I have a feeling that your request is likely to fall on stony ground, so to speak. I'm sending you 1 BOON, out of sympathy

https://github.com/gjhiggins/RepublicCoin

Full fork of Bitcoin 0.8.6, branding and parameters separated out as per obvious.

It compiles+runs on ubuntu trusty, reads the db, syncs to node 54.225.242.168. That's as far as I've taken it. Can you pick it up from there?


Cheers

Graham

Are you thinking of setting up a github org to host the source so that maintenance can be devolved to a group rather than a single-owner, single-dev model? That's the model that I have (hopefully) chosen for the DOACC project.

In other work, we've been following a similar notion but looking at a range of approaches, e.g. investigating Darkcoin variants:

https://github.com/gjhiggins/zendarkcoin-algos/commit/b30c940aaeb053af943da437e26ce5bc1131ace6

We integrated much of that work for the creation of minkiz foundry. It's tongue-in-cheek, up to a point - we intend to make the templates available under an open source licence.

Whilst it would be trivial to go the extra distance and publish the chunk of straightforward Python code that renders the templates as full-on forks of the main Bitcoin Core development stream, we're stopping short of that point. We're happy to work with named devs to help them set up a reliable, robust and contemporaneous codebase but we won't be doing any commercial work with coin developers who operate behind a pseudonym - for us, the loss of transparency is profoundly unsupportable.


We share your thinking on i) explicitly recognising and accepting the current reality & ii) the desirability of making high-quality templates available so that (the inevitable) investors get at least some basic support from a reliable and checkable codebase as a foundation.

We have ambitions for a future where investors show a marked preference for coins based on established, branded, open source templates of assured quality --

“Does it use a Minkiz template? No? Then it's a SHITCOIN!!!!”

(Minkiz templates will be advertised along with Feckle Freezers. You do own a Feckle Freezer, don’t you? ...).

Cheers

Graham

Edit: fix typos

Guilty as charged, I'm afraid. Just by being open, my Linux wallet eventually entirely consumes one of the four threads available on my laptop. I imagine it'll get sorted eventually and I may well rejoin the fold at that point.

Interesting coin, though - and I'll echo an earlier poster's appreciation of the community pitching in to ensure the coin at least gained flying speed.

Cheers,

Graham

Seems a little, er binary. Perhaps we could aspire to something more expressive - something on the lines of the renowned alternate taxonomy offered in the Cryptological Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge*.

The list divides all premines into one of 14 categories:

• Those that belong to the dev
• Recursive ones
• Those that are filched by co-workers
• Suckling pigs
• Mineral pools (or Sumps)
• Fabulous ones
• Stray doges
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that shimmer as if they were mirages
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine right bitshift
• Et::cetera()
• Those that have just exceeded the maxcoins limit
• Those that, at a distance, resemble satoshi

Or, equally bizarre and even more unlikely, an OWL ontology: https://github.com/DOACC/doacc

Which is more conveniently editable/navigable with Stanford's FOSS ontology editor, Protege: http://protege.stanford.edu/


Cheers,

Graham

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge%27s_Taxonomy

Edit: added Protege ref
Edit: added wikipedia ref

I tip my hat to your thorough approach.


As far as I know, only the Skein family runs to 1024 bits, all the rest top out at 512. Probably not worth a special effort.

Cheers

Graham

A masterpiece of crystalline clarity. Ave vidor.

Cheers,

Graham

In development. Basic explorer is functioning:

https://github.com/gjhiggins/chaincoin-hash

https://github.com/gjhiggins/chaincoin-abe

Cheers,

Graham

I see from the posts that a number of people haven't cottoned on to the core issue.

Step one: with borrowed money, buy 40% of the coins.
Step two: sell all the coins, pay back the loan, banking any profits or covering any loss.
Step three: mount continuous, free, penalty-less attacks for evermore.

51% is the minimum for a statistically-guaranteed success. At 40% success isn't guaranteed but those are terrific odds when you can mount a permanent attack basically for free. The odds get more forbidding at 20%, obviously --- but when paired with infinite free attacks, that's still quite tempting, kinda like a CDO Tier3.

That's my understanding of the vulnerability anyway --- I am open to correction.

Cheers,

Graham


Edit: explicitly added openness to correction

Thanks for the kind words. Yes, it is the number of altcoins that have chosen each algo. The data is collated from extensive cross-referencing of various lists that have been published over the last couple of years.

My motivation for posting is to provide discussants with some hard-ish figures. My motivation for collating the dataset stems from a pursuit of transparency. The full dataset will be published under an Open Data licence but you'll have to hold your horses for a few days while the work is completed.


I was nearly severely wrong-footed by failing to detect the (rather large) degree of difference between yer bog-standard altcoin fork and the huge amount of work that you have put into Reicoin. fwiw, I'm very impressed with your migration to Bitcoin Core 0.9; that's a stand-out piece of work and an inspired tactical move.

Cheers,

Graham

(sorry for the delay in responding, intertubes here got bunged up for a few hours)

Good catch, that's a useful observation.


Hahaha. Thanks for drawing my attention to this. I think you're absolutely spot-on about the superfluity of 512 bits in respect of enhanced security, how hilarious.

There's a teensy bit of wriggle room available to whoever was the first to use a 512bit implementation for altcoin PoW ...

IIRC, a few of the SHA3-Zoo denizens claim better performance of their 512-bit implementation over their 256-bit implementation. It's quite possible that all of the NIST candidates were anticipating a general move to 512 (especially if primed to do so by NIST, I'll have to check on that) and directed their optimization efforts accordingly.

Your observation attests to your familiarity with working in a strongly-typed language. I must admit that I had registered the discrepancy but failed to draw the obvious conclusion. Instead, I recall thinking to myself: “Nah, that'd be too big a hole for everyone to miss. Must have the wrong end of the stick.” Had I more familiarity with the practicalities of programming in strongly-typed languages, I might saved myself from that error.

Ah well, I shall just have to junk my hyper-secure, extra-strength, extreme hard-core Skein 1024-bit implementation and return to the drafting table Not  a wasted effort though, it allows me to appreciate fully the implications of your observation. I gotta find out whether there's unimpeachable support for this obvious conclusion or whether there's some subtle haha-its-crypto gotcha that muddies what's otherwise an apparently clear view.

Cheers,

Graham

Sorry, I snipped the legend to save space, wasn't thinking.

The graph shows, in essence, algo popularity and is generated from a database of altcoin metadata, going back to 2009, covering 1260-odd altcoins, post-processed to ensure coverage of a few key attributes.

The compilation was guided by inherently informal concerns and inclusions were only very loosely constrained. If there's a bitcointalk thread, a logo and an algo then it's probably been included unless it was a purely hypothetical concept. The data is not 100% accurate but then again, neither are [ANN] details and sometimes that's all there is; garbage in, garbage out - unavoidable.

As a tour d'horizon, it's not intended to be a precise tool and there's some other stuff to go with it that partly makes up for that:

http://github.com/DOACC

Description of a Cryptocurrency (DOACC) is an OWL ontology for cryptocurrency, following the FOSS communities' lead with DOAP.

Collaborators welcome.

Cheers,

Graham

Unless there's something special about your uint512 implementation that you haven't described above, you could have saved some effort by merely using the existing implementation adopted by many altcoins.

Selecting a couple at random from dozens of potential examples:

https://github.com/qubitcoin/QubitCoin/blob/master/src/uint256.h#L647

https://github.com/dmcoin/diamondcoin/blob/master/src/uint256.h#L647

I've not checked all the denizens of the SHA-3 Zoo but I'm reasonably confident that all of the NIST candidates offer 512 bit functions because that was part of the competition spec.

I'll hazard a guess that all of the chained-hashalgo altcoins use 512-bit hash algos. QubitCoin uses 512bit hashes in its 5-link chain and the same is true of both Chaincoin's C11 and Darkcoin's x11 11-link chains. All of the x* chained algo series use 512bit hash functions. For those looking to the future with trepidation, we can get to about x20 before really starting to scrape the barrel)

I see a very healthy diversity of pow algo usage:



(note, log2 scale for presentation purposes)

Cheers,

Graham

Upside down moon?

TIFOFM (figured out for mysef) that the moon in the southern hemisphere sky would be inverted with respect to my normal northern hemisphere view.

wikipedia already knew but it didn't have any suitable images and I wanted to get a sense of how visually different the views are. Quite a bit, it seems.



Which moon is your moon?

Trivia: The current Mooncoin logo shows an image of the moon seen from the southern hemisphere.



We're sorry, we couldn't help ourselves ....

[ANN] The nearly-infamous Three Moon Wolf T-shirt.




Cheers,

Graham

Do you have any reliable numbers to allow you to reach that conclusion? I'd be most interested if you could share them.

Cheers,

Graham

Have it your way, it's your funeral; garbage in, garbage out. It was either an obvious troll or from a naif.


No-one can produce a recognisably satisfactory definition of [shit]coin because there isn't one to be derived, just as there's no derivable definition for Art.

This isn't a technological issue, it's an epistemological one. Membership of the category that you label [shit]coin does not admit of either an intensional or an extensional definition but only of an ostensive definition. The wikipedia entry will tell you all you need to know. The deliberately heavy-handed humour used to lace the OP text may well have created a context for quasi-ostension, exacerbating the problem.

No-one was ever going to able to produce an intensional definition of [shit]coin and by prodding you hard in this soft area, I hoped to make you think a lot harder about what you're planning to do. The one thing that can be pretty much guaranteed about an ostensive definition is that the process is inherently strongly social, I was hoping you would eventually arrive at that insight. Unfortunately, the tech community is by and large painfully innocent of how much additional grief they incur from the proudly-held ignorance of the tools developed by the much-sneered-at "soft sciences" and this is a classic example.

Fortunately, there's an exit, a re-framing of the process to invert the control, allow coins to petition to be rescued. The petitioners are making the categorisation and if the CoinShield process works as expected, investors will press for petitions to be opened, there will be competition to get a petition accepted, arguments will be more focused and effective, voting will become a popular contributive activity. And when CoinShield later subtly repositions itself to become the first to offer insurance to altcoin operators, no-one will be in the least bit surprised.

Cheers

Graham

Incorrect as stated, as I hope you must know. Obviously-gratuitous hyperbole serves only to diminish the cogency of your argument and in this case, given that you have invited people to state their opinion, sails dangerously close to being insulting to those who made the effort to do so.

Cheers,

Graham

Objective achieved, in spades. Thank you for those invaluable insights, the detail is especially useful. I'm going to have an entertaining time trying to assess the relative impact of each of the various contributory factors you've identified.

I find your observations on distribution to be especially pertinent. One of my self-appointed tasks is to produce an estimate of the density of Mooncoin distribution. I'm fairly sure it's do-able, just a matter of tracking down an adequately-detailed description of the technique.

Cheers,

Graham

FWIW, I can confirm that you are correct on both calls. The difference is that Skein512 is the fourth link in the x11 chain and the sixth link in the C11 chain.

I'm still trying to work out whether this difference in ordering is responsible for the wide-ranging experience of cooler running and reduced power consumption with x11 that somehow mysteriously fails to accompany C11.

It's a funny old world.

Cheers

Graham

Thanks for the pointer, the discussion makes for interesting reading. I was a bit surprised not to see at least some numerical analysis, did no-one contribute any figures or graphs? Perhaps that happened in a different communications channel.

The PoW phase was curtailed to 32 billion coins. Is 100 billion still expected to be the total number of Pandacoin PND generated under the new 100% PoS scheme?


That sounds very positive.

I don't believe that we can point to any tangible consensus on the metrics and instrumentation of Mooncoin's performance, we have yet to tackle that issue. And whilst we Moonies will obviously have to choose a metrics and measurement approach that is appropriate to Mooncoin's objectives, I'm always interested in developing my understanding of the pros and cons of different ways to measure a coin's performance; how is Pandacoin PND's growth and advancement measured?

I'm sure Moonies would appreciate some food for thought when considering metrics, instrumentation and aims so I'll quote the intro text from the OP and the About page - it uses a broad, soft brush but I think the picture is painted well enough to mark out the playing field:


Cheers,

Graham

A case in point.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=613213.msg7475135#msg7475135

I must admit I have yet to try and classify the PoS implementation variants.

Cheers,

Graham