over 90 days.

Just a thought...


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: sor.rge on May 21, 2013, 10:46:30 PM
This is good, this is bad...
That’s just like, your opinion, man. You are trying to enforce all altcoins to be copies of bitcoin. Different hash/encryption algorithm is no innovation, if the base software was any good that could be achieved by changing a single line of code. "Bad" list is mostly just your bad feelings.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Joe_Bauers on May 21, 2013, 10:47:39 PM
I'm looking to redesign the box completely with ScienceCoin, so if anyone is willing to help - let me know.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:51:14 PM
This is good, this is bad...
That’s just like, your opinion, man. You are trying to enforce all altcoins to be copies of bitcoin. Different hash/encryption algorithm is no innovation, if the base software was any good that could be achieved by changing a single line of code. "Bad" list is mostly just your bad feelings.
Edit : Good point, i looked back and removed the 'inflationary / infinite reward' from OP.  While i'm sure that the community strongly distlikes these things, and a coin with them will probably fail because of it, it's not as bad as the other things, which i think everyone can agree on should not be in a legit altcoin.

But if you're talking about the list in the 2nd post -- i don't say anything there is good or bad.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: sor.rge on May 21, 2013, 10:57:26 PM
Nothing is wrong with centralization. Centralized systems are much more secure in many ways.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

Nothing is wrong with unbounded number of coins. Indeed it's the bound which is arbitrary and requires justification.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Testing is a good point.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 10:58:48 PM
Junkcoin introduced the concept of "random" (albeit still deterministic) bonus blocks for miners.  I think it deserves an honorable mention for that
Adding


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: bitdwarf on May 21, 2013, 11:00:08 PM
However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done

I've heard it's possible and that at least one forum user had a working implementation after a couple weeks, but AFAIK all of the 23 days since the coin's creation, save for the first hours (and by several people's experiences CPU mining the first 8 hours, it didn't seem like there was anyone GPU mining at that point), it's been more profitable to GPU mine about any other GPU coin rather than YAC.

As I understand it, if YAC's price rises there may a window of GPU mining being profitable, till N increases so much it becomes too memory heavy for GPUs again. I don't have the theoretical knowledge to assess this, though.

Incidentally, exchange price has remained so low for the whole first month that anyone could buy easily as many as the top hasher can mine (dontmine.me's top hasher has been mining 1500 YAC a day, or 0.67 BTC a day). Renting servers was also profitable for a while. So, there's surely a lot of people with thousands of coins they got without using GPUs at all.

When PoS starts to kick in it will decrease GPU miners' share of the total minting too, but I don't know by how much.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 11:02:41 PM
Nothing is wrong with centralization. Centralized systems are much more secure in many ways.
Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software

Quote
Nothing is wrong with unbounded number of coins. Indeed it's the bound which is arbitrary and requires justification.
Agreed, removed that from OP.  I could add something to the list of coins if there's a novel one that uses inflationary or infinite coins, but i don't know which came first for that.

Quote
Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.
What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.

Quote
What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: sor.rge on May 21, 2013, 11:15:43 PM
Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software
I understand your point of view, but such philosophical arguments don't affect the success of a coin. It's like saying "don't write closed source software, it's bad", that's not going to change anything. Almost all the currencies currently in use are centralized, and before bitcoin there was some research on p2p currencies with limited degree of centralization, say just for registering new users and exchanging coins for other currency. This was all called "cryptocurrency" as well. I think you are biased by bitcoin here.

Quote
Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.
What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.
To the "inflationary reward" remark. I don't think it's easy to predict what kind of reward will lead to inflation, that's all.

Quote
What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.
Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.
Yes, but it's this behavior, this attitude which is at fault here. Of course, if the creators don't have any interest in the coin, it's doomed, independently of whether it hits the exchanges.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 11:20:04 PM
Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software
I understand your point of view, but such philosophical arguments don't affect the success of a coin. It's like saying "don't write closed source software, it's bad", that's not going to change anything. Almost all the currencies currently in use are centralized, and before bitcoin there was some research on p2p currencies with limited degree of centralization, say just for registering new users and exchanging coins for other currency. This was all called "cryptocurrency" as well. I think you are biased by bitcoin here.

Quote
Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.
What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.
To the "inflationary reward" remark. I don't think it's easy to predict what kind of reward will lead to inflation, that's all.

Quote
What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.
Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.
Yes, but it's this behavior, this attitude which is at fault here. Of course, if the creators don't have any interest in the coin, it's doomed, independently of whether it hits the exchanges.
By Inflationary reward i mean literally that the reward for blocks inflates, or goes up over the long term.

Not like the 2->4->10->15->20 or whatever progression used for the first few days to combat early / premining.

I meant like, if the bitcoin block reward doubled instead of halving.

It should either stay the same or decrease.

I don't have anything against centralized systems per say, of course most existing institutions and systems are such.  but discussion and creation of them is meant for another forum.  cyptocurrency as we use it inherently means that it is decentralized and open source.

It would be like writing some closed source Open Source Software.  contradiction in terms. 


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 11:27:32 PM
Litecoin isn't the "gold standard" for scrypt. Fairbrix was the first non-premined scrypt coin, Litecoin just copied it and changed the name.

updated

Quote
Coins which use a novel POW:
Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin) -- 1/3/09 -- SHA256 originator and novel in nearly every regard.  Gold standard
Tenebrix (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45667.0) -- 9/26/11 -- Scrypt originator. Was premined and thus died off.
Fairbrix (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46528.0) -- 10/2/11 -- Scrypt.  Initial launch crippled by bad config.  Second launch attacked.  These problems led to its demise.
Litecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0) -- 10/9/11 -- Scrypt  Current Gold standard for scrypt and altcoins.  Avoided problems of Tenebrix and Fairbrix
PPCoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101820.0) -- 8/19/12 -- Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake
YAC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196196.0) -- 5/5/13 -- SHA3-512 instead of SHA2-256.  Cacha replaces Salsa.  scrypt(N,1,1), N increases over time.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: snailbrain on May 21, 2013, 11:33:18 PM


Distributed p2p domain namespace(?) system:
Namecoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin) -- 2012(?) 2011 - Oldest Altcoin?



Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Invest0r on May 21, 2013, 11:34:39 PM
BitBar - Scrypt - Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake and a fast, continuous difficulty and reward calculation.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 11:38:45 PM


Distributed p2p domain system:
Namecoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin) -- 2012(?) 2011 - Oldest Altcoin?

indeed, i found some more reading on github, updated the dates and order and added the link.

i also dropped the premined coin sections - frankly there's too many damn coins to list there.  the very few ones that were novel AND premined are listed in their novel section with a disclaimer they were premined and thus dead.


BitBar - Scrypt - Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake and a fast, continuous difficulty and reward calculation.
Scrypt and hybrid PoW/PoS were already implemented prior to Bitbar, i will look if there is a novel method in their diff/reward calc


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: WindMaster on May 21, 2013, 11:51:45 PM
However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done

Given that the exact hashing algorithm (substitution of chacha20/8 in place of scrypt20/8, and Kekkac512 in place of SHA256) was a surprise to everyone at the coin's launch, there was a period of time where CPU mining would have had to be dominant.  The lion's share of YAC was mined during the first day by CPU's.  The author of Reaper (whose OpenCL kernel for mining Litecoin was later lifted for cgminer, BTW, so cgminer wasn't the original), mtrlt, reports needing about 13.5 hours of work to get Reaper going with any sort of hash rate that had a noteworthy advantage, and he also reports having had a late start.  Probably few people would've been able to implement it faster than the person who wrote the OpenCL kernel just about everyone mining scrypt coins with GPU's is using.  So, it's probably reasonable to assume that GPU mining of YAC has a high probability of having been entirely CPU for the first 13.5 hours, with a fair probability it was around day 2 before anyone had a GPU implementation up and running (given that most other people attempting it likely would've taken longer than mtrlt).  I did it in 8 hours but ended up with hash rates on a 6950 not much above my dual Xeon E5450 servers, so I didn't bother pursuing GPU mining YAC further.  It appears low hash rate results were common among the people that did attempt OpenCL implementations, as most of us aren't as good at optimizing OpenCL in "thinking outside the box" ways like mtrlt.  So, just my humble guess is that GPU implementations probably started occurring around day 2, with many poorly optimized versions not giving much advantage over CPU's, so I'd consider those a wash.  Until people speak up with more data, we don't know for sure that anyone other than mtrlt managed to achieve significant hash rates for GPU mining of YAC.  There could be, and it's also possible there weren't.  Time will tell, probably.


I've heard it's possible and that at least one forum user had a working implementation after a couple weeks, but AFAIK all of the 23 days since the coin's creation, save for the first hours (and by several people's experiences CPU mining the first 8 hours, it didn't seem like there was anyone GPU mining at that point), it's been more profitable to GPU mine about any other GPU coin rather than YAC.

My GPU's are happily mining LTC, if anyone is curious.  And I'm one of the few that have admitted to having a GPU implementation of scrypt+chacha20/8+Keccak512(N,1,1), albeit producing nowhere near the hash rates that mtrlt, the author of Reaper, reported.


As I understand it, if YAC's price rises there may a window of GPU mining being profitable, till N increases so much it becomes too memory heavy for GPUs again. I don't have the theoretical knowledge to assess this, though.

Incidentally, exchange price has remained so low for the whole first month that anyone could buy easily as many as the top hasher can mine

+1, I've bought far more YAC than I mined.  And I seem to be someone people point at as having mined a lot of YAC (I'm not so sure, I've seen in the YAC block explorer what the people who were CPU mining right from the coin's launch raked in).


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 21, 2013, 11:54:27 PM
However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done

Given that the exact hashing algorithm (substitution of chacha20/8 in place of scrypt20/8, and Kekkac512 in place of SHA256) was a surprise to everyone at the coin's launch, there was a period of time where CPU mining would have had to be dominant.  The lion's share of YAC was mined during the first day by CPU's.  The author of Reaper (whose OpenCL kernel for mining Litecoin was later lifted for cgminer, BTW, so cgminer wasn't the original), mtrlt, reports needing about 13.5 hours of work to get Reaper going with any sort of hash rate that had a noteworthy advantage, and he also reports having had a late start.  Probably few people would've been able to implement it faster than the person who wrote the OpenCL kernel just about everyone mining scrypt coins with GPU's is using.  So, it's probably reasonable to assume that GPU mining of YAC has a high probability of having been entirely CPU for the first 13.5 hours, with a fair probability it was around day 2 before anyone had a GPU implementation up and running (given that most other people attempting it likely would've taken longer than mtrlt).  I did it in 8 hours but ended up with hash rates on a 6950 not much above my dual Xeon E5450 servers, so I didn't bother pursuing GPU mining YAC further.  It appears low hash rate results were common among the people that did attempt OpenCL implementations, as most of us aren't as good at optimizing OpenCL in "thinking outside the box" ways like mtrlt.  So, just my humble guess is that GPU implementations probably started occurring around day 2, with many poorly optimized versions not giving much advantage over CPU's, so I'd consider those a wash.  Until people speak up with more data, we don't know for sure that anyone other than mtrlt managed to achieve significant hash rates for GPU mining of YAC.  There could be, and it's also possible there weren't.  Time will tell, probably.


I've heard it's possible and that at least one forum user had a working implementation after a couple weeks, but AFAIK all of the 23 days since the coin's creation, save for the first hours (and by several people's experiences CPU mining the first 8 hours, it didn't seem like there was anyone GPU mining at that point), it's been more profitable to GPU mine about any other GPU coin rather than YAC.

My GPU's are happily mining LTC, if anyone is curious.  And I'm one of the few that have admitted to having a GPU implementation of scrypt+chacha20/8+Keccak512(N,1,1), albeit producing nowhere near the hash rates that mtrlt, the author of Reaper, reported.


As I understand it, if YAC's price rises there may a window of GPU mining being profitable, till N increases so much it becomes too memory heavy for GPUs again. I don't have the theoretical knowledge to assess this, though.

Incidentally, exchange price has remained so low for the whole first month that anyone could buy easily as many as the top hasher can mine

+1, I've bought far more YAC than I mined.  And I seem to be someone people point at as having mined a lot of YAC (I'm not so sure, I've seen in the YAC block explorer what the people who were CPU mining right from the coin's launch raked in).
I see

it's not the at launch/early hashrate i was concerned about, i am more thinking on the long term, gpu mining for many days, weeks, months while everyone else is on cpus.

but maybe it is still quite resistant to gpus being that great even if you can get them to work


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: sor.rge on May 21, 2013, 11:58:24 PM
I'm not so sure, I've seen in the YAC block explorer what the people who were CPU mining right from the coin's launch raked in
You seem to completely disregard the likely possibility that the author had an optimized GPU miner before the launch.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: WindMaster on May 22, 2013, 12:07:44 AM
I'm not so sure, I've seen in the YAC block explorer what the people who were CPU mining right from the coin's launch raked in
You seem to completely disregard the likely possibility that the author had an optimized GPU miner before the launch.

Yes, that is possible.  And I was one of the first people weighing in on the likelihood that the original developer's claims that YAC was GPU-resistant were likely not correct, back on the first day of the coin's launch (along with TacoTime, who was saying the same thing).  Unfortunately, we're not going to know for sure, especially since the original developer pulled the usual Houdini disappearing act after the coin launched.

I've examined the first ~100 blocks in the YAC block explorer trying to determine any of the original developer's coinbase addresses to try to figure out a lower bound for how much he made.  I didn't find anything exciting in the first 100 blocks that indicated much more than just CPU mining (so I'll certainly say CPU instamining by the original developer was a possibility).  It's entirely possible the original developer did have a GPU implementation but waited before turning it up.  There's no way to tell at this point.

A lot of people were real quick to turn up massive numbers of Amazon AWS instances and mine with them.  It's difficult to distinguish between those people and any hypothetical GPU's or GPU farms while examining blocks with the YAC block exporer.  ~9 to 9.5 hours after the coin launched, I had tons of Amazon instances mining too.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: WindMaster on May 22, 2013, 12:13:56 AM
I see

it's not the at launch/early hashrate i was concerned about, i am more thinking on the long term, gpu mining for many days, weeks, months while everyone else is on cpus.

but maybe it is still quite resistant to gpus being that great even if you can get them to work

This part we don't know yet.  At least the developer of Reaper (mtrlt) reported decreases in GPU hash rate roughly proportional to decreases in everyone else's CPU hash rates as N started to increase.  It's a little too early to tell what the situation will be when N starts getting high and both GPU's and CPU's are increasingly falling back to external memory (since the TMTO related to lookup gap only improves things to a point, which is why everyone gets faster hash rates on Litecoin with a lookup gap of 2 rather than 4, for example).

Future prevalence of GPU mining of YAC is probably going to depend on what exchange rates do, and whether N rises enough to whack GPU hash rates (for anyone that actually did succeed in making a good implementation with decent hash rates) while it is still more profitable to mine other coins with GPU's.  Small arms race, perhaps.  Right now, I'd bet on buying YAC cheap on Bter if someone is betting YAC will rise significantly in price later on, rather than tying up GPU's that could be mining Litecoin instead.

I only implemented OpenCL for YAC at N=32, and haven't bothered trying for other N values.  So, unfortunately I don't have good benchmark data for falloff of GPU hash rates as N increases.

I've gone on record several times in saying that YAC's N started too low at launch though.  I would've started N significantly higher than 32.  As a result, I pulled off an FPGA implementation that performed rather well at N=32, but became iffy at N=64 and couldn't be placed'n'routed by the Xilinx tools at all for N=128.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 22, 2013, 12:21:06 AM
I see

it's not the at launch/early hashrate i was concerned about, i am more thinking on the long term, gpu mining for many days, weeks, months while everyone else is on cpus.

but maybe it is still quite resistant to gpus being that great even if you can get them to work

This part we don't know yet.  At least the developer of Reaper (mtrlt) reported decreases in GPU hash rate roughly proportional to decreases in everyone else's CPU hash rates as N started to increase.  It's a little too early to tell what the situation will be when N starts getting high and both GPU's and CPU's are increasingly falling back to external memory (since the TMTO related to lookup gap only improves things to a point, which is why everyone gets faster hash rates on Litecoin with a lookup gap of 2 rather than 4, for example).

Future prevalence of GPU mining of YAC is probably going to depend on what exchange rates do, and whether N rises enough to whack GPU hash rates (for anyone that actually did succeed in making a good implementation with decent hash rates) while it is still more profitable to mine other coins with GPU's.  Small arms race, perhaps.  Right now, I'd bet on buying YAC cheap on Bter if someone is betting YAC will rise significantly in price later on, rather than tying up GPU's that could be mining Litecoin instead.

I only implemented OpenCL for YAC at N=32, and haven't bothered trying for other N values.  So, unfortunately I don't have good benchmark data for falloff of GPU hash rates as N increases.

I've gone on record several times in saying that YAC's N started too low at launch though.  I would've started N significantly higher than 32.  As a result, I pulled off an FPGA implementation that performed rather well at N=32, but became iffy at N=64 and couldn't be placed'n'routed by the Xilinx tools at all for N=128.
You were able to make an FPGA design for Scrypt(N=32,64)?  How did it work?


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 22, 2013, 12:42:14 AM
Generally Bad Items(tm) Which You Shouldn't Do

* Centralize and/or close source anything. Cyrptocurrency means P2P and open source

I agree with you on everything except sentences above. All important and mission-critical software and hardware on this planet is centralized and closed source.
The majority of servers and supercomputers in existence run Free Open Source Software.

Open source software is more secure than closed source software


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: digitalindustry on May 22, 2013, 12:44:34 AM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin



+1

Great thread  8)

+ 1  i will say i did look into NVC it has been quite innovative , but terribly marketed. but its also on BTC-e I think its a stay.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: casascius on May 22, 2013, 12:54:48 AM
True and false religion: how to tell the difference

True religion: the one I believe in
False religion: all others
True prophet: The guy I listen to
False prophet: all the guys who say they are true prophets but are lying, except for the one I believe in
God: the guy who started my religion and talks to my prophet
Satan: the guy who tries to get people to leave my religion and join others
Good: doing whatever my religion says to do
Evil: doing whatever my religion says not to do, including believing in other religions


Etc.

And so it follows:

Altcoin: the one I hold
Scamcoin: the ones I don't




Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Impaler on May 22, 2013, 01:01:28 AM
Some additional innovations that FRC has

* Smoothly declining block rewards that eliminate the disruptive volatility inducing reward-halving events of all other coins
* Optimized difficulty adjustment parameters, adjusts every 9 blocks up or down 5% based on 144 block rolling window (will go live in a day or two through hard fork).  These parameters were identified through an exhaustive simulation process to be ideal for FRC and similar coins with 10 minute block intervals like BTC and TRC.

Also I don't think your characterization of '80% for developers' is correctly describing FRC, developers have pledged to give away all these coins through a non-profit foundation not keep them for themselves.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 22, 2013, 03:42:59 AM
Some additional innovations that FRC has

* Smoothly declining block rewards that eliminate the disruptive volatility inducing reward-halving events of all other coins
* Optimized difficulty adjustment parameters, adjusts every 9 blocks up or down 5% based on 144 block rolling window (will go live in a day or two through hard fork).  These parameters were identified through an exhaustive simulation process to be ideal for FRC and similar coins with 10 minute block intervals like BTC and TRC.

Also I don't think your characterization of '80% for developers' is correctly describing FRC, developers have pledged to give away all these coins through a non-profit foundation not keep them for themselves.
True enough, i didn't know the specifics of FRC.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: shakezula on May 22, 2013, 03:49:57 AM
I don't think your characterization of '80% for developers' is correctly describing FRC, developers have pledged to give away all these coins through a non-profit foundation not keep them for themselves.

 ::) You can give away sand in the desert too...


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: MashRinx on May 22, 2013, 03:59:33 AM
Quote
Which bounties though?  I am not as familar with them

Any premine is BS, regardless of the stated reason.  I have seen more than one coin released recently with at least 1,000,000 coins listed as a premine for "bounties", to pay the "foundation" (really?) etc.  Those who would defend this will do so for multiple reasons, but it all boils down to defending their holdings in the given coin.

There have been at least a couple coins recently that have tried to reduce the amount of early/surprise mining that I appreciate.  Others may disagree...


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: xan_The_Dragon on May 22, 2013, 05:50:53 AM
i agre with all of this


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: GSnak on May 22, 2013, 06:04:21 AM
A lot of this stuff sounds like actual coding and not just "Find and Replace". I don't think much of it will get done as it sounds like work.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: GSnak on May 22, 2013, 06:09:11 AM
Supercomputers just like battleships, nuclear reactors and so on run customized software that maybe originated from Open Source software. Anyone running stock Apache, PHP,
MySQL, GNU/LINUX or whatever else is an idiot so I don't count those cases as good example of Open Source software.

Hmm. 61.3% of server admins are idiots. Sad, sad world we live in. :(


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: nprussell on May 22, 2013, 06:39:59 AM
Excellent posts OP. This thread needs stickying.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: WindMaster on May 22, 2013, 07:14:21 AM
Supercomputers just like battleships, nuclear reactors and so on run customized software that maybe originated from Open Source software. Anyone running stock Apache, PHP,
MySQL, GNU/LINUX or whatever else is an idiot so I don't count those cases as good example of Open Source software.

My friend works on power grid control for Berlin and can turn off electricity in any part of town or whole town with few mouse clicks. He would laugh on you if you come to him saying
that "Open source software is more secure than closed source software" or something similar.

Not to get into the middle of a closed-source vs. open-source religious war..  But one nuclear reactor manufacturer whose name is a common household name, uses an almost completely unmodified version of uC/OS-II (open source, though not under the GPL license) as the RTOS for their control rod servo drive microcontrollers.  Doesn't get much more mission-critical than that.  Just sayin'..


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: jlspartz on May 22, 2013, 12:13:28 PM
Let the idiots run closed source software. Just don't cry when your coins disappear.

Great thread. I agree with the discriptions of scam vs real alt.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: Praxis on May 22, 2013, 12:18:22 PM
So the implication of this thread is that every coin that doesn't innovate it's automatically a "scam coin"? Because that would be very wrong, I think.

A coin can be perfectly honest even if it alters a few parameters only.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on May 22, 2013, 11:29:59 PM
So the implication of this thread is that every coin that doesn't innovate it's automatically a "scam coin"? Because that would be very wrong, I think.

A coin can be perfectly honest even if it alters a few parameters only.

If you have nothing to offer in a cryptocurrency except replacing every instance of "litecoin" or  "mynewcoin" and changing a few constants.. you're not really doing anything of note.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: ecliptic on June 01, 2013, 09:25:44 PM
Not much has changed i see


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: phelix on August 27, 2013, 08:00:06 AM
Similar attempt: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=280892 List of Innovative Cryptocurrencies

Had not known of this thread until know. Added a link in the 2nd post.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: alexxy on August 27, 2013, 10:06:26 AM
Also you may add Primecoin (it uses prime chains as PoW, and potentialy infinite mining time)


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: kelsey on August 27, 2013, 10:10:40 AM
Sorry just because a coin is plugged as innovative doesn't mean its not a scam coin.

There certainly is some innovative scams out there  :o

To me cryptocurrencies and other alternatives are about making a currency as an alternative to government and bank controlled fiat.

Same tunnel visions repeated Ad nauseam on this forum......all we hear in any ANN thread;

1) "Premine scam!"....OK premine does not make it a scam and lack of premine doesn't make it not a scam.

2) "Innovative". Well yes innovation is great and anything that solves bitcoins failing is a step in the right direction, but again innovation doesn't mean its not a scam.

3) "Its has services."  sure it does!, a 10 minute website, a few faucets, token market place, overnite mining pools..etc etc etc..do not make for services that will have the world adopting your coin.

4) "Fair Launch" really? In the context of the world outside btt, 24 hrs notice on this obsecure forum, raped by specialist mining equipment in the first few days, does not make for a fair launch any better then a premine coin.







Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: LittleDigger on August 27, 2013, 11:46:17 AM
Yeap, I see it pretty simply...

If I gave you a choice between a bag of potatoes, and a bag of gold bars you'd take the gold bars because they had more value..

Unless you were starving to death because you were in the middle of a natural disaster, or on a desert island etc... The gold bars would then be worth less and you'd take the potatoes to save your life.

The point is the value of anything is it's utilty.. and most coins have the same utility.. you could use FST, WDC or DGC with pretty much the same results.. If you weren't having problems with forking and a huge blockchain.. then they'd be worth less than another coin without those issues..

So basically anybody can build a client.. Building real world use, and therefore real world value, is the hard part.. 


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: mullick on August 27, 2013, 11:53:57 AM
Great write up :)

If you have time I can only think of one addition. That would be Bottlecaps. Even though its had its issues lately they are being resolved

.25 Starting difficulty to aid in orphan mania

Zero Premine

stable coin generation from the start 14400 coins per day Except day 1 which produced about 13,900 coins

Okay done with the plug. But seriously good write up. Very informattive


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: digitalindustry on August 27, 2013, 12:06:41 PM
Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin - SHA256 originator
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
PPCoin - Proof of Stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble
Digicoin


+1

Great thread  8)

+1

Great topic - Can i add to that a few other little "Gypsy scams" I noticed along the way, i'm not being all moral about them but its important the market is an informed market.

( sorry if been mentioned just braised will go back for in depth read soon)


- Hugh Rewards at the inception combined with low difficulty  ( the opposite to the ascending reward principal)  

- The principal of the "Random Large block " with of course {eye roll} a few huge "Random Blocks" being right at the start where the "developers" know and can get them.

- "The Straw Man Miner" < much harder to prove but this is an "innovative"  new Algorithm that only has say a CPU miner but the Dev developed a GPU or equivalent device to give a "certain few" an ASIC like advantage.


I just want to say , in the spirit of innovation "Nybble" {name change considered soon} will try to innovate but only ever with the aim to find fair value in the market and stick to the principals of PoW , and over all be a vehicle for which hopefully investors can find a store of value in what are soon to be troubling times.

the advantage of decent quality cryptocurrency is that investors can hop on and off such a vehicle with much more speed and efficiency than with traditional Gold or Silver.

that is our long term aim.

So if the world indeed descends into a chaos and stays there for a long period, the market will adjust its fair value and use, for/towards Crypto , if we somehow muddle our way though and investors think there is need to diversify then there is ample opportunity and the market will find new fair value.

Nybble is not seeking a market , the market will slowly come to Nybble as long as we can make it the best we can with the innovation from the community.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: digitalindustry on August 27, 2013, 12:55:15 PM
Litecoin - Scrypt originator
TBX is scrypt originator, LTC is just a copy.

Bet the guys that pre-mined TBX are kicking themselves they may have made some quick cash - but i know for one i would rather use something call TBX  than LTC clearly TBX would have been the winner right now.

here is the lesson of history guys , TBX could have come back having that legacy , it could have been brought back and it would have been supported.

i've even go so far as to say , the design and name should be revived but a new BC and innovation , i would be happy to help with this and i have the P for Perfect logo ready.

if TBX had of had a fair sart or even the "appearance" of a fair start such as LTC had it would have the street cred now.

also a note Digitalcoin got the idea of not scamming people from Nybble thus it was named in my honor.

: D

- its turned out ok as well, I like all the Johns  : D they all do good work.


Title: Re: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.
Post by: bob131313 on August 27, 2013, 01:38:27 PM
Excellent posts OP. This thread needs stickying.

+1

+1^10