2014 and perhaps 2015 could be a rehash of what happened to Bitcoin in 2012. Bitcoin became mainstream in mid-2011. Once the bubble burst and the market dipped, people left in the following weeks and months. Those who stayed around throughout 2012 were able to reap the rewards of their patience in the following year - in 2013, when the prices truly exploded.

A question for the NXT folks:

Why does SuperNET need its own wallet? Isn't SuperNET supposed to be an asset similar to NXTventure but instead of pure services, it focuses on both services + coins? Is the asset on the NXT exchange enough to own SuperNET or is it similar to NEM? - i.e. the assets are just tokens and you need to download the SuperNET wallet and transfer them in order to get actual coins.

Well, I'm guessing it probably is open source since there are many NXT clones available now which wouldn't be possible if the code wasn't open source. I remember hearing that the core of NXT was open source but some parts under development still weren't but that was several months ago so I'm not sure what the situation is like today. That being said, I'd be surprised if it isn't completely open source by now.

Shame about the avatars but I'm not surprised that theymos takes forum security very seriously. This forum is pretty much the epicenter of the Bitcoin community. If the community here was compromised in some way, then Bitcoin itself would most likely be affected too. Perhaps not on a technical level but you get the idea.


Really? $350,000 for this forum? That sounds like too much. And isn't vBulletin normally considered to be the best forum software? Although my information might be out of date. And I don't think vBulletin is open source either.

I heard that someone (theymos perhaps?) was going to change the forum software but I'm not sure. There is also a mirror of the forum at bitcointa.lk which uses a forum software called XenForo which I've never heard of before. It calls itself "the Bitcointalk community with a proper forum software" but I don't think anyone uses it for anything other than finding deleted posts.

On one hand, Litecoin has lost almost 95 percent of value in a year. It's hard to deny that Litecoin was one of the worst investments of 2014. On the other hand, Litecoin spent most of 2013 losing value only to jump up in price to almost $50 in November. If the current decline in the crypto market ends and we see more investment coming in again, then Litecoin prices will probably rise.

Interestingly, Litecoin seems to react much more to price rises and drops than Bitcoin does. When cryptos exploded in late 2013, Litecoin performed much better than Bitcoin did. Then when people lost interest, Litecoin prices fell much harder than Bitcoin did.

Anyway, to answer the OP, if you think of innovation as piling on new features, then I agree Litecoin isn't the most innovative coin anymore, but neither is Bitcoin. Even Peercoin - the first proof-of-stake coin, which was considered very innovative when it was launched, isn't among the most innovative of coins anymore.

But there is that network effect, that massive hashrate and network security, and perhaps more importantly, Litecoin has a good reputation in the community which isn't tainted by the pump and dump scams that are so common in the crypto world nowadays. Investing in Litecoin can be a bit boring but it's not really meant to be a "flavor of the month" type of coin.

Also, there is still the possibility of improving upon a coin while leaving the core intact. This is the same approach taken by Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't change much in the protocol level but it has entire teams working on adding functionality on top of the existing blockchain (Counterparty, Mastercoin, Colored Coins, and Zerocoin to name a few). Peercoin has them too in the form of Nubits, NuShares, Peershares, etc. I see no reason why Litecoin cannot do the same.

As for myself, well I don't have many litecoins. I might have a couple of dollars worth that I bought a week ago. I'm not sure. Personally, I'm not overly enthusiastic about Litecoin and my rationale for not investing is that by now, anything that could increase the Litecoin price will probably result from a market-wide rise in cryptos in general and now that Litecoin's original niche of ASIC resistance is long gone, opting for Bitcoin seems to be the safer bet.


There are a few other old and respected alts in that picture. Peercoin and Namecoin, for example.

Thanks, that seems to do the trick.

Anyone else checked the block explorer recently? According to the site, the last 20+ blocks were all forged by the same address which holds almost 2 billion QORA:

http://qora.co.in/?q=QXNz5kBknsgNYtRKit4jCDNVm7YYoXLZdB

EDIT: Looking even more back, I can see a few other addresses that also generated blocks. Perhaps it belongs to an exchange or something (Bter?).

Also Poloniex seems to be having some troubles with their Qora wallet. I made a withdrawal and the confirmation email came but after that it came up as "ERROR" so I submitted a support ticket. Apparently others have also been having similar problems too.

EDIT 2: OK, so I have the wallet in front of me. Where is the button to start staking/forging?

Well, I finally decided to download the Qora wallet to transfer my coins from Poloniex to my computer. I've unzipped it but I'm not sure which file I need to open to run the wallet? Do I click on Qora.jar (executable jar file) or run.bat (MS-DOS batch file)? I can't find a readme file anywhere.

EDIT: I just noticed the Qora faucet directs you to the old thread which is locked. Perhaps it might be a good idea if a link to the new thread was added too?

That's true.

Last year, two big dice sites ended up becoming scams (or near scams) - dice.ninja and Dicebitco.in. Whether or not Dicebitco.in was actually a scam is debatable, but it's clear that a lot of people lost their money there. It was the biggest dice site that welcomed investors at the time and became very popular in the weeks after Just-Dice had closed. Dooglus even had them in their signature too which meant that a lot of people invested who otherwise probably wouldn't have done so. First there were a few problems with the site skipping winning rolls. Then some whale came who had a massive and highly suspicious string of good luck which devastated the site's bankroll. Then once everyone left the site, he came back and lost it all. Then the site announced they were closing.

Dice.ninja on the other hand, seems to have been a straight-up scam. No doubt about it.

Just-Dice is good and trustworthy but they don't use bitcoins. They use CLAMS which are an altcoin that you can only get by "digging" old wallets. There really isn't a proper dice site that is both trustworthy and uses BTC right now. Primedice is probably the only other trustworthy one but it doesn't allow investing. Because of this, there's a bit of a void in the market right now for a trustworthy dice site that offers investing using BTC.

I made a similar thread about the NXT AE several months ago and discovered some interesting ones before they were listed on CMC which I probably wouldn't have known about otherwise. Qora has had an asset exchange running for a couple months now, so it seems like a good idea to make this thread. It is also a much smaller coin when compared to NXT and lacks someone like jl777 who is the driving force behind many of the assets on the NXT AE so I'd think that the options would be more limited.

So I'm guessing by now that everyone already knows all the college dropouts that later became billionaires. Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Trump, Dell, Ellison, Branson, etc. But where are the examples of unsuccessful ones? The ones that tried to launch a business but failed spectacularly? The ones that went bankrupt? The ones that died under a bridge owing millions in debt? Google doesn't help at all. In fact, searching "unsuccessful college dropouts" just auto-corrects to "successful college dropouts" and even if you override the auto-correct, only the successful ones are shown.

The only one that I can think of which comes close is Mark Karpeles - CEO of Mt. Gox. But he never went to college so I guess he doesn't count.

Reading some of the earlier mailing list posts made by Satoshi back in 2008 and in his discussions with Hal Finney, it seems that his original vision of Bitcoin was quite different compared to the situation today. He did briefly mention ASICs as a possibility by referring to "specialized hardware" as well as the transition towards light wallets like Electrum and Multibit but he mostly referred to miners as being discrete individuals who mined using their personal computers. The only times where he talks about miners cooperating with each other to mine bitcoins is when botnets are discussed. Neither in his mailing list postings nor in his white paper does he ever mention the possibility of mining pools.


That quote is from a couple of months before he left the forum. Even then, he still held onto the belief that nodes are directly proportional to CPU power. Of course now we know that from the perspective of the network, someone that is mining on a pool is not considered a node and has no influence on the network. Instead, the influence lies in the operator of the mining pool.

Satoshi left this forum in late 2010. By then, the first pool (Slush's Pool) had opened and CPU mining was on it's way out. Perhaps Satoshi saw something that he had not anticipated and realizing what was coming, he panicked and decided to leave.

Does anyone know more about this coin? It's a top 15 coin and is ranked just under Namecoin at 7th place on CMC when significantly premined and non-mineable coins are filtered from the list. Despite the relatively high market cap, there doesn't seem to be a lot of information or discussion about it here. I can't find an active [ANN] thread either. According to CMC, the coin's official site is Ybcoin.org but that site doesn't work for me although Ybcoin.com does. Now according to that site, Ybcoin is a fork of Yacoin intended for the Chinese market. It uses scrypt as its hashing algorithm and most of the features seem to be shared with other cryptocurrencies.

The 12 month chart looks very unusual too and I don't think I've seen a coin do that before. Its market cap started dropping in the beginning of the year, reached a bottom during the middle of the year, and then shot back up to where it was at the beginning of 2014. Very unusual. The coin has reasonably high volume too so there seems to be a lot demand for this coin and a lot of buying and selling going on (most of it is on an exchange called Yuanbaohui which I've never heard of before).

If you remove the significantly premined and non-mineable coins from today's list, it actually looks pretty similar to the same list from a year ago and the list from March 2014 (minus Auroracoin of course). For instance, the current top seven coins using this criteria are Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin, Darkcoin, Namecoin, and Ybcoin. Of these, only Darkcoin was released in 2014 and all the other coins are much older.

Ah, yes how could I forget NTX? I believe that was the one with the "casting" feature. I wonder what happened to it... Like you said, it looks dead according to CMC.

The whole thing seems very similar to Air France 447 which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. From what I've seen, the bodies look fairly undamaged and so do the pieces of luggage that they've recovered so far. Even stranger is the fact that one of the bodies was wearing a life jacket but the pilot didn't have time to issue a mayday call. The searchers think they found the plane in one piece sitting on the ocean floor in shallow waters so it shouldn't be too long before they find the rest of the bodies and recover the black box recorders. Hopefully by then we'll know what exactly went wrong and why the plane dropped out of the sky as quickly as it did.

I have heard this statement twice before and was wondering if there is any truth behind it. Is it true that an Electrum address has 4 billion times less entropy and is therefore 4 billion times less secure and more likely to be brute forced than an address generated using Bitcoin-Qt?

I don't know if the following numbers are correct or not so please correct me if I'm wrong but if a standard Bitcoin address has 160 bits of entropy and an Electrum seed has 128 bits of entropy then 2^160 divided by 2^128 equals 4,294,967,296 or slightly over 4 billion.

What difference does this make in practical terms? I know Moore's law states that processing power doubles every 18 months so if addresses generated with Electrum were 4 billion times less secure then doesn't this mean that they would be cracked 48 years (32 doublings) before Bitcoin addresses are cracked?

With the old animal coin craze a few months ago, I'm surprised that nobody has bothered to make a "Pigcoin" yet.


They are US citizens born in the US of Chinese descent.

... and cloud mining is a lost cause.

The more I look at cloud mining services, the more depressed I become about the industry. I never actually invested in cloud mining myself but I considered toying around with the idea. One of the names I heard most was PB Mining and its 5 year contracts. I even had it saved in my bookmarks with the intention of signing up one day and putting a few bits in to see how it all works. Had I decided to give cloud mining a try, I probably would have chosen them. Them and perhaps Lunamine. Both sites looked professional and they seemed to have a good reputation here on the forums.

Because of this, I was surprised when I found out in December that PB Mining had fallen apart. I don't know the full story of what happened, and I don't know enough about the details to say whether it was a complete scam or if something else happened that was beyond its owners' control. But what I do know is that the mining side of the contract isn't working like it was supposed to anymore, and that many people have seemingly lost their investment.

Then I went to see if Lunamine was still working. Unbeknownst to be, that site had long disappeared too.

Around last week, I saw a thread here about another cloud mining provider called Hashprofit. They were offering big discounts and a free trial period for new members. I did some research into the profitability but couldn't get the numbers that I wanted because of vagueness in the site's FAQ. But it seemed like a reasonable deal and they seemed to have connections with reputable organizations in the Bitcoin industry so I went to my bookmarks folder and deleted the link to Lunamine and replaced the link to PB Mining with a link to Hashprofit.

Then after a week, Hashprofit claims to have suffered from a DDOS attack and shut down its operations. Now the fate of that site seems uncertain too. There could be a chance that the site will spring back to life in early January and everything will go back to normal but the community here doesn't think so and history suggests that when a site that deals with cryptos goes offline for an extended period of time, it won't come back ever again. Just look at Mt. Gox for example. Hashprofit also had an altcoin which was meant to be backed by the site's hashrate. The performance of this altcoin - Profitcoin, seems to reflect this growing concern. It has already lost over 90 percent of its value.

Then days later, another cloud mining site falls. This time it's Hashie.co.

CEX.IO seems to be the only legitimate cloud mining site of all these. They own the largest (measured by hashrate) Bitcoin pool GHash.IO which proves that their contracts are backed by actual physical mining operations. Despite this, I never liked them very much in the beginning because I knew that their cloud mining contracts were highly unlikely to be profitable. In order to earn a profit, you were supposed to trade these contracts. You were supposed to sell unprofitable contracts to others who would buy them for a higher price than you paid for. It was a zero-sum game of musical chairs but now I realize why and I respect them for staying legitimate in an industry that is otherwise full of scams.

Both BitUSD and Nubits use highly complex systems to keep the price roughly in line with their fiat equivalent(s). The peg usually isn't exact, but it's close enough. I don't know how it works and trying to understand it gives me a headache but I suspect there is some degree of centralization going on behind the scenes.

Does anyone know if it is possible to build ASIC circuits for applications like Folding@home? In case you don't know, Folding@home is a distributed network of computers that donate spare CPU cycles to solve problems in the fields of protein folding and protein structure determination. My guess is that because so many complex algorithms are involved, the complexity of designing and building an ASIC for this type of application would be far greater compared to a simple SHA-256 or scrypt ASIC to the point where such an ASIC, if developed, would closely resemble a general purpose computer. Does anyone know if such ASICs have been produced or if they are even possible to build? Are there ASICs for related applications like OCR recognition and weather/climate modeling?