I clicked because I had heard the city of Hull was making a cryptocurrency so clicked to read about St.Loius doing so too, but I get the impression that is not the case.

Around here crypto is much much more densely used, my street has a coin, this house has one, and each room of the house has one too!

How many rooms in St.Louis have their own coin? Heck how many streets do even?

So fooey on that, what a meagre population of local coins St.Louis has!

-MarkM-

Because we wonder whether it is a lie or not, that is, whether St.Louis, like Hull in England, town council has in fact announced that the city is going to have or already has its own cryptocurrency.

We wonder whether it is a lie because some scammers are not above spounting bulllshit lies to try to capitalise on events such as Hull's city council's talk about creating a cryptocurrency...

Also maybe interested in what kind of interoperation the two cities plan if any between their currencies, whether a lot more citiy councils all over the world are starting to get on the bandwagon or what.

So far though it kind of seems like this St.Louis news is just another scam.

-MarkM-

See, they don't even care if it is attacked, in fact they urge an attack, insist jupon an attack as the only way they will even admit that they are running a scam.

They don't care if it gets attacked because they can clone hundreds more identical scams with different names and images and other similar minor details changed and claim oh this one is different, until someone actually pulls off an attack this one is not a scam...

Oops missed prior post.

I guess they also don't care if there is an attack because they will just claim that the attack does not matter, so what we are a scam uh I mean were demonstrably successfully attacked, we are making money, suckers are falling for the scam, so fooey on you you FUDster, suckers are gonna get suckered no matter what you do, so hahaha I win.

-MarkM-

The big problem is simply that none of the scamcoin devs care, because if one scam fails it is so easy to simply launch another.

So bullshitting and bluffing and yelling "FUD!" and so on ensues until someone actually does trash the value of the scam's coins enough to make pasting another announce of another launch seem more worthwhile than posting claims of FUD.

Sunny is simply the first of many such scam "devs", notice he never did even bother to try to justify in what way his fix was a fix, he just went like oh yeah ok its true my idea was utterly broken butv thats okay I fixed it now. With nothing explaining how exactly the supposedly fix actualyl fixed anything.

Also tore a leaf from the solidcoin book, putting in a centralised privileged node.

It is more centralised that solidcoin as it uses just one privileged node it seems at least realsolid had a token decentralisation in the form of having more than one privileged node. But nonetheless solidcoin was laughed out of town so to speak, but nowadays the pronzi-players want a constant stream of new scams to get in on the bottom of and promote, so don't care anymore that all the coins coming out are scams because they are themselves scammers looking for scams to promote to scam money out of people so all these scams are just fine for their purposes.

Except for all the facts, which they decry as "FUD", because they think that if the people they are promoting the scams to knew for a fact they were scams less suckers might fall for them. Knowing it is a scam causes people to fear being a victim of the scam, be uncertain whether they can profit from the scam fast enough instead of being one of the victims, and doubt whether they can suck in enough new victims to ensure their own profit. Hence, "FUD".

-MarkM-

Many cities, provinces, states, organistations, and nations already have "fair distribution" currencies already in place.

They tend to be referred to as "democracies", the coins being referred to as "votes".

They tend to be distributed by the counting of heads, one vote per head, albeit often a head has to have been around a while before it counts.

It seems to me that most of, or certainly a lot of, the motivations people mention for wanting to "fairly distribute" currency are just the very kinds of things for which votes ought to be the currency of choice.

Just like cyptocurrencies, votes can be complicated and confusing to try to use.

So practice. Find out all the elections you can get yourself a vote in, and go spend those votes.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin is not the only secure currency.

But a lot of why I work on the Galactic Milieu is that money is scary.

Long ago when I was working on my Adult Knotwork site, one of my "Tying it all together" Knotwork Sites, I had come to an idea that there are seven "adult" subjects, subjects which some earlier generations had taboos about, topics that once upon a time were "not for the dinner table", topics which often internet forums pretty much automatically banned or discouraged, sometimes on claims that they are flamebait and trollbait, sometimes on claims there is something wrong in them or under them or around them somewhere.

Those seven topics were Drugs, Gambling, Money, Politics, Religion, Sex and Violence.

Hence Knotwork sites (which are also of course archived on archive.org's "wayback machine" for your browsing pleasure or displeasure) such as Goddess Knotwork (Goddess.knotwork.com, about Goddess based faith, spirituality, and religion), Prohibition Knotwork (Prohibition.knotwork.com, about prohibition, including intially mostly prohibition of drugs but in principle including prohibition of certain topics in certain venues such as dinner tables and internet forums) and Makemoney Knotwork (MakeMoney.knotwork.com), mostly about lets build a fully automatic money-making machine, just plug it in and receive cheques in the mail... Bitcoin mining seems a lot like an excellent module for that planned modular system! A lot of investigation of get rich quick schemes, including marketing schemes, internet-marketing schemes, multi level referral schemes and on and on was inolved in that but maybe the most succinct first-off but tongue in cheek "paper" about the basic idea was actually already on ISP Knotwork (Internet Service Provider Knotwork, ISP.knotwork.com) long before Makemoney Knotwork was created.

The thing is, out of all those seven "adult" topics, money seems to be a euphemism for any or all of the rest. It is in some ways a condensation of or proxy for any or all of them.

But when I looked at things like "Civilisation" games (such as Freeciv, used to run planets of the Galactic Milieu) and war games and so on I kept noticing how a lot of times things come down to "send in the Marines!" or "we have Nukes!". Securing a currency is about a whole lot more than just the mathematics of cryptography and difficulty and hash-power. Where are you going to hide that hash power? Will it need to be secured against Marines and Nukes? And so on.

Gambling, of course, includes what some folk prefer to refer to as "investing".

Quite a long time after making the Knotwork Sites, I bought a bunch of "LeadingGuide" domains and tried to get people interested in making "Leading Guides" to various topics or fields.

Somewhere in the course of working on that I hit upon a sequence or hierarchy of topics. It went something like this:

Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Politics, Law, Force.

Mathematical laws, on which are built laws of physics, on which is built biology, on which runs psychology, which in the plural manifests sociology (also in some ways equatable with ecology?), out of which arises politics, which leads to formulation of laws, which tend to end up trying to use force (equatable somewhat to violence in the "seven adult topics"?), and hey wait a sec, laws and forces, that sounds like math and physics, have we come full circle?

I am not sure if I even listed politics in this list before, since really probably sociology subsumes (includes) politics. But since in this post I have brought up first the "seven adult topics" of Adult Knotwork I thought it might be worth indicating how it fits into this apparently/seemingly circular "hierarchy" of fields.

So. Secure currency. How many Marines and Nukes you got? And will there be anything worth buying once all is said and done using such tools?

So much for the larger picture, original poster did say something about meta, right?

Bitcoin is the most secure, it seems, of the Proof of Work (application of force, in a sense?) cryptocurrencies, and its merged mined friends tend to have less and less hashpower the less miners include a particular one of the family in their merge.

But so what? Don't the newer methods of securing distributed ledgers work?

Why the heck not clone Ripple, or NXT, or whatever does work without needing vast farms full of hashing-machines?

Why this constant desire to waste even more electricity on even more "meaningless work" ?

When you have the only Nukes, Nukes might look good, but when more and more and more factions of them proliferate things can get kind of dangerous even for those who have them.

Why not go for something nukeproof, something huge hashing farms cannot attack?

Doesn't it just make a heck of a lot of sense if you want to be CPU (botnet) proof, GPU proof, ASIC proof, to just not use Proof of Work at all?

Presto, no more fear of ASICs, nor of GPUs, nor of FPGAs, nor even of CPUs!

A fearless currency! Wouldn't that be something?

Money without Violence (force)! Hmm well maybe not quite that, as Marines and Nukes still do exist, as does Politics...

-MarkM-

The scammy "IPO coins" opposed often do claim they need to with-hold their source code because they don't want anyone to "steal their idea" or "steal their ideas".

Protecting ideas from being stolen is what patent is about.

If their purported idea is not patentable then there is nothing to invest in, it is worthless vapour/bullshit, it cannot be patented because it is itself stolen, or it cannot be patented because it is not an idea worth protecting, either way they don't have something to invest in really they are just bullshitting people and, at best, bring the value proposition "the mainstream is won by bullshit, see how well we are bullshitting you, buy in and we will make you rich by bullshitting everyone else or at least lots more people besides yourself".

-MarkM-

That video is weird.

It starts out saying the world needs one money, one common tongue so to speak....

...Then in a seeming non-sequitur or brain-fart suddenly wants one city to be stuck with its own local cow-coin specially for local cows...

-MarkM-

No, I am talking about the chance of being the user who gets the next stake-block.

In some of your copies of the blockchain+wallet some other user will get the next stake block, if you only stake for example 1/10th of your coin age on a block (because of wanting to get 10 blocks in a row, for example).

On all the copies where it is not you who gets the next block, well those copies never happened. Your "real" attack chain you pick to build next block on will be one of the copies in which it was you who got the next block.

So for example suppose you have ten times enough coin age to get a 1 in 1000 chance of winning the stake block.

You can thus afford to try for ten blocks in a row, with 1 in 1000 chance each block.

Now make 1000 copies of the chain, so a thousand of "you" are, in secret, trying for the next block with 1/1000 chance each.

What is your chance then?

Now suppose you make 10,000 clones of "you" all in parallel.

Etc.

The fact it does not cost "work", just a bunch of disk space and a little bit of computation, per copy you run in parallel, is why Cunicula wanted "work" to be somehow involved in using your "stake". Not separate blocks even, just make it cost to use stake. In at least one of his suggestions for example, the weight would be some function of work and stake, chosen so it would take a lot of work to beat a little stake but pure stake with no work could be beaten by less stake with some work.

-MarkM-

Just teach those ASIC-lovers a lesson by dumping all your litecoins to buy X11 coins and go mine an X11 coin...

By dumping their stupid old ASIC-prone litecoin you'll drive its price way down, right, since you have such a massive stake in litecoin?

If you don't have a massive stake in litecoin but do in GPUs, maybe an X11 coin is right for you but litecoin isn't it.

Also if X11 is the new king of coins, you'll make so much riches from whatever X11 coin you all pick, or the entire family of merged mined X11 coins, that you will be able to build your own FABs and flood the world with cheap free open source ASICs, so that ASIC is as easy for anyone to get as GPU.

You can even give them away in cereal boxes!

No one can monopolise ASICs once you make open source ones! The problem is the stupid "intellectual property" crap around FABs, not ASIC in principle per se.

-MarkM-

Okay so spawn/clone a million copies of the blockchain, or some number of copies anyway. Trillions, billions, hundreds, tens, whatever your stake farming centre can do.

Pick to build on only the copy in which whatever chance of getting the next stake block happened to fluke out for you to get you the block.

Make as many copies of that resulting blockchain.

Etc.

By what proportion of the number of copies does that increase your chances aka multiply your "effective" stake?

-MarkM-

You are claiming that if you have 51% of coin age you endlessly win as long a chain as you choose?

I think not, because I think you lose the age when you use it as stake.

You can use it on multiple forks in parallel, but not in series one block after another.

Stake your 51% of all coin age in one block, pow you now have no coin age left...

Modified of course if not all coins are online so your 51% is not of all coin age that exists, as then you maybe could ahppen to have more coins offline that happen to be another 51% of what is left online.

But if you have 51% of all coins, you can age more than other people so can always have more coin age being created than everyone else all put together. You still lose some of it each time you actually use some of is stake though. Or you should, anyway. If you don't that would be a problem.

-MarkM-

51% of actual coins, yes. 51% of coin age, though? Maybe not?

Cunicula preferred though that staking cost work or me enhanced by work, not the same thing as having two types of blocks, just a mechanism to make it cost you something to use the same stake on a billion different forks so you could pick whick fork to go with based on which one you did get a stake block on.

(As pure stake right now, in Sunny style PoS, doesn't really cost you anything to run several forked chains in parallel, on each of which you have your stake of coins to work with.)

-MarkM-

Right, so the guy with one 51% saved up can doublespend a free one-confirmation product out of someone.

Cunicula's argument was basically that one product each year or whatever that is sold at only one confirmation, or one two-confirmation products each twice that span of time, or one three-confirmations product each three times that span of time etc is tiny trivial amount of inventory shrinkage compared to what the real world currently experiences as business-as-usual.

The more the spend is worth, the more confirmations the seller is likely to wait before handing over the product.

Plus you still might get arrrested by security on your way out of the mall with the loot.

-MarkM-

Correct. However many of my game players who wanted to run auction houses / princes of trade and the like did want to do it the way you describe Cryptsy doing it.

Many also wanted even more detail: they wanted to see who placed each order, so they could chose to buy an ally's offer rather than an enemy's offer even if the ally's offer was a worse price.

(Better to buy expensive goods from an ally whose deathstars will help defend you than cheap goods from an enemy whose deathstars might attack you, kind of thinking.)

But a normal Earthling-jurisdiction currency or stock exchange here on Earth is usually required to give customers on both sides of the book the best price on the book.

-MarkM-

So in summary closed source financial schemes and executables unrelated to bitcoin are appropriate here?

No "hey open the source or go file a patent then open the source then it is on topic here" ?

If you want to profit from your ideas that is what patents are for, right?

So you can open the source and still profit from it?

Software patents are maybe such an evil evil that simply allowing any old scam to be endlessly re-iterated all over the forum is maybe a far lesser evil?

Maybe allowing any and all scams is the price we must pay to avoid software patents and maybe hopefully even get rid of software patenting?

-MarkM-

Add merged mining to them, so that they can still easily be secured even when prices slump because it will cost miners pretty much "nothing" to continue to keep them in their merge. That can secure the blockchain giving plenty of time to do any further improvments, refinementsm branding and so on without concerns about the whole chain beign just too insecure to be used in the real world.

-MarkM-

How does Earthcoin's hashrate compare to e.g. Litecoin and DOGE?

Can it act as a child/secondary chain in merged mining, so that it can benefit from the hashing power of other scrypt coins, or is its goal to fragment the scrypt space and require miners to add to the Earth's burden of electricity use instead of re-cycling the existing supply of hashpower/electricity-use?

Presumably the idea of in effect "recycling" hashes thus in a sense the electricity used to generate hashes, is something Earthcoin is eagerly in favour of, right up its alley so to speak?

So that we will see it become a major proponent, possibly the major proponent, of merged mining?

Imagine all the scrypt coins, or all that matter anyway going forward, all being able to help support the Earth by including Earthcoin in their merge when mining!

How can Earthcoin possibly resist such a vision? Let alone oppose it?

-MarkM-

Well hopefully some coin that still uses the gravity well and still has a pathetically feeble hashrate will be discovered so that a demonstration of a successful attack can still be done...

Can anyone suggest any worthy candidates?

-MarkM-

Great.

So back to "why single out Aurora?"

Are there any other chains using that gravity well that enough people actually care about and/or have as many innocents standing to be scammed as in the case of Aurora?

Aurora seems like a good choice for this object-lesson since the innocent citizens of Iceland were involved.

All the other coins that use the gravity well and similarly vulnerable difficulty-adjustments might have been more deserving of being trashed, and less deserving of getting to see some other coin serve as the object-lesson, but hey, how many of them will even actually bother with the fix, maybe having already dumped their pre-mine and moved on to create more scams?

-MarkM-