Why not pick up your free on the side merged coins while you mine bitcoin?

Why bother NOT grabbing free namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld on the side along with your bitcoins when you mine?

Not doing so seems kind of like mining gold while throwing away all the silver, copper, and other metals lying there with the gold, you are digging anyway, why not pocket them too as well as the gold?

-MarkM-

Why only up to five? I currently merge eight including bitcoin, but sure I could use any of the bitcoin clones instead of bitcoin or maybe could just leave out bitcoin and use namecoin or devcoin or any of the others as the primary coin in the merge, I think, though I have not tried it. Certainly terracoin or bytecoin ought to work instead of bitcoin.

But since bitcoin pays all the electricity for all the others, why the heck leave bitcoin out? It is over 90% of the value of the entire merge...

I do not know whether ppcoin can act as primary in a merge.

-MarkM-

Yeah but it does not have merged mining, so it cannot really be secured, there will probably always be more hashing power out there that has no stake in it thus can trash it for fun any time than there is dedicated to it. Maybe though the new strategy is to first rake in all the coins yourself before adding merged mining, then add merged mining later to get it secured once you have mined all the coins, or something.

If you look at the tables and plots linked to from http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html you will see some very nicely prospering coins, that are waiting to see what happens to Ixcoin once there is no more minting. Those coins used to be SHA256 coins but could not get enough hashing power to be secure, even with merged mining, because people have been so slow to adopt full-panoply merged mining of all possible coins. Those coins are still waiting for readily available ASICs they have been waiting maybe a year and a half for so they can all turn themselves back into merged mined SHA256 coins and do massively merged mining, mining all of them alongside all the current crop of merged mined coins.

All these recent clones that are dying all around us currently are all way too vulnerable to be as valuable as those on the tables and plots at the above link, since the more valuable a coin is the more tempting target it is likely to be to double-spenders and the like. They got to be worth so much by temporarily retreating to Open Transactions pending the arrival of an era of merged ASIC mining of large numbers of coins, including coins that already minted all their coins long ago so only have transaction fees to offer to miners to convince miners to mine them. (Hence the interest in seeing how Ixcoin fares soon when it reaches that stage of its lifecycle...)

-MarkM-

There has been very little need to launch more of them because there have always been some that are so low difficulty that anyone can easily mine them, so all the work of making and launching a new one was not needed, if you wanted a "new" one all you had to do was add one to your merge that hardly anyone else was bothering with at the time.

The way the first wave of SHA256 clonecoins such as namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, coiledcoin and geistgeld protected themselves from ASIC-attack was merged mining. Why bother to attack a merged mined coin instead of just adding it to your merge? Nonetheless a few attacks were attempted, for example Luke tried to crush coiledcoin in its early days.

Among the recent new batch of clones there have been some SHA256 coins too, but they started out without merged mining, some were total clones of bitcoins maybe with no changes at all really other than name and port and handshake stuff that just makes the coins not get confused as to which coin they actually are.

Bytecoin was a bitcoin clone for example, and maybe the first one of the new batch to seriously consider that maybe all the older SHA256 coins might have had a good idea in going to merged minining. Last I heard bytecoin seemed like it was trying to implement merged mining so that people could mine it alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld.

Currently coiledcoin and geistgeld are still so low difficulty that they might as well be newly launched coins, they are easy for newbies to mine with small rigs heck even with just a single GPU or block-eruptor, and unlike a newly launched coin they aren't being orphaned to death by instamining large mining farms. (Coiledcoin that already happened when it launched years ago, but the attacker who did that might not even have bothered saving the wallets so maybe all the attacker's coins got destroyed even.)

Basically launching a new coin you tend to get jumped, so new coins are not really much good for small miners. Old coins that large miners are ignoring is where the big payoffs are for small miners.

Merged mining seems to help a lot because it seems maybe only raving fanatics attack merged coins instead of simply merging them to add yet more income to their existing array of merged coins, since merged coins are darn close to being freebies you can just pick up on the side while still mining all the coins you already mine.

Old coins that get ignored for months or years are especially good because they are the fairest launches of all, since by the time they get popular everyone and anyone had a fair chance to mine them nice and easy for months or years.

You can sit there with even CPUs in some cases, or just one low end GPU or whatever, mining them day in and day out at pretty much zero cost so that in some months or years when finally the mainstream catches on you will have quite nice stashes of them.

-MarkM-

Is it maybe somehow the case that you lot do not know of the handshake bytes that coins use to prevent them from connecting to clients that are actually of other coins?

If you are using the same magic bytes that identify some other coin, instead of using new unique sequence of magic bytes that uniquely identify your clients, then that is why other coin clients are still able to connect to you. Basically your client is deliberately pretending to be one of their clients.

-MarkM-

There is no "payout time". Each block sends out 90% of its minted coins to people on the recipients list. So where you are on the list determines which block will be one in which you are the recipient or one of the recipients that block, and it keeps looping through the list if there are not as many entries on the list as there are blocks in the 4000 block span of time the list is about.

Used to be you'd thus get some coins daily, but if there happen to be 4000 shares this month each would only get paid out once during the month.

Was nicer when there were way less than 4000 shares as, for example, if there are 400 shares each would end up being paid ten times in order to fill out the month of 4000 blocks of payouts to share out.

-MarkM-

Mine already worked, I just think one had to say bitcoind instead of groupdcoind as what to build.

The GUI might not be feasible to build anymore due to even if you manage to get the correct ancient version of wxwidgets that in turn might have depended on ancient versions of everythig else on your system resulting in gosh knows how many things you might have to use ancient versions of in order to get that ancient wxwidgets to work.

Basically groupcoin is a daemon-only coin as far as I know, unless someone does want to wrestle with that ancient wxwidgets GUI system.

Just make sure to mention you want the daemon compiled, that is, bitcoind, or if someone has hacked your copy of the makefile to change the name from bitcoind to groupcoind, then groupcoind.

I never changed that name due to there are many makefiles for many systems and I did not want to imply they all had been made up to date by hacking just that name when, for all I know, tons of other things in other makefiles might also need changing. I figured best leave the original bitcoin makefiles so people can see that they have not been changed so they can figure out that whatever they do to such old makefiles for bitcoin to make them work the same updates will be needed in these to make these work.

So I just rename bitcoind to groupcoind after stripping it after making it before moving it to /usr/local/bin manually for use.

Also I personally do not even use makefile.unix because it lacks the -mt suffix on the boost libraries and it doesn't force use of my custom openssl that includes elliptic curves, so for all coins first thing I always always always have to do is copy makefile.unix to makefile.fedora15 or makefile.fedora16 or makefile.fedora17 or whatever version of fedora I am up to by then and hack it to tell it about the boost libs suffix and my custom openssl because fedora deliberately leaves elliptic curves out of its openssl packages. For some coins I also have to tell it to be permissive about the order in which declarations happen, because the compiler on fedora is strict so doesn't like the code of some coins, at some versions of the coin. So in general, you might well need to make a custom makefile for your specific version of your specific operating-system.

Some versions of some coins I have sometimes also had to add -ldl too to make it link libdl, as some versions of some coins have sometimes failed to link because that lib was not specifically mentioned. The linker usually says that what is causing the error is in that lib so when that lib needs adding it is made clear that is the case by the error message given by the linker, on my system. I dunno if all distros of all operating systems have linkers that helpful though. I guess whatever version of whatever distro makefile.unix was originally created for some other lib already causes it to include libdl without the makefile having to mention it, or maybe does not use libdl so does not need it or something. Need for it seems to vary from coin to coin and/or version-of-coin to version-of-coin over the years.

-MarkM-

Seems the default make target is the wxwidgets GUI not the groupcoind.

Building with the specific ancient version of wxwidgets that old code used is hard, even if you grab the exact right version of wxwidgets.

Trying specifying to make groupcoind or maybe even bitcoind if makefile wasn't hacked to change name of target from bitcoind to groupcoind.

Now that i0coin has been updated so nicely it is time anyway for all the other merged coins to update themselves based on the new i0coin code.

-MarkM-

If it is true that chips will be available for shipping on wednesday, maybe the more batches people ask for refunds on the more chance there is that our batches will be able to be shipped on wednesday due to fewer and fewer batches actually ending up wanting to be shipped...

-MarkM-

The 7950 can mine litecoins and other coins. So even when ASICs did finally get shipped, GPUs by then had a work-around in place to extend their profitable life.

So again just because marketers claim one thing will be obsolete in two weeks does not always mean they are right.

By the time the two weeks rolls around, especially if it turns out to be a lot longer than two weeks, things can change.

Some private farm could be about to turn on massive numbers of already-built 28nm chips, we just don't know and cannot know.

But historically the FUD-trolls claiming in "two weeks" this that or the other old tech would no longer make profit have been wrong.

We wasted a year not buying mining gear because in "two weeks" BFL's superior product would arrive.

We wasted how much of what thinking Avalon would ship chips in 8 to 10 weeks.

-MarkM-

The biggest problem in guessing whether there will be ROI is all the bullshit and all the delays.

A long long time ago it was clear that GPUs would not make ROI because BFL was going to ship ASICs in "two weeks".

Somehow nonetheless people still keep managing to make money with GPUs.

So mostly I guess it depends on whether you actually believe that any or all of the vapourware that has been announced is going to ship.

For a long long time people who ignored all the speculation about supposedly to be shipped in the future hardware have done rather well going ahead and buying stuff that would not have made ROI had all the vapourware actually been shipped "on time".

Any of these ASICS can probably make ROI if none of the others end up actually shipping, or if they get delayed long enough.

Even USB block eruptors started looking a lot better once Avalon turned out not to be shipping chips than they had looked back when people imagined Avalon was going to ship "on time".

-MarkM-

Well currently I still want my klondike boards, and thus hope some chips will be shipped to Steamboat on wednesday...

-MarkM-

Well its silly to argue anyway I guess since I do want to mine and do still want my Klondike 16 boards built and so on and so on.

I should just jump on the bandwagon telling everyone hell yeah mining won't pay, mining is for idiots, forget mining, if you think crypto coins are good buy them but don't waste your time screwing around with this whole mining thing.

I am partly influenced personally by the fact I made far more CPU mining BBQcoins, a purportedly worthless coin, than I did on any other coin. So to me the ability to mine coins nobody is selling has proven itself to be the most profitable approach, historically.

Really it was all the actual time and thought I put in that paid, no turnkey buy it and plug it in magic box made me my profits, I profited by having the skills, time and equipment to work the outer edges the masses would not or could not.

-MarkM-

Bitcoins are irrelevant though, if it is dollars, or geistgeld, or icecream cones or whatever that you are after.

Heck you could look at it all from the point of view of a person who has electricity to spend instead of a person who has fiat or bitcoins or geistgeld or whatever to spend.

I have a certain amount of electricity and I want to turn it into more electricity.

I could buy a device that can mine any SHA256 coin or even merge a bunch of SHA256 coins, and use it to burn electricity to produce stuff I can sell for more electricity than I put into it.

This fixation on bitcoins ignores the versatility of the device, heck I could launch a whole new SHA256 coin to mine with the device if I thought that would buy me more electricity than mining some already existing SHA256 coin...

-MarkM-

Check out how many coiledcoins and geistgeld a Jupiter would merged-mine per day.

Where you going to buy that many to hold instead of mining them?

You already missed out on merged mining lots of i0coin and groupcoin per day at low difficulty, where did you buy those instead of mining them?

-MarkM-

Yeah but similarly there is presumably no rational explanation for measuring a device which produces i0coin, groupcoin, coiledcoin or geistgeld in any other unit other than one of those.

For a lot of people these devices are devices which produce dollars, thus to them there is no good reason for measuring them in any unit other than dollars.

They might not care at all whether they end up on any given day merged mining all the merged mined coins, or mining one of the standalone SHA256 coins, and will be willing even to change what they mine from day to day depending on which coin or merge of coins offers the most dollars that day.

If I pick just one SHA256 coin to buy, instead of buying a device that can mine any of them or even mine many of them all at once, I am less diversified.

If I buy some of each, even in proportion to what various statistics tell me I could mine of each right now, I still have to worry about whether today it happens to be better to mine, and thus, presumably, to buy, a standalone SHA256 coin that cannot be merged or some particular merge of many types of coins. Since I have to worry anyway about which coin or merge of coins happens to be best on a given day I already am having to track what would be best to mine, so even if I decide to buy instead of mining I already face all the work a miner needs to do of tracking exactly what specifically to mine from day to day or hour to hour.

Plus if I buy there is a paper trail showing which bitcoins I own in many cases or at least in some cases, so by buying I could end up weakening the pseudonymity that some regard as part of the appeal of bitcoin in the first place.

Further, lets say I do decide that I want to buy thousands of coiledcoins and geistgeld each day instead of merged-mining them, where do I buy them?

If I had bought instead of mining, where would I have bought my hoards of i0coins and groupcoins that, thanks to (merged) mining instead of buying, I accumulated in the period during which neither was on any exchanges?

-MarkM-

Someone knows but who, was all correspondence with the fab strictly and directly between Yifu and them or did some renegade part of the "team" get in the middle and run off with some of the chips or what?

-MarkM-

So far there doesn't even seem to be any indication that anyone, even Yifu, actually knows how many chips were manufactured and where they went?

-MarkM-

But is it actually "news" ?

-MarkM-

Good luck buying at an exchange all the i0coins, coiledcoins, geistgeld or even groupcoins that a miner could have been mining for you using merged mining.

Heck you are even forgetting to mention buying some namecoins and devcoins and ixcoins along with bitcoins to make up for what you could have (merged) mined...

Its too late now to rake in lots of low difficulty i0coins and groupcoins with a miner, but coiledcoins and geistgeld a miner still gets them easier than buying them on an exchange as far as I know...

-MarkM-