What definition of security are you using? For any of the double-spends mentioned in this thread it is the number of confirmations that matters, irregardless of global hash rate (yes, the wiki is wrong on this point). If you think otherwise, I'd love to see the math to back it up.

That's kinda my point. Even if this were a problem (I have yet to see or think up a practical exploit), you could just add a few extra bytes instead of wasting time researching and implementing a true error-detecting checksum.

You don't have to switch hash functions, just increase the number of bits you include in the checksum.

Why allow recursion? Is there a use-case for this?

Indeed, quite the opposite. Only a fringe economist would tell you that deflationary currency is beneficial for trade.

Couldn't one of the rules of the aux-chains be to reject proof-of-works which have more than one aux-header in the Merkle tree for the same aux-chain?

Ok, what do you mean by "inflatoin"?

Are you talking about price inflation or BTC/USD? That's what I figured you were talking about since the monetary base is increasing by approx. 30%/year right now due to miner rewards, which matches your magic number in the OP. But inflation only equals monetary growth if velocity, gdp, and overall prices remain otherwise constant.

Or are you talking about block chain growth? If so you're a little late to the discussion--there are technical solutions that are being discussed and implemented right now in bitcoin clients. Blockchain growth is really a non-issue.

Bitcoin is not suffering 30% inflation--that is bad economic analysis. You are failing to account for increases in bitcoin-GDP and velocity.

That said, one bitcoin went from around 11 USD on August 15th, to around 4 USD today. That's a decline of 64% over just two months--or a -99.8% annual return. Which shows that 1) extrapolation from trending market data is pointless, and 2) there's a lot more going on here than monetary base growth.

Yeah I was going to write a big response, but honestly that sums it up. It's been shown in the past that botnets are *already* a part of the bitcoin network, meaning that probably some of the people who frequent here are botnet operators. This isn't theoretical.

That too, is demonstrably false. There's discussion on this forum from the early days between Satoshi and the other core developers about the potential for GPU mining. scrypt/bcrypt existed ans was well known back in 2009, but Satoshi opted for SHA-256 regardless.

There is absolutely no technical difference between litecoin and the various brixes. It is yet another opportunistic scam.

I misspoke. All altchains seen so far (except namecoin) should have no valuation, based on any rational economic analysis. Bitcoin has value because of existing and expected future economy of goods and services. Namecoin provides a distinct utility that is purchased by destroying namecoins. The altcoins? So far, no released altcoin has made a single tangible step towards defining future value. Rather, they've rushed to setup exchanges without clarifying the purposed and long-term vision of their coins. Speculators rush in to buy in the hope that the price will rise. But with no defined or expected long-term realization of actual value, that becomes the very definition of a Ponzi scheme; it's a scam.

As long as we're talking philosophical principles, fine. The “point” I'm referring to is that a secure, distributed currency and a democratic everybody-can-mine-at-home crypto-token are provably opposite goals. It is technologically and economically impossible for the latter coin to ever reach bitcoin valuations. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is selling snake oil.

This is the essence of the scamcoin--either to get you to believe that you can get in early and make big bucks (a classic investment con), or get you to invest in the impossible (snake oil).

@ripper234, if the first thing that comes to your mind in describing bitcoin is “you can mine it at home”, then you're missing the point entirely, and we can talk past each other until the cows come home.

If you have CPU-hours to burn, then at least contribute to Folding@Home, or something equally worthwhile.

So you perpetuated the scams and made some money. What, exactly, are we supposed to take from that?

@ripper234, “bitcoin silver” is a funny analogy I don't quite get. It's not fundamentally any different than bitcoin in any way. Scrypt vs sha256, short rounds, and a larger monetary base... that's all cosmetic. The last two are literally one-line changes, with very little practical effect. It's still bitcoin protocol, bitcoin scripting language, bitcoin generating curve, and a hash-derived proof of work. It's bitcoin through-and-through, except for a choice of hash function that makes it resistant to parallel implementation.

And why? Because a few people on this forum didn't like that parallel sha256 made mining unprofitable for those without means? Please don't forget that the role of the miner is to provide security to the network, not to make you rich. Those hoards of GPU, FPGA/ASIC mining rigs provide security far, far better than any CPU-based system could. That time traveller attack? It still exists in bitcoin, but thanks to parallel miners, exploiting it would set you back millions of $$. With these new CPU-friendly, security-hostile *coins, any reasonable botnet operator will be able to herd more hashing capacity than the entire legitimate network, far into the foreseeable future.

“Tenebrix/Fairbrix/Litecoin: Bitcoin, minus the security!”

You'd have to go to the equation of exchange: (monetary base) x (velocity) = (price level) x (gdp)--velocity being a measure of how quickly money changes hands. A positive increase in price level is what's usually meant by “inflation”, so take the first derivative and isolate d/dt(price level), and you'll see all the terms that need to be dealt with.

To get fixed, positive inflation you'd have to set the block reward to a fixed percentage of the total number of coins (so it changes with each block), then add in a factor to cancel/zero out each of the remaining non-zero/changing terms.

I know of no altchain that does this.

I didn't rant against anything by name. I was also careful to say “as originally presented” w.r.t GEG. Of course having pre-mined 7m coins then actively working to setup an exchange casts one heck of a dark cloud on the whole project. Why are people still mining now that the experiment is a success? Why is anyone putting up a bid order on the exchange?

I have, and I don't like it (I had a heated debate with him on the freicoin forums)--my opinion is quite opposite JohnDoe's: it's disastrous from an economics and security standpoint, but nothing is stopping an implementation. I do like that it is a genuinely new idea. But so far it's all talk and no code, and I don't like that.

@Lolcust, nominally is different from actually--to my knowledge there is no *coin out which strives for the latter (a much harder problem).

As an aside, I do applaud you for Geist Geld, at least as it was originally presented. It came out just as I was in a debate with someone else about the possibility of bitcoin supporting very-short rounds. I had done some modeling which showed that rounds as short as ~4.5s were possible on the current bitcoin network. Although short round-times have made other attacks against the GEG network much worse, it has not been the root source of any security problems, and the network has been remarkably stable (more stable, in fact, than I had predicted).

GEG singlehandedly dispelled a number of myths about round-times that were until now widely believed on this forum. That kind of experimentation is a Good Thing.

Only in a universe where merge-mining is impossible.

Ok, seriously folks: what's the point? About once a week we see a “new” coin crop up--or rather, a new fork of bitcoind with minor cosmetic changes. Congratulations, you can follow directions and change a few magic bytes! So what does this new *coin bring to the table?

“Our coin is GPU-hostile!” Ok... and why is that beneficial?

“Our coin continues to reward miners indefinitely!” Great... and what economic impact does that have?

“Our coin has fast[er] transactions!” Sure... just wake me up when it's instantaneous. Anything slower than that is of no practical consequence.

“Our coin ...”

You know what, f--k it. If you're differentiating yourself from bitcoin by some technical difference, you're doing it wrong. Hell, if you're having to explicitly differentiate yourself at all, you're doing it wrong.

But you know what, I'm going to be heretical and say this: if you're creating yet another currency, you're doing it wrong. Because ultimately, you're competing with the 800lb gorilla, and even if this decentralized currency thing takes off, you're still going to have a snowball's chance in hell of being the last one standing when the dust settles.

Let me tell you a little secret: crypto-token systems were *not* invented to create digital cash. It was much later that someone came along and dreamt up that application. So what other applications can you think of, hmm? Think of namecoin--that's pretty innovative (and useful), right? Maybe there is something cool and innovative you can do with bitcoin's codebase, that isn't a currency?

Ok, fine. You insist on doing a currency. So how about one with demurrage, eh? Ok maybe you're not so fond of Silvio Gesell, and John Keynes is more your style--so give us a coin with a fixed inflation. Or maybe one based on LETS/ripple? Or whatever--but make sure you a real economic theory to back up your experiment; otherwise your shitcoin is snake oil and you should be ashamed of yourself.

You know what, let this be an open challenge to the altcoin community: show us something innovative, new, and useful, 'cause you're making us all look bad.