... Edit: yes this isn't SolidCoin 2.0  no one should be dictating anything Your not even going to take input from anyone about it? Wouldn't hurt to get other input on the subject from the forum users (i.e. give it a day for people to respond) I've been talking to a lot of people about this issue on IRC. At first, I wasn't going to do anything about it b/c the guy isn't totally malicious. He's actually donating coins to people. But it seems like he's not going to stop and the size of the chain is growing big. And since our fees are too low, he can keep doing this forever and it won't cost him much. So it makes sense to increase the fees to make it at least cost something to perform this DDoS spam attack. Since I believe this change is pretty harmless, I didn't think we needed to have a long discussion about this. If you think 0.1 LTC is too little or too much or if you have another way to solve this problem, please post it. We can always put in a better fix later. But I think I need to act now to address this problem. |
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Pretty suspicious that gmaxwell posts that just before it happened.
Either he knew about it indirectly from the culprits or is involved in it.
There is no doubt in my mind that gmaxwell is not the person spamming us with transactions. I'm guessing gmaxwell's post got someone to start thinking what would happen if there were a ton of these small transactions. And he's testing that out. The current fees for Litecoin is way too low because we are using the same fees as Bitcoin. But since the value of an LTC is about 1/200 of that of BTC, we would need to have fees about 200x that of Bitcoin to deter this behavior. I'm going to make the minimum transaction fee for Litecoin be 0.1 LTC for transactions that are large and low-priority. This change will not fork the chain, because clients are not going to reject blocks with transactions containing too little fees. This just prevents transactions with too little fees to be propagted or put into blocks by clients/miners running this new code. I'm working on testing out the code right now to make sure everything is ok. Will release the source and binary soon. |
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Mike, would you consider having a buy back guarantee for the face value of any casascius coin as long as the hologram is intact and genuine?
Formally? I'm willing to formally guarantee that I have appropriately handled and destroyed all copies of the private keys because I can easily control that. And that if you bought one from me, that I have sold you an honest coin. Regarding the physical coins themselves? I'd say informally at best, only to stay reasonable, since nothing is 100% unbreakable. The coins are made with a reasonable standard of care for a 1-guy hobby project given the budget I put into it. Beyond that, I don't have the means or the practical ability to test the physical coins with every kind of ray or chemical or imaging technology out there, so if someone were to find an exploit that allowed the private key to be read on my coins without ruining the hologram, I would be more likely to make a posting or a statement that such had occurred, so everyone would know that they need to protect themselves from it, rather than buy back all the coins. Of course, any announcement like that would be unfortunate - but given that the coins are collected far more than they are circulated, that would be only a letdown, rather than a major vector for transactional fraud. I assume people would keep their coins like they probably already do, and would have nothing to worry about with respect to their own coins. If I were to formally guarantee the physical coins, then at any point an exploit were found, that guarantee would amount to an invitation for people to exploit the BTC off and then redeem the guarantee sell them back to me, and that's inconsistent with my goals for the project. I believe the coins are reasonably secure, but I expect that as Bitcoin becomes more prominent, that there will be advances in the security of physical bitcoins produced both by me and by others, as well as the attacks made against them, and the first iteration of the physical bitcoin definitely won't be the last. If coin material (such as unused holograms or unfunded coins) were to be lost or stolen, I would probably make a judgment call. For a small amount, I would probably offer to redeem them for face value. For a large amount, I would probably announce that the material had been stolen, provide any information that identifies the stolen material, and then probably use a new design that is clearly distinguishable. Keep in mind, the project is to promote Bitcoin, promote a proof of concept, and provide a neat-looking example of a good honest coin... but not to insure against things I couldn't possibly reasonably control. Fortunately, to my knowledge, there have been no occurrences of this kind to report, and to the best of my knowledge, all coins in the wild are either legitimate and funded, or (at worst) are waiting to be funded when enough time has elapsed to ensure they've cleared customs of their buyer. Mike, that's a great honest answer. Thanks. I totally agree with where you stand. Maybe add this information to your FAQ? https://www.casascius.com/faq.aspx |
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The coins look great, but how can you be sure that your friends won't make copies of the private keys they're handling? I have some trust in you to do an honest job, but I don't necessarily trust your friends and especially some employees of yours not to make a few secret copies. Do you have some procedure to stop this?
Yep... it's to always be present and account for all the materials. Nobody makes coins if I'm not there and helping. And I only need help on the 1 BTC coin. The 25 and the 100 BTC pieces get sold much less frequently and it is no big deal to just do these myself. I am pretty certain none of the keys have been compromised, so the claims process idea is unnecessary. If I thought I had a batch of coins that contained any compromised keys, I would probably just move the whole batch to the "bargain bin", rip them open, and sell them as "opened coin samples so you can see what's inside" (like I do on my website). If you ever came across an intact Casascius coin that showed it was spent on Block Explorer, I would likely buy it off you at well above face value just to see what went wrong. Mike, would you consider having a buy back guarantee for the face value of any casascius coin as long as the hologram is intact and genuine? |
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The Solidcoin community isn't denying that Solidcoin *in it's infancy* is run and developed by just a few individuals (causing centralization). Same with Bitcoin when it was first started, it was pretty damn centralized to just a few individuals as well. The idea is that as the network grows, decentralization will naturally occur (same as with Bitcoin). We have a pretty good base built, and I think with time improvements and active development will make this stuff even better.
Wrong. Bitcoin was never centralized. It was true peer-to-peer from day one. Anyone could fire up the client and start mining and be a true equal peer to every single other peer. That is not centralized. I was on IRC talking to RealSolid about centralization versus decentralization a week ago. And it seems to me that he (and likely FlipPro here) has a very different take on what it means to be decentralized. RealSolid believes that the trusted nodes are decentralized because there are 10 of them. Because it's not just 1 trusted node, it means that it's decentralized. I tried to argue that 10 trusted nodes versus 1000 miners means it's centralized. He then said something similar to what FlipPro said here. Basically that when Bitcoin started, there were only 10 miners so that was centralized also. I tried to argue that 10 of 10 means decentralized and 10 or 1000 means centralized. He just laughed me and proclaimed that I know shit about what decentralized means in his arrogant tone that we all know very well. It was a waste of my time. If you alter the definition of "decentralized", then you can basically claim whatever you want. |
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Thanks BTCLot. I will be there! If you lose litecoins to me, think of it as a donation to the project.  This may be the first REAL use of litecoins for most people! If people want to join, make sure you transfer litecoins to the site beforehand. I think it will be a 10 LTC (maybe more) entry tournament and cash games for those that get busted out early. Also, it's daylight savings adjustment tonight in the US, so check your watches and check https://www.google.com/search?q=time+in+gmtThe game starts at 22:00 GMT See you there! |
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There's no faucet because I don't believe the faucet really does much good. It's just another way for people to get free coins.
Yes, it's a way for people to get free coins, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. A faucet (or a way for people to get a free coin) can help people who are just finding out about cryptocurrency to have an increased interest in the whole concept. If I install the client, that's cool, but if I can get a free coin someplace to get started, that raises my interest and even commitment to the project -- now that I have a coin, I can't let it go to waste Anyway, my $0.02. I agree. That's why I'm working on adding p2pool to the litecoin client. So once you start the client, you can turn on mining and easily earn a few litecoins for yourself. That would do more to raise interest in the project I think. |
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Thanks BTCLot. I will be there! If you lose litecoins to me, think of it as a donation to the project. This may be the first REAL use of litecoins for most people! |
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Is there somewhere I can download the blkindex.dat and blk0001.dat files as I cannot redownload the whole thing again on my slow netbook. Thank you.
Coblee, some others might also like the above so maybe consider doing regular snapshots of this etc.
Run your netbook with -addnode=(ip of your main computer) and it'll go in a couple of minutes. OK that went pretty fast. Hope LTC makes it. I am no longer a subject of King RealScam and his various taxes and wallet deletions. ScamCoin deserves to die now. Way to go LTC ! Funny that the AMDFam10 miner is faster on i7 too LOL. Is there litecoin faucet and blockexplorer ? It wasn't that long ago when you were calling me a Japanese scammer. There's no faucet because I don't believe the faucet really does much good. It's just another way for people to get free coins. Here are 2 block explorers: http://explorer.liteco.in/http://blockexplorer.sytes.net/chain/Litecoin |
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There are tons of round holograms on eBay...
If you want to roll your own private key, just pick from any of them. If I give out unused holograms, that compromises all the other coins I have made. Casascius hologram means only Casascius has seen the private key, it wouldn't mean that anymore if I passed them out freely.
Yup, forget that suggestion. I'm not sure what I was thinking. So how much are you selling the blank bars for? |
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While I trust Mike Caldwell a lot, there is still a possibility that he's keeping the private keys (I'm not suspecting he does, but it's a possibility). So there's still a trust issue involved. I wouldn't confidently use the 100 BTC coins for storage of my wealth.
I don't quite understand why you say it'd be somehow safer to deal in physical bitcoins than in virtual ones. The problem with paypal does not lie in the delivery of the bitcoins, but mainly in the reversibility of paypal transactions and the fact that paypal does not guarantee to keep your account usable. Did I misunderstand something?
The increased perceived risk at 100 BTC is understandable and was anticipated. So this bar comes in 2 versions, a 100 BTC one, and a blank one where you roll your own private key and denominate it yourself. Normally people aren't going to be transacting the bars face to face so it is less of a concern whether it has a casascius hologram. The main attraction of the bar is how it looks and as a savings wallet. In my view, if you CAN produce your own private key, you should. There are tons of designs of generic holograms on eBay (diameter 1 inch or 25.4mm, I thought I saw a gold "fireworks" one the other day) or you could just use a regular foil sticker. As for physical goods, credit cards and PayPal tend to give leverage to sellers who can prove they shipped physical goods to the buyer's confirmed address especially if the buyer had to sign for them. For the blank one, you should include an unused hologram that we can just stick to the bar to hide our private key. And maybe give us an option to specify a public key to print on the hologram. |
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Thanks for the response coblee. That seems to make a lot of sense. you can even have web-based games that generate coins while you play Speaking of that, are there any known implementations of a Javascript-based miner for litecoin? Not yet, but I know someone's working on a Java based one. Where can I see the specifics of what actually needs to be done to mine? If I had that, I might give a Javascript miner a shot. The specifics are all in the code. Here's the scrypt algorithm: https://github.com/coblee/litecoin/blob/master/src/scrypt.cThere may already be a javascript implementation of scrypt. If not, you will need to port that to javascript. |
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Thanks for the response coblee. That seems to make a lot of sense. you can even have web-based games that generate coins while you play Speaking of that, are there any known implementations of a Javascript-based miner for litecoin? Not yet, but I know someone's working on a Java based one. |
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Out of curiosity, what is everybody's take on the *purpose* of litecoin (especially coblee's opinion)-- is it supposed to replace bitcoin, or is it supposed to be used alongside bitcoin.
The purpose of Litecoin is not to replace Bitcoin. The goal is to have an alternative coin that's easy for anyone to mine and to be more of a "lite" version of Bitcoin. With faster transaction times, sending litecoins will be quicker and easier than sending bitcoins. Waiting 10-60 minutes for your bitcoins to be deposited can be annoying. Imagine if you can deposit litecoins on a poker website and be able to play in about 2.5 minutes. Since CPU mining is possible with Litecoin, you can even have web-based games that generate coins while you play and Litecoins would then also be used as an in-game currency. I think there are a lot of possibilities for Litecoin to flourish as a lite currency alongside Bitcoin. |
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