It has been quite a few weeks since we have seen a miners dump. 

We've been trying for over a month but they won't respond to us.

Can you please raise a support ticket with them and ask them to fix it?  It is completely out of our hands...they need to fix it themselves.

Quick update on our wallet efforts.

Redesign is coming along very nicely.  I've seen some screenshots.  It looks great.

Core/masternode updates:

Completed

add merged mining DONE
add names/blockchain
add timestamping
change masternode ports -> 9340 DONE
1k Collateral->10k Collateral DONE
get syncing working past block 453273 (aux block) DONE
get syncing working DONE
change dash->crown
change Dash->Crown DONE
change DASH->CRW DONE
change Darkcoin -> Crown DONE
change Masternode->Throne DONE
change masternode->throne DONE
change MasterNode->ThroNe DONE
change MASTERNODE->THRONE DONE
change XwnLY9Tf7Zsef8gMGL2fhWA9ZmMjt4KPwg -> 18WTcWvwrNnfqeQAn6th9QQ2EpnXMq5Th8 DONE
ADD 11 CHECKPOINTS DONE
Add throne manager DONE

To be done:

Adjust block reward -10% for budgets
Adjust sporks - superblocks
Adjust sporks - throne enforcement
Test thrones
Test auxpow mining + specify auxpow address
Don't accept blocks with too low of a reward

We're still on track to be on the platform we want to be on and fully tested in December.

Thanks.

1FEwwtpbdxU71XJDoMV8JyTNA4Vixgucrr

This message is intended to link my BTC address to my Stonehedge BCT account. 26/10/2016. New Heathrow runway may be built above the M25.

H8xOQzoxvDsj9fFzblCaBXUgH98VjDcLVGiOdOwMbdgWARVyCX7/U1s+mMjZuoMwGrNMQKPWu0pCZk7EWlTT6tQ=

I think your public mathematics was partly our inspiration. We're planning on taking it a bit further than that though.  I'm hoping to have the whitepaper finished in early January...this will be one whitepaper I enjoy writing.

Looking really good.

I added and removed a number of thrones and seems to be working seamlessly.

Would be nice to use tabs so that you could get a nicer view of the stats...

Sorry for the long delay.  I had an unexpected piece of real world work to deliver.  One needs to pay the bills.

Proof of stake in its various flavours has the following problems.

Nothing at Stake Problem (fixed with delegated PoS)

If a PoS chain forks, there is nothing stopping a user staking his/her coins on both chains.

Initial Distribution Problem (solved with hybrid PoW/PoS)

Early purchasers of a coin will always be at an advantage over later investors as their coin balance directly contributes to the growth of their wealth. This advantage is confered to the early investor for as long as they own their stake.  Initial coin distribution by PoW somewhat nullifies this.

Long Range Attack (theoretical)

In theory, somebody with enough computational power could build an alternative blockchain starting from the very first block. Some implementations of PoS solve this by defining the maximum allowed depth of a branching point to a certain number of blocks in the past.  NXT sets the value at 720 blocks/12 hours for example.

Bribe Attack

In this attack, an attacker attempts to double-spend his funds in the following way:

1. Buy some goods or services
2. Wait until the payment transaction is considered confirmed by the merchant
3. Announce a reward for building on top of a truncated blockchain that does not include the payment transaction. For example, if merchant waited for six confirmations, the attacker will start with the blockchain without the six latest blocks. The attacker may offer a larger reward for users that mint only on top of the attacker’s blockchain (without this, the attacker’s blockchain would never catch up to the correct one).
4. The attacker may continue paying bribes even when the lengths of their blockchain and the correct blockchain become equal in order to gain support of most stakeholders.

(Proof of Stake vs Proof of Work Whitepaper - Bitfury - http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf)

Coin Age Accumulation Attack

Only relevant to some PoS implementations.  Peercoin famously suffered from this issue but now solved.

In some PoS implementations, coin age is used as the staking metric rather than wallet wealth. If there is no maximum coin age defined in the protocol then it is possible for enought time to lapse for the earliest investors to have enough accumulated coin age to overtake the rest of the network and receive 100% of staking reward.

Some of the above may not be feasible due to required investment size but early investors could be at a significant advantage if intentions are nefarious.

Delegated proof of stake has efectively solved shorter range attacks and the nothing at stake problem but there is no consistency in how PoS coins address these problems. 

There are several active projects that use the earliest implementation of PoS that doesn't address any issues and several PoS projects that have implemented a variety of different fixes to problems with no consistency.  This means that some of these solutions have not been tested on a significant scale to ensure that they stand up to scrutiny.

Due the large variety of issues that need to be solved (admittedly some are theoretical) I don't consider PoS to be cryptographically sound until a uniform approach to solving these issues has been implemented.

In short, Stonehedge thinks "close but no cigar".

We were hoping to pay for a signature to be used when members of the crypto community post in other threads. I didn't expect our thread to be flooded with barely comprehensible cheerleader posts.

What on earth is going on with these random posts?

I agree with you that the distribution isn't ideal from an investors point of view. Then again, all coins held by the original dev team were bought fairly on the open market...the vast majority before the new dev team were even aware of crowncoin. It takes two to trade...somebody had to sell too. Remember that for every large bag holder there are many more coins out there own by persons unknown.

For what it's worth, I'm market selling all my throne income to try to ease the dry market a bit. I hope other people will do the same and that miners dump regularly. People just don't want to sell at the moment.

You'll get to a Throne soon. Do you have any skills that might be useful to the project? Get involved...we tend to pay bounties as often as we can. The more the merrier.

As for scarcity, there will be a tipping point where people start to cash out their long term investments. The market won't be dry forever.

Genuine question...what is the risk of one person owning one million coins?

Are they going to screw their own sizeable fiat investment by dumping on the market?

Even if they set up 100 Thrones they still wouldn't have enough to influence Throne consensus.

One person controls 10% of the coins in return for investing a five figure sum of euros in development. That leaves 9 million coins. You are exaggerating quite a bit.

Also, even if what you claim is true...find me a coin where that isn't the case. At least we know who our Satoshi is.

Why sign up a new BCT account just to post on Crown? What do you have to hide?

I'm not ignoring your question.  I'm just taking a while to think about it.

Sorry, couldn't resist quoting this  


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-06/quiggin-bitcoins-are-a-waste-of-energy/6827940

Here's a very interesting article about Ethereum Casper, probably the highest profile attempt to supersede Proof of Work using collateral based consensus.  The end product is still a form of Proof of Stake though.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/01/introducing-casper-friendly-ghost/

Some common criticisms that I have gathered from t'internet (Thanks to Herman Schoenfeld)

No longer P2P - Casper fundamentally changes the network topology from a Peer-2-Peer (P2P) network where all peers participate in the protocol equally to a "distributed Client-Server" network where one class of peers (validators) have special privileges over another class of peers (nodes) within the protocol itself. This is a fundamental difference from PoW and impacts security and redundancy. First of all, it's not "nuke proof" like the Internet was supposed to be (whether real or legislative nukes). Similarly, like Client-Server the Casper-driven Ethereum network suffers from a single point of failure problem (it's 250 points in casper). Suppose that during a staking period that all the validators happen to be geo-located within the same jursidiction (e.g. the EU). Suppose that this jurisdiction then passes laws to outright (or effectively) ban Ethereum due to it's challenge to banking/economic status quo. Those validators will shutdown overnight and the network will be permanently down. This is a realistic scenario. Note with PoW, this can't happen since new miners can easily spring up outside that jurisdiction and the network can resume where it left off.

Violates protocol neutrality - In a P2P network, all peers participate equally in terms of the protocol. For example, in Bitcoin distinctions between nodes, miners, lightweight clients are independent of the protocol. At any one time any node/miner/lightweight peer can freely convert to any other without impacting any other peer. Not so with Casper. Validators are effectively bound to their status, ordinary nodes cannot independently elevate their status, and worst of all, ordinary peers are forced to accept the status of validator peers. There might be a tonne of attack vectors lurking inside here.

Introduces stakeholder risk-coupling - In PoW, a miner who mints a bad block does not affect the profitability of a miner who mints good blocks. Not so in Casper. The bad actions of one validator can influence the profitability of a good validator. Casper adds economic disincentives to mitigate these scenarios and stop bad validators from minting bad blocks, but this approach assumes that bad validators are rational economic actors. What if a validator is compromised by a hacker or shutdown by a Government? What if a validator is infected with malware? In these real-world scenarios, validators may not act rationally. As a result, other validators (and the network itself) will not be protected.

Stakeholders batton-passing problem - Another coupling issue with Casper is that new validators must be approved by a suitable set of old validators. This is fundamentally different to PoW where miners can begin/cease mining independently of each other (0-coupling). Have the implications of this been researched. What attack vectors can exploit this?

BitTorrent analogy - Just think, if all the entertainment industry had to do was capture 250 peers to take down the entire BitTorrent network permanently, do you think BitTorrent would be around today? If Ethereum really does challenge the status quo, how hard will it be to take down the 250 validators? UPDATE A sustained DDOS attack on the validators could realistically achieve this.

If you want to read the full discussion between Schoenfeld and Ethereum staff, here's the link.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4euiut/fundamental_problems_with_casper/

I guess the issue isn't entirely about whether we trust CCK to use his stack responsibly, the community needs to feel comfortable with that too.

For what its worth, I have literally no concerns about 10% of the current coin supply being owned by the longest running team member with another 3% being controlled by him. The fact the coins haven't moved in so long hints towards him playing the long game.

I'll leave it to somebody else to give a view on this but I do know that a small number (one or two) of those addresses have been lost forever.  

This coin has been as low as 50 sats in the last year and members of the original team kept it going.  I suspect that most of those addresses are original investors who didn't cash out when Crowncoin wasn't worth anything. Lucky people.

There are 1.5m coins that appear to be owned or at least controlled by one person.  This needs to be explained.

The Android Throne app is still about a week away because we decided to include some extra bits after testing. Really looking forward to it being available.

I've got a test version. In my Nexus 5x and it's looking great.

I think the project that humbepirate is talking about ditched your PoBN whitepaper a few weeks ago.

Edit: But hey, at least they contacted you for permission to use it before they decided to focus elsewhere.