For the record, the pool owner in question is Tycho and the pool he owns is Deepbit, which controls between 40% and 50%+ of all Bitcoin mining power. It's basically Bitcoin or bust from here on out.

They should be available in Bitcoin given that's where they came from originally, but they're not and it's not clear they will be any time soon, which is the whole reason I launched CoiledCoin in the first place.

Judging from his comments in #bitcoin, I think that Tycho is basically in agreement with Luke's actions here, and since Deepbit makes up 40-50% of the total Bitcoin mining power by itself...

The plan was to only treat OP_NOP1 as OP_EVAL for blocks with timestamps after the switch-on time, and to make sure that well over 50% of miners will know to reject blocks containing such scripts by that time. OP_EVAL is probably going to be replaced by a different proposal, but that uses the same approach to dealing with transactions which are valid under the old rules but not the new.

Sorry it all went horribly wrong like this. I really wasn't expecting a 51% attack by one of the major pools.

Link. There are others, plus his messages in IRC though he's been pressuring people into not quoting those.

He's preventing anyone from getting blocks or performing transactions and has no incentive to stop, so it's kind of dead. He was also hinting in IRC that he might do the same to I0coin and Ixcoin and has more than enough hash power to do so, but it's possible he was joking.

No-one had the required financial incentive to attack it in this way.

Apparently BTC-E can set up a new exchange quite quickly, though I still have no idea how they found out about Coiledcoin in the first place. Developing the tools to do interesting things with OP_EVAL and suitable lightweight clients is a bit slower and fairly pointless unless there's some way to actually process transactions.

Last time I looked, the Bitcoin developers and pool owners were bickering over the details of how to actually implement these features. Also, you're forgetting that in the process of developing this I found and reported an easy remotely-exploitable node crashing bug in one of those features "QAed entirely by other people".

I'd basically already come to the conclusion that all the approaches usually proposed were wildly unrealistic even for something with as much support as Bitcoin.

Sort of. OP_EVAL was in the process of being added to Bitcoin by having new nodes include verified OP_EVAL transactions into blocks but without bothering to verify that existing uses of OP_EVAL inside blocks are actually valid until the switch-over date. So basically, until switch-over malicious miners can spend OP_EVAL transactions that they shouldn't be able to. However, its not safe to switch it on until much more than 50% of the mining power understand OP_EVAL and they must all turn it on at once. Last time I looked the Bitcoin network was nowhere near achieving this.

However, OP_EVAL is being abandoned by Bitcoin in favour of something incompatible and more limited called "pay to script hash" that requires going through that process again, and I'm not sure the replacement will get as much support from pools. Also, luke-jr's pushing for a legacy-free variant of that similar to what I'm using for Coiledcoin and has been threatening to refuse to mine normal Bitcoin transactions after the turn-on date for P2SH, which will make it harder to spend Bitcoins from pre-P2SH addresses. It's all a bit political.

Not really practical unfortunately. Bitcoin itself is vulnerable to the exact same attack, you just need more hashpower, and all the solutions that anyone's been able to find just cause worse problems. (Yep, for the low low price of a few million dollars anyone that wants to can completely shut down Bitcoin and stop any transactions from being processed. Thankfully no-one seems to care that much.)

On the other hand, if he saw multiply confirmed blocks getting orphaned then it pretty much confirms that luke-jr was intentionally rewriting history. That's vanishingly unlikely to happen otherwise even at ludicrous block rates; it's the whole reason that Bitcoin and the other altcoins based on it work in the first place.

Your guess is actually as good as mine on this one. Wasn't expecting anyone to set up an exchange this soon, they must have a lot of practice at it.

Wow, that's actually quite a clever logo idea.

A big concentration you've got there, though I guess there's not much excitement about new altcoins anymore. To be honest I've no idea what's going to happen; exchanges weren't particularly high up the priority list compared to getting it out there and getting the tools for people to do interesting things with it.

Thank you, hopefully this ought to work OK. (The testing version of the chain was merged mined from the start, partly so I could work out some bugs with supporting multiple chains in some unrelated code, but obviously until the difficulty increases things will be a tad interesting.)

Also, it looks like I screwed up and changed the genesis block back to 50 CLCs at some point, then forgot to change it back. Oh well.

There's a placeholder at www.coiledcoin.org but it really wants replacing.

OK, so this is somewhat later than originally anticipated, partly because of a slight last minute change and mostly because the Windows build is really slow, but it's out:

Windows release
Windows installer
Linux release
Source code
 
The website is coming eventually.

In a way. The sender's side of the transaction is the same size no matter how complex the rules are - the actual script is only included when the transaction is spent, so the receiver pays any extra fees that result from them choosing to have more complex restrictions on how it can be spent.

It's a way of letting you send to addresses that have more complicated restrictions on how the coins can then be spent - such as requiring signatures from multiple people or devices - without the sender having to worry about what the exact requirements are. It also makes it easier to, for example, set up an escrow arrangement where some coins can only be transferred either with the agreement of either the buyer and seller, or by the escrow agent and one of the two parties agreeing - so the escrow provider can't just run off with them. Sadly the tools to actually make this kind of escrow possible aren't quite ready yet.

There's a good technical description here. It was originally going into Bitcoin, but I think they've pretty much abandoned it in favour of something similar which may or may not get enough support. It's all a tad messy on their end right now.

Not really. That'd probably best be done externally by someone with more experience with Open Transactions, if at all.

Well, we'll see what happens - partly depends if anyone manages to launch any interesting services with it.

There'll be source and clients for Windows and Linux once the chain actually officially launches; got the build process for them setup already. Any standard Bitcoin miner will work. This is a slightly rushed launch so I unfortunately don't have a public client out for a test version of the chain. (Obviously there's my private one which could in theory be released but it's probably not a good idea.)

Almost certainly - that's where the person depositing them reckoned they got them from originally. Though in theory I guess the amount of tainted bitcoins should be increasing over time until we hit the point where Mt Gox give up...

Something interesting happened in #mtgox last night. A user got their account locked down and MagicalTux said that the reason for it was that the coins could be traced back to a theft a long time ago. He unlocked the account in question, but it means that the widely-held assumption that Bitcoins are fungible - that it doesn't matter which you get paid with - isn't true and hasn't been for some time. Some Bitcoins are tainted and will cause you problems when you try to exchange them while others aren't, and there's no easy way to tell which is which just by looking at them. (Wonder if there's a way to require payment with recently-mined bitcoins...)

I have no idea whether or how this will affect Bitcoin though.