The Talkcoin team that have been the major players for Talkcoin for a while now put in the effort to save this coin from its current path of destruction, it was the best chance that Talkcoin had to save itself. It is a real shame to see that their efforts have been in vain as they had the best interests of Talkcoin at hand. There could easily have been a fee free version of Talkcoin with a simple fork so if we were to pay fees then it should be for something good. Turns out that the majority of fees simply went to the sell order book on Bittrex which is the worst place for them, it pushes the price down, those fees should have been paying bounties to help progress the coin. A real opportunity has been missed by not following the Talkcoin team's new direction.

Hi everyone 

I am joining the CannabisCoin development team and will be putting in a lot of hours to help improve and develop the coin. I have been in the crypto scene for many years now and have helped many projects in the past. My other home is Feathercoin which I launched over a year ago now and to which I am still committed. For a while now I have been in some contact with members of CannabisCoin and have heard many good things about the good work that has been going on over here. The genius in this coin is seeing what will survive in the future. Looking at historical markets new things like crypto, after they get mass market adoption, the markets will segment, Bitcoin will probably take the main stage but those who work to find their niche will survive with their own market. Cannabis is a market that Bitcoin will not openly follow into, CannabisCoin will rule this market segment and in turn secure its future. Kudos to the CannabisCoin's creators seeing the need for this sort of coin and that it is a niche that can survive through market segmentation.

Now to get to some work, my first order of business is to get a DNS seeder up and running for CannabisCoin. This is the first thing that clients connect to when firing up and from the seeder they get a list of other nodes to connect to. Once we have this in place and added to the source code new users will not have to worry about addnode details as the client will automatically connect. This is only a start to some of the work that will go into making the coin software and its network the best it can be by improving the network infrastructure and security. There are many options in front of us and the best technical direction needs to be decided once initial work has been completed.

I'm happy to be here and I hope people are happy to have me.

Design number six by iawgoM

Trying to introduce scarcity by heavily reducing the block reward will not do any favours long term. Outside this will be seen as an act of greed and unfair to new investors after the block reduction, it would in no doubt give advantage to those who got in before the block reward reduction. All that would do is scare investors away long term.

The plan put forward is a sane one and will see a reduction in coin supply over the long term by sticking to the more conventional inflation model put forward by Bitcoin. A reward halving at 1.5m blocks is within the first year. Artificially trying to reduce the coin supply outside of a well thought inflation model will only see a short term benefit if that. Those who are interested in the long term survival of Talkcoin will appreciate the plan put forward by the Talkcoin team which is made up of the most prominent members of Talkcoin. There are no better people to look after Talkcoin's well being and those who have been following Talkcoin will be very familiar with them.

I believe that the changes happening now are Talkcoin's best chances of longevity.

Quick note on the new inflation model, the reward normally halves when you get to half the coin reward. For a coin supply of 48m and 1.5m between halvings the initial supply would be 16 and after the halving it would be 8. I have been given a model of 15.37 coins now and 7.685 after the reward. It should be set that the reward is going to be 8 after the halving and to make up the difference now and for simplicity's sake the reward can be a round 15 right now. We will approximately be where we need to be at when we get to the halving. For a specific coin reward now we can use the following to work out the current coin reward if we want to be exact about it.

halvingTotal = 24,000,000
amountSoFar = Amount of coins minted at
hardfork = Height of the hard fork
halving = 1,500,000 // Reward halving height

halvingTotal - amountSoFar / halving - hardfork = New coin reward

Even if we go for a coin reward now that goes into the decimal places the reward after the halving should be 8 as this would be inline with typical coin supply. The halving will happen within a year of Talkcoin's launch. It is a relatively short wait until we hit 8 coins a block.

The issue has been identified and a new 0.8.7.2 client has been released for PC and the source can be found on GitHub. The algo change went through and worked as expected but somehow the block time change upset the network, the block time change was applied before the as we moved back to a conventional difficulty adjust during the algo change. This was done as NGW does not like to have its difficulty forcibly set. Somehow this change did not permeate through the retarget changes back to a conventional difficulty adjust and then back to NGW. I am away on holiday at the moment but will be back in my office tomorrow so can create the Mac client and will work on the block time change again.

Apologies for all the trouble caused with this update but the most important part of this fork was successful. Keep an eye out for a newer version soon changing the blocktime.

I am looking into the issue with the clients getting stuck. What is happening is that new blocks seen by the client that are in the correct chain are being labelled as having an incorrect proof-of-work. The initial blockchain sync seems to go through okay but once the client is restarted any new blocks are seen as having an incorrect proof-of-work. I though that this might be an issue between platforms over the floats used in NGW (Nite's Gravity Wave) but this is not the case as the Linux nodes have the same problem.

The old chain is stuck back at block 76,799 looking at the newer longer chain that it cannot join so that is not causing a problem. I imagine that we are going to have to hard fork again to resolve this PoW error. Right now blocks are being run through NGW and are being accepted on to the blockchain, that same block later on is failing when being run through NGW. It seems to me that we will need to move to a new

We could move to Feathercoin's solution which outperforms KGW in responding to multipools. It took months to develop and involved some top excellent people including academics. What we did was to create simulations to show how the multipools were virtually attacking us at the time. We then simulated using solutions like KGW. After several months Dr Tony Doyle and Wellenreiter came up with the best solution. It responded to multipools faster and allowed us to recover from their impact quicker as well. When we finally went ahead with the solution it behaved as the simulations predicted which was an extra credit to the work done.

The solution is simple enough and stays on the side of the better understood conventional difficulty adjust.

The specification for the Feathercoin's Difficulty Adjust are as follows.

• The average of three averages are used for the time, no actual time span of the period is used.
• The three averages are taken from 15, 120 and 480 blocks.
• The change to the difficulty is applied with .25 damping.

Interestingly with this solution a limit of the maximum difficulty swing appears to be redundant. The launch post for this change in Feathercoin can be found here.

Any which way it seems that we will have to change the difficulty adjust solution and development work will be required. I normally have to cover the cost of my time as I have bills to pay.



Right now I am resetting the blockchain in the DNS seeder and checkpointing node. I will report back here on any developments or progress made.

He was a pure pumper and dumper only chasing profit and did not actually give a damn. He had me fooled. Also you know why Feathercoin has a suppressed price don't you? This is part of the reason why we are switching algo. Feathercoin is committed to longevity and we will not be bullied into submission.

Android Wallet

We have recently produced an Android wallet for AppleByte and are now looking to take some other coins on. The AppleByte wallet is a full conversion with all details taken care of, the obvious magic numbers and ports to DNS seeds and alert keys. This work was commissioned by AppleByte and we are now looking to take on some additional Android wallet development. If you are looking for an Android wallet for your coin then please send me a PM and I will get back to you with a quote for the work.

AppleByte on the Play store

Online Wallet

Using the excellent Coinpunk we can create online wallets for any coins. This system is fully reactive and displays very well across many devices giving an alternative to dedicated app wallets like the Android one above.

AppleByte Online Wallet

Other services
We can help with a whole host of other items of work listed below. If you want to discuss your project then send me a PM and I would be happy to advise.

• Coin creation
• Securing blockchains against attacks
• Building of Mac and PC wallets with QR Code support and UPNP
• Reddit Tipbots
• Online Faucet - AppleByte Faucet
• DNS Seeder, required to help clients find others on the network without having to share addnode information

Coding hard forks for:
Changing retarget solution to move to DGW, NGW or more conventional solutions
Moving to a new hashing algorithm
Adjusting your coin protocol

Let us know what you need.

EDIT: Added several other services to the list for those that need it.

I ended up using CoinPunk which is most excellent.

https://github.com/kyledrake/coinpunk

It ports nicely to alt coins as well with a fair bit of work as it uses CoinPunk, BitcoinJS, Insight-API and Bitcore. This is my work below

https://wallet.applebyte.me/#/signin

If anyone needs an online wallet ported then let me know

UFO Coin is experiencing rapid fluctuations in the difficulty due to the implementation of NGW. We have discovered the underlying cause of this in NGW and are issuing this updated client to fix the issue after block 171,900. Please update now.

We have made it past the hard fork. Due to the low difficulty I presume that there are many on the old chain still. Can you please check your block height?

If it is 160,997 or below then you are on the wrong version as the block height is currently 161,313. A few people I have spoken to seem to be on the old version. The latest versions are linked below and in the original thread.

Just to be absolutely clear NeoScrypt is not going to be added on July 2nd to UFO coin. It is not complete yet and the first post should never have said that it was going to be included in the hard fork. The original post was edited by someone else who added images and moved technical information around which made the first post read incorrectly.

UFO coin will move to NeoScrypt when it has been tried, tested and is thoroughly ready.

The subsidy halving in the code above is as the first post says. The 43,200 period is one month as HiroS has noted and the gap between halving grows by one month a time between halvings. The total coin supply will be produced in a relatively short period of five and a half years after which the block times double to increase the number of transaction fees included for miners. This is going to be an interesting one to watch. I was commissioned to do the work for this coin and I have been happy to do so as there is no instamine or premine. I have now handed the coin over but will be available for ongoing support.

I would have expected a bit more fanfare for the launch but I guess the guys were very keen to get the coin up and running first

Something that has not been mentioned is that the time warp manipulability has been reduced and that the blockchain is protected by automatic checkpointing.

Relaunched is the wrong word then. We will think of something more suitable. We choose relaunch as there is new management for the coin, the original developer has long gone and was probably a bit out of his element as well. It is a lot to deal with if you are not fully committed to it.

Any which way there are a few members of the UFO community that stuck by this coin as it overlaps with their personal interests. I believe that one member is going to attend a UFO/Alien conference over in the states and will represent UFO Coin there. I am trying to get the details of this event and will post them here so you can get an idea of the type of scene that we are talking about.

Joining Feathercoin with NeoScrypt will be a big deal. There are many alternatives to Scrypt out there now which are not 100% suitable. Scrypt has been such an excellent solution so far and NeoScrypt is going to be an improvement upon it. Having an unbroken version of Scrypt is where the focus should have been, not creating variable N coins using the same elements that have been broken by differential analysis. If the market for variable N ASICs is big enough then people can make them with very minor changes to the Scrypt ASIC hardware and no RAM used at all. If people really want to create a variable N coin then the best way to do it would be to use NeoScrypt as the starting point. Not a version of Scrypt with Salsa 20/8 or Chacha 20/8 both of which are broken.

I am looking forward to taking UFO Coin to NeoScrypt with Feathercoin. The more coins using NeoScrypt the better as it will allow the third party tools to be produced faster and mature quicker.

Is there an open source online wallet available for Bitcoin?

I'm sure that there use to be one but it got hacked. I know people are loathe to run this sort of thing as there are very few services like this that have not been compromised at some point. If anyone knows of one then please let me know.

If anyone download the Windows wallet could they please do so again. The one linked in was an old version without the NGW hard fork and QR Code support, something to do with a cache apparently. There is a direct link to the Windows client below and the link in the original post has been updated.

UFO Coin 0.8.7.0 Windows

The fact is that there are several members of the UFO Coin community that stood by this coin and its ambitions to be used as funding for space based research projects. I was approached by these people to aid UFO Coin. I respect their dedication to their coin, we need more people to stick to what they have started rather than simply launching new coins all the time. I launched Feathercoin over a year ago which was a steep learning curve, I committed to it and over the year we have progressed it into the mature coin that it is today. I have never given up and continue to work on it and I believe that more people should stand by their projects. We are here to progress the crypto source code, there is plenty of room for UFO Coin to adapt, evolve and in turn contribute to this open source project that started with Bitcoin.

UFO Coin has now hard forked to use the NeoScrypt hashing algorithm to remain in the realm of GPU miners and keep away from ASICs in the near future. NeoScrypt uses very strong elements compared to the current version of Scrypt which is already broken by differential analysis. This affords better protection than blending different hashing solutions together.



I thought I would post this here first. I was approached by a couple of dedicated members of UFO Coin to work on their coin. I genuinely like the community members and the coin as I am a fan of the sci-fi genre so I decided to go above and beyond and make the UFO Coin client into a much better, newer and more secure release. It was 0.6 but I have updated them to a 0.8 client with all the bells and whistles and we are hard forking in a couple of weeks’ time to secure the blockchain against attacks. From there we plan to change the hashing algorithm to the newest version of Scrypt called NeoScrypt developed by the excellent Ghostlander. This will use the latest components available and will be a 2014 version of Scrypt, not the very old and broken one used currently. When I say broken I mean by differential analysis which is why we see cheap ASICs coming out without RAM, as it is broken the protection afforded by variable N coins is redundant.
 
The idea these guys have is to fund research like SETI with their UFO Coins. I am all for this sort of thing which is why I was drawn to this project. I have volunteered a fair bit of time to upgrade UFO Coin, I do enjoy helping out other people with their own coins. I believe in the open source ethos which unfortunately is largely overlooked in crypto currency as other coins are seen as competition rather than other projects trying to progress the underlying software.
 
Below is a message that has been created by the whole UFO team and which I am posting here now to officially relaunch UFO Coin. There are ambitious plans for UFO Coin and I am happy to stand with this coin and help it reach its goals.




We’re excited to announce our new UFO coin team members, though grateful for our legacy contributors. The future is looking bright with the addition of Feathercoin creator Peter Bushnell (bushstar) as the new UFO Lead Developer. In just a few short weeks Peter has steered a technical course for UFO coin, securing it from vulnerabilities plaguing most alt coins. Not only are new wallets available and website but we have just moved to a new hashing algorithm NeoScrypt which keeps us in the realm of GPU miners in the years to come.





Peter Bushnell (Bushstar) has taken the UFO client which was based in 0.6 and upgraded it to the 0.8.7.0 codebase which is much more stable and feature rich. There are several changes coming that will help secure the blockchain but a hard fork is required to make these improvements.

• NeoScrypt - Move to NeoScrypt which uses blended Salsa 20/20 and Chacha 20/20, Blake2s for hashing and FastKDF. Whitepaper available.

• Nite’s Gravity Well - This allows for rapid response to hash rate changes and recovery from high difficulty
• Time Warp Manipulability - Will be reduced to the point where its effect is negligible
• Automatic Checkpointing - This vital feature for any coin prevents transaction roll back via 51% attacks.

The clients made available for PC and Mac have features expected in a new release like Coin Control and the ability to run the client without a wallet attached to reduce the memory requirement. There is the normal elements found in the better made wallets, QR code generation for addresses in the wallet, UPNP and IPv6. The expected network infrastructure is in place with dedicated DNS seeders for clients to use to find others on the network and nodes dedicated for network connectivity.


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In the coming days we’ll be announcing many key partners and features through our UFO Community forum. Again, sincere thanks to our members, miners, sponsors and anonymous contributors for their continued dedication to the project, we invite all others to participate your help is always welcome.


The UFO Team.