Pools completely short-circuit the whole point of mining. On a long enough time scale the rewards are the same anyway (actually better: no pool fees) for solo miners, but as you say the ADD money hose crowd among miners will not find SPR appealing. Suits me.

As I keep saying, any currency that relies for security on two or three pools (2 or 3 known or easily discoverable people running 2 or 3 boxes on known IP addresses at known or easily discoverable locations) is a toy that will never see serious investment or widespread adoption.

The true decentralisation of Spreadcoin + the real-world utility and economic benefits of Masternodes would see a flood of money into SPR. I am kicking myself for not discovering it just a few weeks sooner than I did, but such is life.  

Every single sentence in this post is so profoundly daft that I think UnobtaniumBollocks might actually be a real life economist.

It went from alpha-use-at-your-own-risk to not-working-don't-even-bother-trying a few point releases ago. Forget about it until it's properly implemented.

Well in that case then the doubling of nethash in the last week was purely organic. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/2o1yoz/rewritten_x11_binaries/

I haven't tried it but I'd assume you can plug these bins into the AMD spreadminer?

The whole 'optimisation' thing seems like a red herring to me, as long as everyone is getting about the same hash per hardware, all upping that does is increase everyone's power consumption... wolf has put a lot of work into this though so if you think it's of benefit to you please consider sending him a tip.

Nethash rising nicely, well over 1GH/s now. Some of that is maybe due to wolf's miner optimisations but general interest is definitely picking up.

Back over 1300 Masternodes. 

Consider this scenario:

Mr Spread commits to implementing Masternodes for Spread.

Within a month or two there are 500 Masternodes requiring 1000 SPR to run, each costing $0.16/day to run and earning 8.64 SPR/day assuming a 50-50 block reward split between miners and MNs.

At a SRP price of 0.001 BTC which would not be at all unreasonable should this happen, that's over $3/day profit per MN, and an annual return of over 300%. Remember, that's half a million SPR taken off the market.

 

Just an example obviously, but you get the idea... Masternodes are both useful and profitable. There's a reason the price has risen significantly merely on the possibility that this will happen. A  confirmed roadmap would see the price rise even more significantly. Remember, there are plenty of people who shy away from Darkcoin just because of the name, or because they think they have missed the boat, both of which are daft IMO but it is what it is.

And there are even more people who shy away from PoW altogether because nobody in their right minds is going to trust a vulnerable handful of parasitic pool operators with the blockchain, and thus their money.

The market cap of Spread could be $sixfigures pretty soon. If I had Mr Spread's skillset - well, you know what I'd be doing.

Automatic I'm not sure about, but I think a pop-up warning would be a great idea.

"Warning: Your inputs are too small to use Darksend, would you like to consolidate them and proceed? Yes/No"

Yeah if you have say 10DRK total in your wallet but it's made up of a lot of tiny chunks then you'll need to consolidate it into one bigger lump by sending all the smaller amounts to one address.

Problems happen, it is unrealistic to expect everything to work perfectly all the time.

What is important is how problems are dealt with. If they are admitted and addressed, and get fixed, it's all good, you build trust, which to me as an investor is far more important than the day to day price on some exchange.  I invest in developers, not 1-hr MACD chart voodoo.

No you haven't.

SPR could be trading at 10x the current price by the end of January, with 500+ Spreadnodes providing anon for those that wanted it and a better return than mining for those that ran them.

There are many reasons DRK has been far more successful in the market than the CN clones (which are the only other anon solutions, everything else is closed source bullshit and vapourware) or just about any other alt, and technicalities aside, ironically enough the main reason IMO is that Evan Duffield has always been 100% open, honest, and trustworthy, and has done the right thing for the long term, damn the current price. DRK has had some tough times, but its supporters trust the developer, not on blind faith but because they have been given real reason to do so. That's a rare thing in our little playground. That's invaluable.

You also need to stop thinking of the crypto scene as the market. It isn't. You shouldn't give a damn about it, you should care about the real market, big money, the real world. The real world can use and rely on a truly decentralised currency. It is never going to put money into a currency that relies on a few centralised pools for its blockchain security. Ever.

The DRK code fixes one of Bitcoins weaknesses, but Mr Spread's pool-denying solution fixes the far bigger one: centralisation.

BTC will never fix it's centralisation problem, big money will always laugh at it for the flawed toy that it is and walk away.

SPR, uniquely among PoW coins, has the potential to remain resilient and functional against a serious adversary. That has real value, it was the original selling point of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has long since abandoned the concept.

FTFY.

Best one mines the heck out of it now then, eh? 

Not any time soon, but 0.001 is realistic pretty quickly if Mr Spread lays out a roadmap for adoption of Darkcoin features and sticks to it, with regular updates. The DRK code is solid and getting better every day. Add true decentralisation... spread the word... hard not to have a winner. Mr Spread chose the right codebase.  

Hell, just being the only decentralised PoW currency is worth 0.001.

... by clicking the big rectangular button!

Mining exists to secure the blockchain, it was never intended to be a money hose for industrial scale hardware junkies. And since BTC mining is so heavily centralised thanks to a few huge operations and a few big pools, it isn't even much use any more for its intended purpose. BTC hasn't been credibly 'decentralised' for years.

The only PoW coin that has actually useful -ie, distributed- mining is Spreadcoin, the block structure excludes pools, it's solo only. It isn't perfect, it doesn't preclude large solo farms, but it's a big step in a very necessary direction. Every other PoW coin is a complete joke from a security POV.

I've taken a degree of flak for posting here and supporting SPR, but people forget that open source is a two way street - there is plenty of room for both coins to grow, and persue related but not necessarily identical paths, and increasing the dev count and user base of the underlying code and concept will be beneficial to everyone IMO.

Masternodes are eventually scheduled to receive 60% of the block reward with DRK, although I have my suspicions that that won't be the end of the matter, and shouldn't be, as mining via centralised pools is basically worthless as a security mechanism. With SPR though, where the miners are actually decentralised and thus provide a useful service, a 50-50 split would seem more equable.

Remember that mining and running Masternodes are not mutually exclusive, I and a lot of other DRK folk do both. Unless you have free electricity or Star Trek hardware though, running Masternodes is generally the more profitable of the two.

There are a whole bunch of variables involved, the economics of the two coins are not going to be identical, I'm sure if Mr Spread goes the MN route he'll adequately think through the various feedback loops. 

Yes, they absolutely need to have a non-trivial cost, it makes it financially crippling bordering on impossible to buy enough to have a reasonable chance of compromising the network. Masternodes don't scale linearly like mining does in terms of hashpower or centralised risk (not that the latter applies to SPR! ), a random subset is chosen from the total each time, making them inherently orders of magnitude more secure from a purely numbers perspective than mining.