Maybe bitparking even gives miners full options, such that if they choose not to receive a particular coin they also do not get given work that includes merged mining that particular coin?

-MarkM-

Less people being given free namecoins they don't even want or care about might mean less namecoins being thrown away dirt cheap on exchanges, so it could turn out that slush miners no longer getting them could turn out nicely for people who do care enough to seek out pools that do still offer them.

(Last I heard Eligius offers namecoin and maybe even also devcoin along side bitcoin? Namecoin anyway at least?)

That question about the hash rates of e.g. Ixcoin vs a pool that merged mines it is intriguing, I expect doublec would be the chap to ask about that, maybe he had some troubles with Ixcoin over the timespan the hash rate is averaged over or something? Or maybe Ixcoin has an adaptive difficulty fix against chainhopping that the routine that comes up with the estimated hash rates is not taking into account?

-MarkM-

I am not being nasty, JK is "joke" on the internet and maybe also in SMS texting, only pedants include the / to make it j/k as that costs a whole additional keystroke.

So if the C means coin, it is immediately obvious to any internet-literate observer and probably also any SMS texter that it must mean jokecoin.

But the "coin" part is pretty much redundant, coins that only have two characters of their own throw in the C because they need three characters to be a currency-code, but as anyone can readily understand JNK to be junk you don't need that space-filler, you have a perfectly good three-character symbol without resorting to that.

It is similar to the BBQ case, BBQ is so instantly understandable that using the spacefiller C actually obscures the meaning.

-MarkM-

Good questions. I'd be interested to know the answers too.

However, doublec (bitparking) is far from being the only entity in possession of the patch, that Galactic Milieu sourceforge files download dir I pointed at is mine, the namecoin author wrote the merged mining support so also has some form of it, it is in all the merged mined coins so can be derived back out of any of them and everyone who has  them thus has it.

Bitcoin blocks mined while merged-mining secondary chains contain the chain identifiers of the chains merged, so anyone who knows a particular block was mined by a particular pool can check which chains the pool was merged-mining at the time.

(Tricky part conceivably being to identify whether any particular block was mined by a pool and if so which pool, if the pool didn't want anyone to figure out that pool mined it or if a miner or pool chose to "counterfeit" the stigmata by which a block's miner sometimes chooses to identify itself.)

-MarkM-

It tells "patch" what to change, based on a "diff" between normal bitcoin (which can only act as the primary chain in a merge) and a copy of that same version of bitcoin with support for being a secondary chain in a merge added.

-MarkM-

EDIT re other posts: I do not even know whether litecoin has support for being the primary chain in a merge.

That is your hot-wallet?

How many similar scale cold-wallets?

-MarkM-

I don't. I sold more than a million before the exchanges opened, trying to sell in batches of that size though some I did let go in smaller sized lots.

You ought to be a major holder, if you want another 100k or few hundred k contact me before trying to buy them at tourist prices (aka on the public exchanges).

(The market-making scripts for the Digitalis Open Transaction server's markets customarily use three scales of market and use 1%, 2%, and 3% margins on them, 1% on largest scale, 2% on medium scale, 3% on retail scale. )

(Some pairs use 2%, 3% and 4%, or even larger spreads, due to the relative values of the two assets of the pair or the expcted or typical volatility etc.)

-MarkM-

BTC, NMC, DVC, GRP, IXC, I0C, CLC, XGG

(XGG = GeistGeld).

One version of the patch is in

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

as the file named merged-mining.patch

Google might be able to find earlier versions it derives from.

Also doublec likely has one or more versions too.

-MarkM-

I figured why waste my reply on just one reader when I could inflict it upon the entire altcoin forum? So here it is:



Ixcoin is being merged-mined, On bitparking's merged mined pool it is only merged with bitcoins, namecoins, and devcoins though, so the coins a small power miner would get the most of are not part of the merge so the small miners miss out on the very coins they would get the largest number of if they were included in the merge. So merged mining is best done oneself, so one can include all the merge-able coins and also, if you are a small miner who is very unlikely to find a block of namecoin or devcoin or even ixcoin, you can leave them out (or use bitparking's pool to get some of them) if your resources are too limited to actually manage to merge ALL the merged mine able coins.

Vircurex exchange still exchanges Ixcoins, I do not know offhand which if any other exchanges do.

As to the originator of the coin, maybe he sold off his pre-mined coins and considers the pump and dump joke coin he created to have done its job of getting him a quick buck and has no further interest in it? I do not know. He has not said why he does or does not do whatever he does or does not do.

When a copy of bitcoin with the merged mining patches is made, all the merged mined coins including Ixcoin will be updated regardless of whether their original creators bother to do that or someone else ends up having to do it. So it doesn't matter what the original creators are up to because the community supports its coins because the community cares about the users of the coins.

-MarkM-

Again, I do not consider them walls. If I put 200k at one spot, the small fry tend to leave gaps as they jump from one side of the wall to the other to get ahead in the queue (get their deal done sooner than mine).

Then if someone wants to dump a few hundred thousand BBQ worth of bitcoins they blow out the wall leaving gaps all the way down, tiny snacks as it were, and the price changes vastly, all kinds of monitors all over the coinwebz decide profitability is insanely low or high, thousands of mining rigs watching those monitors swtch to or away from the coin, blocks suddenly come way faster or way slower, panic or tulip-mania takes off. In general providing offers all the way up and down both allows the price to change more smoothly and leaves no gaps for anyone to be discovered squatting on some price along the way because I already squatted every possible price outside of the spread range where the house takes all the profit.

(I developed this approach on DVC/BTC, where trying to keep the value of DVC up is a large part of the motive. In BBQ/BTC I have not yet taken up the "uphold the price by buying" side as I am still in the "gather a warchest of BTC with which to uphold the price" stage.)

-MarkM-

Part of the problem is you have not even proven your own value yet. We have not seen you maintain a coin through hard times and problems, we have not seen you come up with timely or ingenious pull requests, we know of no coins that testify to how useful you are to a coin or the community who is using a coin and so on.

Why would anyone want you on their team?

Or maybe that could be put as why is it that none of the existing teams seem to have found you useful or valuable enough to have welcomed you into their team, providing you with an opportunity to show us all why and how a team with you in it might be one worth joining?

-MarkM-

100k of that is the top of my column. (10k per possible price as far down the list as I have bothered so far to build the column.)

(Column: an offer at each price all the way up or down, as distinct from a wall as in a huge offer at one price preventing price movement. I like columns as the price can move but costs a little more for each possible step the granularity permits.)

-MarkM-

I wonder how much BBQcoin they'd charge to do a custom run for us?

-MarkM-

Not if there were too many of them for any to actually connect and mine due to clogging the capacity of your bandwidth pipe or port opening subsystem or something. Or were simply enough to trigger some kind of "it must be an attack" defenses along the way.

-MarkM-

It would probably make more sense to have the starting difficulty high enough that it will take about a day to mine the first block if only a few people get aboard, but let the rewards start anyway so come the end of the first day if only a few people did get aboard one of them would get a reward.

Maybe seeing osmeone did get a reward might bring more miners aboard, so maybe more than one block would get solved the second day, meanwhile more people would at least become aware that the launch has begun.

By the third day anyone who happened to have the first two days be their equivalent of a weekend, or happen to co-incide with a multiple shift super heavy set of work hours, might hear about the launch for the first time.

By the end of the first week maybe enough people will be aboard that blocks will be getting solved not a whole lot slower than their target time.

Whenever some big farm does jump on the chain though, blocks are going to come really really fast unless by then the difficulty is still pretty darn high.

You will need one of the good adaptive-difficulty routines too, not one of the ones that just make the difficulty rollercoaster exploit faster and easier and maybe also more effective.

Merged mining might help though, especially since you seem to be planning a bunch of blockchains; they might as well all be mined together, yes? So merged mining probably makes a lot of sense for this project.

-MarkM-

FTFY

-MarkM-

It should be JNK; JKC is JoKeCoin, which isn't ready to be announced yet because mining its genesis block without a few dozen huge GPU farms is going to take a few months.

-MarkM-

Are the current custodians of the .com and .net on this forum?

As really the big-three domains would be the most logical ones to put the DNS seeds on but obviously that is screwed if their admins are not reliable, cannot be trusted to keep the seeds up to date etc.

-MarkM-

Well that is part of it. If the big farms thought an exchange might be coming, presto they'd be there and the halcyon days of CPU mining would be over.

-MarkM-

Well y'know, when all you have to mine with are CPUs, or maybe just one GPU, it really isn't in your interest to encourage large GPU farms to come drive up the difficulty.

Tenebrix and Fairbrix are the same position right now, except rather than being rumoured to be a joke they are rumoured to be dead.

The end result though, which is months and months and months of peace and quiet for CPU miners to hum away hi ho hi ho its off to hash I go, is the same.

Much fairer, I think, than the GPU miners' approach of "we raped all the coins, lets launch a new one to rape".

(The one GPU, of course, merged-mines all the merged-mine-able coins; as there is no point driving up the difficulty of the Scrypt coins Tenebrix and Fairbrix prematurely; putting a GPU on them would just force others to also put a GPU on them, everyone would spend more electricity for the same number of coins, it'd just be wasteful and impolite.)

-MarkM-