I was approached by a couple of hard core members of UFO to work on their coin. I actually really like the guys and the coin so I decided to go whole hog sort of thing and make their client into a much better release. It was 0.6 but I have updated them to a 0.8 client with all the bells and whistles and we are hard forking in a couple of weeks time to secure the blockchain against attacks. From there we plan to change the hashing algorithm to the newest version of Scrypt called NeoScrypt. This will use the latest components available and will be a 2014 version of Scrypt, not the very old and broken one used currently. When I say broken I mean by differential analysis which is why we see cheap ASICs coming out without RAM, as it is broken the protection afforded by variable N coins is redundant.

Further technical information

Now, this thread does jump the gun a bit. We added a new member to the group yesterday and he has posted everything before we were ready, we did not intend to restart with such a plain text first post. Oh well here we go. We will put another thread up later today. The members who apporahced me have put a lot of time into UFO coin and really believe in what they can do with it. Their enthusiasm and ambition is what drew me to this project and I am in a position to do the technical work for this project. If you want to grab the source and take a look at the work or compile a copy of this coin please go to GitHub below.

UFO Coin GitHub Source

Here are a couple of clients that I made earlier with all the usual bells and whistles compiled into them.

Windows Installer
Mac Client (DMG)

Keep an eye out for the official launch thread. Graphicola is not going to be part of the team, as I said he came on yesterday and has gone ahead with this without anyone being prepared. Such a shame that someone would do this when so many other have put in hundreds of hours of work combined.

Android Wallet

We have recently produced an Android wallet for AppleByte and are now looking to take some other coins on. The AppleByte wallet is a full conversion with all details taken care of, the obvious magic numbers and ports to DNS seeds and alert keys. This work was commissioned by AppleByte and we are now looking to take on some additional Android wallet development. If you are looking for an Android wallet for your coin then please send me a PM and I will get back to you with a quote for the work.

AppleByte on the Play store

Online Wallet

Using the excellent Coinpunk we can create online wallets for any coins. This system is fully reactive and displays very well across many devices giving an alternative to dedicated app wallets like the Android one above.

AppleByte Online Wallet

Other services
We can help with a whole host of other items of work listed below. If you want to discuss your project then send me a PM and I would be happy to advise.

• Coin creation
• Securing blockchains against attacks
• Building of Mac and PC wallets with QR Code support and UPNP
• Reddit Tipbots
• Online Faucet - AppleByte Faucet
• DNS Seeder, required to help clients find others on the network without having to share addnode information

Coding hard forks for:
Changing retarget solution to move to DGW, NGW or more conventional solutions
Moving to a new hashing algorithm
Adjusting your coin protocol

Let us know what you need.

It is a shame that people think that trolling is a way to do business. Bear in mind that these guys only come out to troll something that they consider a threat.

That's correct. I do a lot of commissioned work to get the bills paid. When launching Feathercoin we learned a lot the hard way and I now spend a lot of time helping teams with their projects. I've helped a fair few teams launch with work complete before launch or assist after launch to secure blockchains, get the required infrastructure in place and so on. I subscribe to the open source ethos which largely seems forgotten in crypto I believe due to the involvement of money. We are all working with open source Bitcoin code, we want diversity to see crypto adapt and evolve. Bitcoin to the most part has to maintain the status quo so it is in alternative crypto currencies where we will see the innovation. If something is a really good idea then as we are in open source others can use it including Bitcoin.

I just wanted to drop in and say hello

I am working on a XC Seeder which will be added to the XC source code. This is a DNS service for crypto coins that the client connects to when starting to find other clients on the network without having to use addnode information. This is the service that replaced the IRC system that use to do the same thing. The work should be completed today.

To the rescue again I see

I really hope that people appreciate your improvements to PoS and the contributions this brings. Perhaps you should write a short paper on the short comings of the original PoS and explain the work you have done here?

I'm mining Orb but if anyone has 0.5 Bitcoins worth then please send me a PM.

As the title says I got a virus warning from Microsoft Security Essentials, this is the native virus protection for Windows 8 and I believe is called Windows Defender. I have not found much on this and presume it is a false positive. Any ideas where this comes from? It is going to spook a lot of new users installing Bitcoin Core. The computer that got this alert is a VM in Oracle VirtualBox running Windows 7 64-bit. It is the 64-bit version of Bitcoin Core.

The license for Feathercoin was a special one which is why it is not transferable. We paid Sunny to do the implementation in Feathercoin and he granted us a special license where we did not have to include any copyright notices for Peercoin. The COPYING file from Peercoin copied in below is a bit different.

Apologies for the confusion I created over this. Auroracoin and others are well within their rights to use automatic checkpointing.

Who are the developers for this coin?

I saw BitcoinEXpress's post about attacking MaxCoin and want to talk about securing the coin. Time manipulation reduction on the blockchain and nodes and also securing the blockchain against 51% attacks which look to fork the chain and roll back transactions. If you are the dev give me a shout or can someone please let me know who to speak to. Steps can be taken to secure blockchains against attacks if developers care to do it.

The people worth paying attention to aren’t the ones who shout the loudest or who have the biggest advertising budgets and the person in the meeting doing all the talking probably isn’t the one with the best ideas.

We have from day one put the people first, the quiet ones who work hard in the background while everyone is looking the other way. It’s people like that who turn up every day and make the world go round. There’s no need for fancy introductions when the work just speaks for itself.
 

If you cast your minds back to earlier this year you may remember that Hull City Council came to our January meet up as they wanted to find out more about Feathercoin and what we were all about. They had already done a lot of research and we were impressed with their knowledge of crypto currency.
 
Several emails followed and Chrisj, Chris from The Oxford Blue and myself attended one of their local forum meet ups in early March.

Hull City Council's aim is to mine crypto currency via multipools and buy Feathercoins to distribute as rebranded Hullcoins to people living in financial need, Hull City Council have provided a network of shops that will accept Hullcoin.
 

Hullcoin is going to be a mix of 50:50 Feathercoin and Ven. David Shepherdson for Hull City Council says "One hullcoin is a hybrid of Feathercoin and Ven. This would be to potentially counteract issues with volatility. This would work by issuing one Feathercoin and the equivalent value in Ven. This would mean the ‘currency’ would remain digital but a combination of crypto and something that is pegged to a basket of trade-able commodities."

I'm proud not only that they have made Feathercoin their choice of crypto currency, but that I have also been invited and accepted a position on the Hull City Council board of directors for this project.  I will be acting as first point of contact for Hull, but hope we can all support them in making the change for people in need.
You can find the Coindesk article by David Gilson here.
 
I appreciate there will be a lot of questions regarding this, as this project is in its infancy stages some of the details are yet to be confirmed but please be rest assured that once we have further details and answers to the questions we will update you.
 

A pleasant evening was had at the wonderful Oxford Blue. We were treated with some very interesting gadgets. The first was bought along by Uncle Muddy who has spent the last month building a Feathercoin ATM. We got to see it close up and give it a try. By putting £1 into the slot it printed out a QR code with 10 Feathercoins on. Watch this video for a demonstration of the Feathercoin ATM and Muddy's engineering skills.
 

The next gadget we got to see in operation was the GridSeed miner brought along by the DemocraticRepublicOfDave. This is an incredibly neat gadget, it looks like a CPU heat sink and fan which connect to a computer by USB. It can mine either SHA-256 at 8GH or Scrypt at 320KH. That seems pretty magic in itself. Dave was kind enough to walk us through this low power magical device.
 
It is good to talk to people who share the same enthusiasms over food and beers. We meetup every month and the more the merrier, remember that our meetups are open to people from all walks of crypto life and not just for feathercoiners no matter what your coin is you will be made very welcome.
 
The next meetup is an extra special occasion as it is going to be our 1st Birthday bash. Some of the team are meeting up again this week to talk over ideas for the Birthday weekend, so if you have anything you would like to see included in the festivities please make a post in the thread and we will do what we can.
 


We are well on our way to the 6,000 FTC goal. I'm currently working on a couple of ideas to get us over the finish line, and also talking to PCUK about making a presentation to them on the Saturday of the Birthday Weekender, but in the mean time if you would like to donate a few feathers to the cause then you can using the address below
 


Inspired by a Flappy Bird clone and in homage to the original Sonic, Feather Roller is an infinite runner where the goal is to dodge the enemies and the collect the ftc. Controls and version updates can be found here.
 

This is my first hand at making a game and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I hope in the future, the game will actually mine ftc for the player if they choose to do so. I'll be making updates to the game at some stage that will add levels, animated character's and buttons and many more idea's. If there's anything you think I'm missing, drop me a comment on the thread.
 
If you would like to try your hand at this fun little game you can download it, why not post your scores in the thread and let others see how you got on?
 

We are proud to announce that as of the 30th March buygolfshirts.com have started accepting FTC as a payment method on their site.
 
From the sales floor to the construction zone, front desk to back lot, company picnic to charity golf outing, we've got the ideal sports shirt to fit the situation. Offering customisation on a huge range of product we are sure you will be able to find something to fit your needs.
 
So next time your looking for a customised sports shirt no matter what the occasion, why not contact the guys at buygolfshirts.com first and pay with some of your feathers?
 
From now on Merchant Watch will become a regular section of the news letter, and over the coming weeks we are intending to put up a new merchant section on the forum, making it easier for you to find places to spend your feathercoin.
 

Some of you are aware that there is currently an issue with our Android Wallet app not being able to sync with the blockchain. It is based on the old way of using IRC to connect to the network. A couple of the devs have taken a quick look at this problem but are currently tied up on other projects so to this end we have raised a bounty of 5,000FTC for the development of a new Android wallet.
 
As a minimum the following features should include:

No cloud server or web service
Display of wallet balance in Feathercoin and various other fiat currencies (currencies selected via app settings)
Sending and receiving of Feathercoin via NFC, QR-codes or Feathercoin URLs
Address book for regularly used Feathercoin addresses
Enter transactions while offline, will be executed when online
Manages blockchain on the device
System notifications for Feathercoin connectivity and received coins
Private key import via QR Code scanning

The finished product needs to be available via open source so further development can be carried out by other people, all code should be made available via GitHub.
 

Many in cryptoland treat it like a big casino, checking the price all day, sitting back waiting to get rich fuelled by a relentless desire for future comfort and a final resting place.

This has created an opportunity for nefarious enterprising minds to make themselves the owners of this big casino. They set up exchanges, start online magazines, bribe shills on social media all so that they can control the information for all their new found customers.

They realise that if they control the information they control the beliefs and controlling beliefs means controlling the price.

But it’s not beliefs that make us who we are, our behaviour does. The reason people like Hull Council want to work with Feathercoin is because it’s full of good people who work hard and stay focussed long after it’s fashionable.

Don’t wait for permission to get involved just do it then talk about it. You can PM Ruthie or me and we will feature you in a future newsletter.

You can find the last official newsletter here: The Heroes. Today special thanks go to @Uncle_Muddy, @Calem, @Bushstar, @Ruthie & @ChrisJ for their contributions to this newsletter.

You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or come on to the forum to stay up to date.

Thank-you for your time.

Some of us are still waiting on that 51% attack BitcoinEXpress promised us a long time ago. That never happened but the threat scared the market into making some very cheap coins available.

BitcoinEXpress, are you looking for some cheap coins again

Now you have our attention how about some evidence to back up your claim?

First post updated with details of Feathercoin 0.8.5 which has just been released. Hapy Holidays

ChrisJ on the live stream now. Pikapay coming up next.

http://bambuser.com/v/4077203

The Live stream URL seems to change. You can alway get the latest feed from the link below.

http://bambuser.com/channel/KnowmadsNL

So many choices for people

We have a live stream of our event below.

http://bambuser.com/v/4074775

This is a bit confusing. I understood that the Bitcoin conference was cancelled so ChrisJ from Feathercoin organised an alternative at Knowmads Business School in Amsterdam starting today details below.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324648.0

We are at Knowmads now setting up

Looking forward to the meetup Chris. I have not been to Amsterdam in a long time

So far we have several speakers and 75 attendees.

Thanks mate

That happens when the old wallet gets run on the new network. This will be different in future as we have reinstated the CAlert system in this release to allow us to notify users through the client. Sorry for putting you through this hassle. It will be better in future.

Now for some good news. The market has reopened

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309757.0

Good news. The Feathercoin market is back with a major improvements and many bug fixes.  Most noticeable is the built-in escrow system which in my mind makes the market work.

The escrow holds the funds from the buyer until the goods have been received. Once you buy an item you send the funds to the escrow address on the screen. The seller can see that payment has been sent and can send the goods. Once done the buyer can mark the item as received and the funds will be released. For more information on the escrow service please view the escrow FAQ on the market website linked in below.

Feathercoin Market



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