The first block using the proposed coinbase split was generated today. See block 212106:

1000 SMLY to the miner (and pool fee)
4500 SMLY for donation
4500 SMLY in dividends


This is being implemented as optional at the moment, but it will become mandatory eventually.

Note that current pool software is unlikely to support this. Modified p2pool software will be made available.

News from Education in a Suitcase, see recent posts on https://www.facebook.com/education.in.a.suitcase/

I didn't even know you have one :-)

Yes!

There are two ongoing mechanisms:

• The Smileycoin rewards are obtained directly and automatically by studying in the tutor-web, at http://tutor-web.net
  
• The Education in a Suitcase project specialises in providing the tutor-web software to low-income regions by crowdfunding or getting grants. This is directed at entire schools or classes and is built up through cooperation with local teachers and administrators.
  

It basically becomes a hybrid POW+POS.

mmm. sure looks like it.
thnx

Yeah, paying students money is hotly debated by lots of people. We're just interested in finding out what we can do to get students to study :-)

i.e. it's initially just  a research question.

-- and also to see whether we can have an impact on education in low-income regions: A dollar isn't much up here but consider a region where a family may live on a dollar a day and there is no tradition of getting an education. Maybe it will give more justification to education in the students' surroundings if they're making the occasional dollar from studying.

Our team has been looking at the changes needed to convert SMLY into a multi-algo coin. This is a fair bit of work and it's probably less of a change to convert the AUR wallet into a SMLY wallet.

This way we'll get the following hashing algorithms: Grøstl, Qubit, scrypt, SHA-256, Skein.

We don't really need SHA-256 and this doesn't give us X11, but neither aspect is really a show-stopper.

As always, comments are welcome.

There are suggestions earlier in this thread concerning the use of a Kimoto Gravity Well.

Any comments on whether we should include this for the SMLY (in the planned changes)?

It's not immediately obvious that this is an improvement on just adding more mining algorithms -- and setting the maximum change to a factor of 1.2 rather than the current 4, inherited from Litecoin/Bitcoin.

SMLY trading at novaexchange is back on again.

The hashlink pool is back up. Thank you, Asemov!

Yeah, we've been plagued a bit by a few issues in the past few days/weeks and we're still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

I *think* the problem is fixed and I *think* the actual source of the problem is at the prohashing mining pool.

This is what we observed:

• 1 An ever increasing mempool with some very old transactions not getting confirmed
• 2 Prices (at novaexchange) stabilised around 10 Satoshi, from several months at 0.2 and yearly average close to 1
• 3 Difficulty levels much higher than we've ever seen before

Exchanges told us they were seeing apparent transaction reversals for old, confirmed, transactions. If anyone can tell us how that can happen (apart from a 51% attack), then we'd like to know! I've been looking at this for some time now (ever since c-cex froze our wallet) and I see no convincing evidence of a 51% attack since these things only happen while prohashing is the sole mining pool.

The folks at prohashing acknowledge the problem in how they handle allocation of hashpower to small coins and have said that they were implementing mods to their algorith, but so far we have not seen any improvement. The resulting behaviour is not just detrimental to us, but it also results in lower payouts for their own customers, so one would think they had an interest in doing something about it, but...

Here is a bigger problem:  Blocks mined at prohashing commonly do not include available transactions!

I don't know why that is or how that can be done. Note that they are a merge mining pool so they do some weird stuff to each block. Whatever the reason is, they have allowed the SMLY mempool to steadily increase by mining without picking up SMLY transactions. Prohashing have the hash power to completely dominate all mining for coins like SMLY.

They have not responded on why they do not include transactions in blocks.

Until recently we also had hashlink as a pool and this problem did not occur with them. But when hashlink died a while ago - no reply from the sysadmin - prohashing became the only pool and with that our problems seemed to escalate.

The folks at Novaexchange have been extremely helpful in diagnosing the problem and finding ways to move on.

We obviously need our own pool - one that we control: one that does not go down at someone else's whim and one that actually puts transactions into blocks. That will be set up during the week and from then on we will be picking up transactions through any mining done with that pool.

The longer-term solution is to include more mining algorithms and that is being worked on, as described earlier on this page. It will take a bit longer but we should get it out this summer.

Now, I don't know how a large mempool can affect the exchanges so that confirmed deposits disappear. If anyone has thoughts on this then I am all ears!

Some of you have coins at c-cex and cryptopia. I do hope they will reopen their markets for SMLY so that you can access your coins.

Time for a status report.

First the bad news:

As you will have noticed, both c-cex and cryptopia have frozen the SMLY wallets so the SMLY can no longer be traded at those exchanges but it can be traded at novaexchange.

c-cex has stated that they have lost a lot of coins and are not happy with this. One possible reason may be a 51% attack back in March or so. They have not answered our requests for what needs to be done for them to reopen for trading.

cryptopia has said that they are investigating a possible fork. They have given no answer to questions on how long this may take or how it is coming along.

Decisions made at c-cex and cryptopia are not in our hands nor much we can do about these things other than to try to improve the SMLY. If you have SMLY at either exchange, your best bet is to ask their admins.

Next the positive news:

We have a team working on improving the SMLY as earlier planned. This includes multiple mining algorithms and changes to the coinbase split as discussed earlier.

The intention is to make the SMLY more robust and better behaved wrt difficulty, regular block generation and less susceptible to attack.

The plan is therefore is to complete the above development and to ask c-cex and cryptopia to re-evaluate their position, late this summer.

If you look above, you will see that the wallets are being changed this summer to allow more options.

At the moment mining is done using scrypt and you will want to join a pool. This will change later this summer.

How you do this completely depends on what kind of hardware you have for mining.

For more info see the official SMLY information page at http://tutor-web.info/smileycoin

Yeah, the folks at cryptopia are trying to figure out what the problem is.

Novaexchange is open for trading SMLY.

Does anyone have objections to reducing the maximum difficulty change for SMLY from a factor of 4 to 1.2?

Please add the novaexchange markets for SMLY,
mainly
https://novaexchange.com/market/LTC_SMLY/
but also
https://novaexchange.com/market/BTC_SMLY/
https://novaexchange.com/market/PIGGY_SMLY/

Thanks for a great site!

Back to this:
It's now summer - sort of, in Iceland  - so this work has started.

In addition to the above, it's been suggested to add more algorithms than just X11 and we will try to do that; preferably something that can still be mined using just a CPU or GPU (given that there are ASICs for X11). The actual number of algorithms depends on how much code can be borrowed from other coins. Auroracoin comes to mind here but if you have suggestions on where to look for good multi-algo implementations, by all means let us know.

Here is the fair warning: This will end up with a hard fork in late summer.

The c-cex exchange still has our wallet listed as in "maintenance".

Other exchanges have verified that there is no problem with our wallet and they have seen no problems with our blockchain.

EDIT:
cryptopia is investigating network issues with the SMLY.

A request like this is being sent to all exchanges with markets for SMLY:

I would like to suggest that your exchange increase the number of confirmations required for SMLY deposits to 70.

The reason: one exchange apparently had a 51%-style attack using SMLY, where someone deposited SMLY, sold them and then opened another chain where the deposit did not exist.

I don't *know* this, but the sysadmin pointed out inconsistencies and there are indeed lost transactions. I can't see any other explanation that a directed attack at that exchange.

There are 60 SMLY blocks between re-evaluations of difficulty, which bounces wildly at the moment. If you set a 70-block requirement, then that can lead to a 24-hour delay in deposits followed by a very fast 60-block generation.

I would prefer safe than sorry, but it is your call of course...and any suggestions you have are most appreciated.

Gunnar

PS We will change the mining algorithms and use of the coinbase this coming summer. All of the above should then become much less of a problem.