All of the reasons to do tenebrix apply to fairbrix and solidcoin2.  So, why get on a chain with 6 years worth of mining awarded to one person?  I'm positive bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today had Satoshi simply given himself a six year bonus upfront.

Also, I'm unconvinced the algorithm is not viable on a GPU.  It seems to scale with clock rate of my CPU and number of GPUs.  Just like a normal bitcoin miner.  I'll look further this weekend but first impression is it should run well enough on GPU -- it's just that nobody has ported the C code to OpenCL yet.

If difficulty drops to 400k I'll be happy to sell at $1/BTC, and would continue to do so (but selling 5x as many coins).  $5 only looks good at current difficulty.

Now I'm at 4.6c/kwhr + fees, so the "free electricity" guys and Ukrainian miners can go lower and still be happy.  FPGA miners can go way lower still.

At what point do the bulls provide fresh injections of cash?  If new money doesn't keep coming we have no choice but to eventually make new lows because it's currently costing $1k/hr (or about $720k/month) at US average power rates just to run the network.  I'm sure the exchanges and other related sites have costs of their own they can't pay in BTC.  New price lows may translate to lower difficulty, which in turn would drive lower prices miners are willing to accept.

Bulls really need to step up and start propping up this pyramid, and soon.  And I don't mean by posting here, I mean by cash injection.  Once the downward spiral starts accelerating it may be too late.

If only there was a way to short the various shitcoins...  I'd do it even with 5:1 margin requirements.  Satoshi was a freaking genius.  Every alt currency so far has been an unmitigated disaster for "investors."

That said, with a truly memory size constrained crypto scheme it won't matter what interface you have to the underlying hardware.  Browser wrappers, native API, whatever.  Just like having a 1600 CPUs won't help when your bottleneck is startIOs.

2x i7 920 at 2.8 ghz - 2.1 x 4 = 16.8 khash/sec.  Averaging about 10 blocks every 24 hours so far.  Not bad -- that's about the same as 2x5830s mining bitcoin.  I'll probably shut down once the 30 or so bitcoins at .0014 are claimed though, definitely not worth doing at .0001.

Incorrect.  If you're really fast you could get around 2.8 btc for that.   If you wait a few days maybe .25BTC?

I have nothing against ArtForz, he's contributed an amazing amount to the bitcoin community.  But yeah, he'll probably wind up with a relatively huge amount of brix as we all edge ever closer to the exit.  I think this may be the first alt chain where I didn't eject in time.

Mostly because tenebrix is a bitch and a half to get working in the first place.   Took me an hour of looking at code, windows batch files, etc to see why it's dumping core or failing assertions before I got it running.  EC2 boxes don't have GUIs.

You've fixed the headless problem, so the major hurdle to running the miners remotely has been cleared.  It's easy enough to do, but as you pointed out with a grand total of 230 BTCs available to cash out (and only 30 of that above .0001BTC) it's definitely not worth the price of admission.

Still, if you want to see it on EC2 post a big enough bounty in BTC and I'll get it running.  Having a hard enough time selling my tiny amount of brix, so not really willing to do it for that.

I'll agree 90% is completely arbitrary and meaningless.  Doubly so when not associated with a timeframe.

IMO bitcoin has more similarities to a publicly traded security than a commodity or government backed currency.  There are capital expenditures, operations, investors and ongoing sales of stock to finance operations.  Far closer to a precious metals mining company than the precious metal itself.

What makes matters worse is there's no real way to hedge against bitcoin volatility.   Bitcoinica and its insane margin requirements doesn't count.   A market cap of billions could provide stability, but even a smaller market cap could be stable IF we had options trading on a regulated exchange to create hedges with.  Oh, and the exchange rate wasn't $5 but more like $50.

Merchants could go long in the money puts and be secure knowing bitcoins they take in won't drop far enough to kill their margins.   Miners could short calls to go long puts, locking in long term income and planning operations with time horizons measured in months or years instead of days.   All sorts of stabilizing options (pardon the pun) become possible if you have reasonable margin requirements and a prayer of actually assigning your options.

You think BoA would be around if it wasn't for a government bailout?  I'm not sure good old Uncle Sam is going to pop out of the woodwork to save bitcoin.  Has Satoshi's been contributing enough to various campaign funds?

In all seriousness I don't think we need to wheel out the plague cart until $1.25 or so.  And that's assuming no widespread FPGA adoption.   Assuming FPGAs we can do much, much lower before the corpse stops twitching.  Thanksgiving and xmas/newyears seem to line up with around the time we would be testing those lows.

Have to disagree.  It *could* flatline with decent volume if the bots are the main traders.  We've seen that before.  If the market maker is bigger than the entire market then prices aren't going anywhere.

Also, "very long" is relative in bitcoin time.  We're talking days to weeks here, not months to years.

Your "quadruple bottom" is actually a trading range, with a slight negative bias.  In order for this to be a reversal pattern it'd have to have a convincing breakout utterly smashing several resistance levels.  If that happened I'd switch from bear mode to bull mode, like I've briefly done in the past.

I was a bit intrigued by lc's indepth knowledge of current botnet pricing per hour, faircoin's 51% attack by a botnet, and him downplaying the dangers of downloading and running mining binaries off the net...  Just coincidences I guess.

Not sure what's more LOLworthy.  Premining 6 years worth of entire network output, or people considering thinking about contemplating the long term support of such a chain.

I may not be a fan of CoinHunter, but at this point SC 2.0 seems like the best contender for a viable alt chain.

You can!  Just fork the bitcoin code, tweak a few parameters, come up with a catchy name, announce it on the alt currencies and speculation board.  Heck, give the btce guys a chunk of your premine (go with 20 mil, why not the first 20 years of mining head start?) and you might be listed on an exchange day 1 and cashed out by the end of the week.

This alt chain nonsense won't stop until people hopping on the freshest pyramid like it was the newest block at a proportional pool get burned to a crisp in less than 24 hours.   The current "weeks" is too long, IMO.

As far as how much premine is enough -- well.  The OP clearly feels that 6 years worth is enough.   I might feel that 24 years worth might be better.  Others think simply being the earliest of the earliest adopters on an even playing field with others is enough.  All I know is this is every shitcoin is coming out with a more and more egregious pyramid attached, and while I'm glad for the bonus free bitcoins I feel a bit sorry for "investors."  Too bad, I believe this particular algorithm holds promise.  I'm a bit upset the OP has soiled it for everyone though.

Then the more it's mentioned the better, right?  I don't remember seeng "I've given myself about six years worth of coins the rest of you schmucks will mine" (and that's what 3 years worth of 50 btc/block turns into at 25 btc/block) featured prominently on the tenebrix website.  Me, I think that fact needs a bit more stress and exposure than it's received.


The problem with pyramids is you never know when the end will come.  It's all a guessing game.  The longer and bigger the pyramid lasts, the bigger the stake.  If tenebrix does take off you stand to win a lot more than $60,000.  It's a risk of existing vs potential payout.  Besides, if you cash out now you'll only get 2 chains worth of reward.  If you can get a dozen or more chains going before cashing out you'll do far better.

Plus you can, at some point, distribute some malware with the final shitcoin variant du jour, making the ultimate payout even sweeter.


Good for them.  But if you DO decide there's enough bids on the exchanges to cash out by the time they get the warning it'll be too late to do anything about it.  Their transactions (and any other speculator transactions), will be behind yours.

Also, isn't your goal to provide a coinage laundry service?  Just wondering when it'll be time to "test" it with your premined GG and brix.

Just picking on you because IMO you got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too greedy with the premine total on tenebrix.  Any of the alt chain pyramids with gigantic premine totals are like that.  Hell, bitcoin itself, with a 1.5M Satoshi premine is like that.
But your latest is truly an amazing display of chutzpah.   

So true.  It won't be hard to inject a transaction from the address containing 7.7M to another address.  But considering how SLOOOW the tenebrix network suddenly got at confirming I'm guessing spending those 7.7M would be a whole different matter.

Been trying to get my last tenebrix to btce while they still have some value.   Go go gadget network!  But still quite hopeful re: maintaining my 100% eject success record.

IIRC it only took 20% (not 51%) of the network capacity to attack NMC because of the way the network does time synchronization.  I don't believe that vulnerability was ever addressed, so for fairbrix that works out to... 30 Mhash or so?  I've got about half that online right now.  Could probably get more than enough to implode tenebrix with EC2 for a few hundred $, a few thousand "trial" accounts or a tiny botnet.

Are you sure about that?  What's a network of a few thousand high end machines with great network connectivity, on 24x7, insensitive to CPU or GPU load worth?  Doubly so with some having the keys to a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of electronic currency?

I'd say quite a bit.  It's only a matter of time -- if a big enough % of the bitcoin community is willing to download and run windows exes for every alt currency that comes along all you need is a hijacked forum account of a regular to pull it off.

AFAIK, the closest we have is that fake miner.  If you think of it as mining a bogus, non-existent vapor coin chain then yes, it qualifies.

If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it's wired into the core of our being.  And an alt chain mining trojan feat is not just possible but borderline trivial.  Not having happened in the 4 or 5 alt chains so far is just pure luck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_%28computing%29

Software trojans are definitely not a myth.  Has there been a bitcoin related one yet?  Absolutely!  I forget the name, but there was some wallet stealer Windows .exe that promised vastly higher hash rates.   It uploaded wallets to an FTP site instead.

It's hard enough to get the half-baked alt chain software to run at all (and speed is of the essence knowing they are all quickly collapsing pyramids) never mind configuring a VM with appropriate hardware access.  Here are steps I've taken which I think are "good enough" to be advice -- it's worked for me for 4 shitcoin chains so far.

1.  Don't use Windows and pre-built .exes.  Just don't.  Ever.  Nothing inherently wrong with Microsoft software, but it is well understood and commonly used by the botnet types.  Staying out of the monoculture is a form of security by obscurity.
2.  Create a new account with no group membership.  I call mine "goatse" for obvious but nostalgic reasons.  Make absolutely sure that account doesn't have read or write access outside of their home directory.   Make doubly sure they can't read the raw hard drive device.
3.  Log out of your main account and into that account whenever compiling or running the alt chain software.  Remember that compilation & installation scripts are code!
4.  Do not browse exchange sites you have coinage in and definitely do not save passwords in the browser when logged in as this account.
5.  If you log into this account via ssh DO NOT enable X proxying.  It's trivial to read your keystrokes, do screen captures, etc when X is proxied.  Let me repeat this one, make sure X proxying is disabled.  If you can type 'xterm' and see it show up on your main account's screen you're vulnerable. 

And yes, I even follow this for official bitcoin software.  On a different account than "goatse" of course.