Just get the major ASIC farms and pools on board with merged mining. Anyone big enough to attack that is big enough to find to hit with massive "this person is criminally attacking our network, costing umpteen dollars in disruption" law enforcement and/or civil suits, cease and desist orders, filtering and banning and loss of ISP accounts at their ISP level etc etc etc.

(Just get infrared satellites to look for undocumented mining farms like they do grow-houses...)

-MarkM-

Another approach that has so far been working really really well for those that have taken it is to put aside the actual using of a blockchain format for your new currency until some future time when the sheer volume of transactions will provide enough incentive (via transaction fees) for miners to get on board. All the chains that have taken this approach, that I know of, have proven far far more successful (in such terms as how many dollars each coin is worth for example) than any of the alts that have tried to fly in blockchain format throughout this early period.

For example although DeVCoin got quite a bit of hashing power through merged mining, and GRouPcoin seems to have survived simply by no one being interested enough to attack it yet, neither are worth nearly as much as the coins that took the more cautious approach of retreating to an Open Transactions format until such time as deploying as a blockchain again starts to look less vulnerable than it looks so far. (GRouPcoin is their weathervane for that; the longer GRouPcoin continues chugging along without being crushed, the more the other coins keep saying hey maybe we could have stayed in blockchain form afterall, like GRouPcoin did, maybe we too would have been unattacked all this time... But, notably, GRouPcoin is valued far less than the coins that retreated into the security of the Open Transactions form...)

-MarkM-

No, the point is anyone can buy a dirt cheap mass-mass-mass-produced ASIC coffeewarmer but its special purpose hardware so an attacker would not just happen to have tons of them lying around left over from cracking some CIA private communique or whatever.

Admittedly putting power in the hands of the masses does tend to mean putting it in the hands of the botnets... But you plan that anyway it seems.

-MarkM-

Part of the problem is that security costs, and your whole objective seems to be to make mining not cost anything.

As long as you make mining so easy anyone can do it, it will be so easy anyone with as much computer power (or money, whatever your powerbase is) as all those cheap old obsolete machines your miners use can attack it.

To stop attackers you need mining to be so hard that even for the professional miners mining legitimately it is very hard just to keep up with the state of the art.

-MarkM-

Diverting hashing power is a necessary response to bitcoin's thugs who abuse merged mining as a way to attack companion coins instead of support them. Switching to a different hashing schere is a natural defense mechanism against bitcoin's thugs. So blame bitcoiners not altcoiners.

-MarkM-

If people prefer paying half a percent fee on every trade for the convenience of using simple easy to guess passwords on website-type user-interfaces that is the free market in action. For puny trivial sized trades the convenience is probably worth it. Maybe though for at least some people avoiding that fee and having to put up with a secure method of communication with a server might seem worth it when they deal with significant sums.

-MarkM-

Maybe they figure the forum admins will have already cleaned out all the bank accounts whose access information you store in PMs to yourself for safekeeping so figure no point being johnny come lately chasing accounts that have already been emptied?

-MarkM-

Dead people are easy to talk to, and so eager to talk they'll say anything you want.

But you do know Steve Jobs isn't really dead right?

He moved to China and took up relic collecting and exploiting teenage boys...

-MarkM-

You don't need to see hir hashrate ever. Just hir "longest" (hardest work) chain.

-MarkM-

The theory seems to be that it makes a better "freebie" to "give" to gamers because their GPUs won't have to compete with FPGAs and ASICs, thus that they might be useful as a kind of "loyalty points" system for games.

Thus far though namecoin, devcoin. groupcoin, ixcoin and i0coin seem to be more popular with gamers, maybe because they do not require running separate mining expenses than one already pays to mine bitcoin.

-MarkM-

Yes, exactly, the user's password never goes server-side because the server only needs the client's public key, not their private key and thus not the password they use on their personal machine to secure their private key.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin is just like all the state-controlled currencies, even to the extent of committing violence to suppress alternatives.

Litecoin on the other hand one maybe could hope embraces the proliferation of alternatives...

-MarkM-

Users' passphrases should exist only on the user's end, not at the server end.

For more discussion of security standards for bitcoin check out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95745.0

-MarkM-

Look at all the security problems bitcoin has been having.

It is trivially easy to plug in any of the altcoins given code that talks to a coin daemon, so any of the insecure frequently hacked web-based applications for coins could use pretty much any coin easily.

For quite a while now there has been an exchange where you can trade litecoins for bitcoins, litecoins for namecoins, litecoins for devcoins, litecoins for groupcoins, litecoins for ixcoins, litecoins for i0coins and so on and so on, but not by using the web's man in the middle certificates system where some man in the middle provides server and browser with known-to-be-insecure certificates and not by storing a hash of the user's password on the server.

The core functionality has been the main focus of development for the last year; what is needed now is people to make end-user front-ends that are "nicer" for users than the current "test GUI" client and the scripting system.

I am of course talking about my Open Transactions server. A summary of the security goals of the Open Transactions system has its own thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95745.0

The system supports many languages, what is your favourite programming-language?

-MarkM-

Electricity might be an expensive currency to use to purchase coins with, but it is locally exchange-able without trusting anonymous or pseudonymous strangers on the net, by dealing with a big brother who already does know who you are and where you live but maybe need not know in addition that you engage in cryptocoin use.

Also, which exchanges sell pristine virgin coins, and at how much more cost than used coins?

Finally, if you think the coins will never be worth the electricity paid for them, you have a pretty pessimistic outlook, why bother at all if the damn things will never be worth that much?

-MarkM-

They are just like the feds I guess, they don't want economies to spring up freely, they want to prevent trade by withholding the tool (means/token of exchange) needed to engage in trade, so that no one is able to prosper thus no one is able to afford to buy bitcoins. A vicious circle.

I guess maybe they never heard of the threshold drug or doorstep drug theory (soft drugs lead to hard drugs) so somehow keep trying to convince themselves that people getting a free taste of cryptocurrency won't graduate to the hard stuff (actual genuine original bitcoins)...

-MarkM-

The last few days have been eventful for General Financial Corp (GFC), starting with its taking out a huge loan at an unprecedented (lowest) rate of interest which momentarily brought its liabilities far far above its assets. It did not help either that drift of exchange rate turned against them.

Today though the Corp succeeded in loaning out, at approximately double the interest rate it is paying, enough of the funds to bring their assets well above their liabilities even despite the current exchange rates.

At the most recent run of the assesment scripts fully through to convergence they evaluated GFC at 11908.30077519 DVC per share.

Note that this is not the last traded price nor the lowest or highest or average traded price but simply an actual accounting of the assets held by the Corp and the liabilities of the Corp. Whether anyone who picked up its offering will part with any shares, and if so at what price, is entirely up to them.

-MarkM-

You could start by making litecoin and bbqcoin merged-mine-able. That would give you the basic scrypt-based merged mining setup from which to proceed onward to your experimental chain(s).

-MarkM-

It seems kind of wasteful, since it uses the same hash type as litecoin but cannot be merged-mined alongside litecoin. Without the ability to merge they are each weaker by however much hashing power people put into the other. The two should be merge-able; until they are one or both is likely to be half as strong as it could be.

-MarkM-

Actually that is exactly what I did for years with a whole bunch of dubious "affiliate programs" I fully expected to rip each other off thereby. Blew my mind that in all those years none of them ever did. Were they just too dense? Or just raking in so much money (it was the heyday of the "its raining hits money is free just put up a site" era) that not one of their employees bothered? Hmmm.

Just seemed easier way to test them than to give each a different password that would prevent them being able to show their true colours.

Of course any of them that actually earned me real money I changed that password and email pretty quick. Oh and I used a different email alias per each one of them of course too to know which one had given the address to spammers or used it to spam.

-MarkM-