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I'm still in for the 10,000 IXC bounty I offered on page 1, as long as we don't change the 21 million coin cap.  I don't think that should ever change.  It's the same cap as bitcoin, which is doing just fine.   "there isn't enough coin to go around" is actually good if we want the price to rise.

I'm still in for the 10,000 IXC bounty I offered on page 1, as long as we don't change the 21 million coin cap.  I don't think that should ever change.  It's the same cap as bitcoin, which is doing just fine.   "there isn't enough coin to go around" is actually good if we want the price to rise.

FrictionlessCoin, your effort is actually very much appreciated.  It's been over two years since someone stepped up to do an update.  But, when someone starts talking about protocol changes it makes people nervous.  Many have been mining the coin for over 2.5 years and the wrong change could spell disaster.  

I think the main reason Ixcoin has lagged on volume and price is that no client updates have occurred in so long people wonder about its future, and of course no services yet to speak of, but those will come with time.  I don't think it has lagged because of the cap or even the block reward ending in 2015.  

I'm not as against extending the block reward beyond 2015 (by lowering it), but I'm ok with leaving it alone.  No one really knows what will happen to the hash rate once the block reward stops, but I'm optimistic it will remain strong.  Everyone who has mined for years has an incentive to keep mining, and I don't see enough dumping to convince me the miners are offloading that much.  We're also already seeing some transaction fees similar to bitcoin, so miners appear to be preparing for no block reward.  

What Ixcoin has always had going for it is a massive hash rate.  It's always been in 3rd or 4th place even after 100+ alt-coins came on the scene.  That's nothing to sneeze at.  It also has a very steady 10,000 transactions per month ( cryptometer.org ).  That's well above the transactions on the two exchanges, so someone is using it for more than just speculation.

I0Coin ought to do pretty well too, no japanese name but like bitcoin it is less coins per block over time, but unlike IXCoin it will keep making a few coins a block for a long time yet.

-MarkM-

You keep saying that but it is not true.  

IXC lacks support for P2SH, multi-sig, dust prevention.  On top of that it is missing about two dozen security and performance enhancements.  It uses the older flawed database system.  It has a different minting rate, inflation, and unknown future in terms of security against 51% attack and revenue model for miners.

By your logic every single altcoin is a perfect identical clone of Bitcoin.

Thanks.

Fundamental question: what impact is your work going to have on this coin, in the short and in the long term?

Thanks for your 'thankless job'

Thank you.

Mark, can you comment on this?


On the bright side, it may be this code update or maybe a coincidence but the run to ~$10 I've been calling for in the next 30-90 days appear to have started.  

I hope everyone got at least the $50 I've been pushing for.

Absolutely no change to the protocol or hard cap.  NONE.  

I will not download any new client and your work will be for nothing.

We have nearly 18 more months, we can change the hard cap next year with plenty of time to mine more coins.

Don't you understand that the biggest advantage ixCoin has is the fact that people will see it IDENTICAL to Bitcoin.

Please, please leave the protocol alone.  If ixCoin doesn't sky rocket in the next six months I will personally lay you to do the hard cap alteration.  But for now, please, do not change anything besides the necessary code updates.

Thanks!

Then what is all the crap about modifying a recent bitcoin?

And screwing the economics / schedule of the minting?

-MarkM-

I0Coin should be simple to modify to make a new version of IXCoin.

It already has merged mining, it also has fixes for the RAM problems caused by the older ways of approaching merged mining.

It is based on recent bitcoin code.

Basically all the merged mined coins all are wating to be updated based on I0Coin so that they can all stop being RAM hogs and will have recent modern code.

If you make a hard fork of IXCoin you are just antoher clonecoin, not IXCoin. IXCoin is the way it is, the way it has always been, and its prices are based on that presumably, including its recent rising in price.

Some idiot who seemingly is not even aware of all the problems of the old merged mining code, nor that I0Coin has new fixes to fix the RAM problems, making a clonecoin  loosely based on IXCoin does not seem helpful at all. Just more pointless and maybe deliberate ignorance. (Why not actually research instead of just jumping in to try to hijack an old classic coin with your favourite clonecoin theories and ignorance of what is actually going on in the merged mining code field?)

This all has been said umpteen times over in man merged miend coin threads.

Just take I0Coin, with all the new fixes that every merged mined coin needs (as all will be RAM hogs more and more without it, it is merely that the faster block times ones showed the RAM problem sooner than the slower block time coins), and update all merged mined coins to that. Noticing, hopefully, though, which that has already been done for and which so far only have the dirty fix done not the full fix.

-MarkM-

I'm not a computer guy but I do understand how cryptos work which is why I said for some time now that Scrypts are dead because sha will allows be more secure as ASICS make it that way.  And merge mining adds the final nail in the coffin for scrypt coin.  Unless of course they get ASICS but it has to be soon which I doubt will happen.

That's fine, but please don't make any changes to the end date or the hard cap.  Let's wait a few months to see what all these new investors coming in right now think of all these coins.  There's enough to mine for nearly 18 additional months - so let's see what the new and large investors like about ixCoin, if anything.

I'm SO excited to tell you guys about this idea I've been working on!

This idea was created to address the problem of traditional POW schemes where by investment in ASIC producing infrastructure leads to logarithmic improvements in hashing efficiency rather than more ideal linear improvement. Someone else explained it best so I'm going to quote.


Advantages:

• Higher security with fewer confirmations resulting for better decentralization
• Significantly fewer resources consumed in the maintenance of the network
• Self regulating max block size
• Self regulating money supply, no inflation OR deflation (after some time)
• No incentive for transaction block creators to pool means more decentralization
• Very strong incentive against address reuse equals better anonymity
• no incentive for miners to store up and dump secret POW chains

In common with bitcoin:

• Private key pairs are created to demonstrate ownership of coins in a decentralized ledger
• transactions are signed with private keys and bundled into blocks with inputs that reference previous outputs
• Change in transactions is sent to new addresses created by the sender as one of the outputs on the transaction

All that good old fashioned bitcoin stuff, we love you satoshi.

Overview

• The key insight here is that a reliable stream of unpredictable but consensus verifiable numbers is basically all you need in order to build a secure cryptocurrency.
• In It's most condensed form the idea is basically to separate those who are performing the POW calculations from those who are minting the new transaction blocks.
• Separation of powers eliminates so very many of the principal agent problems that complicate the successful implementation of other more POW centric cryptos.

 

Miners :

• Miners maintain a blockchain exactly like bitcoin except for some key differences
• Miners will not store any transaction information in their blocks.
• The only information that will be contained inside of blocks produced by miners is the address that that miner would like to use to receive compensation for his service.
• Miners will be compensated with 100% of the newly issued currency
• The difficulty of the POW is to be adjusted in a similar fashion to traditional cryptos (traditional cryptos lawl ) so that new mining blocs will come in at a steady rate.

Once you read this whole post, and think all the way through the logic, the implication is that, in effect, miners will be compensated for their service with the value of all of the coins that people accidentally lose. Though it will take some time before everything settles down to that point

Minters:

• Every transaction is a sort of entry into a sort of lottery
• When a miner mints a new mining block everyone looks at all of the public keys that have have been used in the past, and whoever has used the key that is numerically closest to the hash produced by the miner is entitled to mint the newest transaction block
• Transaction block minters are compensated with 100% of the transaction fees
• You may have noticed that this puts a lot of pressure on people to not reuse addresses, this is a very good thing
• If it is too computationally difficult for all nodes to look through all of the private keys used this could be mitigated with a time limit. I.E. all of the keys used in the last year, or month, or week etc...

I know what you are thinking, blockchain bloat, don't stop reading we will get to that.

Block size:

• At the beginning of each transaction we could include one extra bit of data, 1 equals max block size should be increased, 0 equals max block size should be decreased
• Votes would be time weighted with higher weights applied to more recent votes.
• there wouldn't be any more aesthetically preferable option to latch onto in the state of ignorance, so ignorance on one side would ACTUALLY cancel out ignorance on the other, unlike in politics. (one option doesn't have nicer hair than the other)

I don't generally find myself advocating democracy but i think it could work well for max block size adjustment. There would be no real means or motive here for anyone to "game" the system. No one is going to find it in their interest to author a bunch of fake transactions in order to vote over and over, because the marginal value of that transaction space to you would be so much less than someone who wanted to vote AND actually move money. There is no incentive to be selfish either because the chance that your vote would effect the outcome in a way that is quantifiable and positive for you is infinitesimal.

Blockchain size:
With the idea that I'm proposing i really feel that the advantages outweigh the costs, but there is atleast one cost i have found. One of the drawbacks is that the incentives are such that blocks will be 100% full with transactions 100% of the time. In order to help deal with this, and in order to allow the max block size to be as large as is possible the blockchain would only be stored for a limited amount of time. As bad as this sounds its actually the way bitcoins should have always been. It is very dangerous to have people storing a 100year old blockchain. If ecdsa is ever cracked, bitcoin can fork into newer encryption schemes, but there is the potential for people to unlock all of the coins that have been lost throughout history. In the distant future, this could potentially multiply the money supply several times over in a metaphorical heartbeat. The drawback is that you have to move your coins to new addresses every few years. I know its a bummer, but you'll survive i promise .

Issuance:
This part is going to get a lot of my fellow libertarians in a tizzy but please bear with me until i finish the argument. The block reward for miners would never be lowered, it would be a constant amount for ever. This would not lead to endless inflation i promise. You have to remember that each new issuance would represent a smaller rate of inflation of the over all money supply than the previous issuance. So for example the second block doubles the money supply, but the third only increases it by 1/3 and the fourth by only 1/4. This is much less inflationary than a scheme that, for example, increases the money supply at a rate of 1% of outstanding issuance. Furthermore at some point in the future an equilibrium would be reached where the marginal value of a unit of currency would be less than the marginal value of taking the necessary precautions to secure it from loss. In other words, at some point in the future, the amount of currency lost due to carelessness would match almost 1 for 1 the rate of new currency being issued.

The little details:
You may have noticed that i left out a lot of details such as: target block time, block target readjustment interval, hashing algorithm, number of coins per block and denomination. The truth is those things don't really matter that much. With that being said i do have preferences. I think scrypt is probably better than sha256 because it would lead to more homogeneous distribution; I think bitcoin is a little bit slow on its block time, i would like to see 2 maybe 3 minute blocks; I think it re-targets unnecessarily slowly; and I think bitcoin should probably always have been denominated in satoshis.  But again that stuff really Isn't that important, these ideas are much bigger, i think, than faster re-targets.

Conclusion:
Well thats basically it guys. I'm going to post this in a very raw form and continue to edit it into the future based what ever else i think of and what ever feedback i get. Thank you so much to those who stuck with it all the way to the end! If i can get some verification from some bitcoin experts here on the forums that this is in fact feasible and that I have in fact not made any major irreconcilable mistakes, than we can proceed to starting work on a bounty!

Maybe you fail to realize that this is a merged coin and that what gives it value as compared to other coins.   If you remove the miners subsidize then merge miners will drop this coin and nobody will be moving the transactions.  

I studied the code a bit,  it appears that best case, I can get an update 0.8.x version out in a week!

--------------------


I don't understand how you felt a new coin [legitcoin] which nobody knew about and was not merge mined would do fine without a subsidy but ixCoin, an old and well known coin - a coin which many miners are vested in and is merge mined for free would fail without a subsidy.

Either way, we have until mid 2015 to change the protocol [hard cap and end date] so I definitely do not want to mess with it until it's absolutely necessary.  We will know much more in the coming months about what new miners are looking for in a coin and more importantly - what larger investors and hedge funds are looking for.  

Because after Bitcoin pulled off what most thought was impossible (hitting $1,000) and after Bitcoin gets an ETF license, you can bet large investors and also hedge funds are gonna look at reverse engineering Bitcoin and at which existing coin would have the best chance to repeat Bitcoin's success and I have already stated the numerous reasons why I felt these guys would lock-in on ixCoin, which were the exact reasons I chose ixCoin out of the now 100+ alt coins, to be the next huge crypto hit.

So there is plenty of time to change the protocol and hard cap and it would be a mistake to do it now before we see what real investors are looking for.  Right now the majority of people in these coins have not been professional investors but rather computer and software type guys and hedge fund-type investors, those are a different breed as we will soon find out.

The large purchase orders for ixCoin continue.  

I'm not sure who this is but it's a good sign.  And as everyone can see, not many coins are available for sale. On any given day one is lucky to be able to buy 10,000-15,000 coins.  That's really nothing if you were to all of a sudden get a bunch of people wanting in all the time.  I would expect many more coins for sale for a coin nobody wants and with nearly 17 million coins outstanding.  Before Bitcoin shot up I heard they were too cheap for anyone to care to sell.  Now that Bitcoin is up and ixCoin is still at the same level as 6 months ago, thus making it much more valuable, I still don't understand why we don't see a bunch of ixCoin being dumped on the market.  You know, because nobody wants it.  

Cause even when ixCoin was manipulated to much lower levels, the very first time (some 4-5 weeks ago from 9,000 down to 4,000) it was done on maximum 60,000 coins and this last time (some 1 week ago from 4,400 down to 1,000) it was done on literally ~10 ixCoins.  So in both cases, not very much, given there's 13,000 coins minted daily and the near 17 million coins sitting out there and for some reason these people who think ixCoin is or should be dead and is worthless don't want to part with ixCoin, not when it's worthless and not now when it's worth a lot more.

Does anybody's else find this interesting and odd?


We will be at my trigger point of 80% [of the 21 million] in about 23 days or so.  You need to leave some crumbs and enough time for the birds to feed if you're gonna get this thing to become really popular.

No way, I do not want to mess with the protocol.  The hard limit has to stay and so does the year end date of 2015.  I have the most to lose here, it seems, so I'll take my chances with the current protocol and end date.

I do not want to turn ixCoin into another crypto turd coin with infinite coins.  The biggest advantage ixCoin has right now is that it's identical to Bitcoin, you change that 21 million coin hard cap and you'll get rid of the biggest advantage ixCoin has.

And I'm not an ixCoin millionaire, I was not Able to buy anywhere close to even 1 million ixCoins, even with all the out of pocket money I spent.  So although I am serious about this I simply cannot afford to pay programmers to do all this work for which a premine was done and allocated.

If wallet encryption can be added for around 15,000 ixCoins and the people who offered to pitch in are still good for their word, then we'll do the encryption, but if that's not possible then I'm gonna wait a few more months because I feel by then ixCoin will be much more valuable and if that happens then I will be able to pay for all the upgrades myself.

But right now that's not possible, Christmas is around the corner, I'm broke, I still haven't found a job and there's no way I'm paying tens of thousands of ixCoins out of my pocket for these upgrades which can wait, especially when I think about that idiot dev who did a secret premine and then promised these coins for bounties and now he doesn't even have the character to speak up and pay those coins out.

So then - unless encryption can be done for a good price then we'll just have to wait to do it all together but no way I wanna touch the protocol in any way, we have to let it be identical to Bitcoin as that's its strongest selling point.  There is currently no other coin besides ixCoin which is identical to Bitcoin - you get rid of that and you get rid of any chance ixCoin has to survive.

Just adding encryption would be easier, but I rather like the idea of porting the whole thing to 0.8.x.

Oh man, that sucks.  What about just adding encryption, can that be more easily done?

What do you mean, ixCoin has already had the merge mine patch added and is currently being merge mined.

It's odd that such a difficult task was done but wallet encryption or simple code upgrades were not.

It's almost like that was the intention cause otherwise it makes no sense.

No, I meant to say my average was 8,000 Satoshi.  But yeah, originally I paid $8,000 for my Bitcoins and I paid between $80 and $170 for them. The large majority I got around $130, which seemed so expensive back then and I put all ~65 Bitcoins into ixCoin, so now, with Bitcoin at a much higher price, it seems like I put a lot more than $8,000 in ixCoin.

And it wasn't easy, for some odd reason, ixCoin [a coin supposedly nobody wants] is very difficulty to accumulate so it took me 5 months to finally get so many ixCoins.

It was very hard for me to buy that many and in order to add more I even sold my truck, which was [and still is] a crazy thing to do for such a risky investment.  But I've been around speculative investments a long time and my college degrees are for the same field.

I learned years ago, when you do your work and research and you're absolutely sure, as sure as one can be:  then [in the famous words of George Soros]:  You go for the jugular!

Few investors in the world can detach themselves from their emotions and their money to put it all on the line [when the odds and popular opinion are greatly stacked against you] like that.