I can't seem to get the thing to compile (Windows 7, MinGW)...

Any chance there's a precompiled windows binary out there or, alternately, that someone can tell me how to fix this:

So give away 1 coin per block and let maxint be your ceiling. Those two factors combined would give you a LONG time before you have to worry about inflation stopping... And by then int64 might seem as quaint as int defaulting to 8 bit is to us today

It doesn't necessarily need new features (a la namecoin) to be meaningful. This is part of the coolness of open source, if you think something else will work better you're free to modify and distribute those changes. In this case we have someone who's decided that a brief introductory period of crazy steep inflation would be better since we get to the much-touted deflationary part of the curve sooner. I've considered creating the opposite: a variant where inflation occurred so slowly and over such a long span of time that it would be highly unlikely for the increase in supply to ever outpace the increase in demand. Someone who believes inflation is the way to go might create a fork in which nSubsidy never halves and there is no enforced ceiling on the number of coins.

Just because it wasn't a massive feature-packed fork doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. If you don't think a steep but brief inflationary period would be a beneficial change, then don't use ixcoin. If you think bitcon's curve has the wrong shape, duration, etc. then it's an easy matter to change a few key numbers and reshape the graph to your design. Saying this fork is worthless, profiteering, gluttonous, etc because the changes made aren't substantial enough is like arguing that bitcoin wasn't a substantial change because it's deflationary. Sometimes changing a single thing is a big deal.

Also, assuming any of the bounties on the wiki site are real and will actually be paid, it seems to add up that the original 580k that were mined before release are being used as rewards to help move ixcoin's infrastructure forward. Since ixcoin and bitcoin use identical RPC, any products developed for one should work for the other with little to no modification. If an ixcoin bounty leads to the development of something that can be useful to bitcoin then it has helped the bitcoin cause (and vice versa).

No one is stealing anything from anyone. Not any more than beertokens, weeds or any of the other miscellaneous feature-identical branches of bitcoin have anyway.

Edit: Oh, and since such forks tend to be lower difficulty (even lower than namecoin usually) they also make mining more accessible. BTC and NMC both have difficulties so high that CPU mining is more than unprofitable, it's flat out impossible. Let the casuals mine the forks and those of us with dedicated rigs will still mine BTC. There's nothing wrong with forks, we just need a good exchange to support them all.

I agree, we need more coin-for-coin exchanges. I started working on an exchange once upon a time but had too many problems with Dwolla and C# not playing nicely... Perhaps I could modify what I've already got to serve as a BTC/NMC/IXC/GRP/DVC/MBC/etc exchange...

As for current value... While I see no reason to tie USD values to difficulty, I think difficulty could be a great tool for estimating the worth of coin-to-coin exchanges... IXC diff is currently 4, BTC diff is currently 1888786.70535 so it seems to me that 1 IXC should be valued somewhere in the neighborhood of 4/1888786.70535=0.00000212 BTC (rounded to the nearest satoshi). Do the math the other way to find that 1 BTC ~= 472,196.67633750 IXC.

Of course difficulty 4 won't last for long, even with a measly 2 GH/s for the whole pool, so it may be too early to attempt such a valuation.

Of course, we have namecoin to base our math on too... Already-existing resources have shown that historically NMC is valued at about 2/3 (67.9%) of what this ratio says it should be (on average). The argument that namecoins have intrinsic value because of the service offered by the network might be slightly true, but the bitparking exchange has a volume much higher than the actual NMC spent on registrations, so they're likely being traded by speculators much the same as BTC. If we apply this fractional value to IXC we get the following:

1 BTC ~= 320,621.54323316 IXC
1 IXC ~= 0.00000144 BTC

Yeah let's redo the math after a few weeks worth of difficulty updates

Chances are that a substantial portion of that power would not be mining bitcoins anyway. At difficulty 4 you can still CPU mine somewhat effectively. 2 GH/s is what, 10 Radeon 5830s? I get the feeling it's more like a few dozen people on low-end nVidia cards, CPU or throwing one card out of their cluster at the task. Most of this power probably wouldn't be mining bitcoin or namecoin anyway since both have an effective difficulty FAR too high for low-end miners.

Well, you'd also have to make the tweaks to create a new genesis block, so at least that part is a bit more difficult than setting nSubsidy = 96.

As for the point, as I said I can't really speak to the purpose other than maybe as an experiment in varying rates of inflation/deflation. It's at least got my attention for its experimental value and I'm considering forking it again to make the ridiculously slow inflation variant I briefly mentioned before... As soon as I wrap my head around the genesis block code anyway

Also, my math now puts network speed over the 2 GH/s mark. Not a huge amount of interest, but considering this was posed a bit under 3 hours ago and one hour ago was a bit over 1 GH/s... I'm keeping my eye on this one. I still think Namecoin has more promise, since it also fulfills a non-monetary purpose, but I'm keeping my eye on this one.

Done and done, sir. I can't speak to the purpose but I can speak to the code. A simple KDiff3 comparison of the original bitcoin source and the fork shows very few changes (aside from the obvious bitcoin->ixcoin in nearly every string in every file). The primary change is of course in main.cpp where nSubsidy has been set to 96 and the various necessary changes to the Genesis block have been made. Looks clean to me.

LMAO the starting difficulty is 4... Not low enough for you?

Block #6467 at the moment of this writing, though they're going VERY quickly since the initial difficulty of 4 is still in effect.

~4.679 blocks per minute as a matter of fact, which at difficulty 4 indicates about 1.34 GH/s total, if my math is correct (1 block @ diff 4 ~= 17,180,131,332 hashes [D * 2^48 / 0xFFFF])

Then how about another fork (Xicoin perhaps?) with lower block rewards that won't give away all its coins until 2284 or something? Or for that matter why not make the reward extremely low and simply never stop giving away coins? Assuming the generation reward rate is lower than the coin corruption/loss rate it'd still be deflationary...

Yeah, NewHeur_PE is a catch-all category for anything displaying "worm-like" behavior, which any unknown P2P app is going to throw. I've run this in a VM containing an empty bitcoin wallet and as of yet my bitcoin wallet.dat remains untouched, so at least it doesn't appear to be a wallet stealer. I've also pointed one video card at it and it appears to be mining and generating coins correctly so it seems to be a legit fork.

As for the point... I'm not 100% sure there is one - BUT if ixcoin adoption ever gets to a meaningful level it WILL tell us far ahead of time what is likely to happen when bitcoin finally hits its transaction fee transition point. Better to know all those gory details in 2015 than have to deal with them in 2033 with zero knowledge.

Looks interesting. Part of the awesomeness of tech is that you can change the world overnight. 2015 sounds like a much more internet-esque timeline than 2033

Where in So-Cal? I'm in Vegas but I've got family in CA so I make regular trips.

Also, what are the financials?

What's a kilo-giga-hash?

Nah I'm just playing. I agree with some of your other statements, like these:

So you're still ahead in my book, I just hate it when folks incorrectly combine SI prefixes

For the record: 1,000 Gigahash (GH) = 1 Terahash (TH) 

Namecoin, Beertokens, Weeds, Martian BotCoins, United Kingdom Britcoins and Canadian Digital Notes to name a few.

There's a whole special branch of the bitcoin client (multicoin) to handle more than one at a time, and while I haven't researched the others, Namecoin has its own full-blown block explorer, miner calculators/tools and even an exchange where they can be traded for bitcoins.

"Google before you post" is the new "Think before you speak"

Such a material would, by your very definition and every law of physics I've ever heard of, have a valence configuration and nucleus identical to gold and, therefore, would BE gold. It would be more reasonable to imagine some new process by which we cheaply convert another material into gold and flood the market.

It's also noteworthy that simply matching one industrial quality isn't usually enough. Silver, for example, is a much better conductor than gold - unfortunately it also tarnishes easily which ruins its conductivity. Find a cheap and easy way to keep silver from tarnishing and you'll see store shelves flooded with silver-plated connectors very quickly (considering its cost relative to a similar quantity of gold).

I think there's a little wisdom to be found in almost every theory I've heard re: the patterns and trends in bitcoin.

The "long slow slide" can probably be attributed to the regular sale of mining proceeds - a constant, but slight, downward pressure on the market. The rallies we've seen are those times when market pressure from speculators, new investors etc. outweighs the mining proceeds. The fact that we've seen no serious peaks or valleys for some time now (without an accompanying selloff anyway) would seem to indicate that we have enough regular transaction volume to mostly cancel out the slow fall from the mining proceed sales on an average day. This bodes well for the bitcoin network for numerous obvious reasons. We've also seen multiple times now that the market tends to recover from major selloff events, albeit quite slowly.

I'd say if we can get a few solid weeks without any more hacks, selloffs etc. we could easily be looking at a decent rally.

A few more articles/segments in mainstream news couldn't hurt much either

It would be significantly easier to simply kill & restart your miner process using task scheduler. It won't save you *quite* as much energy/heat as fully hibernating, but the difference between an idle computer and a mining computer IS pretty substantial.

Just make a couple batch files, one containing the command you use to start your miner, the other containing something like:


Replacing poclbm.exe with the actual filename of your miner of course.

Bitcoin mining is mostly integer math. This is also the reason it's so laughable that BitcoinWatch uses some unknown algorithm to estimate the network speed in Teraflops.

If they'd waited just a little longer it could've been HR1984, which would've been so much more appropriate.

If this passes, I'll just be a full-time citizen of TORville.