If the coins turn out not to be in your wallet once you buy them and take them home that would be bad.

If the coins turn out not to be in the exchange's wallet when you try to withdraw them that could be bad too though maybe in principle if the losses were not too much the exchange might cover it, maybe, if you are lucky. Bear in mind coldwallets are no defense against 50+% attacks...

As to the butthurt, it hurts to recommend an exchange as being maybe possibly the one, or one of the few, that might be taking its business seriously, then have it turn out to be just another scam-marketplace. It makes one's other coins seem besmirched by association by being listed on such a site, and one's recommendations suspect as one had in the past told people it looked like that particular exchange was maybe actually taking care to pick things to sell that might actually be good secure currencies not yet another 51%-attack-in-the-making.

People trust the major global stock-exchanges to list stocks that are mostly not all scams-ab-initio, that is why they buy more confidently from e.g. the New York Stock Exchange from the under the counter psst psst wanna buy a stock guy in the raincoat in the alley a few blocks down the street...

Finding out what one had thought might be a serious business is actually just another guy in a raincoat selling any scam he thinks he might be able to make a buck on is unpleasant.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Oh gosh it turns out its yet another scrypt-coin, so it's difficulty and hashpower are actually better than some of the ones already on Vircurex. So maybe it is not afterall the one most in need of de-listing. But even if there were only 3 scrypt-coins that cannot be merged mined together at least one of them would mathematically have to have less than 50% of the hash-power and even if only two existed the only way to prevent one of them having les than half the hash power would be to exactly maintain their hash power at exactly precisely half the hashpower each, and even if you could accomplish that it'd just mean both are right on the borderline, horribly vulnerable. So having it turn out to be non merged mined scrypt isn't maybe myuch better than having it turn out to be a SHA256 coin whose hashpower is way down in the range some scrypt coins have been known to achieve... Maybe they added it in preparation to dropping one or more of the other scrypt coins that have a lower hashpower than it does?

Either Vircurex's display of chain hashpower and difficulty is broken or they have decided to jioin the ranks of the scam-exchanges who sell garbage that has such pathetically tiny difficulty and hashpower that it is basically just a freebie give-away for anyone with a handful of banks of Jupiters block-eruptors to PWN.

How is a coin that doesn't even have a few hundred millions of difficulty, heck doesn't even have a few tens of millions of difficulty, not automatically de-listed as too vulnerable to remain on an exchange

WTF, once upon a time Vircurex seemed like it might actually be taking its business seriously, but if the figures it is showing for the difficulty and hashpower of the brand new scamcoin "DOGE" that they just listed today we'd better take all our money out of there since they obviously no longer care about security. Is there much likelihood at all that any of the coins they think they have in their wallet will still be there once the people trading DOGE to BTC and taking the BTC home with them release their alternative blockchain?

-MarkM-

If there are even only as many as three scrypt based coins at least one of them is going to end up with less than 50% of the total amount of scrypt hashing power the world is able to deploy, so at least one of them will be a pointless pile of crap serving mostly as a sucker trap for criminals to use to sucker idiots into using a currency that can be 50+% attacked.

So if two scrypt coins already exist - which I think they do, right? - its pretty stupid, or criminally negligent, or a conspiracy to defraud by misrepresenting the dangers or security, or, in general, basically a scam, to try to get people to throw their wealth into a blockchain you will never be able to adequately secure...

Instead of asking what new coins are coming next, you should be asking whether any already existing have not yet been trashed by 50+% attacks and if so which such one will be the next one to be forked or doublespent etc...

-MarkM-

Does php have format statements? Or maybe a printf (or sprintf) type of thing? A way to tell it how many digits to display even if they turn out to be zeroes?

I would imagine it must, otherwise dollars displays on websites would lack their cents digits or have only one digit of cents instead of two in cases where the least significant digit was a zero, and I have not noticed that being a prevalent dollars-display format on php-based websites in general.

So I am guessing php must have some kind of format-statement in it somewhere? Unless people always do the correct thing in dealing with money of not using floating point at all and instead using integers and themselves manually inserting a dot where they want it when printing the integer number of cents as a two decimals accuracy number of dollars...

-MarkM-

I have tried it on Fedora 17 and on Fedora 19.

Fedora might maybe have some kind of problem with the concept of a "system tray", which seems to be a mac and/or windows concept.

However, it might be the case that more grandmas use windows or mac than use various types of Linux? (Is Android a type of Linux?) so maybe that is okay?

What I could access of it worked, but without any apparent way to make its "system tray icon" actually appear on my screen I was unable to properly use it because for some reason or lack of reason its main menu is in or popped up from the system tray icon. The main windows that appear for example when you first fire it up and it walks you through creating an account and so on has no way to get to the main menu.

I also had problems when I used "ssh -X" to ssh to the Fedora 19 box I built it on and installed it on from my graphics workstation where all the GUI stuff of any X-windows applications I run on various boxes should display. (The graphics workstation is basically just my desktop box that runs nothing itself ideally and instead merely serves as a graphical display terminal from which to run various apps on various boxes.)

When I ran Moneychanger directly from the screen and keyboard and mouse that were directly attached to the Fedora 19 box, Moneychanger fired up okay, but when I used ssh -X from my desktop box, which is still stuck with Fedora 17, the app popped up (on my Fedora 17 box's X-windows display) an error popup saying it could not find any support for a system tray.

So it looked like Moneychanger did think that Fedora 19 itself directly, using its own graphics card to drive its own local X-windows display, did have system tray support, as it did not pop up that error in that situation. But in the real world real use case of having the application run on an application-server box with its graphical display being on a graphics server (X-windows server) on the user's desk, the support for system tray could not be found.

FellowTraveler basically just says Fedora must be using a broken windowing system or something.

#fedora and #gnome type channels on Freenode never responded at all to any inquiries as to what is a system tray and whether gnome (the windowing system) even has such a thing, nor on whether system tray icons are or are not intended to be able to appear on the end-user's remote graphics server (graphical display, graphical terminal, X-windows server) or are deliberately restricted to only working on displays that are directly driven by the graphics card that is in the same machine that the application itself is run on.

I have problems running more machines to test this currently as all my circuit breakers are full almost to popping due to all the mining gear mining, I have all my machines turned off to free up electrical capacity for mining gear. But, I now have put Fedora 19 on a laptop so should now be able to again try to find what the system tray problem is and whether Fedora has such a tray and if not whether I can get one and install it or what.

(Possibly the machines I initially tried with might have broken X-windows installs or broken gnome3 windowing managers or something; the laptop is a fresh clean install so should let me at least find out if the problem is built into Fedora ab initio or was just something my specific old machines might have broken something over the years in the course of updating through several Fedora versions instead of using clean fresh installs from scratch.)

Also, Moneychanger cannot be built on default Fedora 17 lately, because the QT user-interface-editor they now use to create its user-interface is too new for the QT that comes with Fedora 17 to use. The QT that comes with Fedora 19 can build it just fine though.

-MarkM-

Can you force the display of the full eight digits after the decimal?

It took a moment to deduce that maybe you are using eight digit accuracy but that your format is losing the trailing zeroes, the current per devcoin value of devcoins was shown as 0.0000011 BTC instead of as (for example, at a wild guess, assuming you really are using eight digit accuracy) 0.00000110 BTC.

Those of us used to quickly visually scanning the number of satoshis are subject to a bit of cognitive dissonance when we see what looks like 11 satoshis instead of 110...

-MarkM-

Third party hosting seems pretty dumb idea for wallets, or even for anything that your at home in your steel doored room wallet-machine will trust to tell it how many coins to send where.

Unless you use something like Open Transactions, so that you have at all times crypto-logical proof that all parties agreed to their balances at all times so that the server itself need not be trusted. (You trust the crypto: no change to any account's balance without a crypto-signed acceptance of that change and the new balance it results in by the owner of that account.)

How many times have wallets been stolen by employees of hosting companies? The hosters usually say its up to you to back up your data, and accept no responsibility for any losses you suffer and so on.

You could use the "hot wallet' concept so only your "hot wallet" can be stolen by the security guards who guard the hosting place or the superusers who control all the virtual machines or the technicians who have physical access to the machines and so on, but if so how often is your budget going to assume the entire contents of all hot wallets vanish? Make it part of your budget maybe, always assuming that any day or week or month or year you don't lose your hotwallets contents is a bonus, free extra money to buy better security maybe or something...

-MarkM-

Bear in mind too that if you are going the scan route then you also free up all your cash register operators, since the customer can scan the products they want instead of loading them into a grocery cart, and the box-and-bag-carrier guys can pack it all and deliver it to your car for you directly from the inventory handling facility... You'd scan your products, maybe even via your phone's browser before you even visit the store physically, pick it up already boxed/bagged for you ten minutes later.

Shoplifting should be cut down since all the sample/example/display items the shopper examines/scans can be nailed/tied down.

I am going with your "major retailers" concept, so thinking of retailers such as Amazon and Walmart. Shops would have two sections, the display section where you choose what to buy, and the fulfillment section that delivers it to you or has it waiting for pickup for you. As soon as you scan something it can be picked by robotic arms put into conveyors or whatever...

Heck if you believe Amazon, a drone will fly it to your doorstep from their fulfillment centre if you want...

I suspect also that just finding my way to a checkout in a huge unfamiliar Walmart with my cart takes me at least ten minutes, so by the time I walked or escalated or whatever back from the department/area my desired goods are displayed in it'd all already be rung up and waiting for me. Assuming I do actually insist on inspecting a display model of the thing instead of just browsing it on a screen/kiosk right up near the entrance to the store or even at home before heading out to pick the stuff up...

-MarkM-

Mastercoin, Bitshares, Coloured Coins, FellowTraveler's "Holy Grail" thread are all still active aren't they?

-MarkM-

Have you searched this forum for terms like decentralised exchange, holy grail, and suchlike?

(I am wondering why you seem unaware of the massive, vast, huge amount of material already present here on this topic...)

-MarkM-

In those two years have you never had this idea before?

I am wondering because you make no mention of all the many many threads and projects that already address this...

How did you miss them all?

-MarkM-

For developers with the skills to do this, their best bets really for compensation are probably GRouPcoin (GRP), CoiLedCoin (CLC) and GeistGeld (XGG).

That is because those three merged mined coins are not on exchanges yet, and only one of them (GRP) is even on any major public merged mining pools yet.

Which means there are probably people getting GRP free so you might be able to pick up a lot of it cheap; and for CLC and XGG their difficulty is extremely low so you can mine lots of them with very little hashpower.

So really the way to get rich with those skills would probably have been to merged mine all the merged mined coins (BTC, NMC, DVC, GRP, I0C, IXC, CLC, XGG), even if only with a block eruptor or a few block eruptors or even a GPU or a few GPUs, so as to accumulate lots and lots of the low difficulty ones, leaving those low difficulty ones until last for the software upgrades, so that by the time you upgrade their software you already have huge numbers of their coins.

IXC does not really need an upgrade as much as some of the others do, in fact, though; so actually if you had actually done the merged mining you would have realised that XGG was more in need of the upgrade than any of the other merged coins. Notice that someone has in fact done a partial update of XGG, not the full fix but just the dirty hack fix, to enable them to be able to merge it without eating 8+ gigabytes of RAM to do so.

Actually merging all the coins would have shown them which ones they needed most urgently to update to fit all the coins into their available RAM, unless they chose to just throw RAM at the problem instead of fixing the problem.

Basically working on these coins is a self-funding endeavour, or should be; the under the radar coins are where you get to build up a huge hoard of coins ready to profit massively once you do release updated versions.

IXCoin could have waited, you could have first fixed XGG and CLC however much they needed to enable you to be able to add them to your own merge. Then regardless of whether anyone donated anything toward updating the coins that already have massive hash-rate and are already on exchanges you would have been building up your under the radar fortune in the under the radar coins.

Which of course you might actually be doing; you certainly ought to be doing it, even if it does turn out that you are able to get some donations too.

For long term people all these merged mined coins basically each lose a lot of their appeal as long term investments once all kinds of public pools and exchanges adopt them, because then it becomes too late to spend months or years quietly establishing large holdings of them.

Part of why there had been no urgency to update IXCoin was that it was not enough of a RAM hog compared to e.g. I0Coin and (even more so than I0Coin) GeistGeld to be a problem, and it was already so darn hard to accumulate by mining that attracting even more miners would just make it even harder to build one's position by mining.

Make sure you developers all have CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld in your merges, so that when time comes to update them you need not go begging since by then you will be major holders of those coins having mined them at low difficulty all this time...

-MarkM-

Blockchains are insanely expensive to secure. It is not clear that proof of stake really works to secure a chain, there still seem to be claims floating about that they cannot actually operate without proof of work mining, plus they all seem to be nastily similar to "solidcoin" in having centralised trusted servers that get to make up checkpoints thus maybe could easily attack the coin since they get to make up the checkpoints as they go.

So maybe the eight merged mined coins are kind of special: bitcoin, namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, coiledcoin and geistgeld.

Out of those, coiledcoin and geistgeld are still very much under the radar.

In fact the geistgeld experiment, which is, to test just how fast you can have the blocks without screwing up all the other coins in the merge, maybe has still not really been seriously done: so few people include geistgeld in their merge, and its difficulty adjusts so incredibly fast, that I don't think enough mining power has even been sent at it yet to really determine for sure whether it really is just too darn fast. Possibly it might even need to have its block speed slowed a little, or maybe it just needs more merged mining pool and miners who merged mine to include it in their merges?

Since the vast majority of scrypt based coins, along with the vast majority of SHA256 coins that are not merged mined, will probably eventually crumble under the fact that they simply cannot muster enough mining power to secure their blockchains, these eight merged mined coins continue to seem to me to be some of the likeliest contenders going forward, so it seems to me if you want to get involved in the support side on coins - maintaining the code - coiledcoin and geistgeld could be among the most profitable options available, since you can still mine them so easily.

Groupcoin is also very interesting too even though it is merged by mmpool.bitparking.com because although lots of people probably have some (any miner at mmpool that bothered to tell mmpool a groupcoin address, for example) I do not know of any website-type exchange (as distinct from Open Transactions servers, for example) that support groupcoin yet, so all the "most profitable coin" sites fail to mention groupcoin, so maybe you might still be able to pick them up cheap from people who get them but have not yet realised their potential.

So groupcoin would be another good one to work on.

Basically all the merged mined coins need the code fixes, or kind of code fixes, that were done for I0Coin, so make up for the fact that the original implementation of merged mining turns out to be a massive hog of RAM as chains grow larger. Of those, coiledcoin and geistgeld retain so far the greatest potential for picking up lots of coins at low difficulty before other merged miners realise how much they are missing out on by failing to include them in their merge but groupcoin, having been included in at least one major merged mining pool's merge but not, as far as I am aware, having being picked up by any website-style exchanges yet, also has possibly good potential for picking up cheap since people are probably mining it (look at its difficulty!) but maybe don't know what it is worth. (If you can find anyone willing to sell any for the prices shown at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc you are probably lucky and should take them up on it...)

Tenebrix and Fairbrix are interesting due to being so incredibly low difficulty, but they are scrypt coins so are probably doomed... but hey, the idiots buying all the other scrypt coins might not realise that most scrypt coins are doomed so hey, given how insanely low difficulty they are why the heck not pick up a few tens or hundreds of thousands of each just in case? Afterall, even just recently people were buying BBQcoins that you could pick up with just a single CPU core for a year or so, who knows, maybe they will also pay fortunes for other insanely easy to mine scrypt based coins?

-MarkM-

You can probably do that single-handed for most, so maybe the best approach is simply look at your wallets to figure out which coin would profit you the most if it suddenly multiplied many times in value, maybe spend all the others on that one, and get busy making awesome creatives that everyone will naturally clamour to have built into the wallets and websites and such...

(This is free open source territory, basically, so just pick one to work on, and if you like profits either pick one you have lots of or pick up lots of one first before revealing your work...)

DeVCoin is offering still a bounty for a fifth logo, by the way, so maybe you could showcase your skills picking up that bounty?

You could also become a Devtome author, and get a share of DeVCoins for every thousand words (with images counting as ten words) you write about how to take DeVCoin's (or any other coin's, for that matter) marketing to this so called next level...

-MarkM-

Bitcoin does know bout merged mining. But it only knows enough to be the parent chain, as teaching it to also be able to be a child chain would require a hard-fork.

Any scrypt coin that based itself on bitcoin code without stripping out the ability to act as a parent chain in a merge should be able to act a a parent.

But did merged mining even exist when litecoin was first created?

If not, did litecoin inherit the ability to be parent chain at some point in the course of updating itself from newer bitcoin code?

You do not need to specify the parent, in fact for example GeistGeld calls itself chain number zero (each chain in a merge needs a different number, I think the number is used as index into an array of chains when recording the proofs in the parent and child chains or something like that), even though bitcoin is actually chain zero. If bitcoin ever did learn to be a child chain it could not be merged with GeistGeld unless GeistGeld was used as parent, since otherwise there would be two chains both claiming to be index zero in the array of merkle trees or whatever the chain number is actually used for.

With p2pool for example you run the p2pool of the parent chain, and its chain number is irrelevant, most chains probably just call themselves chain zero like bitcoin does since their programmers probably didn't even know what the chain number/index was about or for, and they did not have being a child chain in mind.

But each chain that is going to be able to serve as a child chain needs a unique number/index.

For example:


RUcoin of course is closed source and has mutated gosh knows how much or how many times since the ancient times of its original incarntion in which it was purported to be able to be merged mined and has the child number/index 7.

GeistGeld is probably a bug, the idiot who wrote it was probably totally ignorant so didn't know to assign it a chain index/number so the value was just left as zero like it is in bitcoin.

-MarkM-

That is far from unknown, it is listed on coinmarketcap.com so likely all the newbies/masses will be buying or mining it every time it shows green and maybe dumping it when it shows red.

To make a killing on unknown coins you want as long as possible under the radar, as once they hit an exchange or a topsite or profitable-coins-to-mine site or even a pool they tend to stop being unknown.

For under the radar coins a good rule of thumb is if they are difficult enough that you would prefer a pool to solo mining, they are already too well known.

-MarkM-

No, you mine it alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, etcetera, all the other merged mined coins, using the same rigs and the same power-bill. You or someone else already pays for the electricity, you might as well rake in all the coins it can rake in instead of "leaving money on the table".

If you want to mine with a CPU your best bets might be Tenebrix and Fairbrix, though I think sometimes some people (such as myself from time to time) point a 5870 in balanced mode at the two of them, if difficulty compared to number of connections is high enough to indicate other people must be using a GPU instead of a CPU on them or are maybe using a lot of powerful CPU cores.

Of course if you have lots of very powerful CPU cores you might prefer to point them at primecoin or (if you have really many or really powerful ones) even at protoshares.

Understand that by unknown crypto I assume you mean under the radar, not on exchanges, likely not even on any pools or merged mining pools, so that you can mine it incredibly easily month after month, maybe even a whole year of CPU mining like people had with BBQcoin, so that by the time the masses remember it exists you have a nice stash of them so you can afford to act as a market-maker when they do appear on an exchange, buying low and selling high, making a fortune providing liquidity...

-MarkM-

CoiLedCoin (CLC) and GeistGeld (XGG), because they are merged-mined alongside bitcoin, namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin and i0coin so don't cost you any of your hashing power (you still get to hash all your usual merged mined coins with the same hardware) but few (read as "no") pools even merge all of those others I listed let alone also coiledcoin and geistgeld so the difficulty is very low. So basically they are the big "sleepers" that you can mine pretty much free for however long everyone is willing to "leave money on the table" by failign to include them in their merge.

Furthermore GeistGeld is very fast blocks - very fast! - so all the propaganda vaious scrypt-based crapcoins that mostl likely will not be able to muster enough hashing power to secure their chain publich about how very fast blocks are a super feature all applies to GeistGeld but without the problem the scrypt coins have of being very unlikely (except maybe for litecoin and whatever coin(s) can be merged mined alongside litecoin) to be able to secure their blockchains.

-MarkM-

Well it would be nice to get our coins we sent in the version 2 coins for... Contact is one thing, sure, but finishing off the distribution of initial coins is surely a good thing to get done if people are hoped/expected to value the coin thus consider mining it?

-MarkM-

It claims that 95% goes to [receivers, basically]. That is factually incorrect isn't it? It should say 90%?

(Other than that, its great, so lets fix that, hmm?)

-MarkM-