Please feel encouraged to help create design documents based on the source code. I'll be available to revise them.

There are many important aspects about a cryptocurrency which are not readily available from the source code. E.g. Sunny chose to use a POW mining reward as a function of difficulty^4. What is the rationale for that? Ideally Sunny would have at least performed a calculation to derive good parameters. Unless many things are just random - but that would not qualify as design.

Good luck trying to assess design flaws this way.

Two passwords, each unique to the site and a yubikey. Only device attached to the account was my cellphone - which was in my pocket while I was driving to work as this heist occurred.

https://blockchain.info/tx/1826f610d9dea7698d906da8f874974240204f42500fa621f1581c7023c6cc61

I think I'm going to vomit...

Yes. Everything is open source. However, recreating the design documents from the source code is like trying to learn about civil engineering from looking at how people build bridges.

Unfortunately the community will have to reverse engineer the security model of ppcoin in an effort to document it. On that note I'd like to push the idea of a tournament scheme to introduce a habit of exploring the security of POS (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152809.0). I haven't had time to work on the details, but the idea is out there and people should state their opinions.

The POS implementation in ppcoin and any of its derivatives is mainly broken at this time. There has been an acclaimed "fix", but based on my analysis all it did was to disguise the underlying problems. A practice which seems to be systemic for the development of ppcoin. However, that doesn't prevent people from bidding the price of ppcoin up - 99% of traders have no technical understanding.

The current POS implementation in ppcoin has the following problems:
1) No theory model on required stake granularity and steady state allocations for stake. I want to see a differential equation.
2) Missing incentive structure to perform transaction validation
3) No effective cost for working on competing branches with respect to the main chain
4) Reversibility between stake and coins - leading to a situation in which market price manipulations change the incentive structure for allocating stake

Especially 4) gets me worried. It exhibits opposite dynamics to POW. In POW, an increase in price encourages investments in hashing power and leads to a strengthening of the network, while in POS, an increase in price creates an incentive to move coins out of stake, effectively weakening the network. However 4) could be dealt with a protocol enhancement which prevents the reversibility between stake and coins.

I still stand by my assessment that ppcoin is an unfinished cryptocurrency. Any investments in it will evaporate as soon as the underlying flaws start to affect the resilience of the system. Buyer beware, drama included!

Done

Seeing as you invoked me here, allow me to respond.

Firstly, we are all aware that wallet developers are weak points in the trust chain. I have already started tackling this problem for the case of the Android wallet by researching and obtaining code that can do genuine RSA threshold signing using the Shoup algorithm. I can assure you it was not easy to track down a real threshold RSA library, as far as I can tell none are publicly available (fortunately the one I obtained is open source, just oddly enough it's not distributed).

At the moment the Android wallet isn't being signed using threshold keys but that's just because I didn't get around to it yet. This will come with time, assuming Andreas agrees of course. Once that's done only a quorum of people could make new releases that phones and the Play Store accept. It'd make backdooring a wallet much harder. At any rate, there's no good way to find out via block chain analysis that someone is using Bitcoin Wallet or MultiBit so the same kind of dilemma dogisland faced won't come up.

The second thing I want to comment on is your trolling about what I believe or my trustworthiness. Like a lot of other people, you seem incapable of distinguishing writing about a future possibility with actually supporting it or believing it's a good idea.

In my posts on this forum over the years I've explored many ideas - some of them people here really like such as peer to peer exchanges/credit or how to implement lightweight SPV clients ... and others that a lot of people don't, such as how governments might tax or regulate Bitcoin users. Exploring these ideas doesn't imply wanting to actually make them happen, no more than Gregory writing about StorJ implied that he thinks autonomous lifeforms that evolve and hire humans is a good idea. It's just an intriguing possibility that's worth thinking and writing about.

There's another distinction you're (probably deliberately) failing to make. Just because I think Bitcoin users can be regulated doesn't mean I think all those regulations are a great idea. The fact that users can be regulated is unarguable at this point, lots of people who were running exchanges have had their bank accounts shut down because they didn't follow all the rules, and in the past police (in the USA) have busted people as apparently innocuous as car dealerships for failing to do the right paperwork when accepting cash transactions. If you think using Bitcoin makes you immune to the law, then you're gonna get slapped in the face by reality the moment you scale up your business and get noticed. I mean, it's easy to bluster about sticking it to the man when all you do is generate forum posts. Once you start running a real business, unless you can somehow do it entirely online and perfectly anonymously like the Dread Pirate does, well you're going to have to get in line or go to jail. That's not an opinion, just fact.

Now no reasonable person would be stupid enough to argue blindly for or against "regulations" in general, all that word means is rules and only the most extreme anarchists believe society should have no rules at all. Even libertarians believe that the state should enforce contracts, and contract law is large and complex. Our worlds are full of regulations on everything from finance to the labelling of meat products. You have to weigh up the cost and benefit of specific rules on a case by case basis to figure out if you support them or not. As it happens, I feel the value of many financial regulations are rather questionable. You can easily see how they evolved the way they did and each step along the way probably seemed reasonable at the time, but it was a "road to hell paved with good intentions" type thing. The costs are really high and the benefits often don't seem to be there. Maybe the best possible solution is no financial regulations at all, or maybe there's some in-between sort of compromise solution that helps society keep a lid on thieves, hackers and other scummy types whilst not impinging on civil liberties or creating red-tape overload. That's a topic worth thinking about and exploring, and I personally haven't made my mind up yet. I don't much like the current way finance and crime-fighting intersect, but I haven't decided if I dislike the general concept or just the way it works today.

Regardless, my own opinions on the matter don't affect existing laws or enforcement of them.

I am most pleased to present http://bteex.com/ the worlds first bytecoin exchange and for that matter as far as i know the worlds first virtual currency only exchange.

This was a collaboration between myself and from ditto here on the forums. Really I'm just the capital, ditto did all the programing.

I would recommend starting out with very small trades early on since it is still in the very early stages of development and slowly work your way to larger trades as you begin to feel comfortable. There is a 0.5% commission on each side of a trade and 1% fee for with drawls.

good luck and happy trading!

Most people, especially in here, don't understand that most "assets" are not investments because they have been brainwashed by banks to think that their devalued car is an asset. Their house is an asset. And so on.
When in reality, if it were not for the housing bubble, most people would never see any kind of profit from a home sale. And you certainly cannot expect to profit from selling most cars. Yet banks view this form of chattel as something with value and therefore brainwash you to believe that you are making money by owning them and borrowing from the bank against them.

The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze.

Noobs know nothing about preminers, hoarders and lost wallets (destroyed coins)
We need a small nominal inflation of 1-5% just to keep the real inflation to 0% in the bitcoin world.

consider: compare the likelihood that mt. gox is currently 'rigging' the price of a bitcoin compared to the likelihood that any other commodity is being rigged by a particular bank. compare the relative concentration and power. many users of this forum are living in a fantasy land.

Now I am really confused, the POS is not meant to stop, Sunny intends POS to mint 1% inflation forever. If its stopped then something is wrong. Right?

why not TRC, NVC, BTE, FC, or IXC for that matter. They are in the same league with PPC, clone coins with no use.

2 million less? I may be mistaken but at the moment there are more PPC than BTC and PPC will continue to expand the currency supply quicker than BTC for all eternity, being as there is no upper limit for PPC*.

*There is a 2 billion upper limit but its meant to be unlimited.

That means if both PPC and BTC continue to exist BTC will always be more valuable because there will always be more PPC, unless BTC fails and PPC doesn't

PPC needs to work out the checkpoint issue and also someone mentioned that POS can still be gamed.

I like the idea of PPC but there are still issues.

Also PPC can never be 1:1 with Bitcoin unless Bitcoin actually fails, because there are already more PPC than Bitcoins in existence.