Bitcoin Forum

It appears mining on the Ixcoin blockchain has reduced significantly so I was wondering whether we should switch to merged mining like Namecoin. The hope is that more people would mine the Ixcoin chain to make it more secure. Any thoughts/advice/code/reservations appreciated.

Finally.

I don't care about merged mining, but why not if easy.  What I would really like to see is all mining stop after block 50,000 to create the worlds 1st deflationary currency.  There is a danger if a large merged mining pool say 100 Gh decides to drop ixcoin, you might be wait 6 months to get 144 blocks.

??? Stop mining?  That would stop the currency.... and make it all worthless... I don't understand what that accomplishes?

Mining offers no value to the currency.  Bitcoin at price of 5 has to come up with $1500 every hour to keep it from collapsing.  Yes, eventually it will reach 1% inflation in 15 years.  Mining makes the currency go down!  way down! 

I am running the ixcoin graphic bounty.  I would love to change the name to "The Worlds 1st Deflationary Currency" graphics ad bounty.

I think we should do anything to make the currency go up.  Maybe offer bounty for BCE to fix holes. Merged mining, end mining! or sleeping with the fed reserves daughter.

Search deflation on youtube or in the economics section.

what accomplishs this
total number of $ = M
k = constant
value of a dollar = k (M/person)
value of dollar = kM/person

If you double amount of currency, the value of the currency will halve.

Sadly, mining is also the sole act that allows transactions to become confirmed in the first place, and the sole thing that keeps one from double-spending.

In case you are concerned by  growth of the number of coins available on the market for purchase (a dubious concern, but I am quite tired of arguing over it with deflation crowd), what you should be looking into is introducing factors that increase irrevocable loss of coins, not decrease production (that would induce the overall number of coins available for purchase on the market to stabilize more quickly)

Sorry Mr. Express but namecoin gets more valuable as time goes on as it requires less coins to register a domain.

I'd say the main driver of namecoin value would be US Gov and its ugly "intellectual property protecshun" initiatives ;)

this was my point, without computers mining.... coins can't be transacted.  It's like saying let's all invest in a set number of rocks, and then send them to the moon and never trade them... they become worthless...

Can anyone point me to a fix for in the code of other alt coins where this was fixed please? Thanks.

I still think merged mining has more potential though.

If we stop mining rewards without a large ecosystem of paid Ixcoin transactions, then there will be no incentive to mine.


Possible, but I don't see a trivial way to prevent this.

Merged mining will probably get new users into ixc so it might increase interest and thus value.  Locust/BCEx eventually for most coins mining is going to cease anyways.  In 2015 mining is going to seize for ixcoin anyways.  And in 2030 all mining will cease for bitcoin.  We could cease mining, and only have transaction fees minus 10% which are destroyed.  Thus, you will get something for mining.  Why mine a worthless coin?  If there was a way to automatically mine when you open the client, thus people would keep the client open to get a tiny bits of coin that come from transactions.  Early versions of bitcoin had a miner built in, maybe set the default to mine automatically?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nJYN94m2pw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nJYN94m2pw)

Mining will not cease.

Subsidies will.

With all due respect, learn the distinction, and then we shall proceed to discuss the optimal way to build a deflationcoin

subsidies? the added 50 25 12.5?  It will be a decade before btc becomes useful, in the meantime your puppy will die of old age.  

So would it be ok to end the 96 subsidies and allow the miners to keep the transaction fees?

If mining is required to protect the network, I think you should have mandatory mining in the client.

I don't even know where to start...

That's probably worse idea than coin taxes. There, I said it. There can be worse ideas than taxing miners in favor of third party.

Also, x-flation is irrelevant as far as utility of a cc as way of transferring value tokens is concerned

In California we pay close to a 10% sales taxes.  A crypto-currency could have a 5% sales tax (transactions) and delete 100% of them.  They could also give 75% to miners and 25% to deletion.

If IXCoin is back, I'll mine them again!

Dear my, you gotta be trolling.
MINE ALL THE COINS ! ;)

To stop a BitCoin network you would need to break every single BitCoin node.  - quote by SD

Would merged mining stop the time travel exploit?

It is not either/or.  You have to fix the exploit regardless of whether you do merged mining.

I've seen the "fix" (sorry, no link handy) but am left wondering, Why not update difficulty continuously?  Pseudocode:


TIME_i would be the "current" time as stored in the block header.  Validation would require that "now" >= TIME_i >= TIME_i-1.  (If a block appears with time in the future, the client would hold onto it in case it is part of the best chain when it becomes valid.)

Let's see how this fares in some pathological cases.  1. Difficulty too low.  A long sequence of blocks with little change in time: TIME_i-TIME_i-1 is close to zero, so difficulty increases by a factor of approx. B/(B-1) with each block.  Difficulty doubles every 1397 blocks (approx. B*log(2)).

2. Pool dumps coin.  Difficulty too high.  A long stretch of time without any blocks.  Current algorithms suffer.  This one decreases difficulty with the passage of time, not just the solving of blocks.  Difficulty halves in 2 weeks (approx. B*N) even with zero blocks solved.

3. Miners leave block time unchanged despite passage of real time.  They may gain from higher chain difficulty, but they will have to mine at an increasingly higher difficulty than the rest of us, and eventually that advantage will get us mining a block with updated time.

4. Time traveller visits.  Can't do much as far as I can see.  Blocks in past (before previous block) fail validation.  Blocks in future must wait for their time (and hope the chain doesn't pass them) before clients recognize them.  The lack of discreet difficulty jumps moderates profit.  Exploit thwarted by appeal to external authority (the stars, crystal oscillations, Naval Observatory, etc.) yet without requiring absolute, network-wide agreement.

5. Computer clocks all wrong.  As far as I can tell, the incentives are for accuracy.

I'm curious whether this has been proposed and discussed.  Edit: proposed in mid-2010 here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=463.0), though in a simpler form suffering from use of floating-point arithmetic.  To clarify: the pseudocode is not meant to suggest use of floating point or incompletely specified operations.  No arguments against my form, but of course for the established chains there is inertia.

Yes, that's it. But do remember that you have to set this to switch over at a future block. Since it will cause previous diff changes to be incorrect.

How come sometimes when I generate an Ixcoin block I get an extra .0005 for the reward? 

Transaction fees are included in blocks.

Thanks for that. It would require a chain split but seems easy enough.

If we'd be doing a chain split for this fix, we might as well look into merged mining too. Twobit suggested https://ixcoin.org/forum/index.php?topic=141.0 (https://ixcoin.org/forum/index.php?topic=141.0) we use the MultiCoin client as the basis for Ixcoin. I'm not familiar with it yet, but apparently it supports merged mining and other altcoins already. If it keep sup with the main Bitcoin 0.4 updates then this could be a good option for Ixcoin. It would mean all supported altcoins could benefit from the same code updates.

Interesting idea. I think the key issue (for Ixcoin and maybe other altcoins) is to get a substantial number of miners mining the chain to prevent 51% attacks & co. Maybe a continuous difficulty adjustments could help to motivate miners but we'd need more proof of concept before going with this.

I really like the idea of a small sales tax on a crypto-coin, like 1%-5% with the end of mining known rewards.  With a portion deleted and a portion going to miners.

1. The owners of the coin will like the deflation the amount of coin will diminish and the price will go up.
2. The businesses won't care, they will just increase the prices.   They want owners/consumers of the coin.
3. The consumer won't care all they want is something to buy.
4. The miners deserve little or nothing, however having it attached to a bigger transaction will create sort of a game.  If the economy grows, the sale tax might actually be larger than the 96.

People mine today because it is the easiest way to get coin, it adds little value and the first coin that ends the mining will benefit the most.  ixcoin is the 1st coin slated to end the mining, I just wish we could end the mining now.   

So is Ixcoin actually going to be fixed?

I'm not sure but a if I look at the difficulty increase (almost 100% in 24 hours in 10% steps) a lot of people assume it will  ;D

I still have a wallet with 3700 IXCoins, mined and speculated them.
I won't throw it away but I won't start mining yet... To uncertain, unless the creator can convince me :P

Yeah, I'd say get the time travel exploit fixed first before even thinking about merged mining.

Would a fix for the time travel issue be sufficient to reassure DoubleC into reinstating his IXcoin bitparking exchange?

It couldn't hurt.  If nothing else, it might encourage more people to mine if they see that Ixcoin still has active development behind it... even if you just copy pasta :P  But it's still vulnerable to a 51% attack just like any other *coin.  IMHO you should just go back to a block-count based retarget schedule but retain the 400/10% adjustment coefficient, just to keep with a KISS methodology.

ixcoin on the bitparking exchange was never double-spent. i0coin was. I saw BitcoinExpress had in his signature for a while that he purchased an ipad 2 with money obtained from an ixcoin double spend - I don't know what that was in regard to.

I wouldn't open another ixcoin exchange (or any other low hash rate exchange) in their existing forms , unless I found some way of dealing with double-spends or improving the way existing exchanges work to reduce the risk.

In reality, that's 20,000 IOC because you can double spend it ;D

I certainly do not mind if all coins are merged, mine one and you mine all, that will certainly help increase the profits of mining :)

Ok, thanks for the feedback. I'm going to look into merged mining for Ixcoin then as I don't see anyway to counter 51% attacks without a a-la-Solidcoin centralized approach.

And it increases survival chances of an alt-coin.

Any status of this.  Seems network is dying I only connected to 5 nodes and I have always connected to 8.  I think merged mining is the way to go with a 5 coin reward to miners.

Ixcoin.org should be back up soon.

Looking into merged mining. Anyone who wants to help with the coding can claim 5K from the 10K Ixcoin coding bounty.

Yes, solving the time travel exploit wouldn't take much coding effort. However it wouldn't necessarily guarantee sufficient miner uptake for exchanges to be confident about potential 51% attacks. I believe merged mining would address this. Plus I'd rather include as much as possible in the next compulsory update, rather than having myself and all users go through the new release process twice.

Hah you stupid shit, forgot to turn off the automatic bullshit posting software? Not even close to a misunderstanding, just a straight out lie; but i guess that's nothing new for you.

Any time frame for the merged mining to take place?

I'm still looking for someone to help with coding merged mining into Ixcoin. I've had no volunteer yet.

If you cannot volunteer coding skills but would like help, then you can send Ixcoins to xvqw8p6smpLmLbXhLaDhjvuEhKdkTXhscP. These will be added to the 10K Ixcoin coding bounty for anyone that adds merged mining to Ixcoin.

Just what I was thinking.
I like the idea of merged mining these coins but if this is all he can come up with, we might as well just bury the chain right away.

I might add more indeed. I would hope others also chip in too since the value of their Ixcoins is at stake.

Any suggestions as to who I could contact who is sufficiently knowledgeable in merged mining?

What about that davinci guy?

davinci knows dog shit about it, he pesters shads about every single question all the time.

Slush's pool is using merged mining for namecoins - so you can contact slush.

Funny how people like BCX are holding onto a lot of IXC and I0C and want to restart the scam so they get more suckers and take their USD.

But hey, I guess someone has got to compete with King RealScam's chain right ? I mean it is a free market around here not a monopoly ;D

you are free to mine ixc and i0c too, why not drop btc and mine real coin.  It is an ixc world and you are in it.

LOL. What ?

Thanks for the suggestions as to who to contact. Any other suggestions are welcome.

I've received a 500 IXC donation towards the fund.

If you can do merged mining with bitcoin, with no changes.  I would think you should be able to do merged mining with ixcoin with no changes?  However, I do wish they would drop the mining reward to 0.5 IXC for each block instead of 96.  A very generous reward when the price rises like SC and IXC reaches gold parity.

I will add 5 BTC and 3000 IXC if the reward is dropped from 96 to 1 with merged mining.

i0coin reward is 96 per.  Ix is 48 IIRC.

i0coin reward is 48
ixcoin reward is 96

Namecoin has a purpose of domain name system.   Bitcoin is the main coin.  Ixcoin must seperate from the pack with merged mining to offer something the other coins don't.  That is why I strongly propose a 1 mining reward after block 40,000 or block 50,000.  Doing so will create the lowest inflation coin and the price will skyrocket.  Mostly likely past bitcoin to gold parity :).   It will be the 1st true digital currency.

Keep drinking the kool aid.

1. The value of existing coins should increase. The owners of existing coins should be upset at all future mining as it dilutes the value of their coins.  I don't think you would be changing value, other than increasing the value to existing owners.  The only purpose of mining is to protect the network and possibly advertise it.

2. I now own 50K IXC, so I am a little selfish here.  As I would like to see my coin go up in value and everyone had and has the chance to mine ixc.  There is even a pool at coinotron.  Nasakioto would have to make the decision, and in an earlier post he claimed the reward was hardwired into the code.  

3. I noticed ixcoin.org is now up after a month down with many spam posts.  Maybe Nasakioto is taking your code and fixing it already for ixcoin.

4. If nasakioto says no, I would be game to starting a new coin.  Where there is zero premine.  Maybe a 100 reward for the first 10,000 blocks, 1000 reward for the next 45,000 blocks, then a 1 reward forever.  With 1 block every 2 minutes.  Thus all coins out in about 2.54 months.  Difficulty change every 120 blocks with a 1 permanent transaction fee.  Maybe call the coin goldcoin - where inflation is less than gold.  The inflation rate would be 0.57% after 2 months. Maybe IXC should be renamed?  

sounds like a get rich quick scheme to me...

Quite the contrary.  It is meant for the long term the 1000 year long term.  A get rich scheme is to pre-mine 1,000,000 then sell them off.  Once they are sold, start a new chain.

I agree,

"Maybe a 100 reward for the first 10,000 blocks, 1000 reward for the next 45,000 blocks"

Let's do some math:

100 * 10,000 = 1,000,000
1,000 * 45,000 = 45,000,000

So whether you call it a "premine" or call it "initial mining" you're still simply infusing/distributing coins into the market and then dropping future inflation.  How is this not any different than what ixcoin and/or i0coin would be if future rewards were dropped to 1 coin/block right now?

I think the only difference is that you would have more in "your" wallet.