So you think mercenary scrypt miners willing to screw any scrypt blockchain to grab a few coins on some new scam out-hash the actual dedicated scrypt miners who mine to protect (secure) their holdings of scrypt based coins?

Do you also think that mercenary SHA256 miners who have no SHA256 coin wealth to secure out-number SHA256 hashes that exist for the purpose of securing the SHA256 coin holdings they own?

-MarkM-

It was destroyed from the start by the idiots or maybe more likely outright scammers who tried to con people into somehow imagining that scrypt is a viable method of securing a blockchain.

DOGE already showed how insanely vulnerable scrypt is, by conjuring up almost overnight so much hashpower that they could have totally screwed litecoin. It was lucky for litecoin that DOGE happened to be a "lets be yet another scamcoin" meme instead of being a "lets trash all the scrypt blockchains" meme.

Thus we already know that scrypt coins are just a meme away from being worthless.

Yet scammers keep on churning them out, since obviously they don't give a shit about other people's money except, of course, to steal it or scam people out of it.

Really what DOGE showed is not merely that scrypt is garbage but that CPU/GPU is not a viable way of securing a blockchain.

(Scrypt might actually be salvage-able, thanks to upcoming ASICs for scrypt, for one family of merged blockchains, all sharing the same massive hashing power, if that merged family controls more than half of the world's scrypt hashing power. Will that family be litecoin and friends or DOGE and friends, or will ltiecoin and DOGE adapt themselves to be merged mined together as one family so that litecoin and DOGE and friends could all be secured with the majority of the world's scrypt hashing power?)

The only reason bitcoin got away with using CPU then GPU then FPGA to secure its blockchain was that potential attackers were caught unprepared, they did not anticipate so much wealth being so easy to steal using mere raw brute computer-power.

Now they know well that blackchains can be attacked and how to attack them, and are loaded up with GPUs and CPUs and FPGAs.

Thus just a stupid meme can conjure up shitloads of raw brute computing power almost overnight.

Thus any serious attempt to secure a blockchain by proof of work needs to build ASICs before risking people's money on such a blockchain.

-MarkM-

Isn't Iceland one of the best places in the world to mine?

Geothermal to generate electricity, cold climate to not need to waste electricity on air-conditioning, I thought it was one of the mining Meccas everyone wished they could relocate their mining operations to?

-MarkM-

No, not digitalcoin.

The scammers behind digitalcoin do not even bother to secure their blockchain. Look at its hashing power, it is utterly pathetic. It is simply a bullshit scam trying to scam idiots into putting money into a wet paper bag to be stolen.

-MarkM-

Do roleplaying games, civilisation games and such count?

If so, all aspects of the Galactic Milieu have been using I0Coin for a long long long time.

Eventually it is hoped anyone building a bank city-improvement in any city on any planet will be able to bring that bank to life as an Open Transactions server; for now that functionality is prototyped by the Digitalis Open Transactions server, whose contracts show it as based in the city MI5ius on the planet known as M5 but which currently provides the banking and market and stock exchange services for all markets, banks and stock-exchanges on all planets of the Milieu.

Historical tables and plots showing I0Coin prices in terms of various other assets are online at

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Actual use of I0Coin in the Milieu though precedes the creation of those collections of historical data.

-MarkM-

United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB) has been around for years:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

The big problem is securing the blockchain. Look at the value per coin. No way that would be secure with the garbage wet-paper-bag levels of hashing the vast majority of altcoins have.

Thus UKB, like the other "nation" and "corp" coins that came out around that same time (years ago now), were forced to temporarily move to using an Open Transactions format until such time as their transaction volumes are large enough that transaction fees will be able to afford enough mining to actually secure such valuable blockchains.

-MarkM-

The vast majority of them are hideously overpriced.

The very few coins that are actually useful are being dragged down with them though too because the scammers dumping the garbage are using the very few actually useful coins to cash out their ill-gotten gains to fiat and they don't much care about getting a good price when they sell for fiat because it is faster and simpler to just clone a bunch more scams to dump than it is to wait for a good price for coin they use as their route out to fiat.

For example if they use bitcoin as their route out to fiat, they don't care how cheap they sell their bitcoins since if they want more they just clone a bunch more scams. So they might as well just dump the bitcoins at any price since it is so easy to get more. If they need twice as many they can just clone two scams a day instead of only one for example.

-MarkM-

Why would the people who buy coins want them to be hard to mine?

Only the miners want that, for everyone else it is simply an artificially vulnerable blockchain.

So sure the guys selling "vaults" for securing money want to sell wet paper bags as "vaults" but the fact that scammers love to sell their wet paper bags as vaults does not make wet paper bags good secure ways to store secure and transfer wealth.

-MarkM-

This does not seem to indicate any trends at all. Which are or were trending up, which down? Or is some other "trend" somehow mysteriously depicted?

-MarkM-

There are many makers of ASIC chips, and you can pick up block eruptors dirt cheap if you just want to do it as a hobby.

DOGE showed that GPU coins are not secure, by whipping up amost overnight enough hashing power to have PWNd litecoin had it chosen to whip up that power for PWNining instead of just to make yet another crapcoin.

ASICs are not in few hands, lots and lots of people have them.

Maybe more important in the long run might be how many nations have cheap enough electricity to make mining even reach break-even once people actually are mining efficiently. At some point the contest will be who can generate electricity cheapest as much as or more than who has the most efficient chips.

So maybe you will then also argue that miners should be using human-powered electrical generators and eat the cheapest most efficient foods so as to be able to power the most hashes per GPU per miner fairly? Since maybe most people cannot afford gas or liquid powered generators and don't have good sun so human power is fairest?

-MarkM-

Arguing that you want something to use your GPUs on is just ike buggy whip makers arguing that they want someone to sell their buggy whips to.

If you want welfare just go apply for welfare.

If you want to get into the business of securing a blockchain, or to stay in that business, tool up with the hardware needed to actually secure the damn thing.

All this argument that we need to build new roads that automobiles cannot traverse because buggy whip makers need to make a living is perverse.

-MarkM-

The bitcoin technology doesn't make it easy for anyone to create a currency, it only makes it easy to churn out craploads of totally insecure blockchains for attackers to PWN.

It is an insanely expensive system, and even with merged mining it is hard to actually secure a blockchain, out of eight merged mined coins at least two of them are pathetically vulnerable still because even though merged mining makes mining them "almost free" miners still do not bother to mine them.

If you don't use merged mi9ning them you are looking at needing to spend as many millions or billions as have been spent on securing the bitcoin blockchain in order just to have a secure blockchain, which is really the bare minimum necessity for a currency.

-MarkM-

That is normal for ponzis and pyramids. New is always better, as the old ones its too late to "get in on the ground floor".

The original poster of this thread is just another ponzi/pyramid schemer looking to make new schemes instead of actualyl doing real work building support infrastructure that actually makes currency useful else they wouldn't be urging the making of even more schemes but instead the making of useful infrastructure, businesses and such.

-MarkM-

But why even bother to build such ASICs at all? There are more different companies making SHA256 ASICs so SHA256 is less centralised.

Creating a new algorithm just moves you back toward more centralisation because it lowers the number of providers providing specialised hardware.

-MarkM-

Without specialised hardware there is no commitment, miners run off after any stupid meme or fad that comes along.

When people invest millions into dedicated hardware it indicates they are more serious about actually securing a blockchain than when a bunch of gamers decide to leave their gaming rig running between game sessions to grab themselves some lunch money.

-MarkM-

If you think a project lacks a particular kind of presence, can't you go ahead and fix that yourself?

Maybe it simply lacks that particular presence because so far none of the enthusiasts of the project have happened to be into providing that particular aspect?

-MarkM-

Miners who generate or buy electricity efficiently (at a good cost) and mine efficiently (using the best most efficient chips) make plenty of money.

I am not asking buggy-whip makers to whip automobiles, I am suggesting they need switch to a more efficient and appropriate technology.

General purpose computers are great for general purpose computing. For specialised financial systems specialised systems are appropriate.

It is not as if ASICs are hard to come by, and solar power gets cheaper all the time too. Buy a few little solar panels and some block eruptors and knock yourself out.

The point of bitcoin was to get away from the garbage fiat money the politicians print on demand.

Now it is like you are a printer complaining you are out of work because money is no longer being printed profitably for you so you want to issue more and more new currencies to print so you can keep your money-presses rolling.

-MarkM-

Being resistant to being secured is not a feature for a blockchain, it is a bug.

Blockchains need to be secured.

Making them harder to secure, and, especially, making them easier for botnets and meme-fans and such to attack, is not a feature at all it is an idiotic design-flaw.

It is like designing roads that horse-and-buggy can traverse but automobile cannot in order to try to keep buggy-whip makers in business.

Utter idiocy.

-MarkM-

How are they going to secure their blockchain?

Bitcoin is INSANELY expensive to secure, not only do miners get paid every coin ever minted, but they get transaction fees on top of that too!

That leaves less than nothing for the country or company "issuing" the coin. In effect its not their coin at all, it is issued by random miners all over the world, not by them at all.

That is utterly insane overhead cost for anyone looking to mint a currency.

-MarkM-

GRouPcoin actually has quite a lot of hashing power now. CoiLedCoin doesn't because no large public merged mining pool has picked it back up yet, but that just makes it an excellent opportunity for private merged miners to accumulate a hoard before the difficulty does skyrocket. GeistGeld is also a great opportunity for private merged mining, and has such fast blocks that all the crapcoins with fast blocks but no way to actually secure their blockchain should eventually get blown away by it IF there is any truth in the notion that fast blocks are a good thing.

The big difference is the ability to actually secure the blockchain.

-MarkM-