Massive, massive hashrate. More hashing power than DOGE, Litecoin, or I0Coin. Heck maybe even more than IXCoin really.

-MarkM-

Well in that case maybe look at high difficulty/hashrate coins that are massively underpriced right now, like I0Coin, IXCoin, DeVCoin...

There is little point scamming around with garbage that has such pathetically low difficulty/hashrate that a stupid meme can whip up more hash rate than it has almost overnight, as such crap is just too insanely vulnerable to attack.

-MarkM-

It is also full of assholes who launch coins they cannot secure.

What is Auroracoin's difficulty/hashrate?

-MarkM-

Ok then the rationale for buying the merged mined SHA256 coins is that they are merged mined, and the rationale for not buying Tenebrix and Fairbrix is that they are scrypt coins in addition to not being capable yet of being merged mined.

I should add CoiLedCoin to the list since it too is a merged mined SHA256 coin that is not on any exchanges currently.

The rationale for mining or buying coins that are not on any exchanges of course is simply that once they get on to exchanges various profitiability sites will notice how profitable they are and pump the difficulty way up which often can tend to also pump the price way up, so they are best mined or bought long before anyone even imagines that they will ever get onto any exchanges.

Check out http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc for a glimpse of some coins that you don't yet see on web based exchanges...

The ones not on exchanges yet are mostly also not yet included in the historical tables and plots of rates that are linked to from http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

For many of those assets market-makers had tended to place their sell orders one, two, three or more percent above the shown rate and their buy orders one two three or more percent below the shown rate, depending on the scale of the market. (Scale meaning are you buying/selling in whole coins, tens of coins, hundreds of coins, thousands of coins, tens of thousands of coins etc scale. All pairs can have distinct separate markets of different scales where scale is any integer power of ten.)

-MarkM-

Awesome, thanks. I will keep on with my hoarding of all the merged mined SHA256 coins then.

(I would have anyway of course but would also have had to get some fixes in place to protect my investment. As is I will continue to protect my investment by deploying the most efficient ASICs I can get my hands on, starting by filling up my new 400 amp service with miners as soon as the damn electricians and power corp complete the deployment of the 400 amp service...)

-MarkM-

Your error right from the start is the fact that you have not missed the bitcoin train.

Thus the remainder of your reasoning is irrelevant.

Bitcoin is currently still at an insanely low price, an excellent buying opportunity.

Any time you can buy them for less than US$1000 is a good deal but right now you can pick them up for way the heck less than that thus profit very quickly just in the recovery to $1000 then the regaining of the $1200+ previous peak let alone the long term continued growth.

-MarkM-

So all the merged mined SHA256 coins are still vulnerable to timewarp of one kind or another?

If so any fixes available yet so they can all be updated with a fix?

-MarkM-

Are GRouPcoin, GeistGeld, Tenebrix and Fairbrix new enough for you?

-MarkM-

Is GeistGeld still vulnerable?

How about the other merged mined SHA256 coins?

(In which we might as well include Huntercoin and Mazacoin though I am not yet convinced merged mining those is working, as in I haven't actually found any blocks of either of them yet.)

-MarkM-

Flawed in what way?

Other than the fact it was initially prototyped using multicoin, since the point of multicoin was simply to be able to use the same executable to run any blockchain) In other words, what was wrong with the specifications of its blockchain, that made it too flawed to use the same specifications in the bitcoin based executable that runs just the one blackchain and a testnet for it instead of using a config file to set which blockchain it is to use at runtime?

(Which language or binary one uses to run a blockchain doesn't change whether the blockchain is flawed or not, it is merely an implementation detail).

-MarkM-

Yes hopefully litecoin will get most of the ASIC power and all the clones will be left in the dust.

But DOGE nonetheless showed how insanely vulnerable a blockchain is that has not yet got huge amounts of ASIC power securing it; it is vulnerable to GPUs, some might even be vulnerable to CPUs: botnets, though more and mroe now botnets are going to have GPUs as well as CPUs at their fingertips.

Actually botnets might even be a good argument why it would be better not to have mining power in the hands of non-technical people, since if any idiot can have a bunch of ASIC power probably that will mean botnets will have lots of ASIC power, since it might be mostly the "any idiot" types who provide most botnets with most of their zombie machines...

-MarkM-

I didn't miss the boat. How he scammed people is by basically a variety of pump and dump. He built a coin, got people bought into it, (kind of similar idea to "pump") then screwed them over by abandoning it and creating a whole new blockchain, kind of like dumping one and pumping the next one.

He didn't merely port over the scrypt stuff, he orphaned the blockchain he had sold people on and started another instead.

Kind of a bait and switch even maybe. People bought in to his supposedly improved coin, improved compared to tenebrix; then once he had sold them on that he came out with yet another one without carrying over people's investment like for example Protoshares has done with Bitshares.

He screwed his investors.

-MarkM-

Having two coins use the same hashing method without being merged mined very very nearly guarantees one having enough hashing power to attack the other.

Once there are three such coins it is a mathematical certainty that at least one of them has less than half the hashing power.

So yes, if the litecoin miners chose to attack DOGE they have enough hashjing power to do it.

Merged mining might not help even, since if they were merged mined the litecoin miners could attack DOGE without diverting any of their hashing power from still mining litecoin at the same time they attack DOGE. So some claim that even merged mining is no real help.

-MarkM-

They ported fairbrix from multicoin codebase to bitcoin codebase but the scam part entered when they then hacked the name and maybe a few stats instead of simply releasing it as a bitcoin code based version of fairbrix, a simple upgrade of fairbrix to the bitcoin codebase.

Basically instead of upgrading the existign coin they chose to try to start a new scamcoin of their own using the fact it was based on newer code as a selling point. kind of unfair competition even since of course the fairbrix users/holders were screwed over by their own developer, who ran off to screw them over with a competing coin instead of upgrading the coin he had already created and caused people to buy into.

So it was a double-scam: dump fairbrix and pump a new scam instead...

The gentlepersonly thing to do would have been to first release the upgraded fairbrix - fairbrix ported to the bitcoin codebase, before going on to churn out yet another scam.

Instead it was like thanks for all the wealth you poured into my fairbrix blockchain but ha ha I an now leaving you in the lurch as bag-holders and starting a whole new blockchain ha ha ha you suckers never learn do you I bet you are gonna throw money at this one too hahahaha.

Since he was demostrating that leaving the investors in the lurch was his modus operandi it maybe was kind of pathetically stupid for anyone to buy into litecoin at all, how long was it before he abandoned that one too?

-MarkM-

Look at the difficulty history of litecoin and DOGEcoin.

DOGE had enough hashpower to trash litecoin: to 51+% attack it, double spend it, etc.

A currency needs to be SECURE. If a stupid meme can whip up enough power to trash it virtually overnight it is no-where near secure.

If all the hashing power that litecoin has plus all the hashing power that DOGE has were all added together then maybe possibly that might add up to enough that some other meme couldn't whip up enough hashing power almost overnight to be able to attack it then maybe that would start looking secure.

So maybe if there could be merged mined together so all that hashing power could be combined, maybe scrypt might be getting somewhere.

Then again though maybe DOGE was just a fluke little stupid meme not an extremely well-crafted expert deployment so who knows, maybe another meme will pop up and show that truly well executed use of viral media/memes can come up with enough power to blow even that combined power away.

It is very fortunate that the DOGe meme happened to be a "lets be yet another scrypt coin" meme instead of a "lets PWN all the scrypt coins" meme because the amount of hashing power raised was enough to blow away any scrypt coin.

Since then yes the balance of power has shifted. Both litecoin and DOGE though are still pathetically insecure. Implementing merged mining for them might maybe help but so far no one seems to be working on doing that.

-MarkM-

But that has already been done.

There is no point churning out more and more and more variations on "the wheel". What is needed is uses for wheels. Products you can buy, services you can use, merged mining pools that let them all work together and so on and so on and so on.

What needs doing now is securing any coins that can be secured, and building services for them and making products available for sale denominated in them and so on.

Possibly if Litecoin and DOGE were made able to be merged mined together scrypt might maybe be salvage-able, if not oh well too bad but there are still ten coins that can be merged mined together, using SHA256 ASICs so we can at least maybe hope to secure ten chains. Maybe. Well maybe at least a few of them anyway.

What would really help would be for someone to build a free open source merged mining pool package, so that merged mining could be come widespread due to a plethora of pools for doing it appearing...

-MarkM-

For a crapcoin, also known as a blockchain based coin for which you do not control more hashing power than the rest of the planet, yes.

As such crap is something you simply cannot secure.

Look what happened to Litecoin: a stupid meme blew it away. If that meme had said lets PWN all the scrypt coins instead of saying lets be yet another scrypt coin, boom, it'd be obvious that scrypt is way too insecure, so insecure a stupid meme could come up overnight with enough hashing power to PWN it.

Kind of ironic really, since it had been thought that what was insecure about it was its lack of ASICs, which implied that it was vulnerable to any attacker willing to create an ASIC for it. Turned out all it took to beat its hashing power was a stupid meme, without any ASICs at all.

-MarkM-

Well if you want to start from scratch, don't start from blockchain based cryptocoins, because that is so far from scratch it is just garbage garbage garbage.

Do something totally from scratch for a coin that someone - so called Satoshi Nakamoto, apparently - did make from scratch.

A whole new service or application or something from scratch for the coin that was itself a from scratch coin...

Years ago people wanted me to make currencies for them, but as we keep seeing over and over again, blockchains are insanely expensive to secure, hardly any of them are anywhere close to secure. So I had them all move over to Open Transactions, a system I have for years been working on helping the guy who built it from scratch get it ready for "prime time" aka "for grandma"...

"From scratch" nowadays for blockchains means, basically, "starting with more computing power than everyone else on the planet all put together". So basically it means first lets design a new algorithm and an ASIC to do that algorithm, then build a world class datacentre full of such ASICs and fill Future Shop, The Source, Walmart and so on full of consumer miners, so on launch day we can turn on at least one huge datacentre per continent plus have that still be less hashing power than all the units the Walmarts etc have customers waiting all night for the midnight hour to buy...

-MarkM-

I didn't say no-one else does.

Basically who-ever it is that you are not / do not have needs salary. Whatever you yourself are - the founder - doesn't need a salary because they are the idea person whose idea is so great in their own eyes that they are willing to take a year or few living on Ramen sleeping under bridges to spare every penny they have to hire who-ever they need to do the parts they cannot do themselves...

Or if they do need a salary, they get a job, and work on their idea the other 16 hours of each day except the days they collapse a few hours into sleep.

-MarkM-

I've been loving the fact that so many of my lowball buy offers have been accepted, I have acquired lots of IXCoins thanks to who-ever is dumping them so cheap.

I have tons of offers still spread down and down and down though so the more they want to dump the happier I will be.

-MarkM-