Certainly not for DOGE, since we already saw all it takes is a stupid meme to come up with way more than 67 GH almost overnight.

If the next meme is a "PWN the blockchains" meme instead of a "lets be yet another scamcoin" meme all the scrypt coins could be PWNd.

Or all but maybe litecoin, if miners not in on the meme rally to defend it.

-MarkM-

I have more than 35 bitcoins frozen on VIrcurex. The main reason I have not bought any IXCoin at 7000 satoshis is simply that I get them cheaper so there is no point in buying them at higher prices than I can get simply by sitting on the buy side waiting for impatient sellers to throw their coins at the buy book.

-MarkM-

Maybe Vircurex was chosen to place the huge IXCoin sell order precisely because Vircurex is where the long term supporters of the merged mined coins were?

The people seriously trying to build price floors under the coins seem to have mainly been on Vircurex, as the whole mentality of chasing all the latest scams that most other exchanges display is kind of counter-productive to those who are looking to focus on serious coins for the long term and actually uphold them instead of doing scratch-and-burn style fly by night migratory mining and pump-and-dump-ing

As our frozen bitcoins on Vircurex come unfrozen we will be able to pick up that wad of coins, if it is still there by then.

-MarkM-

The pools get a percent don't they?

Most merged mining pools are in mining for the long term, not fly by night scratch-and-burn miners like the GPU miners tend to be, so presumably some of them would have been holding coins for the long term not throwing them away as they get them to drive down the exchange rates?

Heck there is a good chance merged mining pool operators first mined a lot of coins themselves before adding a coin to their merge. Then also look at how mmpool works, it merges all the coins and only gives them out to the users who want them, do they keep for themselves the coins that users did not want?

-MarkM-

DOGE showed that just some stupid meme can conjure up more hashing power almost overnight than Litecoin had.

It thus showed not only the Litecoin was not secure but also that it itself is not secure.

So it kind of killed itself in that regard, especially by not implementing merged mining so that it and litecoin could be merged mined together. Even between them they might not be able to muster enough hashing power to be secure, but deliberately fragmenting the hashing power kind of destroys all the scrypt coins not just DOGE and litecoin.

-MarkM-

Trying to get the public to adopt insecure crapcoins just undermines confidence in the whole blockchain technology.

The first thing should always be to create something absolutely secure before pushing it at the public.

Anything less is fiduciary irresponsibility, scamming the public into throwing their money away on insecure garbage.

Is even namecoin secure enough? Heck is even bitcoin secure enough?

If any are, it would be those two. But do we need even more hash power in them before they are secure enough to be responsibly promoted to the public?

For sure neither Litecoin nor DOGE are secure enough, as DOGE showed. DOGE taught us that just some stupid meme can conjure up almost overnight more hashing power than Litecoin had, thus that Litecoin was not secure...

-MarkM-

I still like SHA256, because even with ASICs coming to scrypt it looks like the scrypt miners are too brainwashed by the GPU miner mentality of "scratch and burn", destroying everything they touch, no interest in the long term.

How that will work out for owners of scrypt ASICs I do not know, since unlike GPU miners any "lets destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs" activities on their part isn't backed up by the ability to sell off the rape-and-pillage equipment to gamers once they have totally destroyed all credibility in all the coins foolish enough to be susceptible to them.

The fact that ASIC buyers aren't buying something they can use briefly to kill the golden geese then sell off to gamers means that at some point ASIC miners are going to face that fact that their gear will be useless once all the golden geese are dead, so hopefully more and more of them are going to settle down to the real job, the long term job, of actually securing blockchains.

In scrypt the top contenders cannot even be merged mined together, so constantly undermine each other, which makes scrypt seem like a poor choice even for ASIC miners. But who knows, maybe litecoin and DOGE will eventually realise that they need to be secure, and settle down to be merged mine together. Meanwhile though merged mining is already in place with the SHA coins, allowing owners of SHA ASICs to settle down to the long term job of securing all the merged mined coins at once.

Thus SHA looks so far to be the most mature algorithm, with the more security in place for the most chains.

-MarkM-

The people stuck with GPUs constantly kill any "golden goose" that comes along, about the only chance to make anything that lasts is probably to make it useless for GPU miners so they can stick to killing off all the GPU coins leaving the ASIC ones to thrive and prosper without all those idiots constantly running around making the entire panoply of GPU coins look silly and pathetic.

-MarkM-

The idea is to have actual transactions happening, paying fees, so that there will be fees for miners to earn.

Pools will though presumably own lots of coins by then so might well prefer to continue to secure the chain, which is, after all, the purpose of mining, in order to retain the value of their hoards of coins, which so far have hardly been worth the bother of selling. Once miners are not longer raking in 96 coins per block maybe the hoards of coins the pools and miners have accumulated all these years might even start going up in value.

Basically it is a test, will people actually perform enough transactions to attract miners, if not will those with a vested interest, such as pools, bother to continue securing the chain to retain the value of their hoards?

For a test of the continue to emit a few coins case there is I0Coin, so that we can observer IXCoin and I0Coin side by side and see what happens...

-MarkM-

Deuterium mining works great from a phone of course, because it is basically just time that does the work, a browser (such as one on a phone) is only required for setting strategic choices such as what kind of mines to build and such.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html

-MarkM-

The whole point of giving them away, whether you give them away to people who use phones to get the "free" coins or people who fill out captchas or people who happen to live in Iceland or people who happen to be Native Americans or whatever, is to get them into the hands of lots of people so that maybe some of the people who are given some might actually do something useful with them to build an economy instead of just dumping them like miners tend to do.

-MarkM-

There is no point adopting garbage that cannot be secured.

By deliberately not implementing merged mining ability most coins make it obvious from the outset there is no intention to secure them nor even to enable them to reasonably be secured even were anyone wishing to secure them.

On the contrary, they are deliberately designed to be abandoned by miners.

With merged mining though miners are free to mine any good useful coins that come along without being forced into abandoning all the coins they already merge in order to do so. Thus they are deliberately designed to enable miners to stick with them for the long haul.

-MarkM-

If you don't care about the security of your coin enough to buy efficient hardware with which to secure it that is fine, there are still coins that people do care about enough to invest fortunes into securing them so despite your constant bait-and-switch running on to new coins abandoning the ones you had created the illusion of investment in by mining them there will be secure coins. Presumably you dump those bait-and-switch scam coins too as well as abandoning them.

ASIC manufacturing is already more distributed than GPU manufacturing, isn't it?

If GPU makers have not yet started building mining farms that might just point to how tiny even the market caps of the highest cap coins currently are, rather than any inherent greater security having only a couple of manufacturers, but currently having a few other lines of application to profit from, might provide.

If GPu makers did decide to get into mining (don't they "burn in" GPUs before shipping them?) it would be interesting to see whether they prefer to use GPUs for that themselves or build something more efficient for the purpose. Fortunately others are already making ASICs for mining available to wider audiences so by the time the GPU makers do decide to get into it they hopefully won't have as close to a monopoly as they have on GPU manufacturing.

-MarkM-

If DOGE and Litecoin adapted to be merged mined together, with both having the ability to be a secondary coin in a merge, then maybe scrypt might start to look like a serious option.

Until then all the scrypt coins look like garbage because they all undermine each other instead of working together to try to achieve some security, evidencing thereby a total lack of caring about securing their blockchains thus a total disdain and contempt for investors and potential actual users.

-MarkM-

The big problem is insecurity though, because the Proof of Stake approaches that might maybe potentially work to secure a chain no one has yet actually bothered to implement so those who use Proof of Stake are just using the PPCoin method which is not secure, relying upon centralisation and Proof of Work to secure it, and those based on Proof of Work lack the massive dedicated hashing farms that would be needed to even pretend to try, probably not really very convincingly, to secure them.

This the recent wave of 100% pre-mined coins, the so called "IPO scams", opted for something more like Ripple's style of trying to secure their ledgers, though it is maybe yet to be seen whether such approaches actually are secure.

DeVCoin though has managed to maintain a not too horribly shabby hashrate despite only handing out 10% of its coins to miners; but its original intent had been to switch to only giving miners 5% and that intent was never carried forward because even giving an entire 10% of the coins to miners it was still hard to actually get enough miners and some miners still complain that they aren't being paid enough, despite it costing them darn close to nothing to mine the thing.

SInce with pre-mined coins you have to trust who-ever got the pre-mined coins anyway, it mgiht make a lot more sense to use something like Open Transactions than to even bother at all with the overhead cost involved in tryign to secure a decentralised ledger. You have a central party you have to trust anyway, so they might as well jsut run a database or an Open Transactiosn server to run the ledger themselves. Open Transactions provides the signed receipts systems that allow users to prove their transactions so probably Open Transactions would make more sense than e.g, MySQL and such, but all the "exchanges" seem to have no problem attracting users without providing users with cryptographic proofs of all transactions so evidently customers nowadays don't really care about provable transactions.

-MarkM-

People might be starting to realise that coins refusing to implement merged mining are deliberately undermining the security not only of themselves but of all the coins using the same miners / mining-hardware. How long can you keep on with the bait-and-switch of spawning a new scam to mine, abandoning the previous scams, before the suckers catch on that you are deliberately not implementing the merged mining code that would allow you to continue to mine - and thus help try to secure - the previous scam's chain when moving on to the new scam?

Basically these scams try to conceal the cost of securing a Proof of Work blockchain by deliberately not securing the blockchain. Their main reason for not implementing merged mining is that merged mined coins tend to reflect (price-in) in their market cap the cost of securing a blockchain.

The bait and switch scamcoin miners do not want thier scams to reflect the cost of securing a bolckchain, and since they have no intention of actually securing blockchains, preferring to keep spamming out new coins to keep doing the bait and siwtch over and over again, it is correct for the scamcoin blockchains not to reflect the cost of securing the chain. But, for a while in the past and likely still to some degree even now, the market caps of these bait-and-switch scams have not seemed to reflect the fact that they are insecure garbage. Their market caps have been reflecting the lack of cost for security gained by deliberately not being secure, being in fact designed to be insecure and even maybe not practical to secure, but have not properly reflected the fact that they are not secure.

Maybe largely because they are mostly the realm of bait and switch scam miners and ponzi scheme promoting "speculators" both of whom do not care about securing the chains since both will be moving on next day or later in the day or whenever some profitability website says so to another similar scam, the scam of the day or scam of the hour so to speak.

-MarkM-

Haven't you people been following along? It seems not.

Low difficulty means more chance any one hash gets a block so gets into the blockchain so counts when adding up work.

The higher the difficulty the less chance any one hash happens to get a block so less of the hashes done get into the blockchain to count as work.

So with lots of low difficulty blocks more of the hashes done to get them got into the chain to count as work so the more of the work done to make that chain gets counted when adding up height/length of the chain (the total work). This might also be part of why faster block chains achieve more security in less time; more confirmations (blocks) in the same amount of time is likely to be more actual work counted due to more of the work (hashes) done actually managing to make it into the blockchain.

-MarkM-

Merged mined coins such as IXCoin reflect the true cost - the horrendous cost- of Proof of Work in their market cap.

A lot of coins prefer to do without a secure blockchain, basically selling people a bunch of insecure garbage - refusing to implement merged mining because by leaving their coin insecure their market cap can pretend that securing a chain doesn't cost a fortune. However they achieve that pretense by not actually securing their chain.

Basically they are aimed at miners not at users nor investors. Speculators seem to like them too thoguh because speculators like moving along with the miners to new coins every day leaving the fools who fell for the previous days' scamcoins holding bags.

Basically the miners are trying to get paid without doing the work: they want the pay but have no intention nor desire to actually do the work of securing a blockchain, so they just do a constant bait-and-switch, making a coin look like it has miners, while cloning another con to switch to leaving idiots who bought their stupid scamcoin stuck holding the bag, while their tame "speculators" follow them on to the next bait-and-switch ponzi scam.

They don't want to support merged mining so their chain can maybe actually have some chance of becoming secure because merged mining tends to lower the market cap, as it should since it tends to cause the massive cost of Proof of Work to actually be reflected (priced-in) in the market cap. To an extent the change in market cap (between not implementing merged mining and implementing merged mining) is a direct reflection of the real cost of securing a blockchain with Proof of Work. SCamcoins prefer to inflate their market cap by not securing the coin so that the market cap does not reflect the cost of securing the coin, and of course they try to pretend the chain is not secure since they also hope the fools they suck into their bait and switch ponzi coin schemes don't realise the garbage they are buying is utterly insecure.

Coins like IXCoin already reflect that cost, and share it with a whole family of merged mined coins, so they all have much more honest market caps than the scamcoins; when they raise their market cap they probably do so in a far more "real" way than when the scamcoins do.

-MarkM-

Billions and billions.

That's a rhetorical answer.

-MarkM-

Ah, Vlad left, no wonder it takes hundreds of hours to find a block now!

-MarkM-