I do agree that the absence of PoW with this coin raises a lot of questions and new ways to "game" the system. PoW can be very energy intensive, but it works very well to distribute coin circulation to participants (esp early on when it's crucial to get coins in as many hands as possible), while rewarding folks that take the most risk (i.e. dedicate the most computing resources to it) and preventing manipulation by unethical players that would undermine the basis of any currency (trust).

It sounds like at this point the issue with this system is how to prevent someone from just creating 1000 amazon instances, with 1000 node instances on each. I DO think this matters because besides the obvious unequal and unfair coin distribution in this case (where, unlike PoW there isn't a significant cost/risk increase on the "hatcher"'s part to justify it), I also see network speed and stability issues. If your coin distribution is controlled primarily by how many "trusted" hatching nodes/clients you have up, the P2P network could grow to immense proportions and complexity, especially if the coin starts to gain traction and "hatchers" try to out-game eachother. At that point, your propagation speed across the network could become an issue (or at least would be greatly affected). Machines do have hard limits on the number of open file descriptors/ports, for instance. With bitcoin, this is a non-issue because node participation is not a rewarding factor in and of itself, and thus is naturally optimized in the system.

Any solution to the above in a PoW-less implementation would most likely need to solve the issue of accurate node identification... for instance, if, in the protocol, they tie hatcher identity to IP (or something that factors network node identity in, such as MAC address), you can possibly use tor/proxy meshes, MAC spoofing, IP aliasing, etc to overcome this. I highly doubt there is a form of zero-trust node identification that can not be gamed. With PoW this doesn't really matter, since the work itself is both the limiting and identifying factor (i.e. payment address), and can be easily verified by other nodes.

I guess we will see what direction this all takes when/if the source/whitepaper is released.

Hasn't this guy released like 3 coins in the past week, or talked about doing so?

YAC was on CoinChoose for a bit, but I think sal002 took it off because it skewed the graphs. Perhaps there's another way we could have it added (on a separate "CPU Coin" section...or not have a line for it on the graph, but have it in the grid, etc).

I do agree that it's very important to have it on CoinChoose, but as it is a CPU coin with a low value, the result may not be that impressive anyhow.

I'm interested in testing.

I think a lot of folks are turned off to altcoins in general, from the sounds of it and the recent crap coin floods. I like YaCoin personally. Here's to it's continued market growth.

Just wondering: Do we have any live graphs?

Agreed. NetCoin needs to be open source from the start I believe, otherwise it will lack legitimacy. I believe as well that a Netcoin clone would be seen through by the community, with people gravitating to the "real deal" because of it's innovator advantage and strong development community.

AmeriCoin, fuck yeah!
Comin' again to mine the mother fuckin' coin yeah!
AmeriCoin, fuck yeah!
Pumping & dumping's the only way yeah!

ChinaCoin your game is through, 'cause now you have to answer to...
AmeriCoin, fuck yeah!
So lick my butt and suck on my balls!
AmeriCoin, fuck yeah!
Whatcha gonna do when it come for you now?

Guys, have you seen bitminter.com? Very neat pool. They do something similar to what we were talking about with bitcoin. Java web start client...relative no-brainer to get started (certainly a LOT better than setting up cgminer). I use cgminer/anubis with my farm, but ran their client on my workstation to try it out. It looks like they have about 8000 miners on their systems, around 2/3 of which are using the bitminter client. Funny thing is, their client does detect the CPU and offer it as a mining device, although I don't think that's used much anymore.



Another option is to create a pushpool client that works like this. A mmcfe fork could be created that offers services like statistics, registration via an API, to allow the user to just download the client and register from it, as well as viewing their statistics. There could be a master pool directory web service that could be used to allow switching between pools possibly. If something like OpenID or Google Accounts OAuth was used, registration could just be off of their google account, for instance, further simplifying things (this is how bitminter works for the initial signin).

p2pool is probably the most "resilent" way to do it, but my thought is that p2pool has a major deficiency currently with their statistics feedback. In short, it really sucks (IMHO). Any user of a tool like this wants to see, at an absolute minimum:
* their current hashrate
* estimated coins per day
* graph of coin yield over the past week or so
* graph of hash rate over the past week or so

This info doesn't necessarily need to be in the tool itself, but has to be available. With bitminter, it's on their site when you're logged in.

If anything, this is food for thought to me at least.

Hashrate for me looks to be around 125MH

$ ./yacoind getnetworkhashps
125940739
(then about a minute later)
$ ./yacoind getnetworkhashps
128083276
(another minute later)
$ ./yacoind getnetworkhashps
127557858

On the first point, I'd rather it all be in a single installer. I think we should definitely aim to keep the whole process as simple as possible (i.e. one installer to run over two).

As far as p2pools, I proposed that because with pushpools, there is the whole setup routine (register, set up worker, etc) that we avoid with p2pool. However, as you said, they can be a fast moving target. We have a few options here:

a. Hardcode it with the 3 or 4 most popular p2pools (via multiple -o options...so even if one or two go down, we're still good)
b. the script that launches the miner makes a web service call to a central service (on google appengine for example) that will feed back a "current" list of p2pool hostnames. From this, the command line arguments are constructed. Making such a web service would be trivial. The script could be created that a default, hardcoded list would be used if this webservice was down.
c. Achieve a similar effect to b above by using round-robin DNS (CNAME entries)...I don't know enough about p2pool to know if this will work...

Also see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=187714.0

Add this to the list of tasks to simplify in yacoin. Looks like it needs yacoind.exe under windows.

Stupid question, related to this, have updated binaries off of WindMaster's build been released, or if I want to get an updated binary for Windows, I would have to compile it myself?

I looked into the same exact thing. It is possible with the 'aliases' namespace still under development (http://dot-bit.org/Namespace:Aliases). Offering something like this would be a huge boon to both namecoin and cryptocoins as a whole. Payment addresses are so confusing to most folks.

Yes, excellent idea. Having the server either be an executable that's fired off as a Windows service, or just started as a normal program. Or, you could take it out to a library-type interface, where it's initialized as part of another program...and bindings for other languages such as Python, Perl, PHP, etc could be wrapped around that with SWIG, for instance.

Having to write a bunch of GUI code in C/C++ is just a major headache. Taking this thing out to a light JSON RPC-driven interoperability layer where the GUI could be web based, or based on another (more high level language) such as Python, .NET, etc. would be a huge boon.

And yes, the entire -qt interface is a bit clunky period.

As a first step, just having an installer that installed shortcuts to launch:
1. the QT interface
2. a bat file that queried yacoind for the primary wallet address on startup, and then launched minerd with the top 3 p2pools, specifying that address to receive payment for both
3. a link to a howto document on mining, selling YaCoin on the exchanges, etc
(4. allowed that bat file to be autolaunched at startup (e.g. added to the Startup group under windows)

Would be a big step.

So on the topic of YaCoin development, I wanted to put forth some ideas on how to increase the coin’s adoption.

I think we can all agree that currently, this is a coin developed by technical folks, for technical folks. You could say the same thing is true for most all altcoins, and you’d be right. Their technical complexity (both conceptually and from a day-to-day operational standpoint of the current toolset and utilities) is a big factor keeping them from starting to enter wider adoption. Bitcoin itself is just now starting to get over this with sites like Coinbase and Bitpay.

However, with YaCoin, we have a coin where money can be made with no special hardware required beyond a general purpose CPU. Admittedly, the money is not much at all today, but when I think of the number of folks that may be open to running this on their work computers, for instance to make some coins to play around with, it’s extremely compelling because that both increases knowledge and interest in the coin (and digital currencies in general), along with strengthening the network by leaps and bounds (which lends back into the former in a virtuous and synergistic cycle).

However, I believe that the technical hurdles with the toolset are still insurmountable for most folks, and are ones that YaCoin inherited from Bitcoin, etc. Things like:

•   Downloading the client as a zip file, with a bunch of DLLs and no installer. Huh?
•   The wallet.dat file is stored in a separate location from the program itself (makes sense, since it’s tied to the user, but it can be a pain to find if you don’t know that).
•   Want to mine for coins? You have to resort to either creating and editing some (seemingly) random .conf file you have to create in some (seemingly) random directory, or downloading and figuring out command-line switches for an external mining program like minerd or cgminer
•   So I finally do that, and then get some coins… what now?


For us, none of these are show stoppers, but for 99% of computer users…you’d lose them at the first one. I am definitely not proposing making this thing appealing to 99% of computer users, since most of them at this point wouldn't understand the concept of a digital currency anyhow. I’d rather be interesting in focusing on enhancing the client design to open this up to the top 10% of computer users, who have the skills and possible inclination, but don’t necessarily want to read a book on these coins to figure them out. As a bonus, you’d greatly simplify things for the existing yacoin community (if I can blaze through an installer to set up yacoin on a random box, awesome). Focusing on Windows at least at first, for obvious reasons, it would be something like the following:

•   Start by creating an installer for the yacoin client. And/or, have a “portable” version that you can throw on a USB stick, that throws the wallet, blockchain, etc right there in a subdirectory under the .exe
•   Enhance the yacoin client to come packaged with minerd. Add a tab to the GUI to start and stop mining (and allow the user to auto-start the client and therefore mining at machine startup). Starting mining would find a suitable p2pool, and launch minerd, pointing at that. Coins would then naturally end up in the user’s wallet.
•   Possibly include a ticker in the client showing announcements (such as “Complexity increase in 2 days. Your hashrate will be cut in half.” and the current yacoin price, for instance)
•   Tutorials around this client, along with explaining about selling/trading the coins on an exchange.
•   Future ideas of web-wallets for yacoin, such as a coinbase clone….

At this point, you have a coin with more user-friendliness that any altcoin, which I believe matches its technical profile as a CPU-mineable coin. And the fact that you introduce new folks into the digital currency space by means of yacoin would be an amazing feat.

Comments, suggestions? I am a developer and could assist with some of these tasks, as well as contributing some YAC as the start of a bounty pool (my time is limited however as I run a rapidly growing business).

+1 for YaCoin, being my 5th choice after BTC, LTC, NMC, PPC

YAC skewed the CoinChoose numbers (as it's 99.9% CPU only at this point) so it had to be taken off CoinChoose.

Error with Bitbar display...showing the low Cryptsy price instead of the (much) higher bter price.

Thanks bitdwarf! Can you have them remove that stupid warning on the page while they're at it?

To me both options are about the same, if everyone has a GPU miner for this coin, then it's about the same as no-one having a GPU miner. Right now we got one guy it appears, with a very decent GPU implementation.   If he abused that however, it could really damage the coin, at least if my calculations and the net hash rate estimates are correct.

I'd like to learn more about the issues at N=8K before I'd feel comfortable buying up any more YAC. The fact that the GPU/CPU ratio appears to be shrinking over time could be encouraging, but even at a 10:1 ratio, there would still be very little reason to CPU mine if GPU mining somehow got out.  And if it turned into a GPU coin, I'd think a much higher coin price would be necessary to justify any miners switching over their rigs to this coin for a fraction of the hash rate (after N goes past 1024). This is a very interesting coin.