The amount of reward per block drops continuously though to make up for that... It is designed specifically for pre-mining, a little thing like constantly adjusting difficulty wasn't about to stop them, you just pick a coin that has some already out there excuse for lowering the reward constantly to make up for it and presto, you're golden.

-MarkM-

Yes, all the latest scamcoins all used the "pre-mine right in front of everyone's eyes, bribing the first few hours of readers/miners into jumping aboard the pre-mine" approach.

Ever tried starting a bitcoin clone with just one "only a few years old in 2009" CPU and see how long blocks take when you mine them all by yourself with just your own CPU? Even testnet took a while to find a new genesis block for with just one CPU, and testnet was 16 times less initial difficulty than bitcoin!

Nowadays you have to figure on not even just one rig of four or so 7950's, since you know at least a few other miners have to jump aboard for it to have any hope of taking off. So you probably need to set initial difficulty to a level where it will take at least ten such rigs to not have it take 24 hours per block!

-MarkM-

Because it too was pre-mined right in front of everyone's eyes.

Basically the difficulty of a new coin should be such that it is likely to be taking longer than its target time between blocks when it is launched, so that unless the author actually gets a few miners on board to help mine it, it could take hours per block at first with the author mining alone with only his own bunch of rigs... But as more farms come on board, within a few hours of launch, as miners wake up and read about the launch and start mining, the time per block should lower downward until the target time between blocks is reached.

-MarkM-

No, it is a pre-mining thing.

The coin is being pre-mined at something like maybe one second per block.

So waiting for a long poll, or for cgminer's default 60 seconds it waits if there is no long-poll, is useless.

You need to set -s 1 or something like that to make cgminer scan every second for new work since during pre-mining the whole point of pre-mining is to rake in blocks insanely fast before more miners get aboard.

-MarkM-

No, it is not, because the difficulty is INSANELY low, not merely low.

Until a decent number of miners jump on it it should be taking a lot longer per block than its target time, not less time than its target time.

It is a deliberately pre-mined coin and what you are seeing is it being pre-mined right before your eyes.

You are actually watching the pre-mining happening, and even attempting to participate in pre-mining it.

-MarkM-

It *is* a pre-mine. The people mining it right now are the pre-miners, pre-mining it.

Maybe once the difficulty adjusts to a point where the target time between blocks is attained then it could be said to have shifted from pre-mining mode to normal mining mode.

But that should have been the case from the start, by setting the initial difficulty correctly based on the fact this is not 2009 anymore.

Really a new coin should be taking a few hours of more miners jumping on it before it even has enough miners to find blocks as fast as its target time, initially with only the first few miners it should be taking a lot longer than the target.

-MarkM-

There is nothing "natural" about it, difficulty was deliberately set insanely low to enable rapid pre-mining of the coin.

The "natural" way to start WITHOUT a pre-mine is to set the difficulty to a level where if the usual number of miners jump aboard they will hopefully be enough to not make it take a lot longer than the target block-time between blocks right from the outset. Certainly not massively LESS than target.

Instead it was set up to enable an instant pre-mine.

-MarkM-

Pre-miners, you mean.

This thing is being pre-mined right now, you are one of the pre-miners.

Blocks seem to be coming in every second or so, it is in pre-mining mode, difficulty deliberately started ridiculously low so the the author could start mining a block a second or more while you set up your mining then you mine a block a second or more while preparing to post and so on.

It looks like no attempt at all was made to set the initial difficulty at a reasonable level, instead the whole thing is designed specifically, like mincoin, for pre-mining.

How fast are blocks being found, and what is the command people need to use with e.g. cgminer to make it not expect at least a minute between blocks? (As otherwise no wonder everyone finds only stales, sixty blocks have gone by by the time they check for new work.)

This is basically deliberately designed as a pre-mining scam.

-MarkM-

There were no blocks? How many hours ago was this? There are shitloads of blocks, it looks to be pre-mining even as we write.

What the heck initial difficulty was it?

-MarkM-

So, they asked you to announce it because you are a respected forum member with good familiarity with the source code who can thus assure us that he has inpected it, done a diff againsts other coins to ensure nothing fishy has been added and so on?

I am surprised you didn't mention the lengths you have gone to between being asked to announce it and actually annluncing it with regards to checking it is all good... Since that surely is the whole point of having a respected forum member do the inspection and announcement?

As it is a reader of the OP might think you simply turned around and announced it without doing due diligence of the code and the binaries...

-MarkM-

EDIT: ALso, at ten minutes per block there are a huge numbers of blocks, how much hashing power was the intial difficulty designed to expect would jump on the coin initially? It was obvious surely a huge amount would? Even if twice as much as jumped on Feathercoin jumped on this one the blocks should still be about  5 minutes apart, surely? How much more hashing DID jump on it than on Feathercoin?

Check out http://dvcstable02.devcoin.org:8080

It is the Cyclos banking system, but that includes an advertising system for people to advertise things they want to buy and sell, and it includes stuff for webmasters to use on their websites for payment buttons and such.

I have it set up with DeVCoins as its currency, so basically it is a DVCbank, a bank in which accounts are denominated in DeVCoins.

So webmasters could "accept devcoins" similar to how one "accepts fiat" with things like Paypal; that is, by having your account added to, instead of by having to deal with actual coins or notes/bills or, in the case of cryptocurrencies, actual blockchains.

It has no blockchain interfaces at all, it knows nothing of blockchains.

But that just means it might be worthwhile to figure out exactly what kind of modules that do somehow do something with blockchains Cyclos needs and making some bounties to get them made...

When you create an account it apparently says the admin has to validate you. That'd be me so I guess I will have to manually verify people's email addreses, or something. As I have not even looked into how sendmail is set up on that machine but I think by default sendmail on Fedora only sends to local users on the machine not out onto the internet so likely the machine has no outgoing email ability.

-MarkM-

I guess the thing to do is build merged mining ability into your coin from the start but not tell anyone.

Then you can merged mine it alongside the previous oneven the primaty needs support even just for being the primary. Bitcoin has primary support but does litecoin?

If so then yeah, release a merge-able secondary but don't anyone it can be merged mine, so they switch hashing power over to it while you merged mine it with your hashing power that is already mining something else.

I guess first thing we need to know is, have all the existing scrypt coins, or even any of them, inherited from bitcoin the ability to be the *primary* chain in a merge?

I suspect though that the really killer profits are made using CPUs to mine, like the people who mined BBQcoin for many many months back when all the GPUs were ignoring it, and the people who are still mining Tenebrix with CPUs while the people with GPUs are ignoring it. In general, mine the really really easy coins for howerver long you can at low difficulty then profit when peope finally realise it is still around and still accumulating users (grass roots users, folk who don't have mining farms or even, usually GPUs).

Hearing a coin "is dead" is music to the ears of those who only have CPUs or maybe just one GPU, as it doesn't mean dead at all, it means PROFITABLE!

(Remember that to a tiny miner, electricity is ignorable, it might even already be priced into their rent. So they don't care about selling coins to pay for rigs nor selling coins to pay for electricity, they just care how many months they will be able to pick up free coins until the GPU people catch on come back take over and get an exchange set up... The longer that takes the better, in fact best would be if the GPUs don't catch on until at least one block-reward-halving has happened! )

-MarkM-

A single GPU can rake in GeistGeld, CoiLedCoin, and GRouPcoin, maybe even i0coin, quite nicely merged-mining, and since those are just the easiest of the merged-mined coins can also have the small chances of eventually finding blocks of IXCoin, DeVCoin and NaMeCoin n too by merging the whole lot of them. Furthermore, just the BiTCoin alone will more than pay for the electricity.

(You use p2pool for the merged mining, so you get the benefits of a pool for the bitcoins, the rest you are gambling on find a block yourself solo, which is a good bet for the lower difficulty coins. One 5870 gets lots of blocks of the low difficulty coins per day. While the bitcoins pay the electircity plus also some profit too just on the bitcoins before even considering all the effectively-free altcoins.)

-MarkM-

f you need more BBQcoins to resell at such prices I can supply you with them at 1 bitcoin per 10,000 BBQcoins...

-MarkM-

You can code kiddieporn into your grocery receipts too by careful choice of what you buy and the order in which you hand it to the cashier, then sue Walmart (or whatever shop you pull this trick on) for printing porn with their cash register and handing it to... well heck, lets go for handing it to a minor! Have a minor accept the receipt from the cashier!

You can also code it into bank deposits, so bank statements that banks have to keep for years contain it!

Oh gosh golly!

-MarkM-

Well I looked around and apart from someone asking 1.5 bitcoins per 10,000 BBQ coins it does seem like 1 bitcoin per 10,000 is a reasonable price.

Send 5 bitcoins to 1KyiwDZgbDLRtt8hf7xwzaEY27dAPYmgZY

And tell me the BBQcoin address to send the 50,000 BBQcoins to.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Don't dawdle, Feathercoin is going for 13 times as much and is just a trivially recent upstart compared to venerable BBQcoin! This price won't last!

I0Coind right now is eating 4.9 gig and GeistGeld typically eats about four gig.

What kills I0Coind though is boost craps out trying to do a DNS lookup.

It is the only coin I have that problem with, I have no idea why it even does DNS lookups once it is up and running, but it dies every day or two or less from this and has to be restarted.

We need a github repo where a recent copy of bitcoin with the merged mining patches, and ONLY the merged mining patches, applied.

Once that is in place, all the merged mined coins can be updated at leisure.

Without that, each time any one of the coins gets updated the whole work of getting the merged mining patches to apply to a new version of bitcoin ends up having to be duplicated for each coin, which is just a total waste of developer-time.

-MarkM-

We already made United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB) and Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) years ago.

Turned out there was not enough hashing power to secure them adequately so they have temporarily switched to using Open Transactions instead of blockchains, for security.

Someday when transaction volumes are high enough for transaction fees to be able to support enough merged-mining, they will be able to move back to blockchain format. But in the meantime, blockchains are simply way too insecure. (Or another way of looking at it is blockchains are simply way too insanely massively ridiculously expensive.)

-MarkM-

Scam scam scam scam
Scam scam scam scam
Lovely scam, wonderful scam!

I'll have scam scam scam bacon egg and scam without the scam, please!

Can I have scam scam scam scam rat and scam with a little less rat in it, please?

Etc.

(Consult Monty Python for further details.)

-MarkM-

For coins with low difficulty it seems safest to hold coins that are secured by as many hard-coded checkpoints as possible.

Basically, ancient coins from way back when.

But, of course, if you don't have such coins yourself in your own cold storage you introduce another layer of risk by trusting some cold storage / cold wallet / vault provider to actually have the ancient coins the tokens they provide the ability to trade represent.

So really it seems best to deal mostly with high difficulty coins such as bitcoins, namecoins and devcoins...

Otherwise, don't count your coins as really secure until you have held them long enough for a few generations of client-upgrades to have gone by, layering hardcoded checkpoints over them to prevent unravelling of the blockchain to a time before you received the coins.

-MarkM-