Difficulty actually went down. Once you get a proof of stake block you are way ahead of someone who just got a proof of work block, they can rack up proof of work blocks like crazy and maybe never catch up with the staker. So likely who-ever threw ASICs at it earlier has so many coins that the pathetic one coin per proof of work block just isn't worth wasting a block-eruptor on once they started getting stake blocks.

-MarkM-

Well it seems this thing was so obviously a scam, worm, trojan, or whatnot that no one else even bothered to build and run the damn thing. Curious, eh?

I was actually interested in how deep it went, its one thing to figure it is obviously something bad, quite another to actually see just how bad it really is.

Are you running it where there are no other wallets it can upload somewhere, or where all other wallets are encrypted so you don't care if it sends them somewhere or what?

Or if not, have you noticed anything going missing from any other wallets yet?

Do you have wireshark or something running on your LAN so as to be able to notice if an invisible root-kit has been put in place?

(Or, rather, to notice when/if it eventually calls home?)

I am still curious whether it is "just" an instamine or a direct attack on your machine...

Did you get connections and blocks right from the start?

-MarkM-

With what code?

I built NINJAd on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which by the way involved creating the obj directory you left out of the github repo.

It rejects everyone's suggested blocks for having coinbase greater than 1.00000000 and bans them for misbehaving for offering such blocks.

Is the github code - the default branch one gets by cloning frm the main repo URL - maybe buggy, forgetting to account for the fact blocks could have transaction fees in them or something like that?

Or is everyone else simply cheating, giving themselves more than one coin for a block and all agreeing that is okay to do because all are cheating?

-MarkM-

So all  my "coins" are unchopped, pristine, the very sizes that I mined or was awarded for staking?

If so I have presumably been running coins as small as 5.00000000 at times if I found any PoW blocks worth five coins?

And presumably the largest individual items would be the 500-sized awards obtained by early PoW mining?

What about the order in which they are used as stake? The same order in which they were mined/awarded?

Should I expect a bunch of fast(er) stakes periodically as my size-500 chunks come around agfain in a roundrobin, longer and longer average success times as smaller and smaller awards/coinbases come around, then back again in roundrobin fashion?

If so maybe I don't need to manually mess with it as much as I would in a coin that keeps chopping up my chunks smaller and smaller?

Optimising chunkage seems like something a computer ought to be useful for, rather than something to take up human time with...

-MarkM-

This size of chunks concept... I have noticed in various threads about proof of stake coins discussions that seem to refer to more than just how many of a coin you leave in any one staking wallet.

Some even seem to have some kind of automatic chopping up of "coins", presumably outputs or something like that?

Some even have users talking about various plans to manually re-arrange their coins within one wallet to help or hinder staking.

So I am wondering is all that done for us automagically here or do we need to worry about fidgeting around in our wallets to stake efficiently / effectively?

-MarkM-

Nothing over six months old?

That seems silly.

Admittedly many scams are revealed as such long before they have been around six months, but at least if you wait until a coin has been around at least six months, preferably a few years, you will have a decent timeline to look at and over which to see how serious its community really is about making something of their coin.

One thing I would suggest is look what happened to scrypt coins: a stupid meme (DOGE) happened along and almost overnight conjured up more hashing power than litecoin, which had had years to establish a solid base of hashpower to secure itself. What happens if the next stupid meme to come along says "lets doublespend all the scrypt coins" instead of "lets make yet another scrypt scamcoin"?

Proof of Work is insanely expensive. Ultimately you need more than half of the world's hashpower to secure a Proof of Work blockchain. Even with merged mining I am not sure any of the merged mined SHA256 coins (other than Bitcoin, the parent with which they are merged as child chains) has more than half the world's SHA256 mining power securing it.

With Proof of Work blockchains that are NOT merged mined, ultimately you are not only trying to pay for enough miners to mine it but also paying them NOT to mine something/everything else. The more others they could instead be mining, the more chains you are financing an attack upon. So if there are, say, 100 scrypt coins that are not merged mined, and you choose to support a 101st such coin, you are paying to attack 100 chains in order to support that one chain. You are in effect 100 times as destructive / criminal / evil / undermining-of-the-crypto-field as you are constructive.

So if you have ethics and/or morals, hopefully that rules out all the Proof of Work coins that cannot be merged mined.

If on the other hand you were to invest in merged mined coins, you might actually manage to secure them, making them at least not wet paper bags with "steal my money" painted on them...

-MarkM-

That depends... in which of those years will you stop beating your wife?

-MarkM-

I know that a lot of folk are working on that, but so far they do not seem to have been getting much traction in what they consider to be the crucial make-or-break silver bullet, which, in their view, is collateral.

Because we are operating in virtuality, with virtual money so to speak, virtual coins; what they have been trying to do is broaden the scope of "virtual collateral".

For this particular audience we have at this forum though their customary stance is so abstracted into "actual coins" and "actual currencies" and "assets on blockchains" and such that this venue and others like it have not proven so far to be a good source of people eager to work with, and in the process even provide value to or enhance the value of, things such as virtual real estate, valuable game-characters and game-units, valuable in game inventory for use by such game characters and game units and so on.

That being the case it seems quite likely that you do not have any particularly valuable seizable in-game assets that you could put up as collateral for a loan and thus would need some kind of valuable crypto-coin or similar liquid crypto-asset you can put up as collateral.

Basically if you are not even, say, a first level scum of the earth thief/robber/brigand/beggar in some particular city on some particular planet, whose login credentials have a measurable value in some suitable currency and can be seized if you fail (aka it fails) to pay the debt, or whose dead body is edible meat and craftable bones marketable in or near that city on that planet, you have to figure you are a worse loan risk than even the most untrustworthy, scamming, conniving, determined to rip off its creditors such rogue...

So it kind of comes down to how many bitcoins of collateral do you have or how many characters of how much level wealth and skill owning how much in game goodies?

-MarkM-

In a way DOGE is the scam that showed up Litecoin as a scam.

Because the security basis of Proof of Work coins, if they are to have significant real value, is not simply that they are so worthless that they aren't worth deploying enough hashing power to beat them but, rather, that the quantity of the world's ability to perform such hashing that is devoted to defending the chain exceeds the rest of the hashing power on the planet.

DOGE was a scam in the sense that it scammed people into undermining Litecoin, which some people had imagined to have so much hashing power that it was secure, or at least "sufficiently secure".

It scammed people, by using a stupid meme, into providing it so much hashing power almost overnight that if the meme had bee "lets trash litecoin" instead of being "lets churn out yet another garbage clone coin", it could have accomplished that and even gone on the defeat all the scrypt coins if the meme had been, say, "lets trash ALL the scrypt coins".

So basically by scamming people into showing how little hashing power the most highly hashed of all scrypt coins really had, so fickle that just some stupid meme could beat it almost overnight, DOGE showed that all the scrypt coins were basically scams, whose devs might even have scammed even temselves into imagining they were secure enough to be taken seriously as a currency or store of value.

It basically also thereby showed itself up as equally a scam.

The fundamental scam here is implying to potential users that the pathetically insecure scrypt coins were secure enough to risk putting real wealth into.

But hey, at least DOGE and Litecoin did, between them, actually have quite a lot of hashing power.

There is an even worse scam, the sheer marketing wins all scam, which I have seen around here from time to time, where some marketer who is probably of the school of thought that once you can scam enough people out of real wealth by making vapourware claims you can then hire or buy-up any real solutions that happen along that can even be remotely marketed as being just the very thing their vapourware claims were on about thus that it is okay to bullshit and lie and obfuscate and go on about some vapourware possibly technically impossible greatest thing since sliced bread because if you thus raise enough money you can always afford to cover your actual arse later.

They say things like "it isn't the university with the most security guards that is the best university but, rather, the best university, by attracting the most money, that affords the most security guards" to justify scamming money out of people using some utterly insecure bullshit such as a litecoin clone, figuring if they do happen to decide not to run off with all the wealth they could in principle hire enough miners to secure the thing.

Thing is, bank vaults aren't quite like universities, are they?
Because the security basis of Proof of Work coins is that

"Lets pile all our money on one windowsill in one wet paper bag with one "steal me please" sign on it and we'll have such a huge pile we'll be able to afford to buy a vault" isn't that great a foundation for a bank vault, is it?

Proof of work is a hideously expensive way of securing a blockchain. Diverting hashing power away from all the chains it could be securing at once via merged mining is an attack, in effect, against all those chains.

DOGE initially demonstrated their full open eyes intent to scam by refusing to support being merged mined as a child chain, which of course should have been something built into it from launch.

Because the security basis of Proof of Work coins is that
They preferred to victimise all the users of scrypt coins by undermining the security of all scrypt-secured wealth, and didn't give a damn about that so long as they could make a buck by doing it.

So not only was it a scam, it was, clearly, perpetrated by scammers. They scammed miners into under-mining (pun intended, it seems) the security of all the chains that had been basically the customers of the miners, admittedly doing the service of showing us all that scrypt PoW chains were not, and probably still are not, secure.

-MarkM-

How much electricity? As in for example how many watts, or how many circuit-breakers at what voltage and amperage?

My experience is that homes in the city do not have enough electricity to plug in enough machines, I have been having to upgrade my country-house to 400-amp electric supply because apartments in town just don't have enough watts available. For example a Neptune mining rig wants a 20-amp 110/115 volt circuit all to itself. How many such circuits can you provide?

It seems unlikely you can provide enough to make your proposal worthwhile.

-MarkM-

By ancient, long dead I meant to exclude bytecoin style "create a coin today yet pretend it is ancient" type scams, so you'd've had to've created your shitcoins years ago by now in order to be eligible. Those you create today wouldn't be eligible for years yet, and the expectation that folks would start creating shitcoins deliberately to die and lie in wait for another round of sharktank might make them remain ineligible for decades or forever.

But anyway, back to the sharktank idea, presumably one strategy available to bagholders would be to offer up portions of their bags to the sharks, yes?

So basically they could bid for hero/legendary developers to give their coin a makeover.

We could also maybe judge them on the basis of how much of some not-dead coin they'd be willing to offer instead of their bags, as surely the more bitcoin someone would be willing to pay instead of one of their bag coins would be a good indicator of how much they really think their bags are worth?

Though also, of course, of their confidence in the makeover. If they don't think the make their bag worth more than 100 bitcoins, for example, it might not just be lack of confidence in their bags but also some lack of confidence of the abilities of the makeover team?

-MarkM-

Well myself I am doing it partly by being a game developer, partly by using free open source code aka by co-opting existing free open source games to serve as "clients" or "views into" my "metagame" in which they all play a part, and partly from trying to start as much as possible from economics/finance games.

For example in Freeciv, some of the "city improvements" that cities can build are the Market, the Bank, and the Stock Exchange. So I thought well lets start with that: lets get Markets, Banks, and Stock Exchanges working as free open source code, so that cryptocoin enthusiasts and asset-trading enthusiasts can "play" as soon as possible with the bonus that the enthusiasts of such games seldom care about actually having a character on a map who has to walk through a city to reach the market or bank or stock-market and who thus might be vulnerable in-transit to robbers and greedy corrupt city-guards and irate housewives emptying their nightsoil into the street on top of the heads of passers-by and other such glorious details Role Playing Game enthusiasts might enjoy but, rather, tend instead to just buy high and sell low anything they can turn a profit on, even if whatever it is cannot be used to slay dragons or robbers or irate housewives or even as a conveyance to convey them safely back and forth between their lodgings and the Market, Bank or Stock Exchange.

In other words, I hope we can start quite abstract, with traders trading the coins/currencies of various nations on exchanges without maybe much caring even which nation controls how many square miles of which planet, how many characters of what character-types live in which cities that nation has built or is building on that planet, or other such details that Role Playing Game players and/or Civilisation Game players or even Rogue-like MMO players might find more interesting than just plain raw currency-exchanges, asset-exchanges or even, maybe - though this might be where the various types of players could interact - actual in-game-object markets where players could use various currencies and assets to barter, buy or sell various in-game objects such as armour, swords, guns, spaceships, military units, units of settlers capable of founding cities. or whatever.

SInce money seems so often the stumbling-block, a game being basically a hole in the internet into which you throw money, hoping maybe someday some players might also chose to throw money, it seemed prudent to start off with the making of money first, then elaborate around that once there is enough money to elaborate around.

So hey, maybe we can start by having good reliable free open source code for Markets, Banks and Stock Exchanges making money first, then use that money to paint in the planets on which the cities in which those get built exist.

The top level wiki page for this metagame concept is at http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu

Some stats on some of the currencies and assets are at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html and if anyone knows how to fix the fact that the nice GNUplot plots that worked fine running GNUplot in Fedodra 17 don't work when created using the same scripts against the GNUplot that Ubuntu 14.04 provides, that would be awesome so we can get the pretty plots working again.

Afficonados of scamcoins and shitcoins might notice that although in the game currencies such as UKB, UNS, CDN and such are blockchain coins whose blockchains run over faster than light communications channels, here on Earth they are not operated as blockchains for the simple reason that securing a blockchain is insanely expensive. Thus those asset pages refer to the Digitalis Open Transactions Server, which was where we were running them until such time as an affordable means of securely running them as distributed systems became feasible here on the planet known as Earth.

-MarkM-

Re-visiting the idea of hiding a miner in a game that people run at home and play at home, maybe making it an MMO adds needless complications.

Maybe all you need to get normal gamers to mine coins is to embed a miner into a play at home game that keeps them playing partly by releasing the coins it mines to them.

But why would they bother playing the game to mine the coins instead of simply isolating the part of the code that does the actual mining and running just that, so that it can earn them coins without them needing to be there all the time holdings its hand aka playing the game?

That concern does seem to hint that hooking gthem into a network could be needed just to force them not to run the miner part isolated from the actual game part.

So maybe you get back to MMO by trying to find a way to enforce that the miners are actually playing the game aka spending/wasting/investin human time/attention in the mining process.

Maybe huntercoin has the right solution: don't embed the miner into games, instead embed a game or multiple games into a blackchain.

Consider roguelike MMO type games such as the free open source Crossfire RPG. It keeps things down to simple keystrokes, so maybe could be amenable to some kind of "you get one keystroke per block" system.

Verifying maps could be as simple as taking their hash, so the blockchain specifies the hash of the map they a player applying a certain door gets sent to.

But verifying the "business rules" aka "game rules" aka actual execution of the exact same rules/moves/functionality by all nodes could be trickier. Though maybe re-casting such a game into something that has formal provers (Haskel has been said to have such things, maybe?) could allow some kind of formal proof that everyone is running the same rules.

Or maybe it'd just have to come down to whether more than half the nodes agree on the same blockchain-of-keystrokes-and-outcomes?

Maybe it is just a matter of the huntercoin game growing more and more powerful and complex over time until it does become more "roguelike" ?

-MarkM-

That stuff should all be macros / constants / config-file settings, so folks don't have to touch the code to change it all.

Would make it much easier for folks to keep their shitcoins up to date with the latest bitcoin code.

-MarkM-

Maybe it is more like etherium functionality is the future of bitcoin, ether (its currency) is not ?

As presumably once the functionality is fleshed out and tested if it is good some bitcoin sidechain will adopt it ?

-MarkM-

OK how about exhume all the dead coins in one swell foop: make a genesis block that takes all the dead coins in all the dead blockchains and gives out exhumecoin proportionately to all the private keys (by converting all the addresses over to the first-byte coding used by exhumedcoin) so all the private keys used in all the dead coins all get some exhumedcoin.

Then since presumably all legends and heroes have huge holdings of bitcoin, maybe throw in all the coins on the bitcoin blockchain too, so the legends and heroes and such behind this scheme, who afterall might not be bagholding any dead shitcoins or not enough to matter, will make something out of this.

Sort of like CLAMS did, but ancient long-dead like hundred year eggs, a real delicacy...

Oh and just think, all the developers who dumped all the shitcoins they developed will be out of luck on this, hahahah, karma bites, sukkas.

Throw in a "locate wallet.dat | import" type thing to automagically suck in all those dead wallets on the users' hard drive for easy importing without having to manually hund down all those dead wallets.

-MarkM-

And that had a GUI wallet?

-MarkM-

Sure, but thats because Bitcoin was a fork of, uh... waitasec... someone's got this, don't they...

-MarkM-

I used to chat with him on #Tenebrix, he always gave the impression that he was just the idea man, looking for a coder or coders to code up his ideas.

Thus making the idea that he himself might be Artforz never even occur to me since Artforz was known to even make FPGA and pseudo ASIC type devices even.

-MarkM-

"Dead" coins can be extremely lucrative. I made probably at least half my bitcoins simply by CPU-mining BBQcoin for a year or so while it was out of the public eye then selling it before it got on an exchange to people who wanted to revive it and get it onto an exchange. So I didn't even have to wait for it to get (back?) onto an exchange in order to rake in hundreds of bitcoins for a year of devoting one CPU-core to it.

So yeah there are fortunes to be made on coins so "dead" that you don't even need a GPU to mine them. Devote a CPU core each to them while preparing a shiny new version, hopefully with merged mining as a subchain included so that, unlike BBQcoin, it need not die again as soon as it comes back into the public eye due to rape and pillage miners who perforce have to jump from coin to coin because coins are so seldom able to all be mined at once with merged mining; and wait for some idiot to come along with a GPU driving the electricity costs up for everyone by needlessly driving the difficulty up instead of quietly mining with just a CPU core like everyone else; at that point go public with the shiny new version, having hopefully accumulated far far more coins than the idiot who prematurely unleashed a GPU on it will make now that (s)he "forced" you to go public so (s)he now has to compete with gosh knows how many other GPU-miners or even ASIC-miners instead of co-operating quielty with the CPU-mining/dev team...

-MarkM-

EDIT: Lolcust IS Art? Wow I didn't know that. Lolcust always gave the impression of not being any kind of coder type at all.