Supposedly ideal strategies run by scripts likely just become predictable prey for smarter predators, don't they?

Basically once you figure out how they are operating you should be able to come up with ways to exploit them.

Even a brute force strategy such as "pay to win" where you just throw more and more money at the problem until all the other players give up due to not being able to afford to keep up with your spending might not work so well if your paying means paying to other players, since whatever you pay can end up financing your enemies instead of your friends.

That of course leads to attemtping to find an optimal strategy for alliances, how to decide who your friends are, when or if to backstab them and so on.

If you pay to the game administration instead of to other players then yeah pay to win seems bad. But if you are paying to other players doesn't it just make the game more "interesting", and offer the potential to make you be basically a "fish" for the other players to prey upon until you realise your money inputs are helping others more than they help you?

-MarkM-

Actually there is no need to create a new coin to be an early adopter, there are coins still running that have crazy-low difficulty so anyone can pick up a bunch of them very easily, heck you can even pick them up with merged-mining in some cases so you can get them using hashing you are already doing. Maybe eventually as even ASICs start being marginal due to driving difficulties up more and more ASIC miners will branch out into more and more merged chains but for now hardly anyone is merging more chains than bitparking and bitparking is only merging a few of the chains so there is plenty of room for early adoption still on a number of easy chains.

Hmm I guess maybe some people won't like me even saying this, it is a bit self-defeating maybe if anyone does in fact act on it, as right now people are able to just keep quietly harvesting them really easily simply because all the big miners don't bother with them yet. In a way the big miners are sitting back letting all the small people "pre-mine" the coins for the time being it seems. By the time the big players sit up and take notice many many small players could have some nice nest-eggs.

-MarkM-

Oh never mind I was thinking of RUCoin - both types of hashing. All you Russian coins look alike hahahahah. But adding it to PPCoin as well would be nice, sure.

-MarkM-

Good idea. Are you adding it to both the SHA256 and scrypt sides?

How about also adding merged mining? On the scrypt side that would be a first, and people would have something to merged-mine alongside litecoin. Though personally I am more interested in the merging with the SHA256 side.

-MarkM-

What you are calling "zombie" might well just be "sleeper"... Basically allow some years for the initial distribution of coins to take place before worrying about them having value. Coins that aquire value too fast tend to not get distributed to a whole lot of people as it very fast becomes hard to get them. The coins that all the big miners think are dead are actually ones that normal folk can easily pick up instead of being crowded out by the already-rich but greedy big miners.

-MarkM-

Maybe the fix is how namecoin did it: merged mining?

As it is people have to divert hashes away from the entire family of merged mining coins to mine this thing; add the merged mining patches to it and all those folk can just add it to their mix.

-MarkM-

Oops typo, corrected.

-MarkM-

Why hasn't anyone used scrypt with more the kind of parameters it was intended for instead of perverting / crippling it to make it fit in GPUs? Everyone owns GPUs so doesn't really want to make CPUs competitive?

-MarkM-

Oh wow, Freicoin didn't learn anything from Namecoin's famous experience that led all (except Freicoin it seems, any others?) altcoins to adapt their difficulty adjustment systems? Sheesh.

-MarkM-

Install and run p2pool. It lets you merged-mine the whole set, including bitcoins.

(For example I am currently using it on BTC, NMC, DVC, GRP, IXC, I0C and CLC all at once.)

-MarkM-

Obviously the backbone connection and hosting companies can offer bandwidth and storage cheaper than those who they sell it to, but I guess if some of their customers are paying for more than they use they could get some of it back by selling even if they sell "at a loss" since its a loss they otherwise have to eat the whole of anyway.

-MarkM-

Yeah and XRP are not a currency, just an anti-spam device. Naive much?

-MarkM-

Well maybe if their pre-mine does in fact cause people not to use XRP as a currency then bitcoin might still be useful, otherwise presumably it makes sense to ask why use bitcoin, with its huge overhead cost of electricity and circuitry for securing its network, when you can use XRP instead?

So maybe it comes down to whether the massive pre-mine makes it un-usable as a currency?

Maybe like i0coin was created as a zero-premine version of ixcoin there will be a r0pple once the source code is available, a zero-premine ripple?

-MarkM-

All that happened, I think, is someone either just mined lots of blocks or did like Luke did to coiledcoin, mining blocks while also only building on their own blocks not on anyone else's blocks, and not putting other people's transactions into blocks without fees. I think Luke did it with jigh fees for other peopel's transactions, not sure the details on this one but the attack was very short, attacker did it a while, bragged about it being dead, and went away, leaving it in peace ever since. Basically it never really died.

-MarkM-

Premine isn't a coin-killer anyway.

If anything, the fact that there are coins mined by any Tom DIck or Harry that has some hardware can be a bit of a killer, since a whole lot of those Toms Dicks and Harries throw away the coins they mine dirt cheap.

Once upon a time I was skeptical of the players who insisted on issuing 100%-premined coins, I never expected any of them to catch up with bitcoin in price. Yet most of them overtook bitcoin. Weird huh?

-MarkM-

Yeah, Ripple is brilliant that way, get everyone distracted with all the IOU and distributed-exchange stuff while sneaking in a 100% premined coin that does not need vast electrical consumption to secure it. Pretending XRP is not intended as a currency its just an anti-spam measure. Brill.

-MarkM-

If people held onto their bitcoins with a deathgrip they would not be so absurdly cheap, we would have recovered from the big oh gosh it got hacked crash of a few years ago almost immediately and be up to hundreds of dollars a coin by now. As it is people throw them away for pittances so that it has taken us this long to get back on track.

-MarkM-

No one was hiding the fact its another RUcoin, right, so a few million pre-mined is pretty much normal for them isn't it?

Actually one could argue that someone let the cat out of the bag too early since there weren't yet a couple of million pre-mined by the time it was mentioned here. I guess thats the flaw in trying to pre-mine by obscurity instead of by hard-coding your few million premined coins into block two.

-MarkM-

So what if a bunch of Russians scam another bunch of Russians out of valuable hashing power?

As long as when a time comes that you sell them something for their ill-gotten gains you can get paid in something you value are you going to refuse to accept bitcoins or dollars or whatever your own currency of choice is from them merely because they raised it by scamming people out of hashes or rubles or whatever?

-MarkM-

If the people in your circle prefer to sell your personal info for basically nothing maybe leaving them behind isn't a bad thing.

-MarkM-