19 pages of semi-literate bickering.

Depressing.

There is a GPU miner for Primecoin (google primecoin reaper), it's just not competitive.

And? There's nothing impossible about that. Search around on Google Images, you'll find images like this:



GPU mining is something that practically any nerd can do, but there are also people who aren't just dicking around with their gaming GPU, or building little crate rigs with two or three cards.

Of course, whether they'll see ROI, nobody can say. Big gamble.

The catch is that he's being a bit loose with his definition of "mining at the same time". Some of those coins support merged mining (UnitedScryptCoin, PesetaCoin, HunterCoin and OrgCoin, apparently) so these will mine concurrent, but you can't mine LTC at the same time as Doge/Cat/Pot/Digitalcoin and get payouts for all, you have to pick one.

DDoS attacks are cheap, lots of pools are small; it'd take very little money to hose many of them effectively with a botnet. Nobody stays on a pool that's down or regularly unresponsive, and the number of people that would jump ship may well be worth the expense. In the case of Pandacoin vs Vertcoin it could also be factions from each side. It's worth noting that Pandacoin's network hashrate now exceeds that of Vertcoin. The people who are invested in Pandacoin doubtless appreciate the threat that Vertcoin represents. It would be silly to assume that these individuals wouldn't spend a few bitcoins on a botnet if they think they will gain from it (this also holds true for Vertcoin and its supporters).

There is no maximum.

What you're talking about is the 51% attack, google it if you're interested. There's no profit motive in investing money to crash a successful currency; on the contrary, anyone who could afford the hardware would be better served by mining legitimately. The more successful a currency becomes, the higher the hashrate, and the less viable the 51% attack becomes.

Hashrate is the amount of work your card is doing. Your pool should give you an estimate on how many coins/day you can expect. You don't need to worry about nodes if you're just mining.

Also, you probably want to drop the intensity down a notch, as your miner is showing HW errors (HW: 53). This appears to be having a negative impact on your WU (work units), which is the actual indicator of work done - should be about 90% of hashrate, yours is less than half.

Sad that this bears repeating, even if it doesn't apply in shiren's case.

I'd have assumed that anyone involved in cryptocurrencies would be savvy enough to know better, but the endless "omg (x) coins stolen... what does 'encrypt wallet' mean?" posts you see around here seem to indicate otherwise.

I don't think you've thought this through. They could just hold instead.

On the contrary, to the extent that you're there you get hammered by the botnets. This isn't something you can easily fix when you're at that later stage; hard forks are problematic and threaten trust.

If the proof of work is violable then it will be exploited to the degree that it is possible and profitable to do so. You'll need a better indicator of human status than 8GB of flash to preclude this kind of activity. If all this seems horribly critical, I apologise. I'd like it if you could convince me otherwise.

Looking not too far into the future, I'd expect to see most laptops/desktops ship with "smallish but sufficient" SSDs, as increasingly content sits in the cloud and is consumed on-demand. In this scenario what does Worldo do about the performance test? I appreciate that SSDs are not going to challenge HDDs on price per GB for the foreseeable future, but OS sizes are not increasing inverse to the reduction in cost per GB.

What you're looking for is hardware that proves the miner is a human intending to mine; a "human proof of work", if you like. "Something that has the performance of a flash drive relative to a spinning drive" is a poor indicator of this, and will become worse over time. Botnets aside, virtual instances have access to large amounts of RAM relatively cheaply, enough that 8GB is probably not a big deal. I suspect that cloud mining and dumping to fiat for immediate, if cynical, ROI have a bigger effect on CPU coin prices than botnets do. I might be wrong.

If you want to keep the "USB as proof of human" concept then, as a thought experiment, you could mandate a dongle which all miners require in order to function. This would be cheap to make (a few dollars in hardware costs, something that won't threaten early-term mining ROI as ASICs do) and do something that botnets or cloud compute services can't competitively do. Ideally, the dongle would be easily available from a broad plurality of manufacturing sources. I believe this line of thinking is what lead you to arrive at the "8GB flash" idea. I have no better solution, but I suspect yours won't work.

Considering you took their work and have yet to credit them appropriately, you should show a little more respect.

In fact a bit of composure in general would be a good start. I wonder if you realise how much damage your personality does to what you're trying to accomplish? Your reputation goes a long way but your petty insults and pithy snipes at competitors are juvenile and completely unprofessional, and taint this project substantially.

I wish you all the best with your launch, but for your team's sake, I hope learn how to present yourself in a way that says "businessman" rather than "snotty-nosed teenager with a messiah complex".

All of this aside, the coin's design, ethos and community is avowedly anti-ASIC. It would be unwise for a potential ASIC manufacturer to risk the expenditure of creating a product whose functionality would likely be broken through a hard fork.

The biggest problem, the one that made me promise not to come back, was the lack of a manual withdraw option. I'm never going with a pool that lacks this again unless there's really no alternative.

Every three days ("If your balance remains under 0.01 for more than 3 days with no mining activity, payment will automatically be sent the following night.")

I dabbled with this pool last week and got a high rate of rejected shares, whatever caused it seems to have been fixed in the interim.

The support I received was courteous and responsive (after an initial wait) - overall far better than other pools I've used, anyway.

With regards to Lloydie's suggestions, I think multipool.us already offers something approximating this arrangement - you mine, choosing what coin, then later you can convert it into BTC.

However, it's a massive leap to go from running a pool like this, to running an exchange for fiat. Any time you interact with fiat, by nature, you're playing it by their rules, and that means regulations and paperwork - most pools (especially the smaller ones of which Vertcoin has correctly encouraged a plurality so far) won't be interested in taking on, or capable of handling, the hassles associated. "Decentralizing exchange to fiat" is much easier said than done; you can't code your way out of this, because what's stopping it isn't a computer problem, it's a regulatory one.

Why has nobody said this yet..? Your HW errors are too high.

It's one thing to say that, and entirely another to do so. Vertcoin currently has no non-speculative value. The people who might one day use it have no current interest in it, and won't unless the ASIC Armageddon kicks in. The people who might use it after that are so far away that talking about them makes no sense.

You can't sell average people on Vertcoin because the things that they're interested in don't collide with the things we're interested in.

I think the problem here is that you're trying to sell a product, and Vertcoin is a service. That kind of marketing can work for service brands ("For everything else there's Mastercard") but I really don't see how adding a cute mascot, at this stage, would help in any way. Jingles are for television adverts, "good marketing" is too vague to discuss. What exactly do you propose? Bear in mind you're trying to sell something that doesn't have intrinsic benefits for anyone other than the people mining it. I think Vertcoin's viability rests solely on adoption by miners, at least in these early days. You won't convince them to come with cute or sexy marketing; either they'll see the potential in the gains that the algo provides, or they won't. I'm taking a fairly long view here. Litecoin didn't start out valuable, it became valuable because the mining community adopted it in response to FPGAs/ASICs. The network conditions that kind of situation creates validate the currency, and I hope to see the same for Vertcoin.

That's my take, anyway. I welcome criticism.