It does seem to be a scam, someone started mining using the old code from github that has not finished being coded yet, for example it does not even have the starting difficulty adjusted yet.

Give the guy time to finish coding his coin and make a real genesis block for it and launch it for real.

-MarkM-

Okay I checked the code, this is not the correct version yet at all, someone has gone running using the old original whatevercoin code they copied from, one of the >> 20 ones based on litecoin, the usual scam orphans difficulty, it is not even adjusted to bitcoin's >> 32 yet let alone an actually reasonable difficulty.

GIve the guy time to make his real code, this hijacking his github just steals the name of his coin before he has even finished coding it.

It might take him days to mine his genesis block if he doesn't make an exception for the genesis block in the difficulty checks but it will be worth it as we'll get a decent launch instead of yet another scamcoin.

-MarkM-

Is this a fake start from someone who hijacked the github or what?

The difficulty was going to be reasonable but sampling random pages from the huge thread it seems people are mucking around with some old code that the difficulty fix was not pushed to yet?

-MarkM-

That is weird, I compile geistgeldd on Linux, heck I even use Fedora which means I have to link against my custom openssl libs that include elliptic curves since Fedora doesn't ship with elliptic curves enabled.

Maybe you are using a different version than I am?

Unfortunately "git help" does not seem to offer any "show where you are pulling from" command so I do not know where I am pulling from other than that I think it might be a repo under the Lolcust username at github.

Of course trying to make a GUI would be painful because it would want wxWidgets, an old and maybe quite particular version of wxWidgets, possibly the version I tarballed into my sourceforge Galactic Milieu file downloads directory. But GUIs are useless crud anyway that just make it really awkward to run the thing on the server where it needs to be for the whole merged mining thing anyway so not a big deal.

Once the time comes to come out into the limelight it will probably be with a new codebase based on a recent version of Bitcoin, the same recent version all the other merged mined coins will be updated to; then it and all of them will have a QT based GUI. That of course will tend to foster mass adoption thus putting an end to the era of fair access for all and a start to the era of even the lazy bums who cannot be bothered to learn stuff being able to jump on it, which would reward ignorance so is best left until those willing to learn have had a chance to learn and to apply what they have learned...

-MarkM-

The internet cannot really handle 10 second global consensus creation.

(By blockchain system; Ripple is trying to achieve it but using a different consensus method.)

GeistGeld's 15 second blocks are probably about the fastest that could work, and even they might turn out to be too fast.

For "instant" stuff you can simply use "green addresses" in bitcoin, or off-chain transaction systems.

Green addresses actually seem to be a pretty simple and effective solution.

-MarkM-

Day 1 money is always hotly contested / fought-over.

The best money is in picking up under the radar coins with your CPU while they are NOT day 1 money, because the day they do become cash-able is the day they will become too hard to mine with your CPU... and the day you'll be off to an exchange to sell several hundred thousand of them...

BBQcoin is the recent exemplar, you had a whole year or so to mine them with even just one core of a CPU and rake in hundreds of thousands of them, but now they are selling so now it is too late to mine them with your CPU and in fact by now you have even missed the best time to get the best prices for the hundreds of thousands your CPU would have picked up during that year of CPU mining.

Now even Tenebrix and Faircoin might not have much longer left to be picked up easy by CPUs before the same thing happens to them as happened to BBQcoin.

-MarkM-

The idea adds an insanely massive and totally not-necessary expense: the securing of a blockchain.

Since the folding problems have to come from an authority anyway, that authority can also track the balances of users.

The whole blockchain overhead is merely an insane waste of resources that is completely not needed given there already has to be some kind of authority.

-MarkM-

The problem for pools is the lack of free open source software for divvying up secondary-chain coins.

I have a p2pool at dvcstable01.devcoin.org:10332 that merges all the coins, but p2pool only pays out the bitcoins, so right now the best I can do is present it as a zero-fee bitcoin pool.

If the mining profitability sites are correct such a pool should actually be able to pay out 105% to 110% of the bitcoins people mine, but although there is a bounty offered by the DeVCoin project for tools to which a pool operator can give a bunch of coins and tell the tool to divvy them up to miners in proportion to the number of bitcoins p2pool gave the miners there is not yet a tool a pool operator can use to send out the extra earnings.

I eventually want to run at least two pools using such a tool, the current one, being devcoin-oriented, would send the miners their bonus in devcoins, a second one would send out the bonus as bitcoins.

Basically the pool operator would sell the secondary-chain coins for whatever type of coin (s)he plans to pay the bonus with, take whatever fee the pool needs to pay its hosting and bandwidth and operator-salary or whatever, and send out the bonus.

Actually expanding p2pool to be able to actually track and send out all the various altcoins would be a big programming-job.

The code that mmpool at Bitparking uses is not free open source as far as I know so thus far if you want the actual coins of the secondary chains you have to merged-mine yourself or use mmpool which only gives you a few of the types of secondary chain coins.

The DeVCoin project is offering bounties for a tool to divvy up coins to send to p2pool miners in proportion to the number of bitcoins p2pool sent them, because the plan is to pay miners in devcoins some bonus over and above the 100% of the bitcoins. But so far the only tool for divvying up secondary chain coins themselves seems to be the proprietary code used by bitparking for mmpool.

Though of course given the generic (pick a coin to send as bonus) tool the DeVCoin project has put bounties on, a pool operator could if they chose send out one bonus per type of coin, paid in that type of coin, if there were some way to link a user of p2pool to their various addresses for various other chains. Some users do not even like having the devcoins bonus sent to their bitcoin address because they dislike having to export their bitcoin address from a bitcoin wallet and import it to their devcoin wallet. In principle the same bitcoin address can be converted to any other coin, so the same thing could be done for any other coin, but, with devcoin addresses the form of the address when displayed for humans actually looks like the exact same bitcoin address, whereas for other coins it would not look the same so would be additionally confusing. (Refusing to let people use one address for all currencies is a big problem with blockchain based currencies, Ripple nicely fixed that in Ripple so we will see whether in reality users find RIpple's same address for all currencies approach more or less useful/confusing than the blockchain coin family's insistence on making users deal with different address for almost all blockchains...)

-MarkM-

The biggest problem is that blockchains are insanely expensive to secure.

All these recent pump and dump scams don't care about that because once they have been dumped they just create yet another "new" pump and dump, so the problem of how to actually secure a blockchain long term is simply irrelevant to them, there is no long term, you pump, you dump, you move on.

Maybe once ASICs can be ordered right off the shelf you could figure on buying massive massive quantities of hashing power, spend a few millions on ASICs and once you have close to 50% of the hashing power of bitcoin, launch a new coin, making it merged mine able so your ASICs can secure it while still also securing (and raking in) bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld.

But since so many of those are still "under the radar", under-exploited, you might actually do much better by simply raking in those under the radar coins while they are still under the radar. There is probably a heck of a lot more money to be made, with a heck of a lot less initial investment, in just picking them up while their difficulties are so insanely low then promoting them once you have huge hoards of them.

It will be easier to get huge hoards of them than of a newly launched coin, if you want something that lasts, because the larger a share you get of a newly launched coin the more obvious it is to everyone that it is just another scamcoin.

These ancient but under-exploited coins on the other hand have a massive, massive "fairness factor" built in, because everyone has had years to mine them really easily, and you can delay their coming out into the limelight as long as you like to add more and more months of fairness factor, heck you could also stagger it, promote one a few months in when you have a nice number but not a vast hoard, then months later when your hoards of the rest are larger promote another, then more months later when your hoards of the rest are even larger promote another etc. There are easily a year's worth already there in play, I hope you are taking advantage of this long long time of equal access for all to pick up your fair-but-large share of them right now already...

...Notice how darn FAST GeistGeld is, too. People keep saying they want a FAST coin and GeistGeld has been right under their noses all this time, pretty much as fast as it is possible to get and still have any chance of realistically working...

-MarkM-

BBQcoin seems to have been the most massive profit for CPU miners recently, with Tenebrix and Fairbrix still poised to give as good a payoff too when they eventually come out from "under the radar" like BBQcoin did.

-MarkM-

You had an entire year to pick up BBQcoins all day and all night with just even a single core CPU or a single core of your CPU, and you chose not to.

You still could have been raking in Fairbrix and Tenebrix all day and all night the same way, and still can, but are you?

If not then it is totally and only yourself to blame for your missed opportunities, they have been right here all along and you simply keep choosing not to take them. Instead you waste power on really hard to mine crapcoins.

-MarkM-

GeistGeld is fast too, 15 second blocks, and it is secured by merged mining so is much more affordable to mine. Heck the difficulty is so low still right now that you could probably mine it with a CPU despite it being merged mined, because so few merged mining operators are including it in their merge right now.

It is those coins, the ones with ridiculously low difficulty, that give the massive payoffs for quietly mining them with your CPU during the months or years they manage to stay under the radar.

YAC is hard to mine right now, BBQcoin was really really easy which is why CPU miners made so much profit on BBQcoin. They still get to mine Fairbrix and Tenebrix really really easy too still so for small miners it is the potential for massive payoff like happened with BBQcoin and maybe will yet happen with Fairbrix and Tenebrix that still look best for small miners.

Sure if you are paying for lots of Amazon instances you want your pay soon, but small miners can easily afford to run their desktop CPUs on a few obscure coins like BBQcoin, Tenebrix, and Fairbrix, maybe one core on each or something, for a year or more. BBQcoin probably bought a whole lot of people whole new desktop servers and maybe GPUs to put in them, maybe a new car and a kitchen renovation or something too once it did come out into the limelight.

-MarkM-

It is still running, serving like BBQcoin used to as a nice quiet low difficulty chain where people who do not have GPUs can pick up coins month after month using their CPUs.

Tenebrix is also still serving that same purpose.

BBQcoin no longer serves that purpose because after a good long run - a year or so maybe, maybe a little more or less - of CPU mining the GPU miners "re-discovered" it and drove its difficulty too high for CPU miners, it went to the exchanges (which alone would have brought it to the GPU miners' attention) and now the CPU miners who mined it all those months get to cash out on it while continuing to quietly CPU-mine Fairbrix and Tenebrix.

-MarkM-

I0Coin is not dead, but when difficulty gets low exchanges don't want to take the risk of doublespends and such.

Pretty much all the recently launched coins probably have too low difficulty to be secure too or will have shortly so probably once the exchanges have sucked all the juice they can get out of the pump and dum "greater fool theory" instant scam technique the launches are designed to do they'll drift into the background like others before them to be mined quietly by CPU miners for months or years until maybe someone put merged mining into them so they can share Litecoin's hash power to try to get enough difficulty to seem an acceptable riisk again to get back onto the exchanges. (Maybe just for another quick pump and dump then drop them again, unless merged mining does eventually turn out to work.)

-MarkM-

Well supposedly in normal code the coins in the genesis block cannot be spent anyway.

But it used to take me hours to mine testnet genesis blocks, I would just set it running and go to sleep.

What does it matter if it takes even a few days or a week or two, there is no "need" to have it "real soon now".

(Testnet was 1/16 the difficulty of normal net, so it would have taken me 16 or more hours to mine a normal genesis block.)

-MarkM-

As was pointed out long ago now, that is easily fixed since you can just not actually check the difficulty of the genesis block, only check its hash.

-MarkM-

And Cash, like CZech Bitcash (CZB)

And Scrip, like General Mining Corp scrip (GMC), General Retirement Funds scrip (GRF) and United Nations Scrip (UNS).

-MarkM-

Well presumably also when it is difficulty 400 like kitecoin is or is approaching, it will make 400 coins per block so still be shown as more "profitable" than any other coin unless the sheer number of coins eventually makes the price drop from the supply being so inflationary.

There is not no scammy reason not to START the difficulty at "ten" or more though. Likely that stlil won't be enough but at least it might give people a few seconds to get set and go before hundreds of blocks have been mined at 100 or more per second.

-MarkM-

No, because there will be compensatingly less blocks.

So when there are ten times as many coins per block, there will be 1/10th as many blocks.

But in the beginning, hashing power will hardly count, as there won't be any difficulty, each block wil lbe solved pretty much instantly and its all about latency nothing to do with hashing, and the blocks will be insanely fast so weeks worth will be snapped up in minutes or hours.

-MarkM-

It is trivially simple, just start difficulty way the heck higher than the insane low values all the scams have been using.

Bitcoin was >> 20 so maybe >> 10 might at lest allow a few seconds between blocks instead of multiple blocks per second.

We don't even know because none of these coins actually did any research / teting such as each coin launching with the value shifted a few more bits so that each one would be closer toward being a reasonable value.

By now with this many coins launched if each had increased difficulty more based on the previous one's increase not having been enoguh we'd at least have a decent ballpark figure by now.

Some people have suggested that whatever bitshift corresponds to what litecoin type clients show in getinfo as ten ore more might be enough but that has not been tested yet to see if it too is still much too low.

-MarkM-