He did it for a bug in a coin code itself, not because someone sent coins to the wrong address.

In addition to bittrex, blocktrades.us and openledger.info (Bitshares DEX) also trade Steem.

Blocktrades has said they will trade Steem Dollars when they start being distributed in a few weeks. Others probably will too, but none has announced it.

No it doesn't. The probability that a block will be found on the next attempt (ignoring various constant scaling factors) is 1/D. It is independent of M. As M grows then mining becomes less profitable and it is more profitable to hop elsewhere.

The reason this doesn't happen with PPLNS is that N is constant. M is not.

Sorry, I didn't read the rest of your post because it seemed premised on an error. Once we get past the initial error the rest of the discussion may be worth another look.

That is reasonable but if if you are going to use a DB, LMDB is about as lightweight as it comes because it uses memory mapping and access to hot data is as fast as regular memory. Of course, much rests on knowing how to use it properly, and although the Monero implementation is getting better, that part is unfortunately still not optimal.

I suppose I should also count Howard Chu, the developer of LMDB, as a premier level Monero coder. I didn't think of him because he is relative newcomer and I also haven't personally reviewed his code (other than a few small commits, but I couldn't get much from that). But his accomplishments with LMDB, LDAP and other projects speak for themselves. He prefers to code in C, not C++.

warptangent was a talented coder and active Monero developer but not "core team" member and certainly not a forum personality (I think he may have posted once or twice). I'm pretty sure he was younger than you. Out of respect for his family's privacy I would rather not go into further details about his death (and I also don't know that much)

Announcement was here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4c9wh8/a_fond_goodbye_to_our_friend_and_contributor/


The blockchain node, which includes most of the core logic for managing accounts, rewards, tokens, etc. is all C++. The web site back end is closed source so we don't know anything about it, or at least I don't. They have several developers (full time I believe) with apparently different specialities.

Well, it is a nice balance that it can be mined with both, and has been since shortly after launch when GPU miners became available. Recently there has probably been relatively little GPU mining because Ethereum mining has captured most of the GPUs. In the future maybe they will come back. 

What they hell? I showed you the ledger for Steem's "stealth mine" coins. Most of the Steem "stealth mine" coins are sitting in the 'steemit' account doing nothing. A relatively small amount have been sold off, and coins are consistently being distributed to new users.


Only the devs can mine is wrong. I mined and so did some other non-devs. Unlike Dash, Steem has a hyper-transparent ledger where most of the coins in existence can be clearly seen and tracked with people's names on them.

It was not a "fair launch" as you like to define that term, but it wasn't completely closed either, nor was there anything deceptive or misleading about it that I have identified.

I'm also not sure where they claim "no premine" either. It used to be on their thread but I don't see it any more.

There are no coins making any real moves to 100 millions of user adoption with the possible exception of Bitcoin perhaps slowly very, very doing so. But this was a discussion of altcoins, which makes Bitcoin irrelevant.

Leave that kind of hyperbole to the pumpers. You're not very good at that game (no insult).


It may, it may not. I'm on record saying many times that it will probably fail and become worthless. Of all the coins around, it is in a small group that has the best chance to be around in 20 years (Bitcoin obviously far eclipses all the rest, and not only because of its size)


Maybe. It could be that the mass market just doesn't want it. One of the merits of a slow and steady approach is that the mass market may wants something in the future that it doesn't want now.


IMO the Bitshares ecosystem (including Steem) has the best coders and not just Dan, at least if you want to stick with C++ or don't care about PL. Also the best quality code stack. Bitcoin has very good coders, but I'm assuming you are only speaking of alts. Monero had one excellent C++ coder but he unfortunately passed away, along with several competent ones. I'm unsure about Ethereum; apparently Gavin was a good coder (speaking on second-hand reports, not my personal assessment). Vitalik is hardly a coder at all. I don't know about the others. But as you say coding ability is not the only thing that matters. There are many other ways to mess things up, and other ways to add value.

8600/day or so?

You are doing what you decry, which is trying to declare the market to be according to your perceptions or desires (all about 100x pumps and 3-6 month hype coins). Monero is doing fine after two and half yeare. Development continues, the market cap is at or near its all-time high, and even the price in Bitcoin is higher than it has been for most of if its lifetime (or another way to look at that is the weighted average of coins from their date of emission).

Monero has outlasted and outgrown hundreds of hype crap coins that came after it and it will continue to outlast most of the current crop of garbage. If you want to play the pumps as a trader, or think that you are have a particular skill set that makes you well-suited to playing crap coin launches as an organizer and hype promoter, only then would all this short term noise even matter to you.

It is not. With the scheme as described the split factor for block rewards is not constant (ignoring difficulty changes) as it is for PPLNS (i.e. 1/N). More shares at the same height means rewards split more ways, which reduces the expectation for a winning share. This is in some way analogous to PPS, and will uncover similar problems.

Of course I do. And a free market includes a free market of ideas where people can give opinions, point out problems, and criticize actions (including my own).

It does not mean that everyone is free to rip everyone else off without being called out for it.

I think you have me confused with cryptohunter. I don't think Windows binaries are that big a deal, although certainly if you are going to huge number of coins in the first hour even time spent compiling is a disadvantage. Steem didn't do that; mining was flat and there was plenty of time to figure out how to compile it (or follow the posted instructions).

Go ahead and look at my Dash instamine thread. It doesn't mention it, except to point out how Evan was offering 5000 XCO for someone to compile it shortly after launch, demonstrating that he had already mined a lot of it.


You could do exactly the same virtual box deal with steem, so that can't possibly be a point in favor of Dash. By the time of the relaunch there was a step-by-step mining guide posted.


It doesn't matter if he did. He transparently mined almost all the coins anyway. Hardly anything left to hide, especially after accounting for the (relatively tiny) mining done by me and a few others.


It is unsuitable because in unlocked form it has permanent 100+% per year inflation. Unless you live in Venezuela, I can't really see anyone finding that an attractive proposition (and even then, Bitcoin or something else is far more attractive). In locked form it has 0-10% inflation but can't be spent and can only be unlocked slowly over a two-year period.

The purpose of the token is to serve, in locked form, as a form of sybil-resistant karma, reputation, and voting power on the social media site. The unlocked form exists only temporarily to facilitate transfers, after which someone needs to relatively quickly relock it or see it inflated away. Steemit, by the way, doesn't use the karma aspect of their holdings at all (voting or posting on the site). The coins just sit there in a transparent account doing nothing (which causes them to slowly lose value).

Whether or not you think any of this is a good idea (many aspects of it are half-baked at best IMO), there is no way to consider any of this a cryptocurrency where you (or at least some people even if not you) might consider speculating on it becoming widely accepted as a currency.

There is a smartcoin USD-pegged token (that doesn't exist yet) that will be used to payout rewards for the best posts, but that's still not something you would want to speculate on either, unless you feel like speculating on a likely-inferior-to-the-original USD (other than possibly speculating on the failure of the pegging as recently happened with Nubits).

That has been extensively discussed on the Monero subreddit recently: https://reddit.com/r/monero

For a while I think their thread did say "No premine" which was literally true but misleading. They caught some heat for it (with good reason) and it was removed. But if we are going to compare with Dash lets keep in mind what the Dash thead still says:


Really???

Funny thing there is just such a transparent ledger -- the blockchain!

The disposition of the "stealth mined" coins is entirely transparent on the blockchain here:

https://steemd.com/@steemit

They originally flowed in from the mining accounts that were named steemit## and sminer## which you can see on the history if you go far enough back. There were a few other accounts such as "administrator" and "moderator" that were also disclosed on the original thread as being theirs.

Coins that are used to fund new user accounts are sent from there to here first:

https://steemd.com/@steem

Coins that are sold to fund development are sent to @bittrex or maybe @blocktrades. Ned, the CEO of Steemit, has been transparent with the community about when he is selling coins for that purpose (although it is obvious on the blockchain anyway).

The payouts to posters are newly-created coins (like mining) not from any account.


I don't.


Well they do, but I still don't "approve" it.

First off that statement is obviously nonsense because no one knows the distribution of Dash, nor can we can really compare on a apples-to-apples basis between Steem at a few months old and Dash at a few months old.

But let's compare Dash with Steem.

Dash was launched with misleading statements by the developer about the launch time. Steem did not do this and in fact relaunched with a day advance notice of a specific launch time after there were some problems with the first launch. By that time some community members had already posted guides for how to compile and mine and even some lesser-skilled miners had started attempting it, making it somewhat less of a stealthy launch.

The Steem code was essentially feature-complete at launch so everyone could look through the source code as I did in order to determine what the coin was intended to do (and everyone had extra time to do this given the relaunch). Dash, on the other hand, did not release any feature or development plan information whatsoever until after the conclusion of the instamine, and in fact deliberately withheld it.

The Steem developer told people at launch that he was mining a lot and released the names of the accounts he was using for mining, making it all transparent, disclosed to all participants, and verifiable on the blockchain (there are no relevant privacy features and the blockchain uses transparent named accounts for all operations).

Steem mining proceeded at a constant rate for one month. Dash's instamine was front-loaded primarily onto literally one hour (and remember that is one hour following a misleading launch time), then front-loaded to a lesser extent over the first 8 hours and finally concluded after two days. At some point during the month the Steem developer stated he had mined "enough", cut back on his mining so others could mine more (and again, it was verifiable on the blockchain that he actually did this).

At the conclusion of the pure-PoW mining phase, all of the coins from the developer mining accounts were merged into the transparent 'steemit' account, with a stated plan to sell them off to pay for development and distribute them for free to new users (each new account requires 10 STEEM funding). These actions have occurred and are transparent on the blockchain. Where did the Dash instamine coins go? How much was mined by the developers or others? Is there similar transparency? Are there or have there ever been explicit, transparent and verifiable plans to distribute it?

Unlike Dash, there have been no supply or emissions cuts in Steem that have the effect of amplifying the early mining. There have been no new schemes introduced to pay more of the supply to the instaminers, and indeed some of the tweaks and proposals that have been made have the effect of diluting early holdings even faster.

And finally, on top of all this, Steem isn't even trying to by a cryptocurrency, it is a social media site. The Steem token is totally unsuitable for use as a cryptocurrency, and no one (including the devs) suggests otherwise. So again, comparing it and its distribution with Dash (even if Dash's distribution were likewise transparent which it mostly is not) makes no sense.

So while I will repeat that I don't think their stealth mine strategy is a good idea, nor do I personally support it, nor do I think it has worked out particularly as they had planned, nor do I suggest that anyone invest in it, comparing it to Dash or suggesting that it is somehow more of a fraudulent launch than Dash ignores all or nearly all facts about what actually happened with each coin.

How do you implement PPLNS without consensus on the order of shares?

I think when you make this kind of change to allow sibling shares you will need to introduce more complex incentive models to try to make the payouts "fair" and unexploitable (including hop-proof), not unlike how GHOST or ETH's version of it attempt to do so with block rewards. That sounds like a mess.

In any case I'm glad to hear that firmware issues seem to be resolved on the latest Antminers, potentially reducing the need for this.

That is really fantastic news. Let's hope we get a lot more of those beasts up on p2pool soon.

I was considering restarting my modest (well under 1 MW) but, despite claims of full and forced industrialization and centralization, economically-viable Bitcoin mining operation after reviewing the initial S9 announcement but for largely unrelated reasons decided to wait for a later batch. When I deploy them it will almost certainly be on p2pool.