First mass-produce ASICs for your new coin, dirt cheap USB miners $5 each or something.

Only once those are ready to ship is vast quantities release the coin they are to mine.

Or, separate distribution of the coins from securing the ledger/transactions, such as by using Ripple (once it becomes open source) method to secure it and the kind of "CPU mining" described at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining to distribute the initial full number of coins ever to be minted.

-MarkM-

Maybe more large farms like ASICminer are going to be necessary then: large farms that don't run around chasing the scam of the say but instead have securing a particular chain or family of merged chains as their primary goal or at least their primary focus?

Maybe even ASICminer will end up chasing scams if shareholders get the tulip mania bug and vote for that, so maybe in the long run we need the major industries that depend on a particular currency or family of currencies to maintain massive farms not to rake in profit but just simply to secure the basis of their wealth or the hoarded wealth of their shareholders?

-MarkM-

TL;DR They *are* reversed; Ixcoin is 3, I0coin is 2. Weird. Maybe they moved to merged mining in a different order than they were originally created.

Old post:

No, that will not work, I think, as each secondary chain needs a different ID, I think the ID is used as an index into the list of secondary chain merkles or something in the coinbase transaction or the block header or something.

Here are the IDs and default ports of the merged mined coins:

# Chains:
#  0 geistgeld 8777
#  1 namecoin 8336
#  2 ixcoin 8339
#  3 i0coin 7332
#  4 devcoin 52332
#  5 groupcoin 51332
#  7 rucoin 8082
# 16 coiledcoin 9442

RUcoin is no longer a merged mined coin I think, but when it was its ID was 7.

Notice that GiestGeld failed to set a unique ID, it just used bitcoin's ID, so it probably only works due to bitcoin itself never being one of the secondary chains.

So have you actually merged-mined this alongside ixcoin and not found that the IDs clash?'

Or has my list reversed the IDs for Ixcoin and I0coin, like maybe actually Ixcoin is 3 and I0coin is 2 ?

Ixcoin came first though didn't it, so seems likely its number would be lower than I0coin's?

Coiledcoin's 16 reflects the fact they already way back then thought it likely by the time they released their coin several more clones would have popped up!

-MarkM-

TL;DR They *are* reversed; Ixcoin is 3, i0coin is 2. Weird. Maybe they moved to merged mining in a different order than they were originally created.

Coiledcoin was never killed, it was attacked for about three days or so then the attacker ran around boasting of having killed it while actually it kept humming along just fine and has ever since.

It is a merged mined coin merged alongside bitcoin, namecoin, devcoin. groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin and geistgeld.

-MarkM-

Well the really important question of course is does it actually work as a secondary chain in merged mining?

I tried to find in the code where it sets its aux chain ID as chain number three but could not find it, but then again going back to the old code and looking there I also could not find it. I cannot remember anymore where the merged mined coins set such things.

-MarkM-

if they don't use merged mining they will all hang separately due to not hanging together, like all the scrypt crapcoins.

Already some, maybe most, of the SHA256 coins that cannot yet be merged mined are looking into adding merged-mine-ability for the same reason - survival - the old wave of altcoins did.

-MarkM-

It is cheap right now because people get it "free" with their bitcoins namecoins and devcoins when they mine at bitparking's merged mining pool.

But if bitparking and who-ever else is securing its chain keep on mining it once it no longer mints coins, all of a sudden the "free" Ixcoins supply will drop to a trickle, the transaction fees. Hopefully people who have been hoarding it all these years will see the value in continuing to secure the chain in order to secure their hoard, so it could get interesting.

Also bear in mind that for most people ASICs are not really here yet, so lots of people who have all along intended to secure the merged mined chains have kept putting off doing so because they didn't want to spend money on GPUs or FPGAs while BFL's ASICs were due to arrive in only two more weeks...

-MarkM-

Well maybe the Ixians will become a major clan:

http://mudgaard.knotwork.com:27744/clans.cmvp#Ixians

Or actually the way they have been going maybe more like a collection of clans, since they chose the type of clan structure known as "family", which does not seem to recognise marriage as making someone "family".

Dracix, who formed clan "Ixians", married Darling, but she was unable to join his clan, evidently only his children will be able to join.

Thus, she formed another family-type clan, the Darlings, and now they are waiting for their children to grow up...

http://mudgaard.knotwork.com:27744/clans.cmvp#Darlings

-MarkM-

Yeah but bitparking's merged mining pool merges them so if you prefer pooled mining that is the place to go. Not sure if any other merged mining pools merge Ixcoin yet.

-MarkM-

So this is probably why GeistGeld uses even more memory than I0Coin, too.

No memory leaks required, these coins are simply showing us what would happen to all the merged coins if people only merged mined them using p2pool.

People who would prefer not to have to use as much memory for merged mined chains thus have an incentive to try to convince pools other than p2pool to merged mine the coins.

As it is, p2pool makes all the coins other than the primary chain into roulette aka solo mining, which will be more and more of a crapshoot as merged mined coins in general go up in difficulty.

So basically anyone who wants I0coin and GeistGeld and, eventually, most other merged mined coins, not to grow in memory needs as fast should set up methods other than p2pool for merged mining them.

They could also consider pledging to the bounty that DeVCoin already has been offering for a long time now, a bounty for software that can be used to in effect make merged mining pools. The current bounty can be won even just by software letting someone offering access to a p2pool node to divvy up the secondary chain coins among the miners; maybe this finding though will motivate a separate bounty that leaves p2pool out of it and specifically wants free open source merged mining pool software to be created.

I will not be running your dirty trick version of I0coin, it does not seem a good idea. RAM is cheap, lets just throw RAM at the problem.

A non dirty trick updated I0Coin is welcome though even if it does consume more RAM. It should download the blockchain much faster and just basically be a better client with all the modern features.

-MarkM-

As more people and maybe even more pools get into merged mining more coins, it should increase.

Also as people already merged mining it upgrade their mining equipment...

-MarkM-

Well as long as we're making shit up, how about this made up story.

Lets say it takes maybe ten million to get this far. At half a million a piece that is twenty pieces of the pie already sold just to get this far.

Maybe none of those twenty want anything to do with this forum full of bullshitters and trolls but a few million more to grease the wheels wouldn't hurt if some hero trolls want to deal with the riff-raff. So what the heck, throw it out there, hey hero trolls, do any of you that play on our scale wanna piece of the pie so you can be even more heroic in your den of trolls known as bitcointalk?

Maybe nothing will come of it, but at least later when the trolls say its not fair you twenty piepeople having such bit mining operations and exclusive access to such hot chips we can say hey we gave you an opportunity, if you lot can't even raise half a frakkin mill too bad, its less than ten thousand bitcoins for gosh sake, heck closer to five thou, whats your problem?

Did I do it right?

-MarkM-

Is Maddoff or something like that the name to cite here, as in some crook every idiot who wants a fast buck throws their money at because wow the profits are huge so better just jump in what could possibly go wrong?

Aren't there enough ponzi / pyramid / tulip-mania scams out there already without starting to break the few things left that aren't just scams run by some megalomaniac who will do anything to make a fast buck?

A centrally managed money supply with a central power that sets the interest rates, how original, and even more original that they are raised so all the cronies of the central power can get lots, then of course lowered to keep out the riff-raff. Sheesh, that novacoin is so innovative!

Maybe you should check what the brains behind Enron are up to now and get in on that too, sure to be a big hit!

-MarkM-

Mining, though is all about the profits?

Or are you maybe suggesting all the people who aren't profit-oriented so lose out in the mining game by sticking to a coin to secure its blockchain should just go become developers and leave mining to the profit-oriented folk?

Why should developers be all about altruistic service hoping maybe someone might tip them a nickel here and there but mining be about raping the suckers and making all the chains less secure?

-MarkM-

Maybe once an "Open Transactions client for grandmas" is available more people will use it to get direct access to the assets listed at

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

It is a pity in a way that no "brokers" showed up on the forums or web, though I suppose the players whose guildmasters or clanmasters or whatever provided some kind of provision of such things might be happy not to have been pushed aside by hordes of bitcoiners during the early years...

-MarkM-

Well these are seven major intergalactic currencies, if any one of the civilisations or corps whose currencies they are failed to stake-mine the other six, maybe the other six would retailiate by not stake-mining theirs.

So part of the incentive to stake-mine other major currencies would be you want the nations/civilisations/corps who also have major currencies to stake-mine yours...

Maybe therefore it would be useful for each branch of each national/corp bank to use the same address all the time for their stake-mining, so people can check off their checklists to make sure each and every major branch of each and every major currency's bank is in fact doing its part in staking?

Part of what makes a major currency major, of course, is the sheer number and power of starships, redshirts, starship troopers, galactic marines etc each major power can send in to conduct negotiations with any planet whose banks are not doing their part...

On the other hand I suppose maybe a consensus system, a la Ripple, might be another approach. Each nation could choose to list only its own bank branches as trusted servers, and if one nation ends up thereby lying about how many of another nation's coins someone has, well there again maybe that would not be considered the act of a friendly or allied or even neutral nation, so could, again, edge things toward war...

-MarkM-

Is pure proof of stake, with no proof of work, a bad idea?

There are quite a few coins that have long ago already issued all their coins, so I was wondering whether maybe they could work using pure poof of stake, with no interest rate since all the coins have already been minted, but since the only mining will be stake mining, the transaction fees would go to the stake miners.

This would be for coins such as UKB, CDN, UNS, NKL, GMC, GRF and MBC, which currently do not use blockchains at all due to how insanely expensive blockchains secured by proof of work (even when using merged mining) turned out to be...

(Or rather, how insanely insecure such blockchains turned out to be when they have nothing but transaction fees to pay miners with?)

-MarkM-

Oh well obviously the best games are text-mode, so as not to impact the GPU too much.

Or maybe at most, two dimensional tile map games like Crossfire-RPG and Freeciv and Battle for Wesnoth.

-MarkM-

It is up to the players what player-to-players currencies they choose to use, not something that needs to be built into a game-engine.

That also creates niches within the game(s) for trusted market-operators and traders and so on, since the game engine itself provides no guarantees you will get what you pay for or get sent the coins you sell stuff for. Putting code directly into the game to handle player-to-player (p2p) currencies just takes away from the players that whole opportunity to build up their business by building trust. Though of course it also eliminates the opportunity for nafarious long-con businesses to build up trust then cheat people.

GameCoin is just another bitcoin-based currency, it is pretty easy to plug in any such currency once you have one coded. I built IRC bots that gave people accounts in many currencies and let them trade them and so on, and the same shell scripts can be used by bots in various games. But if the players aren't bothering to introduce their favourite coins into the games it isn't really a great idea for the game administration to play favourites and pick one or several to provide built in support for.

Maybe when some clan or guild or nation or whatever gets a particular coin really super-well established they could in the game construct banks or whatever, ultimately finance getting code specially to support their currency put into the game via their national bank or whatever. I am thinking for example on the Freeciv scale, maybe when someone builds a bank in their city and gets an Open Transactions server set up to represent that bank, they could choose its main currency or something.

That Ix character who tried to bring Ixcoin trading into the game wasn't even from this forum, in general people from this forum aren't really into games other of course than "playing the markets", they seem to prefer to just bounce around on the web trading at exchanges and such without having a "character" that they play that muggers could lurk in wait for outside the exchange and stuff like that...

Or maybe the hacks and such that have happened to various websites serve as quite enough emulation of such aspects of games.

-MarkM-

Are any of you Gamecoin people actually interested enough in games to join in a game and try to establish Gamecoin in the game as a viable currency?

Basically get established in the game, maybe form a clan, build up in-game resources, and start offering to sell those resources / items / etc for Gamecoin?

Most coins no-one bothered to do this with, the main exception that comes to mind being Ixcoin, I recall a character named Ix running around in-game as a trader, offering to buy and sell stuff for Ixcoins.

Maybe a bunch of Gamecoin people could even form a clan and work together so they could build up resources and items and so on more efficiently than people who do not work together as co-ordinated teams and thus be able to offer better prices than competing traders?

-MarkM-