Devcoin already meets most of these aims.

1. It is merge mined with bitcoin, and thus can and indeed is mined with ASICs (via pools like ghash.io)
2. The merge mining protects against 51% attack - though an attack against bitcoin will take out devcoin and other merge mined coins - but this is unlikely.
3. Same pseudonymous protection as bitcoin - unless you know someone's address it's difficult to work out their identity
4. Very decentralized - the coins are widely held. Devcoin has been going since 2011, and lots of people accrued them over the last two and a half years
5. The one drawback - needs a new wallet, but the devs are working on it
6. Meets this criteria, some of the best devs in cryptoworld do work on this coin
7. Meets the philosophy criteria too - the coin was designed to support developers and others through bounties and is doing this successfully.

Other benefits - the transaction fee is very low in dollar terms, and while this coin isn't as inflationary like dogecoin, it isn't deflationary either, and is thus suited to micro transactions and a spending economy. Some 24 stores already accept it - you can buy a walmart voucher with devcoin, which is more than you can say about most cryptos.

Finally, longevity. This coin is older than litecoin and has stood the test of time. The devs and community arn't going to walk away.

I'm trying a series of experiments to raise Devcoin's profile (trial and error to see what works and what doesn't). Need people to help to make it work though.

Details in this thread:

http://coinzen.org/index.php/topic,627.0.html

The action seems to have moved to Cryptsy.

24 hour volume on Cryptsy for DVC/BTC was 5.16 BTC and for DVC/LTC it was 0.9 BTC.

On Vircurex it was 0.3719 BTC for DVC/BTC.

Not sure why you are getting so worked up but

1. Satoshi made his code OPEN SOURCE for a reason - so that if people wanted to take it and make their own versions, they could. Having multiple SHA256 coins is not that different to having multiple browsers based on the Chromium open source browser system. Are you using Google Chrome to view this thread? Well, Google Chrome COPIED the code from Chromium, and released it under their own badge (and lots of the stuff they added slowed the browser down, but people use it because hey, marketing works in getting people to adopt your stuff).

2. There arn't that many SHA256 coins, most of the alts released are scrypt.

3. Not sure why you are so angry that Shakezula wrote an article about how to do it. This is how science works, Spoetnik - the knowledge is shared openly. It isn't hidden or buried under a load of patents.

Get a life and stop getting worked up because other people are sharing information. Shakezula hasn't broken the law of any country anywhere on earth in sharing how to code an altcoin. In any case, even if he hadn't written that article, you cannot ban information. Once it's out there, it's out there. (And who do you think you are trying to ban people from sharing information - the petty dictator of bitcoinworld? Get a life.)

Remember that the technology is neutral. Some of you are assuming that just because a bunch of libertarians have adopted Bitcoin (and tried to push out anyone who isn't a libertarian), that people with other agendas can't adopt the technology for their own purposes.

Actually anyone can make a cryptocurrency, including a city council and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Hull council are being rather revolutionary:

* they haven't used taxpayer money for this, it's funded by a donation
* they've creatively thought of a way for people to earn these coins through work (a key part of a crypto-economy, and one that bitcoin hasn't cracked yet, though other alts like devcoin are actively working on this)
* they are going to use their influence to try to get local supermarkets to accept the coin, probably in it's raw form without an exchange, like some many local "trading points" schemes. If successful, they'll have a real economy around their alt.

Suppose we have another 2008 banking meltdown and this time govts arn't able to unblock the system and people simply don't get paid their wages and businesses can't buy and sell stuff.

Well, Hull will be well placed, because they'll have done the ground work to have a payment system that by-passes the banks, so people can buy their groceries and pay their rent.

For everyone else it'll be hell. It'll be hell even for bitcoin people, because many of the businesses that pretend to accept bitcoin do nothing of the sort - they rely on intermediaries to change the money into dollars, and pay them in dollars, and they receive their dollars via the current banking system.

So all power to the elected representatives of Hull - they're trying to achieve something bitcoin hasn't managed yet.

Also, Hullcoin may succeed because they're simply talking about supporting the local economy, there is no ideology involved. Bitcoin's biggest achilles heel is that some people are trying to force a libertarian agenda on everyone, and the majority of the world isn't libertarian. Trying to insist that anyone who adopts bitcoin must adopt libertarianism is the biggest thing holding bitcoin back - people don't like to be forced into anything.

^^^^

There's nothing stopping a bunch of icelanders from launching their own coin and doing it properly. Call it a proper icelandic name too, you don't need to have English imposed on you.  All the code is open-source, all that's needed from you is a bit of effort. i.e. you'll have to mine it, and secure it, which means using your own electricity and buying your own ASICs. And doing your own marketing. And because you all collectively work to control it, you'll all own it and it should be a success.

The mistake you've made is trusting in some fairy god-father from panama, believing that they'll do everything for free - and you just sit there and collect your airdrops.

All currencies require effort, whether govt currencies paid for and backed by the taxpayer, or private currencies worked for by the community. There ain't no such thing as free.

And no expense probably means no value either... Better to keep the krona as at least that is backed by the Icelandic govt's tax raising powers!

Everyone on the entire planet got screwed over by the banking crisis! Even goatherders in Africa felt it's effects. And many depositors in Britain and the Netherlands got screwed over by Icelandic banks essentially stealing their money and then they got screwed over again by the Icelandic govt refusing to honor the guarantee that they'd freely given for those deposits!

So the idea that Icelanders are poor things, worse victims than everywhere else is quite wrong. And the idea that they are a special case and should be given free money and it's not their fault for being too lazy to do some mining on an old computer... words fail. This is not like mining bitcoin, there was so little difficulty that anyone could have done it if they wanted to.

Look - if you don't want to trust your government to defend your currency, and want to create an alternative, you have to do the defending yourself. Just being passive and expecting everything to be done for you, foreign people to mine it for you, foreign people to develop it, foreign people to secure the blockchain, people in panama to do airdrops ... come on! This is not how the world works.

Also - auroracoin wasn't hacked, it was attacked. This is the crypto version of attacks that go on in the forex markets eg the attacks on the euro, the currrent forex attacks on the rouble and the brazilian real. This is how the world works, how it will always work. But you can defend yourself, if you can be bothered...

And for how many weeks have people been pointing out that this coin is vulnerable? I've read dozens of threads and I only look into the forum a few times a week! People were given plenty of warning - and they didn't care enough to do a thing about it. If the Icelanders really wanted this coin they should have started mining it. If the speculators didn't want to see their investment go to zero, they too should have started mining it. But they didn't because at the end of the day they didn't care. This coin died because it's community didn't care.

I don't think this is about "talking up theft" at all.

It's about pointing out that auroracoin was insecure and that the developers didn't give a toss about it's insecurity and neither did it's community (because they weren't bothering to mine it but were waiting for free air-drops instead!). As an aside, since when is money "free"? You either earn it through mining, or earn it through work and use earned money to buy more coins.

If it could be taken down so quickly and easily by some anonymous guy with a botnet, then the Icelandic govt could also have taken it down too. So what's the point of this coin (apart from making the developer rich on false hype)?

If people are serious about cryptos, they'll make them robust against all comers. If they're not serious and are looking for a quick pump and collapse - well at least be honest that you are not serious, and don't whine when it collapses.

The fees are nothing to do with mining or the economics of mining.

They were added to make it expensive for someone to attack the network with spam.

See:

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/2961409

Just a heads up to people who have coins on vircurex. They are freezing bitcoin withdrawals from March 24th. See

https://vircurex.com/welcome/ann_reserved.html

If you have any bitcoins on that exchange, I'd get them out asap.

But you are interested in making profits, right?

Maza - how big is the Lakota nation? Maybe a million people tops? That limits how high the coin will go, even if every single person in that nation adopts it plus everyone who trades with them.

Aurora and Iceland. Same problem. Population of Iceland is only 321,857, and even if everyone there adopted it plus those they trade with (mainly fishing these days), there is a natural limit how high it will go.

Doge. Regarding tipping, gifting and small purchases - there already exists a coin with this capacity  - Devcoin, which invented the 50,000 coin per block thing, very low fees, plus inflation. Devcoin was launched as long ago as August 2011, it is merge mined with bitcoin (especially in the ghash.io pool), and which has additional features (the support for devs and others) and an already established broad community. Why would you need a fly-by-night like Doge to provide the same function?

Look deeper before you invest and you won't lose your money.

Why are you bothering with coins that have come out in the last month? Most of the innovative alts launched two years ago. Litecoin with script. Devcoin with inflation plus innovative ways of earning the coins (makes me laugh when the Doge community think they invented inflation!). peercoin with it's proof of stake. Primecoin with it's scientific goal.

All these have stood the test of time, survived attacks and have established communities and economies. Most of the coins being launched now are just derivatives. If you invest in a derivative, of course the price is going to collapse once the hype dies. Why would they stay up?

And yet, and yet.....

Mark Kapeles of mtgox bailed out another exchange back in 2011, using 17,000 BTC of his own to make sure the customers of that exchange didn't lose money - and I'm sure they were glad.

Why did he do it? Because it's not in the long term interests of the community to allow large numbers of people to lose money. It wasn't then and it isn't now.

Decentralized networks don't mean "you don't have to bail out or save any one entity" - it just means that there is no govt to organize the bailout and the community does it instead.

Think very hard before you advocate the "selfish at all costs" model which is quite different from a decentralized model.

If these types of incidents start to happen very frequently, one of two things will happen a) bitcoin will die as people will shudder at a non-regulatory environment that practically says to crooks, come and steal there is no comeback and no compensation for the victims or b) regulation will happen because the victims become so numerous, they eventually make up the majority of the community.

I think a bailout is a good idea. Perhaps Mtgox can issue bailout bonds that we can buy for 1BTC each and which pay a % of the profits. That way he raises capital to pay the victims, they clean up mtgox - put in new management, and when it's running properly again, those of us who have participated in the bailout get a small return for our altruism.

^^^ That site doesn't say anything about selling BTC for fiat. It seems to be just a crypto exchange.

Thanks anyway.

I had a look on there and it's too difficult to work out who is legit and who is a scammer.

Would rather deal with a reliable service provider and pay their fees.

Have just ruled out 24change - they seem not to deliver judging from the angry people on their thread. Will keep looking - suggestions gratefully welcome!

Both Coin2pal and coingator have been down for what seems like aeons and I was wondering if anyone could suggest a reliable coin to paypal service.

(Don't want to use bitstamp at the mo because SEPA takes three days and need the money in my account by 31st.)

Thanks in advance

Am not sure it's a good idea to leave this board altogether. How would new people find us otherwise? One of the benefits of being on here is that any member of bitcointalk can drop in and talk to us if they want. On a special board, they'd have to go to the trouble of signing up just to say hello, and I'm not sure casual visitors just dipping their toes in with questions would want to bother.

If we move, I vote we go somewhere like a subReddit, which is equally "public" and where new people can easily locate us.

But were the alts being used as a "substitute for real currency", or were they just goods that had a value assigned. eg you can trade a car for money, but the car is not a substitute for money, it's a good that has a value assigned.  

With egold, the entire point of the business was moving dollars into egold and then out of them. Cryptsy is just bartering virtual tokens back and forth, no dollars involved at all. Second Life Linden dollars are traded on LindeX for dollars, but I think they are treated as a good, like a car or an ipad, not as a currency. So you are using your US dollars to buy a good rather than a substitute for real money.  If anyone knows more about their status, please post.