Being broken on the initial release of the algorithm absolutely disqualifies it as cryptography. If initially it is uncrackable and over time new methods come to light which degrade its effectiveness, that is one thing (specifically your SHA1 example, which is a hash, not encryption btw). But calling ROT26 an encryption algorithm is senseless and just playing at semantics. Blaming someone for cracking ROT26 is mindless and betrays a complete misunderstanding of what cryptography is for.


If your uncle gets a sex change, he could be your aunt. Many things are possible, but before they become so, some things need to take place (turning an outie to an innie for instance). We don't judge based on what something might have been if incorrect assumptions are made (that everyone on the internet plays nice).

FYI, every potential encryption protocol goes through a testing period where some of the best math minds on the planet try to "destroy" it. Releasing something onto the world without an alpha or beta test and then blaming others for bugs is the work of a novice. Novices should stay out of the field of cryptography.
'

The fact that you don't consider merged mining on day zero a flaw, especially in light of recent events is baffling. You really think that you can assume there are no people in the world with large computing resources at their disposal for use in a nefarious manner? Welcome to the internet, I hope you enjoy your stay.

Then again, lots of people have trouble with the concept of what merged mining is. They conflate hashing power with the resultant hashes. They don't understand contract law. They have no idea what is, and what is not valid cryptography. They have no idea what the criminal side of the internet engages in, or what sort of resources are at their disposal. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people get the ethics wrong.

Somehow, an act that caused no economic harm to anyone has everyone in a tremendous uproar. We need a picture of a cat and a car analogy to go with it.

That is exactly my point. Neither the method of cryptography (specifically sharing the BTC hash method, initial friendly hashpower too small or non-existent) nor the facilitation of trade (exchanges on day one) met the minimum required levels.

The experiment was valuable because it identified serious flaws in the launch protocol of potential cryptocurrencies.

But it aint a currency if people can't spend it, and it aint cryptography if it gets cracked on day 1.

Anything that claims to be a cryptocurrency, but fails within 24hrs of launch, was not one.
This thread is off-topic for these forums since it is supposed to be about alternate cryptocurrencies.

I can fork it. I can improve it. I can attack it. I can experiment with it. I can run which ever version of it I like. It is called freedom.


If that power was in the hands of the people, it would be democracy. Unfortunately, you are head of Solidcoin for life and nobody voted you in. That is a dictatorship, not a democracy. You also define the term "non malicious" and you might consider any action counter to your wishes at the time a malicious one. Bad PR hasn't stopped you in the past from making choices, I don't see it stopping you in the future.


No, they don't control bitcoin. That is what you fail to understand. The users of bitcoin are free to do with it what they like. They can run it in any fashion, they can use any derivative work they choose. They can get their bitcoin code or binaries from competing sources. They can make their own mods and offer that as a competing client.

All Solidcoin derivative works are subject to your whim as you retain all rights to code & binary usage.

That is the difference and it is a major one. Perhaps Solidcoin2 needs this additional protection, who knows.

Actually, you owning the copyright makes you the rightsholder. You dictate the terms of use to anyone who uses the code. Those terms are spelled out in license.txt. Finally, license.txt says you reserve the right to revoke usage of the solidcoin codebase from anyone.

As for copyright and bitcoin, the bitcoin code is distributed with the following license:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

Once I download the bitcoin code, I can do with it as I wish, as long as I include that notice at the top of the files.
Solidcoin code and all of its derivatives will always be under the control of Coinhunter (unless the license changes).

1. It can also be CLC merged mining pool as can every other BTC pool in existence. This is the mathematical definition of CLC, any BTC miner can also produce CLC with no additional work. Whether or not a pool chooses to take advantage of this is up to the operator. Whether or not the pool operator chooses to pass on the rewards is up to the operator.

2. Why is it the only thing? Is there a contract that states it will not have any alternative sources of revenue (like advertising)? Providing work and rewards is the minimum a pool must do, there is no upper bound (explicit or implicit) as to a pools functionality. That is like saying the Google is search, and only search, and they made Gmail and now I am FURIOUS because my AOL mail account is less valuable!

3. The miners agree to use Luke's service, in return for some portion of the rewards. The size and shape of that portion is entirely up to the pool operator. Too little rewards, fewer miners. Too great of a reward, pool costs too much to maintain.

4. Luke does not use their systems resources at all. They ask for work, the pool provides the work, they complete the work, they return the completed work, the pool checks the work and gives them their reward. The only thing the pool does is provide work, check the completed work, and provide the reward. The pool does no calculations and runs no code on the users machine.

5. Luke did not "use" their hashing power. He used the results of their hashing power. The result is information. The hashing power is the conversion of electricity into information. No hashing power was used above and beyond that required to hash for BTC.

6. There was no agreed upon scope as you state it. There was no EULA and no official statement as to what services would be provided.

7. Again, he did not use the pools resources. He used the result of the pools resources. The result is information. The pools resources are the conversion of electricity into information.

8. He executed no code on any of his users computers. All information from the users of the pool was given to the pool in exchange for fixed rewards of BTC & NMC. All BTC & NMC rewards were paid. Further use of that information was not covered by any agreement between the users and the pool owner. Furthermore, since Luke created the blocks in question, he owns the copyright on them. The users are paid for the shares they submit. Nothing more than that.

As to litigation. One must prove harm. Since Luke currently controls all CLC coins in accordance with the CLC spec, I don't see how he broke any laws. If anyone should be litigated against, it is the creator of CLC for making exaggerated claims as to the security and viability of the CLC blockchain.

Incorrect. There was and still is no agreement to provide Coiledcoins. There is no agreement promising not to use the completed POWs for other calculations besides those promised to the users.

The housing market is a very complicated example. Some of the speculators misrepresented their assets & earnings in order to take out loans they could only repay by selling the home. Some of those giving out loans lied about the assets & earnings of those who took the loans in order to package these loans into bonds and sell them to investors. Some investors lied about the contents of the mortgage bonds in order to package them into structured debt with inflated ratings and sell them to still more investors. All of these things also took place in countries that did not have the US GSEs or the Fed setting interest rates. It just so happened that by value, the most damage from this occurred in the US. By percentage, Ireland, Spain, and the UK all surpassed the US in housing losses. None the less, these speculators bear a share of the blame because it was their inability to complete the transaction (not the transaction itself) that led to disaster. Had all the housing speculators paid in cash, there would have been no "subprime crisis".

Regarding volatility: one of the most volatile US futures markets is that of onions, and speculators are 100% forbidden from that market. Evidence that volatility exists where no speculators are present.

Name them. Most of the claims on this board involve supposedly new and improved crypto currencies. Many of these are neither new, nor are they improved. They also involve a submission of a proof of work in return for new allocations of currency. They do not involve a percentage of this new allocation given to earlier blocks. They are pump and dump schemes, not pyramid schemes.


If he did the cooking and you did not restrict the use of the knife to only cooking, no fraud occurred and there is no broken contract. Lets say after he is done cooking, a home invasion occurs and he successfully defends his family with your knife. Again, as long as he did what he said he was going to do with the knife (say to cook some food for you) and delivered both food and knife to you as agreed, there is no violation of contract. If you want to make sure that the only thing he uses the knife for is the cooking, you had better spell that out (for instance, kosher rules governing what the knife touches).


The coin was released with merged mining and the largest pool doing merged mining was not acting to appreciate the currencies value. That is a structural flaw in the launch of the coin. The fact that it was not foreseen by the founders is irrelevant. Bitcoin could not have received such an attack as there was no such thing as merged mining when it started, also there is no crypto currency with orders of magnitude more hashing power than BTC that is required for such a scenario to play out today.


It was the centralization of CLC in Eligius that created the conditions where a 51% attack can succeed. You cannot eliminate the potential for the attack, you can only minimize it by distributing the resources among many nodes. Since the ultimate control of the currency is in the hands of the users, they could all band together and decide to modify it in any way they see fit. That is technically a 51% attack, since the majority of the miners decide to change the protocol. The implementation of OP_EVAL in BTC by the developers will technically be a 51% attack on the original protocol. Ideally, no losses of BTC will occur.

You are no longer "unknown" because you just identified yourself!
That means I am now the "dark pool". MWAAHAHAAHHAHAH!
wait...

But does the end of the year coincide with the end of the world?
Can you trace your ancestry back to the Mayans?
Will the 49ers beat the Saints?

This is exactly on topic. You make assertions about what is or isn't ethical, but don't have the underlying information to make an informed opinion.
Pyramid schemes necessarily involve fraud, particularly assertions about a products quality, or market penetration, or underlying value. That is why new investors are needed, without them the scheme cannot survive. Now who would invest in a dying enterprise? Someone who was lied to about it's prospects of course.

Luke-jr used the result of peoples computing power, not the power itself. Why is this distinction important and is it actually a distinction? People who signed up with Eligius did so in order to mine Bitcoins. Merged mining involves no additional work in order to function, it uses the results of other proofs of work in order to build its own blockchain. Luke used the results of the BTC mining to attack CLC. Eligius users would earned the exact same number of BTC had Luke-jr not attacked CLC. Since nothing was taken from Eligius users, no economic damage occurred. Eligius users did no extra work to take part in the attack on CLC.

These are the facts as I understand them (I might be wrong):
CLC was basically an unreleased version of BTC with first day merged mining and exchange support.
Luke-jr demonstrated how an unreliable pool operator can destroy such an entity.
Luke-jr did so without incurring any economic harm to or requiring any extra work from his users.
Luke-jr did not double spend CLC, only demonstrated that he could have by creating a separate but longer CLC blockchain.

 Whether he should or should not have attacked CLC is a different question from whether he harmed his users while doing so. Of course, Eligius users who don't like Luke can always switch their operations to a different pool.

Should CLC have been attacked? Should a crypto coin with such a deep structural flaw deserve to survive? Both are interesting questions with deep ethical implications.

The entire premise of cryptocoins is that they are immune or at least very resistant to such manipulations as occurred with CLC. It appears that CLC was not resistant to, and in fact was highly susceptible to such manipulations. So, should we encourage people to place their faith (and cold hard cash) into such a crypto coin? Should we discourage people from doing so? If people are allowed to market fatally flawed products, should not people also be allowed to take steps preventing those products from gaining market traction?

I dunno, mostly because football is on TV right now 

I think you need to read up on what a pyramid scheme is. You seem to have to serious misconceptions about it. You also conflate the misrepresentation of facts with "peoples ignorance". According to that logic, Worldcom and Enron were not criminal, they just exploited the stock market's ignorance about the true state of their finances. No ethical problem at all right?

You also manage to say something is ethically ok and disgusting at the same time. This is convenient in that you may point to either to deflect criticism from any side.

Amway is not a pyramid scheme because if nobody else enters the system, it will not collapse. Pyramid schemes are non-sustainable business models that require new investors in order to fund payouts to existing ones.

Someone should implement a cryptocurrency inside of OP_EVAL. Then we can all worship InceptionCoin. 

Ah, the contortions that companies go through when trying to sell information as if it was a widget.
Software businesses work best when their wares are sold as a service, not as a product. Not all software fits nicely into this model, yet. 

By endorsing pyramid schemes, you have lost all ethical credibility.

Away with you and your facts!! /jazzhands /bugeyes

Let us presume that enforcer node X is compromised and beings attacking the Solidcoin2 network. Coinhunter issues a code update to strip that node of its enforcer status. Some portion of the user base implements this code update, most critically exchanges and pools. Solidcoin has enough enforcer nodes under his direct control to continue the protocol processing until the other enforcers update. The remaining enforcer nodes now have a choice; they can run the old "insecure" client that allows them to be "attacked" by node X, or they can update to the newer more "secure" version.

If they don't update, they will be left behind and eventually become a liability themselves. They can't write their own source to fork because of the following line in license.txt:

"We reserve the right to cancel this open source license to any project which has a negative impact on the SolidCoin network or SolidCoin users."

Of course "negative impact" is defined by Realsolid, and he owns the copyrights to all the code.

The trusted nodes may not be "operated" by you currently, but they are instantiated by you. You can take them away just as quick. It doesn't matter if there are one or ten nodes if you designate what is and what is not trusted. What happens when one of your "trusted" nodes attacks your protocol? You hit the switch and kick it out. What happens when one merely insults you, or says something you don't like? Depends on your mood I suppose.

Your blockchain isn't fixed, it is whatever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be. Users are forced to upgrade by your enforcer nodes, and your enforcer nodes can be decertified by a code update (which your users must adopt or they will be cast out of the blockchain).

4 devs is better than one. Unfortunately, your track record of playing well with others is somewhat bleak. As long as the four of you keep mining, Solidcoin2 will still be alive so there is always hope.