Does anyone know what happened with http://forum.yacoin.org ?

Perhaps you are operating with wrong parameters.

-- CPU corei7 with 4 threads
https://github.com/Thirtybird/cpuminer/releases


-- GPU Radeon R7 240 4GB
https://github.com/Thirtybird/YACMiner/releases

    --Raise minimum stake amount To make minimum stake produced 1 YAC? Over time, will it not be extremely unlikely to occur anyway?

As it stands now, no. When I've written that, I did not know GetBlockTrust function does not give PoS coin with higher stake higher trust value. As it stands now, someone with modern computer could buy 1M YAC, split them to 2 coins and then leave it on. After a while his PoS blocks would flood the chain and the only thing that could be done is PoW miners to start ignoring all small PoS blocks.


    --Raise coin age growth from 3 months, which will require another security feature Could it be raised to 6 months? Is there a way to make this amount of time not so arbitrary?

I am aware this would mitigate but not solve the problem (generating a lot of small PoS blocks for small price). There is be a better way to solve this.


    --Amplifty NFactor for smaller PoS blocks(?), then allow consecutive PoS blocks
    --Increase PoS trust value (2-1000x (=f(coinage, NFactor))

I think raising small stake PoS block N factor can be done in some way.
But allowing consecutive PoS blocks is very delicate decision and this would really have to be seldom allowed. A am not sure we have the right algorithm for this now.


  -- Make PoW difficulty step up until PoS block is found then bring back down to lowest difficulty level

Perhaps this could be combined with allowing higher PoW reward for those who mine on top of PoS block.




As for the rest, I believe we should prepare Yacoin for mass adoption, without addressing critical issues after they occur. Real question is how many hard forks Cryptsy is willing to bear. Other than that there wouldn't probably be many complaints from currently (small) userbase.
I think the only way to gain credibility is to prevent any kind of misuse as soon as possible instead of relying on most people having good intentions.

Here is the winning block:




And we have breached 1G of blockchain+blockindex data (these numbers would be smaller without orphans):

585M    blk0001.dat
540M    blkindex.dat


EDIT: Money supply: 50M+ (50070902)

Now who is going to be user no. 1000000?

This is by design and it is intended to prevent blockchain bloat/spam attacks.
Removing that would cause far more harm than good. It is just something to keep in mind when projecting future value because it serves as a powerfull weight from above. I mentioned it because it is related to what I will write later.


Next:
In order for all willing participants to generate interest there has to be enough space in blockchain to accomodate their PoS blocks. Yacoin with it's one minute block target (~1440 blocks per day) leaves enough "slots" for 720 PoS blocks considering current "no two consecutive PoS blocks" rule. That is - if miners allow it and they don't refuse to mine on top of PoS blocks in order to maximize their profits with up to 720 additional PoW blocks per day.
Leaving that aside, we get to 262800 (=720x365) honest stakeholders with one wallet each, generating interest once per year . If each stakeholder opens his/hers wallet once per month, than we get to 21900 (=262800/12)  - let's call them individuals who were able to generate interest every month this year.

Now what happens, if there are more participants or we all divide/split wallets so thay generate PoS blocks with higher frequency (as we all do now)?
Eventually those 720 "slots" per day will get used and from then on PoS blocks with higher consumed coin age will replace those PoS blocks with lower values at the tip of the chain.
This will lead to high amount of orphans, and it will also cause some small stakeholders not being able to generate interest in reasonable time, because even if they find PoS block, there's a chance it will get kicked of the tip of the chain by richer stake miner with higher coin age.

Someone with bad intentions and big wallet could split his funds and create many many PoS blocks so he would occupy most of those "slots".
And it would cost him nothing to do that (except being online and leaving wallet open).

Here I am only exposing one side of bigger issue with current implementation, because it's crucial to be aware of it in order to understand my proposition.

Other PoS cryptocurrencies with higher block spacing (less blocks per day generated) will have this issue manifested even more, and soon enough only richer portion of stakeholders will manage to generate interest simply due their higher coin age and lack of enough free "slots" in blockchain.

This is PoS issue in general and it was designed that way for security purpose ...


EDIT: ...
My previous post wasn't ment as a speculative investment hint, but I am using it here as input. Considering it's content, I would contend we should raise minimum stake amount, so that no less than 1YAC is generated with each PoS block. That means someone with 20 coins ( = ~2...200$ according to my presumptions from previous post ) could generate 1 PoS block after 1 year. Currently coin age growth is capped at 3 months. This cap would have to be raised then, but another security feature should be added.
We could make PoS hash function result dependent not only on coin age, but we could also amplify N factor when dealing with blocks holding smaller coin ages thereby increasing resource requirements.
In addition to that, consecutive PoS blocks could be made possible again, if subsequent PoS block would fit much stricter criteria, for example exponentially larger coin age plus higher N factor.

I am talking about refactoring of PoS system, so that it becomes more resource demanding. Then we need to give PoS blocks back trust value that is higher than PoW block value. This value could be somewhere in the range of 2-1000x ( = f(coinAge,Nfactor) ) of average PoW block value. It should be high enough so that miners wouldn't ignore PoS blocks and build their PoW-only chains for maximum profit.
In addition to that, PoW difficulty should step up incrementally when there are no PoS blocks near last n blocks. Every PoS block would bring next PoW difficulty back to lowest allowable level. That would discourage PoW miners from ignoring PoS blocks.

Theoretically YACoin is already less vulnerable to PoS issues than other hybrids, because each hash consumes 16MB of memory now (and soon 32MB). It is not so simple to just create thousands of wallets and than build a PoS only chain, because it takes some time (and memory) to hash 1000 scrypt-jane hashes.


This is just an outline of my idea. It is in no way perfect, but I had to get it out

When priced at 100$, 1$ would get destroyed with each transaction due hardcoded 0.01 yac transaction fee. Who would transact in amounts smaller than 10$ if one tenth would get destroyed with each transaction? I believe this rule in a way serves as limitation for maximum future price. My guess is that it could hardly get above 25$ per yac (25 cents destroyed with each transaction) and more reasonable target value could be between 0.1 and 10$.
I am aware people were paying high transaction fees when btc was at it's high, but that amount did not get destroyed.

Priced at 0.1$ YACoin would now have 5$ million market capitalization. Compare that to current Litecoin market cap (62$M) you can see how small "the push" must be to get us there.

And all that presuming dollar and other fiat money would preserve it's value:)

Yacoin doesn't share ROI with novacoin, so GetProofOfStakeReward (in main.cpp) will need to be updated in testing version.

Here is a fresh change:

https://github.com/senadj/scrypt-jane

I am yet learning git, so expect a lot of useless commits 
I also have a windows build but I do not know how to upload it yet.
A week or two and I will also have a OSX one too.

Joe, how did you test reindex operation?
I've checked the code and there is no such flag nor function with similar name.

These are my node current connections on default port:

        "addr" : "198.74.231.92:7688",
        "addr" : "80.86.87.204:7688",
        "addr" : "106.186.30.86:7688",
        "addr" : "94.23.227.83:7688",
        "addr" : "71.114.128.156:7688",
        "addr" : "199.204.38.210:7688",
        "addr" : "119.123.182.111:7688",

That is great job, Joe.
I don't have time to test it yet, but I will get to it asap. I did checked GetBlockTrust() and it doesn't look more harmful than current implementation
Anyway thumbs up ...

I think this is planned to speed up client chain download (first headers, later transactions - possibly on demand) and enable "thinner" clients with less disk space requirements. This is not yet in a version Joe is working on now - so I believe.



I am not sure what kind of merging do you have in mind, I am using wxWidgets C++ framework (without gui components) for this tool.
Code is not ment to be merged with yacoin. But I will publish it after I clean it a bit more. Besides I plan to either extend functionality later or create separate tools.

I am looking forward to reindex:)

That is great news Joe.

I developed a tool for fast blockchain file sorting -> backing up. I was thinking of also putting online sorted *.dat files for first 1M blocks (and later perhaps every icremental 100 or 200K rows).

I did not know reindex was unavaiable in yacoin. That means all blocks need to be imported again (yacoind -loadblock="sorted.dat") and that is not too much faster than downloading them from peers. On the other hand, the later is a safer option from the point of security.
Does that (reindex option) change in 0.4.5?

My tool was ment to be experimental feature for fast development setups. And for blockchain backups. I thought we need a way to "boot"  peers faster, so people do not wait days before thay can even test yacoin.

Now it should.

This is not permanent setup yet, just having fun...

http://forecast.yacoin.net

Using Yacoin v0.4.4.0-g32a928e-yac-wm on Ubuntu linux.

I am having problems with -reindex operation. It does not seem to work at all.
If I delete blkindex.dat file and log file from database directory I get this error:

EXCEPTION: St13runtime_error
CDB() : can't open database file blkindex.dat, error 22
yacoin in AppInit()


Has anyone succesfully tried this before?

This should work on UNIX/Linux/OSX.
Have you checked README.md file?

It seems coins got to the destination address:

http://explore.grokonet.com/?address=Y6VGzRr3c7HKkQT2kcGc3oYZPmvrj6Nypj
http://explorer.yacoin.net/address/Y6VGzRr3c7HKkQT2kcGc3oYZPmvrj6Nypj

Perhaps transaction wasn't accepted in the block right away.

Anyway you should contact bter if transfered funds aren't listed in your balance.

I am glad it helped though I am not sure why you need this - I didn't get this error building yacoind on AMD x86-64 EL5.

First try this and report what happens: