The bitparking pool has now enabled i0coin (and groupcoin) for testing. Let me know if you have any issues. It's currently applying only a percentage of the pool towards i0coin to prevent pool performance issues due to large numbers of block submissions.

Bitparking is testing merge mining groupcoins. You can register an address an earn coins. This is an experiment to see if the coin is desired.

This was caused by the enabling of i0coin for testing. It was finding i0coin blocks so fast that it impacted pool performance. I've tuned it now so only a portion of the hash rate goes to i0coin.

This of course means that i0coin is now available. If you've already got an i0coin address registered then you're already mining them. If not, you can register a new account and add an address.

I've also added groupcoin, another merge mineable coin. Both these coins are in 'testing'. If they cause issues with the pool then I'll remove them after the testing period. Neither coin has an exchange for them yet but if they do get one, you'll have coins.

Yes, I'm currently testing it at the moment.

Yes, I'll likely add it it. I'll start with putting some hash rate towards it and see if it's stable before opening it up for registration. Bitcoin 0.8.2+ has been fairly unstable for me when used on the pool. What did you do about about the block forking features added in bitcoin that weren't in i0coin originally? I assume this client can cause block forks due to p2sh support, level db vs bdb differences, etc. This would make it a requirement for your client to be used by everyone pretty quickly. Probably not a big deal since i0coin isn't getting much mining power or exchange presence.

bitparking does merge mining of namecoin, ixcoin, devcoin as well as bitcoin with stratum. The pool has no fee (it's currently funded out of transaction fees). Additional income from the merged coins is currently:
Not huge but not bad either.

i0coin had merge mining added first. Then ixcoin added it once it was proved to work for i0coin.

I was travelling overseas and was without internet for longer than expected to release the payments, sorry. Now that I'm back I'll work on automating that process as a priority.

It enables you to use the merge mine proxy program to merge mine bytecoin as the primary chain. The patches aren't needed if you're using pool software (eg. p2pool, eloipool) that do what those patches do using getblocktemplate. The advantage of using the mergemineproxy is you don't need pool software so it's easy to solomine.

They've implemented what is done via the patches to bitcoin internally into p2pool. The mergemineproxy could be modified to do this as well but no one has. It predates 'getblocktemplate' which was the functionality added to bitcoin that allowed this type of thing to be done outside of patching bitcoin.

The 'now supports merge mining' was referring to being able to use it with software that uses the merge mining proxy protocol (getworkaux rpc, etc). That isn't included in bytecoin before their latest round of changes.

No, it can't without additional block forking changes.

ixcoin is about 80,000 blocks away from having its subsidy drop to zero. This means miner income from that coin will only be via transactions. Will the coin survive this? Will the price increase or collapse when this happens? I think this was one of the experiments of the coin - to make that drop to zero happen faster than bitcoin to see what effect it has. Block 227,499 is the cutoff block number.

Ah, I see! The seed is the previous block hash and is passed to the random number generator.

Edit: It seems to use a substring of the prevhash. If difficulty reaches a certain value (bitcoin levels?) won't it always produce the same substring and therefore the same random value?

How does this work in terms of nodes validating blocks? In other coins they check the number of generated coins is valid and fail to validate if a number greater than the subsidy value is there. In this coin if the random check succeeds the subsidy value will be higher. Any other node validating the block would also need to hit that random value successfully to actually validate it without rejecting the block as invalid. And every node on the network would need to do that everytime it validates the blockchain.

How does this coin prevent that from happening? If it doesn't validate the block amount then people could change the source to any subsidy they want.

Edit: See the check in ConnectBlock that the generated coins is not greater than GetBlockValue. The value of that will change for each node that tries the random number.

No sane person would run a closed source alt coin client. How would they know it wasn't a wallet stealer?

You haven't explained how they are stealing it. Are they implementing features you didn't ask for? Are they not doing things you're asking for?

You might want to try to develop a thicker skin if you want to develop an alt coin. The alt coin world is full of people trying to exploit them, hack them, find out flaws in their reward schemes, etc, etc. I definitely don't recommend paying anyone to do it since the risk of failure is huge.

It doesn't mean they hijacked the coin, it just means they could. If they're implementing what you want, and doing what you want, then there's no hijack. What exactly are they doing that you're not happy with?

I'm not entirely sure what you've done since this is the ixcoin thread and you seem to be talking about some other coin without any links to what that coin is. It sounds like you got someone to create a coin for you and they've got control of it due to the source repository being controlled by them? If so, not much you can do. I hope you didn't pay them any money. If you want to 'found' a coin you really need to control the canonical repository, website and announcement thread/forum for it yourself. If you hire a programer to work on it don't give them access to the core repository. Take pull requests or patches for the changes they're making, sanity check them, then apply them yourself.