Litecoin will not be secure until litecoin ASICs come out, or, at least, massive massive massive number of scrypt FPGAs.

Even then it will only be secure if it turns out to be the majority of the scrypt hash power coin. (And all the rest will then be the insecure ones. Maybe even if they do turn out to be capable of being merged mined alongside it.)

It is not certain yet that with some fixes to p2pool and/or cgminer speeds less than I0Coin/CoiLedCoin will be practical, that is, that GeistGeld's speed (which I think is more than 15 seconds, like at least 20 I think) might be workable given some fixes to cgminer and/or p2pool.

So lets complete the determination of what exactly the speed limit for merged mining is before choosing a speed, otherwise you will end up not being merged alongside whatever other scrypt coins are capable of being merged mined, so you will be insecure unless somehow you manage to be the scrypt chain that has more than half of the world's scrypt hashpower (and thus be the one all the others will be wanting to use as parent chain).

-MarkM-

GeistGeld kind of shows this: the only merged mining pool that did try to merge it claimed its being so crazy fast (faster, admittedly, than most johnny come plately coins the go on about being super fast) that it screwed up all the other coins in the merge (because they have to get new work like every few seconds, because its difficulty is so crazy low, because cgminer hits on p2pool insanely fast with responses to crazy-low difficulty shares compared to the rest of the coins in the merge. Possibly maybe fixable by mods to cgminer or p2pool or both?)

Without merged mining you get on no major pools at all, you are then looking at having to first get some kind of new ASIC unique to your new coin designed and built, then at how to distribute those without anyone getting more than 50% of them.

So yeah, too fast a block speed seriously undermines security.

I think though that I0Coin is maybe 2.5 minutes or 1.5 minutes or somesuch and CoiLedCoin 1,5 minutes or 1 minute, maybe? Whatever their speeds, they seem to work okay, so between them and GeistGeld where the too fast to be practical spot is is fairly well bracketed I think.

(GeistGeld is like 40 or 30 or 20 seconds. But ends up "instamined" because compared to the other coins in the merge its difficulty tends to be horribly low due to so few of the merged mining pools mining it. Apparently cgminer spams p2pool to death. I have been experimenting though with pointing some block eruptors directly at GeistGeld to keep its difficulty up despite the merged p2pool having trouble, plus I think it possible that if p2pool honoured clients requests regarding difficulty of shares desired that might even fix the problem, since it seems like p2pool imagines that when you say you want difficulty 100 you really mean that you only want difficulty 100 if none of the coins in the merge have difficulty less than 100 other wise you want whatever insanely low difficulty the lowest difficult coin in the merge has...)

-MarkM-

First go through all coins that might maybe actually have some chance of being secure. There are very few such coins.

Then explain what it is about each one of them that makes it unusable.

(Because if it is not unusable presto you found a coin that might be reasonable to use, and furthermore all the development and so on is already taken care of for you.)

Generally what one finds when witnessing such an exercise is that ultimately they don't give a damn about their users thus they don't care that they are deliberately with aforethought launching a train wreck that is going to ruin gosh knows how many lives, take food off the tables of gosh knows how many children and all that; the real reason no existing coin is in their eyes suitable / useful /usable is the fact that none of them seem to them to be sufficiently fast-buck get rich quick at other people's expense and damn the starving children types of scheme, so they somehow convinced themselves they need to launch a new scam in which they get to be in on the ground floor so to speak.

Since we already know that you think even a simple scrypt-based coin based on Satoshi's code can do what you want that kind of pretty strongly implies that almost any existing coin can. So around comes the loop again, why is it that scamming shitloads of people with an insecure as a wet paper bag scam is of benefit to anyone but scammers?

If you seriously want to accomplish something useful and good using cryptocurrency, just stick to bitcoin and build your services around that. Maybe think about plugging in one or more other coins once you are fully up and running doing whatever it is that you thought a cryptocoin could help you do. Even the merged mined coins are not very secure maybe compared to bitcoin, how much of bitcoin's hashpower would they need in order not to be 50+%'d by a foe who could not quite 50+% bitcoin itself? (Plus what if all the bitcoin miners who don't mine a particular merged mined coin all decided to PWN the merged coin instead of merely choosing not to merge it?)

-MarkM-

It makes sense because economics as in the rational person who produces the invisible hand effect is not a person it is an easter-bunny, robot, myth, or simply an erroneous theory. Upon which, unfortunately, economics seems to be founded.

It makes sense because humans are not rational animals they are rationalising animals. (Tip of hat to Lazarus Long, whose philosophies the Grand Old Man of science fiction conveyed to us.)

-MarkM-

EDIT: Also, they do NOT have huge market caps. On the contrary, even bitcoin keeps having its value horribly crazily suppressed, possibly because of all the crapcoins causing lack of confidence in the whole blockchain concept. $300,000 per coin is merely reasonable, akin to gold; but gold is not huge it is tiny compared to forex/finance... Huge would be way the heck more than $300,000 per coin, can't recall the math offhand so cannot recall about how many orders of magnitude more.

EDIT2: Heck there are corporations trading on stock markets that have larger market caps than bitcoin let alone larger than most altcoins. So very very far from huge. A nation's entire stock-market even maybe isn't huge, is it, really, even for the largest nations? Just a drop in the bucket compared to the Forex market? I wonder how many publicly traded corporations there are whose market cap is larger than bitcoin's, let alone larger than an altcoin's?

The big problem is that blockchains are insanely expensive to secure.

You need more than half of the world's computing power of a given type in order to secure the chain.

It is like the how many nukes do you have game, except you maybe don't get to know which individuals, terrorists, or governments control the nukes.

So maybe we could have a few superpowers, like one has a few superpowers among nations, but, with the bonus that their nukes do not work on each other, only on their imitators, client-states, internal states/provinces or whatever. The SHA superpower cannot wipe out the Scrypt superpower nor can the Scrypt superpower wipe out the SHA superpower but all the non-ASIC third-world and balkan and etc trivial little minor states can all probably be trashed by any superpower any time until they too get ASICs uh I mean nukes.

About the only reason any Scrypt coin might be able to actually become secure enough for serious use is that Scrypt ASICs are on the way.

Have you tried computing how much an attacker can afford to spend to attack a coin that is worth even just a paltry $300,000 per coin?

Or maybe you could calculate by market cap, $300,000 multiplied by how many coins equals how much can an attacker spend and still make a profit from an attack?

Most coins have a market cap that is less than one bitcoin once bitcoins start to achieve reasonably useful "serious" values.

When it costs just a bitcoin (a few billions or tens of billions of dollars) to totally PWN a chain, maybe profiting directly by taking over a coin won't hardly seem worth it, what the heck for gosh sakes the whole chain is only worth a bitcoin or so, why bother, just destroy it. Short it then destroy it.

Its like you lot are running around with a bunch of little plastic water-pistols playing war and you don't even have concentrated acid in the things let alone live anthrax. Get real.

-MarkM-

If screwing everyone over by pulling the rug out from under the most basic definitions of a coin, the how many coins there will be and the how many there will be per block is absolutely necessary, go ahead and have bitcoin not halve its minting, that will fix the ratio and it will do so without turning devcoin into fraud / false advertising / scam / bait-and switch.

Let the other chain be the fraud not this one, okay?

-MarkM-

Why not "just" change how bitcoin does things so everyone needs a new bitcoin client?

Such a change would be a so called "hard fork". I expect there is a lot of info about "hard forks" on these forums, especially in the technical / development section.

(Bitcoin likes to schedule such things two years in advance, so that once they do change the code they change it to code that says "when we reach this two years or so from now block, these new rules go into effect...)

Please check whether you read my previous post since I editted it as I was still working on it when you posted...

-MarkM-

You obviously skipped a bunch of posts from a day or few ago, plus same data in posts way longer ago than that.

Each "round" is 4000 "blocks", and the mining tries, by adjusting "difficulty", to target an average time between "blocks" of ten minutes.

Thus a "round" - 4000 blocks - should on average tend to be vaguely around about a month or so of "real time".

It is a hard limit, as 4000 blocks is the definition of a "round", and since each block is a share, there are only ever at most 4000 shares.

This is why eventually we will likely end up with only 4000 projects getting a share each, or up to 20,000 getting a fifth of a share each, then each project will divvy up its coins among its participants/workers itself after it receives them.

For example in an Open Transactions server maybe a videos site might have an asset called Moviecoins or Videocoins, and a medical/health site have an asset called Healthcoins or Medcoins or whatever and so on, which it can give out to its workers and then periodically when it receives devcoins on the blockchain it can issue digidevcoins on the Open Transactions server to represent them and place offers in the markets in the Open Transactiosn server to buy back its medcoins or moviecoins or whatever wit digidevcoins, which in turn could be cashed out for real on the blockchain devcoins (maybe via a multi-dignature blockchaincoin-pool in which multiple servers must approve the digidevcoins in order to sign the multisig on-the-blockchain transaction that moves the actual on-th-eblockchain devcoins).

-MarkM-

Each line is one block, each block is called a share, and the software supports having 1/5ths of a share (by placing five addresses on one line).

Try receiver_1.csv, receiver_2.csv etc. The number is the "round" number. (Each 4000 blocks is one "round" of payouts. We are paying out "round" 29 now I believe, and clients will pick a random block during this "round" to download the receiver_30.csv file so that they don't all ask for it at the same moment.)

-MarkM-

The receiver files are on your disk, in the subdirectory named receiver in your devcoin data-directory.

You could use a text editor to read them, heck maybe even a word-processor.

Or simply use the "more" command (or, on Linux systems, the new improved "more" known as "less").

(Maybe you might like to tell your file-viewer that that type of file is to use that type of viewer to view it; though since the extension of the filename is .csv, meaning comma separated variables, you might find your file viewer already recognises them as files suitable for viewing in a spreadsheet program and hey, they might look better viewed in a spreadsheet than viewed in a text editor or word processor.)

-MarkM-

Those coins are sent directly to authors' wallets, not to "devtome".

Devtome admins have the authors' addresses put into the "receiver files" that the DeVCoin clients and daemons consult to figure out who to send 90% of the mined coins to each block.

At some future time though the various projects like Devtome will use Open Transactions to divvy up coins between their authors and such, whereupon yeah there will have to be some kind of "treasurer" for each project, to whom the digiDevcoins on the Open Transactions server will be sent.

However, by then maybe the actual coins will be going to a "N of M signatures" address so that it would take more than one person, or even more than one Open Transactions server, to sign a blockchain tranasaction to move the actual coins. (Normally though all the Open Transactions servers that audit the one that requests a blockchain transaction be done to send coins on the blockchain will sign if the digicoins on the server are legit, so just the coins pool feature of Open Transactions won't by itself prevent the admin the digicoins are sent to misappropriating the coins. How to handle this needs some more thought/work.)

-MarkM-

Recently all my sell offers on Vircurex way up through 193 satoshis got bought up by the way, in case no-one else noticed.

So are the people who claimed the previous times my coins bought at around 30 sold for up near or over 200, or even up to and just beyond 300, was just some weird pump and dump scheme orchestrated by Fontas now going to tell us this too was such a thing; that it is not true that the price ranges from down near 30 and maybe sometimes below to up near 200 and sometimes to 300 or higher?

Notice it happened fast, again. Waiting until you hear about it then firing up a client then waiting for six confirms before you can exchange your coins might not be the best way to cash in on such cycles; despite the inherent risk in sitting coins on third party sites it might we worthwhile to start putting some profit coins, coins you can well afford to lose, into buy offers one offer per satoshi of price all the way down from 250, 300 or 350 to some nice high figure that is seldom actually reached (so that you don't sell them at a price these spikes tend to blow right on through and keep on going...)

Also maybe as you sell them (at double or triple or quadruple or more what you paid for them) start taking some of the profit and putting it into satoshi by satoshi buy offers from one satoshi up through 30 or so, to profit also on the low end.

-MarkM-

I thought that about Ripple too, but by the time they did open the source it was way too late, too many other things to do to go back and look again.

Seems likely that by the time NXT is open source the same thing will happen, oh yeah queue it up like Ripple as something to look at someday but meanwhile keep looking into the actually already open source ab-initio stuff...

-MarkM-

Well hopefully pouring out these huge bribes initially is paying off, since we do seem to have attracted at least one lifestyle writer plus we have gotten a lot of admins from the pool of Devtome authors.

Hopefully in what will seem after the fact like not long at all we'll have found plenty of such people, at which point maybe we can do the same "overkill pay to launch the thing" approach with the next major project, whatever that ends up being; and although the authors who squandered their DeVCoins will moan and complain at the insane pay the new type of people get and how writing isn't even bringing in minimum wage anymore the lifestyle "gotta write, gonna write, how much do I have to pay to be able to write, writing is my addiction" people will be sitting back looking at their one entire share and their huge pile of sell offers sitting at 200 or more satoshis per coin and the price of the bitcoins those satoshis are the lowest denomination of and think "holy cow I am doing well, those new guys are gonna be millionaires unless they squander their coins and if they do squander them guess who will be buying them cheap while they foolishly dump them"...

(By then hopefully the pay for articles will be shares of the ad revenue of devtome, and of course lifestyle authors who write as a lifestyle are just as free to post to Devtome for shares of its ad revenue as the new guys are to build their rocketships or whatever it is that the new guys do...)

-MarkM-

The profitability sites do not know what the exchange rate will be in 120 blocks or in however many blocks it takes for your mined coins to mature.

Whereas the people who already hold the coins, possibly for example having mined them when their exchange rate was not high enough to attract migrant miners, don't have to wait for their coins to mature, they just have to wait for the exchange rate to become profitable compared to their power bills and amortised equipment costs and labour.

So by the time your coins mature folks who already mined some before those sites sent all the migrants flocking to try to get some can already be at the exchange waiting to sell just before coins that were not mined until the profitablity sites twigged can mature.

Once those sites claim the coin is no longer profitable, or is not the most profitable, and the migrant miners thus run off somewhere else, is maybe a good time to sell a few coins, just enough to keep the exchange rate from going high enough to trigger another wave of migrants...

In my experience so far, the most profitable coins of all have been the ones that are not in any pools and not in any exchanges, because you can pick those up hand over fist for however many months or years the folks following those profitablity sites choose to ignore them.

For example last year BBQ was killer, by the time pools for it fired back up again and exchanges took them back in the people who had been CPU-mining them all last year made fortunes...

-MarkM-

It is just ONE share for having a lifestyle commitment to free open source development that chronically consumes at least ten hours per week/month of your time.

Even if it consumes your every waking hour that is one share - one life, dedicated to such a lifestyle. Ten hours is a minimum, surely it is very hard for such people to limit themselves to only working on the stuff ten hours, heck that is less than one day, usually when they get on a roll they are likely to very shortly notice it is morning again yet they feel like they only just woke up and got into doing some good work... When you are a lifestyle developer, it is good to try to remember to sleep at least once a week whether you need to or not.

(Ten hours is the week you go on vacation and have to work while "using the bathroom" and such because your family thinks you are actually not doing any work that week so you can spend time with them... )

-MarkM-

Look at the hashing power and difficulty. If less than half of the hardware in the world that is capable of mining it is mining it then it is way too vulnerable, so basically for each type of non merged mined hashing (SHA, scrypt, prime numbers etc) check out the one that has more than half of the hashing power, for starters.

For example primecoin and protoshares both use CPU mining, so which of them has more than half of the world's CPU power mining them?

Ooops, neither. CPU is a really crappy choice because it is unlikely that as much as half of the world's CPU power is even mining at all, let alone all mining the same coin.

So forget all the ones that are CPU-mined, until they come up with ASICs to do their mining they are trainwrecks waiting to happen.

(Waiting to become valuable enough to be worth wrecking, so I guess if you are only looking for crappy little penny-stock type toys they are fine, but if you are interested in coins worth $300,000 or more per coin forget all the CPU and GPU mining crap, get ASICs deployed as soon as possible or just assume the great chain robbery will happen as soon as it is profitable for the robbers to make it happen.)

So hmm I guess we are down to bitcoin and maybe a few of the coins merged mined with bitcoin (those that have more than half as much hashpower/difficulty as bitcoin)...

Oh proof of stake? Last I heard is still doesn't work without proof of work, plus, the actual proof of stake itself has a man-in-the-middle, much like Solidcoin, it seems. A gang is already sitting there with their hands on the wreck-switch just waiting for the right time to pull a heist...

-MarkM-

Scrypt hashrate is way too fragmented, you are likely to end up with way the heck less than half of the world's GPUs and scrypt-FPGAs securing your chain, and thus basically you are designing from scratch to be already out-hashed umpteen times over before you even launch.

It is irresponsible to deliberately set out to build an insanely vulnerable system given that the system will be dealing in effect with other people's money.

First figure out how to ensure more than half of the world's hashing power is dedicated to securing your blockchain.

Hint: look up merged mining.

Or, design and build an ASIC for a kind of hashing no other coin uses, then launch your coin after you have the ASICs up and running.

By the way this thread too seems like it is in the wrong section, I think you can move your own threads so maybe don't bother waiting for a mod to move it to alternative currencies section, be polite and move it there yourself.

-MarkM-

How much equity are you offering?

Hopefully some mod will move this to the right section (the alternative currencies section) soon.

-MarkM-

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-