This is an interesting experiment. BTW what do these companies do?

Probably best not to crucify the exchange operator. From the looks of things the site fell victim to scammers that transfered money from phished Australian bank accounts and used that money to buy bitcoins.

Obviously account verification should have been introduced much earlier but that is not infallible as accounts could still be verified with stolen identities.

While I sympathize with people who have lost money you probably should have seen this coming. He had to change banks accounts several times because of these problems and Mtgox faced the same issues with their technocash account when they stupidly allowed direct bank transfers.

oh ... so is LTC CPU mining as good as dead now?...

Here's some news coverage of a recent fund raiser that her friends held for her:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/video/watch/28575521/

You can see me in a blue cap at about the 0:51 mark.

Thanks to Jeremy from Spend Bitcoins you can now use bitcoin to donate to the fund to help pay her medical and rehabilitation costs. Dana lived in the same neighborhood as me and is the victim of an arson attack that left burns to 60% of her body.  She faces a long and difficult road to recovery.

Please see:

http://www.spendbitcoins.com/dana-vulin/

That's not the coins responsibility.

There is still potential to a) reduce the latency at each step of the pyramid or b) throw out the pyramid model and come up with something new entirely

While you say the niche market for software that would make use of this hardware is very small it would almost certainly be associated with very high profit.

That sounds like a challenge. Remember I said it would be a means of speculating on future CPU innovation. If you look at history there have been fundamental breakthroughs in CPU technology at various times. We are going through a period of steady innovation.

I would say something like this:

If you don't believe that we will make some incredible breakthroughs in CPU tech in the future don't invest in this hypothetical coin.

If you do want to speculate that there will be incredible breakthroughs in CPU tech then do invest in this coin.

There may be a faithful  small number of believers that keep hashing away waiting for the breakthrough in CPU tech. It may never come or it may be decades away or it may happen in just a few years. People
like you will keep saying it will never happen and those people would never invest in this coin. If it does happen those people will wish they did and the people that did decide to speculate in it will win big. Their initial investment would really be more like taking up a hobby than taking a risk with the upside of a huge potential pay off.

It is for speculation. I.e. No one knows what will happen in the future but allowing the creation of markets for speculation in technological innovation would be a big step forward.

and an ASIC is less efficient than DNA based computing but that's years away

Anyway as ignorant as I may be that didn't stop Forest gump

I may even pledge some kind of a bounty towards development of this coin. It won't be a huge one though. Just for a bit of fun really.


Yes, but that's I'm arguing that this is the point. We want to encourage CPU's to become more efficient at memory hard math. Sure if people can load lots of cache onto FPGAs or saSICS/ASICs and make them good at memory hard math then  that's certainly no small feat either.

All we need to do it be a leap a head of ltc and solidcoin and we already have a market. If we can keep that going for a few years we are bound to see some exciting developments in that time.

I think we will see proprietary digital coins and there are groups working on them (or at least reference standards for them) such as opencoin, faircoin and e-dinar.

You may see a hybrid between fiat and crypto currency where only central banks can issue coins. Governments will likely back these as "standards" but only because they are lackies for people that own banks.

Part complaint, part observation, part jealous rage.

Also consider that Mark Cuban is a billionaire thanks to the .com bubble be he has openly called the share market a scam.

Really it is the observation that sometimes when we want to make resources free for the world to have we may latter find that we ourselves missed out and what have been personally better off if we had of focused on our own personal gain. Then wait until after that to start being generous.


Also domain scarcity is interesting because there is a glut of domain space speculation now. Recently there was a a new tld .xxx and many lucrative .xxx domains (for example gay.xxx) sold for 5 figure amounts.

They keep introducing new tlds and people keep speculating in them. Once there was so little interest in .info they had to give millions of of them away for free. Now some .infos sell for 4 figure amounts.

Now iccan rules will probably lead to a lot of people losing their shirts buying new exotic tld domains and then most of the market (with the exception of domains that people actually use) going bust.

Who knows maybe .bit domains will be the next big thing when the public gets interested in them.

A lot of the early internet culture was about freedom of information. About post-scarcity. Ironic that proponents of the new age are usually believers in some form of post-scarcity yet the people that profit from the new age are those that get in grab all those resources for themselves.

btw here is the pic of the microbee modem..

came out before the days of smart modems... so you had to dial the number yourself on phone handset

only 300 baud.. but I wish I had of used it to develop a fascination with them

 http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=19#top_display_media

all the crap I got at school for "talking about computers too much" I should have ignored or possibly been "less talk more action"

Well I had a PC as well.  Actually my first computer was a microbee that I got in '87. That actually did have a modem but our family didn't get a modem when we had the 286. Much later in about 1996 about a year after the web started to get famous thanks to shows like "hot chips" on ABC we finally got a 14.4 modem ... when the 28.8  was available.

Before that I was mostly using my PC as a games machine and mostly in DOS. I never started up Windows (2?)3.1 because it was shit. The kids at school bought games consoles because their parents couldn't afford computers. So it was the "cool" thing to get a games console. That's the lesson don't follow the crowd. Do your own thing that most people have never heard of. Do it at least 10 years before it will become mainstream. Any modem at all even a 9,600 at the right time could have put my on a completely different path to getting on the net 2-3 years earlier which would have made a huge difference to my life.


Hindsight is a bitch but i'd rather have it than be blind. I think that the best opportunities have no risk at all.


That's true just like the web. The people that started it convinced the world to give them a lot of money. Maybe in the days prior to the web when it was mostly usenet and whatever else no one would have dreamed that the internet would one day be commercialised.

I've recently started thinking about the early days of the web and domain names in a similar way to how I have been thinking about bitcoin. If only I had of bought a supra 14.4 .32bis modem instead of a sega master system 2 in the early 90's (when I was about 12) and then a proceeded to register hundreds of domain names.

A bit of a scam the whole early adopter DNS system when you think about it.

I could also suggest that the miner could set their own difficulty. For example if my CPU doesn't have enough cache to mine at the current level of "memory hard" I would set it to a lower level. The block reward would be lower (and possibly slowly shrinking) at this level too. Finding the right balance between keeping lots of people hashing and encouraging development and deployment of CPUs much better at memory hard math would be ideal. The graduation to higher levels of "memory hard" would probably progress the declining block rewards for those mining at easier levels.

Although if someone were to do it i'd suggest that the way the difficulty adjusts should be optimised to happen slowly enough to not lose hashing power (contributed to the network) from existing CPUs but still encourage increasing efficiency for memory hard math e.g. new state of the art CPUs. The slow hash speed on video card and main RAM used would reduce the hash power of the network and then adjust the difficulty so that it is less memory hard bringing CPU's back in until they are beaten (but more like very gradually phased out) by CPUs more powerful and efficient at memory hard math.  

This alternate coin would encourage CPU innovation and give us a secure network with a much lower energy footprint.

Ideally it could just plod along for years like bitcoin did Jan 2009 to Jan 2011. If cutting edge CPU ability at memory hard math only increases very slowly then the difficulty only goes up very slowly. If there is a sudden innovation rush and technological breakthrough or arms race then the difficulty adjustment will be able to cope with this as well.

So the memory hard difficulty is dependent on the hash power of the network.

Thanks Artforz, I didn't think it would spill over into main or graphics card RAM but such a coin sounds like desktops would quickly become irrelevant compared to high end servers with a lot more RAM slots. It would be interesting to have a coin that starts off CPU then goes GPU with heaps of video RAM then back to CPU but then requiring heaps of system RAM. Soon we could be looking at 8GB ram modules. After a while though you'd have to mine on high end server machines. The original idea though was to make CPU's better at memory hard math without resorting to system RAM. i'm not knowledgeable enough to know how this could be possible.

I got a reply back from the "International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)" . as mentioned in the bitcoin minefield thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28009.msg720076#msg720076

Dear Chris,

We thank you very much for being willing to make a donation to ICBL-CMC.

Could you please, kindly let me know what you mean by "bitcoin" as we do not
have this system in place yet but are ready to consider it.

Looking forward to hearing from you.
With our best regards,
ICBL-CMC team

I don't understand this line but the rest of your post is a welcomed commentary that I do intend to provide counter-arguments for.

I would assume that the more memory required the *less* feasible GPU mining became. For instance you could (if artforz released the code) mine scrypt coins with a GPU but it would be so inefficient that you might as well just mine them with the CPU. My understanding is that increasing the amount of memory required further would make GPUs even more pitiful. If you kept increasing the memory required CPU's would decrease in hash power. Some CPU's with smaller and or slower amounts of cache (or inefficient cache usage) would fail to keep up. This would push innovation to improve memory management in CPU's as people try to design ways to make CPU's address large cache sizes faster or make more efficient use of L2 and L3 cache.

We would first see more efficient mining software just as people keep improving the existing scrypt miners but ultimately we would be pushing for CPU's that are continuously improving at memory hard math.  
Although you argue it is difficult to make large amounts of cache easy to address there is room for competition and innovation in this area as people push the boundaries on what is possible with the CPU.

Yes it sounds like a lot of very difficult work I agree but that's the whole idea. It is a speculation market for emerging CPU technology.