I am not sure why this thread claims it is dead, maybe it just means the original post author has given up on it.

As far as I know the only pool to have so far included it in its roster of merged-mined chains is still slugging away at it and simply does not yet have enough hashing power to defeat the attack. If more people mine it, or join pools that are merged-mining it, at some point possibly honest miners will out-hash the attacker, who can then either be regarded as just a more aggressive than usual and somewhat cuckoo-type ponzi scheme profiteer doing the usual massive initial mining that is already so familiar in other chains.

The option possibly also remains of actually restarting at the genesis block but at the reached difficulty once enough hashing power is aboard.

Luke claims not to have used Eligius hash power in his attack, it seems possible that the reason an entire pool appeared to give up the fight was thinking they were up against Eligius not just one religious fanatic's personal hashing rigs.

-MarkM-

Supposedly how he attacked coiledcoin was not just simply mining it, but also rejecting all other blocks and transactions.

On the face of it this would just mean no other miners ever get any blocks, and the receivers continue receiving. Unless he can strike out somehow against the receivers too?

If he cannot, maybe it doesn't matter that he is the only miner?

Uh, except for no transactions being able to be recorded in the blockchain during the duration of his attack. I guess we can trade dDVC on Open Transactions though, and settle up on the blockchain at some future date, when/if the attack ends or is overpowered. (Maybe we can spend a few years gradually building up a devoted-to-DeVCoin collection of FPGAs until they add up to more hash power than he is willing to continue devoting to his mission of hatred?)

Not actually using the blockchain for the duration will simply put DeVCoin in the same boat as many other blockchains that are currently looking to use Open Transactions or somesuch as a stopgap due to blockchain technology not yet being quite ready for general use/deployment despite the hope that the idea of merged mining had briefly seemed to hold out.

Maybe we should re-consider the "approved miners" concept?

-MarkM-

Heh well if advance announcement is a criteria, let me remind everyone once again of such chains as Martian BotCoins, United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, CZech Bitcash, bitNicKeLs, General Mining Corp and General Retirement Corp. Just because you don't see them around a lot doesn't mean they are creeping up to surprise anyone, there has been plenty of forewarning of them.

Oh and just because Unthinkingbit didn't have any use for Groupcoins once Devcoins were developed doesn't mean they no longer exist, either. In fact they have merged mining patches now just like Devcoin does, hoped to provide a slight lead time test before Devcoin's merged mining kicked in but in practice I don't think anyone who has figured out how to actually attempt to merged-mine has tried them yet to see if it actually works.

Maybe a bunch more chains would be useful, I wonder how many chains at once Luke would bother setting up to attack? A dozen? Two dozen? A hundred?

-MarkM-

That has been the plan of many groups. If and only if merged mining does prove to work as a way of securing additional chains is there any point in exploring the potential of such secured chains. It is all pie in the sky if in fact merged mining is not an effective approach. Some other method, possibly such as sticking to a centralised system until transaction volumes generate enough fees to make the huge expense of mining start to seem budgetable, will have to be found if merged mining cannot do the job.

-MarkM-

I would rather we invested in FPGA mining hardware than pay others to mine for us with possibly more energy-consumptive technology.

Sure it would be slower but so what? It seems there are advantages to being an ignored, even hardly-even-heard-of, chain. In a way its a shame devcoin has found its way into the limelight. Well hopefully the limelight too might have its advantages. Lets hope so.

-MarkM-

I don't like the pump-and-dump actually. One of the key problems of creating value in blockchains is the mining of coins by miners problem, which is what leads to the dumping. It puts the thing you are hoping to use as value in the hands of those who basically seem to do their best to devalue it, which is kind of counter-productive.

-MarkM-

In addition to helping children. Merged, remember.

-MarkM-

I think the folk whose major innovation was to be that someone would actually "back" the currency to provide price stability and to ensure it actually has value from the start have mostly chosen the "centralisation can go away later" route. Start with Open Transactions, don't bother to move to a blockchain format until transaction volume is sufficient to support "miners" without needing to have "miners" mint coins.

They had hoped merged mining would allow quite a number of chains to be secured quite easily and rapidly, but didn't really put all plans on hold to wait for it, instead they pushed me to get Open Transactions up and running.

-MarkM-

Give up on planes/flight?

Not at all. We should launch hundreds, or dozens, of identical planes until we find out how many we can in fact keep in the air, then we will know how many innovation test-tubes we have available for innovating among so can compare that number to the number of innovations we'd like to try in order to determine whether we have enough to try one innovation per or will have to put more than one innovation into each slot in order to get all the innovations out there in a secured chain to see how they fly.

But if we cannot even just get a dozen or few identical clones secured there's no point worrying about so called "innovation".

Maybe its just the age old war of neophobes versus neophiles being played out yet again?

-MarkM-

It looks like it is premature to waste time "innovating", we should first just clone as many identical chains as merged mining can practically handle, get them all up to difficulty matching bitcoin's and only *then* worry about which ones to make which changes to to develop various innovations or changes.

Until we actually have a whole string of secure chains to innovate with, speculation as to what innovations might prove good is kind of moot. First lets actually secure some chains. If we can do that, fine, we can look into varying them from each other. If we can't its a doomed route anyway.

Most of the people who were looking forward to merged mining as a proof that innovation might have some chance of having a point or usefulness are seeing so far that, sorry, merged mining is no help, any attempt to innovate is going to have to wait until some other way of solving the terrorist / religious fanatic / mad bomber attack scenarios before there is any point wasting thought on it.

-MarkM-

Taking down bitcoin could maybe be paid for with bitcoins. It might just take some seed capital to throw together 51%+ hashing farm, which could then pay for itself plus make profit plus bring down bitcoin once the desired / targetted profit has been made.

-MarkM-

Until it is proven that the supposedly tried-and-true bitcoin code can actually work and survive with only the absolute minimum changes needed to form a separate blockchain, such as default port and connect handshake, proposing revolutionary changes, innovations, "advancements" seems possibly premature.

It actually is starting to look as if bitcoin itself is fundamentally flawed, since it is not itself at all immune to exactly the kinds of overly rich, even if on other people's resources, religious fanatics that societies that try to use currency in lieu of, and possibly even as an attempt to ameliorate or avoid, violence, warfare, dictatorship and so on, seem so good at aquiring as enemies. How hard would it be for any other Ayatollah to do to bitcoin what the bitcoin Ayatollah's are able to do even to chains that are pretty much identical to bitcoin itself?

Apparently bitcoin is not a tool of freedom at all, just another tool for concentrating power in the hands of whatever fanatics choose to abuse it.

-MarkM-

Luke's pool has far less than 51% of the hashing power of the top ten pools combined, and is not even the largest of the top ten pools. There are a number of pools that could all by themself "fix" Luke's attack.


They might not even have to use their member's hashing power without prior consent either; they could openly offer their members the option of merged mining more chains. We haven't yet even discovered how many chains is the practical limit for a pool to merged-mine at once.

-MarkM-

But looking at the listed hash rates of the top ten pools, it seems a very easy 51% to fix?

Or are all the pool operators akin to the lukester?

-MarkM-

Maybe this is the kind of thing markets are supposed to automagically correct?

If the majority of self-interested rational economic entities prefer to hand over all their potential merged-mining gains to Luke, that is their market-given right, maybe? While similarly if they prefer to collect their potential merged mining gains themselves by mining at other pools that too is their decision?

Presumably though that logic should lead to everyone joining one pool that doesn't process anyone else's transactions and pays its miners a larger share of the merged mining proceeds than other pools? Hmm.

This maybe should be quite feasible to do with bitcoin too if people really will flock to the pool that does the best effort at preventing anyone else from mining effectively?

Why hasn't it? Maybe its not as cut and dry simple.

Some large pools hardly merged mine at all yet, maybe that is indication their users prefer their pool operator to use merged mining behind the scenes for any purpose the operator chooses thus are perfectly happy not to have the operator offer to merged mine openly giving shares of the proceeds to the members? Maybe Luke's actions are an interesting sociological experiment that might bring out info about how the members of other pools that aren't offering their members the benefits of merged mining more chains feel about such matters.

-MarkM-

Well this is why pools were considered a dangerous development in the first place, isn't it?

If a majority of cryptocoiners favour sabotage of computer/networking/software systems maybe it is true that cryptocoins are inherently criminal enterprises used by criminals for criminals.

Maybe laws against cyber-harrassment, cyber-vandalism and such do not apply among cybercriminals, but if open warfare is to be acceptable why rule out guns and nukes, or at least far more primitive than computers weapon types such as poison, knives, bludgeons? Where do such lines get drawn?

(And by whom? Burning at the stake to free people's souls is perfectly acceptable by some moralities, who is to say whose morality applies?)

-MarkM-

He is doing a 50%+1 attack? If so the only counter is more hashing power, surely?

Are his users supporting him in this? Or are there folk who will refuse to deal with a pool that does such things?

-MarkM-

EDIT: I see some un-used cde, a .h and .cpp, in which checkpoints are broken out into separate files that are not, in devcoin, actually used. Not sure when they appeared, maybe they might be why you had said before that checkpoints do get used at times other than original download of the chain.

Maybe the merged mining patches just didn't include whatever patches are needed to make that happen?

I thought of this when it occurred to me to put in another checkpoint, when I realised that as far as I know checkpoints only get used at original download. I noticed these new-to-me files when putting the patches into groupcoin.

-MarkM-

0x0005

-MarkM-

One purpose of groupcoin is still to test things that are going into devcoin. Groupcoin's merged mining should start very soon now, so hopefully if there are any problems we will see them there before devcoin reaches its kick-in block-number. Both are based on same code and use same merged mining patches so if it works fine for groupcoin it should hopefully also work fine for devcoin.

Other than that groupcoin has been a nice little low difficulty background thing a few people occassionally mine from time to time just to keep it moving, partly as a fallback in case they never do manage to solve the problem of securing all their various chians such as Britcoin, Canadian Digital Notes, Martian Botcoin and so on they have been waiting for for so long.

Oh one specific feature I do recall about Groupcoin is it is an inflation-coin; it keeps giving 50 coins per block forever if I recall correctly.

Once upon a time there had been various folks arguing in favour of such continuous creation of coins, so Groupcoin might eventually help tell whether they were right that that is a desirable feature.

-MarkM-

If you downloaded the source code of devcoind then the thing to do is compile it, which will require all the dependencies such as boost and cur

If you want to compile the GUI version you will also need wxWidgets.

The details depend a lot on what kind of operating system you happen to be using.

Meanwhile, I am uploading to the sourceforge site a version of groupcoin that has the merged mining patches applied, since we are very close to the block at which merged mining will become active. It should probably happen some hours before it becomes active for devcoin by the look of it.

It is kind of amusing with all the altcoins that have been flying by how devcoin and groupcoin kept being overlooked, but maybe now with merged mining they will both be able to gain some difficulty and maybe some interest.

Groupcoin, like Devcoin, is included among the coin types supported by the alpha test Open Transactions server (which itself is currently waiting for some more robustness fixes that should be coming along shortly.)

-MarkM-