Back to all these merged coins being related...

Two less well known members of the merge family, coiledcoin and geistgeld, do not seem to currently be supported by any well known public merged mining pools thus have quite low difficulties, and monitoring them can be helpful maybe to the whole merged family because they might be able to show us potential problems before those problems start hitting the more-popular members of the family.

GeistGeld is the super-fast-blocks one, like crazy-fast blocks, so fast that just looking up an auxblock to give work to a miner can take long enough that no matter how many gigahashes the miner has it won't be able to increase the difficulty. The main original purpose of GeistGeld was to find out the practical limit on how fast blocks can be and still allow merging of many blockchains. It might be good to adjust its speed in fact, to try somewhat slower, since it seems clear that its current speed is too fast for any pools to consider supporting the coin. The pool ends up spending so much resources on trying to keep up with GeistGeld that it does not process other chains as fast as it otherwise could; mmpool once reported that the actual value mined was less in total when GeistGeld was in their merge, because other coins such as bitcoin suffered enough lag to earn less overall than if resources were not being spent trying to merge GeistGeld.

Coiledcoin is slower blocks, but have you noticed that it is using lots of RAM? I thought the RAM problem had been fixed across all the merged coins, including Coiledcoin?

Maybe some of you could take a look, see if it seems to you too to use lots of RAM?

It seems to use more than GeistGeld, yet GeistGeld has of course way the heck more blocks to process so shouldn't Coiledcoin be using less RAM than GeistGeld if both have the same RAM-usage fixes in place?

-MarkM-

SCammers advocate PoS because they cannot secure their blockchains.

With Proof of Work is is blatantly obvious they will never be able to secure their blockchain, so instead they obfuscate about Proof of Stake, pretending that somehow Proof of Stake will let their garbage scamcoin be secure even though it of course will not be secure.

It is all about the scam, selling people insecure garbage. The more people become aware that Proof of Stake is not secure, the more newfangled scammy "secure the blockchain" methods get made up, all in the attampt to sell yet another insecure pile of crap by obfuscating the fact it is insecure crap.

TL;DR it is easier to fool idiots into thinking your garbage-coin is secure if you use Proof of Stake so scammers prefer Proof of Stake when creating new scamcoins.

-MarkM-

How will you secure the blockchain?

Or are you just out to screw everyone out of money with a garbage scamcoin that you do not have the terahashes to secure?

If you are not just another scammer, but actually want to deal with something reasonable as in secure, you might do better to grab up lots of one of the high difficulty coins that are currently selling insanely cheap then promote it, with emphasis on the security aspect...

-MarkM-

CoinMarketCap is giving false values for IXCoin, for example right now it claims IXCoins are at 0.00009878 BTC but that is bullshit, they have been in the 10-thousands and eleven-thousands all morning and just now hit twelve thousand again.

(On Vircurex.

Just because some stupid exchange somewhere that does not provide its users with an incentive for building strong buy-sides of its orderbooks ends up with empty low end on its orderbooks in no way means that it is reflecting the true price that those who are serious about supporting prices (by building strong deep buy-sides on the orderbooks) are paying for a coin...

Of course CoinMarketCap doesn't even seem to have heard of one of the other high difficulty ancient long term staying power coins, I0Coin, at all, so maybe it is stupid of me to even bother looking at CoinMarketCap site at all? There must be a better site the actually provides for real the kind of stats that CoinMarketCap pretends to be providing?

-MarkM-

My second batch Neptune only gets 2.2 terrahashes and refuses to show the advanced readouts page so I cannot tell how much of the shortfall is associated with which cube.

I have tried upgrading the firmare to the latest but still cannot get the advanced page to display.

Has anyone else had trouble getting to the "advanced" page? If so, did you ever eventually get the page?

-MarkM-

Not being secure is not fair to holders/users of coins.

So hashing power is very important.

For that reason classics like IXCoin, DeVCoin, I0Coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld look good, in order of how long a term you need to be looking at.

All of them except IXCoin and maybe DeVCoin have had periods during which no public merged mining pools included them in their merge, thus were excellent for miners; anyone could merged mine them easily at one time or another. Plus having been around for years anyone who wanted to has had plenty of time to pick them up cheap.

The last two are still not mined by any of the large public merged mining pools so are STILL great opportunities for private merged mining miners.

GRouPcoin is only merged by mmpool.org as far as I know, and I do not know of any exchange that lists them yet, even Vircurex has not listed them yet though they have said a long time ago that they would so once they see IXCoin and I0Coin do better volumes quite likely they will list them, probably resulting in a lot of dumping by mmpool miners who have been accumulating them for a long time now. Maybe the best time to pick up such coins though could be before they get listed; you might still be able to get them dirt cheap in private deals with miners.

-MarkM-

I use p2pool to mine BTC, LTC, GRP, DVC, IXC, I0C, CLC and XGG all at once.

But, when I got my first Neptune miner, I thought the miner was broken because I could only get one terahash. Switching to mmpool I got 3.4 terahashes. So even using a nice server for my p2pool and spreading my altcoin daemons across three servers I somehow was not able to get my full hashrate.

Thus I now point my Neptunes at mmpool and just use my Saturn and some butterfly labs miners to mine at my p2pool.

I'd love to find out how to "fix" my p2pool though to make it able to handle Neptunes. I wonder if using solid state disks would help? Hmm...

-MarkM-

IXCoin and I0Coin are both looking good because they mint so few coins. If minting none at all does turn out to be a problem (when IXCoin stops minting), then there is always I0Coin chugging along at low minting rates.

As for keeping all the merged mined coins up to date, lets not forget GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, eh? All of those just keep churning out coins, like DeVCoin does, so watch DeVCoin to see whether price can be sustained despite never-lowering amount of minting; if it can, then these three should eventually start to come to more people's attention...

...GRouPcoin (GRP) is merged mined at mmpool.org but as far as I know there is no exchange that carries it yet, despite Vircurex supposedly planning to add it long long ago. It would be nice if they would, in the long run it'd be nice if one could trade all the merged mined coins there. CoiLedCoin (CLC) and GeistGeld (XGG) are not merged at any public merged mining pool that I know of, so are excellent bonus coins for anyone who does their own merged mining. They too are not on any web-based public exchanges yet that I know of.

-MarkM-

Has there been any indication yet of when the compensation Neptunes are going to be shipped?

(The extra/duplicate Neptunes for the first and second batch buyers...)

-MarkM-

Last I checked, merged mining it alongside bitcoins etc (SHA256) didn't work. Was that ever fixed? If not is there any intention of eventually fixing it?

-MarkM-

You could try to get into Deuterium mining, but of course you'd need some initial outlay to build yourself a mining colony. Once your colony is up and running though you can sell Deuterium, see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html but you can also probably seem metal and crystal too if you think you can afford to sell it rather than use it to expand your own colonies.

(Nowadays people tend to be shipping 5 to ten million units of Deuterium at a time, so the trade is not on a trivial scale...)

-MarkM-

Shouldn't arbitrageurs have caused these prices to flow over to Vircurex? At a glance it looks like one could make a profit buying IXCoins on Vircurex and selling them on the abovementinoed Cex place?

-MarkM-

I have not heard that the newer version is ready yet.

-MarkM-

It is the use of the same hashpower, the same mining rigs, to mine many chains at once, such as by mining bitcoin, namecoin, groupcoin, devcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, coiledcoin and geistgeld all at once.

See mmpool.org for an example of a merged mining pool, or look at p2pool for a distributed pool that can be used to merged mine.

-MarkM-

"version" : 32430,

-MarkM-

Once all the hype passes away, sheer hashpower is still the big thing, a coin that cannot secure its blockchain is just a train wreck waitign to happen.

So just keep on mining and collecting the merged mined coins...

The scammers and hype-artists bullshit about if a coin is popular it will have the money to attract miners, but non-merged mining simply is not efficient. Once the hype blows over the insanely high cost of securing blockchains inevitably shows. The scammer don't like merged mining because to compete as miners they would need real serious mining operations, whereas all they actually have is a scammer's facility at lying and bullshitting. They cannot secure their scams. So just ignore them and look for the coins with real serious hashing power. Not ones whose hashing power is obtained by diverting hashing from other coins either, but ones that allow the serious hashing power that is dedicated to bitcoin to also secure other coins at the same time...

-MarkM-

I keep getting errors from IXCoind:

************************
EXCEPTION: St12out_of_range
CInv::GetCommand() : type=3 unknown type
ixcoin in ProcessMessage()

Anyone know what that even means?

-MarkM-

I never managed to get any blocks with huntercoin, it seemed as if it did not merged mine properly at all using SHA256, those folk who claimed they had managed to merged mine it were using scrypt as far as I know.

Re repos, I seem to have been using  and https://github.com/rsnel/geistgeld.git and https://github.com/makomk/coiledcoin.git but doing "git pull" on the latter asks me for a github password so maybe the repo has been taken down or made private or something now.

-MarkM-

I run p2pool but when my Neptune arrived I found I could only get under one terrahash on my p2pool pool but 3.4 terrahashes on mmpool.

For some reason p2pool just wasn't handling the high hash rate.

I wanted to use p2pool though, and still do use it with smaller hash rate, so as to include coiledcoin and geistgeld in my merge.

Leaving them out didn't help my p2pool handle the high hash rate though.

-MarkM-

GeistGeld's block target is something like 10 or 12 seconds I think, not 30 seconds.

But still, even leaving GeistGeld out of the merge I was losing close to 2/3 of my hashing power it seemed.

With only my Saturn and lots of Klondikes and Block Eruptors my losses if any were much lower. It seems the more hashing you throw at p2pool the higher the loss rate becomes.

Maybe I need to use solid state disks for my coin daemons to speed up block creation?

Though I think all transactions should be in RAM so maybe that would not really make the difference.

-MarkM-