+1. 

There's really no point even talking about it while the people talking can't see the code yet.  Nothing concrete to discuss.

First, yeah, you can 'issue' a cryptocurrency.  It would be centralized, but with transaction log published in real time and automatically auditable by any client.  You get a couple of the major advantages of bitcoin without all that messy anarchic decentralization stuff that "reasonable consumers" don't care about anyway.  You can make promises about the money supply and people can use software to ensure that those promises remain unbroken.  You can transfer it across the globe in minutes, etc. 

And it's just not true that anything an altcoin can do can be done better by Bitcoin.  Peercoin does proof-of-stake mining (keeping transaction fees low enough that it can be used in vending machine sales etc), and Bitcoin doesn't.  Nextcoin promises to do that even better, btw.   Anoncoin does Tor integration and Bitcoin doesn't.  Several coins resist centralization by being ASIC resistant and Bitcoin doesn't.  Bitcoin transaction fees are already too high for vending-machine sized sales and several altcoins are able to fit into that niche.  Technically speaking there are already valid reasons to choose different cryptocurrencies for different applications rather than choosing Bitcoin for all applications.  Bitcoin currently has a bigger network, and that is to its advantage in many, but not all, applications. 

Cryptocurrencies have a massive advantage over paper currencies in terms of counterfeit detection, auditability, liquidity and speed/reliability in transmission.  But they're not really more resistant to theft (as wallet-stealing programs demonstrate), nor inherently resistant to being extorted from someone against their will (or cryptolocker wouldn't work).  Anyway the nub of the problem is whether any cryptocurrency, in the long run, has a massive advantage over other cryptocurrencies.   The question of why someone prefers one paper currency over another is not posed as an analogy to the question of why someone prefers a crypto over a paper currency.   The interesting question is why to prefer one cryptocurrency over another cryptocurrency.

I don't see any evidence yet that this is a "natural monopoly" wherein network effects will automatically cause a single mover to become dominant.  That's an interesting idea, and may be true, but I don't see evidence for it yet.

Satoshi's invention combines a printing press capable of producing tokens that can be easily verified real and can't be forged, an international courier service that can take these tokens anywhere in just a few minutes, and 'brakes' on the printing press that guarantee that no more than a given number of tokens will ever be produced from that printing press. 

And now anyone can set up one of these printing presses, each with its own international courier service and its own supply of unforgeable, easily-verified tokens.

I've been trying to identify a reason why one of them should become (or remain) dominant in the long run, and I don't think there is one.  Some will die off as their developers give up or their innovations lead to security failures or whatever, and some will become more popular because of good technical innovations, responsive devs, good interface design, or good support.... but I just can't identify a reason why any of them should ever achieve lasting dominance.  They are competitors in a market with little or no barrier to entry, and many of them are more or less suited to particular commercial niches, so there are incentives to choose one over another that vary from one task to another. 

In the physical world, on paper, anybody can set up a printing press (or a laser printer) and print his own money.  But most of the time nobody cares.  If I show somebody my freshly-designed $4 bill with Guy Fawkes on the front, they'll look at me funny and treat it as a joke.  Or a crime, although some folks can't tell the difference. I can promise I'll never print more than a few million of them, and they'll wonder why the hell that's relevant.  I can demonstrate that nobody else can make them exactly the same, and show how you can tell mine from any attempted copies -- and by this time they'll be getting mad at me for standing around talking uselessly so much and kick me out.  If I happened to drop any of those $4 bills, they go in the trash once I'm gone.

What would I need to get my paper $4 bills taken seriously?  And is it something that any of these cryptocurrencies have?

This is our unacknowleged problem.  Altcoins didn't cause it; they just exposed it.

Sooner or later someone is going to issue a cryptocurrency with a promise that you can use it to buy a certain amount of a particular thing from the issuer.  And other things being as equal as possible,  and most folks being unconcerned with privacy, I think people are going to appreciate that more, and be more confident about it, than they appreciate and are confident in abstractions like privacy and decentralization.

My point is that Chuck Berry *ISN'T* analogous to TCP/IP, and neither is Bitcoin.  You don't have to be chuck berry to play rock & roll, and you don't have to be Bitcoin to use a cryptocurrency protocol.  

Bitcoin exists at the application layer, not the network layer.  You can have a different application use the same network and even the same protocol, and you don't need to touch infrastructure to make the change.  

There is absolutely nothing that locks out new coins from competing with Bitcoin.

Um. 

I can't find any way to use 'listunspent' to get more than just the utxo's associated with a particular wallet or account. 

I want a list of all the unspent txouts in the entire blockchain. 

Am I missing something, or do I just need to write a blockchain explorer to get my list?

thank you. 

Most of such advice you'll get is from people who would profit from you buying them. 

People who cheerfully give such advice may not have your best interests at heart.

For those who are saying "no newer and different cryptocoin could replace Bitcoin, cos Bitcoin was first!!!11"  

I'm noticing that a lot of Rock & Roll artists sold a hell of a lot more records than Chuck Berry.  

Inventing Rock & Roll (arguable, but he was definitely the "firstest with the mostest") did not get him to the all-time record for most number-one Rock & Roll albums and greatest number of Rock & Roll fans.  Those honors went to Elvis Presley and the Beatles (at least so far... ).  Largely because they had slicker promotion and weren't working against long-established racism.  

We need to remember that slicker promotion is *OWNED* by major commercial enterprises like banks and search giants, and that commercially speaking prejudices against the anarchic, decentralized, and anonymous are just as strong as prejudices in the US in the late 50s against racism.

For those of us who flatly refuse to install flash on a machine we're trying to keep secure, would you care to post the vid in a non-flash format, or even just type here about why you think they'll never be spent?

The protocol didn't get hacked, Dogewallet got hacked.  

Somebody got access to the server's filesystem and modified their PHP, arranging for all dogecoin payments to go to an address of the attacker's  choosing.  

While the hacked website was running, people typed in their passwords authorizing the payment of about 21 million dogecoins to various places; and all of those wound up with the attacker instead of the intended places.

So the dogecoin protocol is fine, but the people who ran dogewallet failed to keep their server secure.  

Ohh, that's one of the wrong answers.  That's just saying "not my problem" which means you have no solution.  I was actually thinking this would work until you failed to answer that.

Is there a handy way to use the RPC interface (or something) to extract a list of the transactions (including pubkeys) associated with unspent txouts?  Some special command on blockchain.org?  Something?  I know the client has to build and keep this list handy; I'm just wondering if there's a way to look at it.

The nice thing about this guide is that it's applicable to nearly any bitcoin-descended cryptocurrency source code.  You don't need the foocoin or barcoin or even Litecoin sources to start with this.  The line numbers won't match, but the features involved in the files you need to edit are the same across a wide variety of sources.  You can download the Bitcoin sources directly to get a known quantity with all the latest bugfixes, or the MEC sources to get some cool extensions, or the Doge sources for ... um, sorry.  I guess there's no reason to do that after all. 

Cryptsy has been scrod a couple times by client updates causing forks; they apparently prefer now to stop trading in a coin before a client upgrade  happens, then reconnect afterward. 

Looks like we're all out of locomotives and legos.

The difficulty would just need to be proportional to the number of coins being used for mining.  Anyway, it doesn't probably need to adjust more than once per a long enough period for the money supply to change significantly.  The description is that the factor due to time since the last block is exponential - ie, it doubles once a minute or something like that.  So even if there's twice as many coins being used for mining, block times only get one minute shorter.   And even if 75% of the coins used for mining are taken offline, the block times would get only two minutes longer. 

There's probably no real need for difficulty to change more often than new versions of the client come out.  That said, there may be a feedback mechanism that does the difficulty changes built-in, but I wouldn't worry if there isn't.

My problem with all of these 'trips into space' is that they are two-way trips with no destination at the other end and no way to build a destination at the other end.

I want three things in a 'trip into space' lottery prize:  First, I want a destination to go to where it is possible for people to self-sufficiently live their lives and build infrastructure. Second, I want a one-way not a two-way ticket, and third, I want an apartment to live in, or an offer of local employment sufficient to pay for one on an ongoing basis, when I get there. 

wait.  40 second blocks, reward halving every ten million blocks.

equals 400 million seconds per halving time.

1 year ~= 365.25 days, 24 hours per day, 3600 seconds per hour.  total 31.5576 million seconds. 

400 million / 31.5576 million = 12.6752... years.

So, the reward on this would be halving every 12 years, 8 months, 3 days, 2 hours, 1 minute, and 53.35 seconds?  Approximately? 

Hoooly crap, that's a long distribution schedule. 

So, yes, definitely not a pump and dump.  But dude, are you seriously in this for the next fifty years of your life? 

100 Quadrillion is a lot of coins.  Let me see:  to store that in a 64-bit integer, you'll need to have 5 places of divisibility or less.  IE, DRK can be no more than 100K of its smallest subdivision, where one Bitcoin is 100M Satoshi.  So for starters you'll need to set COIN (in util.h) to 100K instead of 100M, and right under it set CENT to 1K instead of 1M.  

Depending on whether other people have made this change and tested it before, you may have some bugs to hunt in parts of the code that aren't sensitive to those constants and ought to be.

But seriously, why the ever-larger numbers?  It's getting to be a cliche and it's been done so much now that it's become one of the hallmarks of a crapcoin.  Cut a factor of a million off of that and it won't change the way people use it at all.  

The reward halving time is much more important than the number of coins.  If it's more than four years, the coin may be a good long-term investment.  If it's less than half a year (like QRK) the coin may be good for a big pump and dump, but it will not be interesting or valuable after the first few months.

Heh.  Maybe I ought to make a boardgame about pump and dump scams.  It could be interesting...

Seconded.  If you're trying to link people's transactions without their active consent and cooperation, then you're working directly against their interests.  Good people will be trying to stop you.