You're kidding, surely. 65% of the very few people who don't think the thread is/was a premature April Fool's joke not worth bothering to read think it is a good idea?

I would not expect more folk who think it is a bad idea to even bother to open the thread, not expecting anyone but idiots to vote yes and not realising this forum is so full of idiots.

I mean everyone knows there are vast numbers of idiots here but might still have hope that it just looks that way due to the idiots being the noisiest bunch.

(Which maybe this poll actually helps to show...)

-MarkM- (I haven't even bothered to vote as it is such an absurd idea, why even bother?)

EDIT: I cannot even see the results so until I read the post I am responding to I never imagined anyone but a very few idiots would have voted yes, so saw no need to bother voting. If in fact idiots are in fact the ones voting then again why bother since they evidently plan to flood out all other opinions anyway. As others have said just do it, the real vote will be in gigahashes (or maybe only kilohashes if the idiots aren't ready to put their hashes where their forum-ranting is.)

For miners though the trick is to mine them before they pounce, because once they pounce their difficulty will skyrocket massively.

Look at I0Coin and GRouPcoin for example, they laid low a long time giving miners plenty of time to mine as many as they wished at low difficulty, then POW, suddenly I0Coin is back on Bitparking's merged mining pool and is thus difficult to mine again for small miners, and mmpool also picked up GRouPcoin for the first time at the same time so now GRouPcoin also skyrocketed in difficulty.

Plus since of course responsible exchanges do not list coins that do not have huge difficulty now that their difficulty and thus their security has skyrocketed I0Coin is already back on at least one exchange and GRouPcoin is on the "vote for it if you want us to list it" queue of at least one exchange.

Meanwhile CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld continue to lay low, for any miner who wishes to mine a nice hoard at low difficulty before they too "pounce".

-MarkM-

Unthinkingbit was the DeVCoin designer, he wanted merged mining because he wanted a secure blockchain and because he did not want all the coins to go to miners, the entire point was to create coins that someone else other than miners can get. Specifically, developers of free open source software, hardware, art and so on.

One thing I have been trying to provide that end users should like is actual "backing" for the coin: ever-growing heaps of buy-orders ensuring that anyone who wants to dump is able to dump, and hopefully at an ever growing price-floor.

-MarkM-

Pools are far more of a problem than ASICs. Long before ASICs came along all the GPU miners were already constantly trying to centralise.

The more different manufacturers come out with ASICs the better, of course. How many GPU manufacturers are there, are there more ASIC makers than that yet?

-MarkM-

Huh? DeVCoin is only just getting started. We only recently set up our forum and have barely started populating it with sections / categories / topics yet, our only Open Transactions server so far is the same old original Digitalis server because "Open Transactions for Grandmas" isn't out yet, and so on and so on. These are early days still.

-MarkM-

All these "problems" cited all assume that proof of work mining is being done to secure a ledger/blockchain, which is a stupid approach for targetting such a platform in the first place. Have the "mining" be simply a way of distributing a currency instead of trying to have it be a way of securing the ledger and all those problems go away.

You could even have phone users "mine" coins by phoning friends and getting those friends to download the app, for example... A social virus, in effect.

-MarkM-

Of course I am Vircurex. What other exchange carries the merged mined coins but not every garbage scam that comes along?

I don't want to refer friends to a place full of scamcoins just to tell them how they can buy/trade/cash-out  DeVCoins, for example.

-MarkM-

It is a buying opportunity, people who are able to take advantage of it by buying low have good reason to celebrate it.

It is annoying to have my bitcoins frozen right when all the coins I'd like to buy with them are very cheap.

-MarkM-

Such april 1st!

-MarkM-

But why use proof of work at all for an "IPO coin" instead of cloning NXT or Ripple or whatever other "no work required" system?

-MarkM-

On the contrary, it seems. The timewarp attacker spawns many more blocks than the defender, so if more blocks meant more length/height in the measure of which chain is the winner, the attacker would have even more of an advantage.

Maybe divide by the number of blocks instead of multiplying?

But likely that would lead instead to an attack by saving up a chain of few blocks that each took massive amounts of time/work to create.

So either way the current way of adding up the work is likely the best, it is just unfortunate that there is no record of how much work was actually done (how many hashes actually done) by hashers between hashes that got lucky (got enough work to meet their target and thus get into the chain and thus count at all toward total work).

-MarkM-

The SHA256 family of merged mined coins has a 1.5 minute blocks member (I0Coin) and a only a few seconds blocks member (GeistGeld).

So far even the 1.5 minutes block speed has not seen much consumer demand, let alone the only a few seconds one.

-MarkM-

Scrypt is far from dead, on the contrary it is about to mature like SHA256 did into a secure family of merged mined coins or maybe a winner takes all one coin to dominate the field.

In either case, hopefully into a mature technology sufficiently secure to be used for real world financial applications.

-MarkM-

Hopefully only on  those that do not pre-arrange with the merged mining pools to be ready and willing to add the new coin to their merge at launch and which neglect to have sufficiently large ASIC farms of their own in place before launching a new coin.

-MarkM-

If there turns out to be some fundamental flaw in SHA256 (which seems very unlikely), then bitcoin could switch to some other algorithm.

Litecoin has helped finance the development of ASICs for "some other algorithm", thus makes the idea of being able to switch algorithm look more plausible than would be the case were there no alternative algorithms for which ASICs are available.

Thus to the extent that litecoin continues to motivate improvement in alternative-algorithm ASIC technology and availability, it is potentially useful to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Of course if SHA256 does not turn out to have some serious vulnerability/flaw, all that work could turn out not to have been needed after all.

If someone makes ASICs for a more efficient alternative, then using scrypt as fallback algorithm could easily come to be seen as a poor choice.

It is ironic, of course, that it was propaganda claiming to aim at "ASIC resistance" that has financed the development of a fallback-algorithm line of ASICs.

The drawback to using such irony to develop a fallback is the expense and/or inefficiency of the fallback line of ASICs.

-MarkM-

That you propose to use scrypt shows you are scammers who are deliberately proposing to use an insecure system.

If you must promulgate your scam, at least use a secure system to do it.

(Pro tip: scypt is actually just one example of the category "GPU-mined coin"; any other GPU-mined non-merged mining method is also insanely vulnerable, but at least won't take just a tiny fraction of one ASIC mining machine's hash-power to PWN; an attacker would need more than one GPU, quite likely, to PWN it. Assuming you have at least one GPU yourself with which to defend it, that is.)

You might though announce how many 100-gigahash ASICs you have set up in place devoted to defend this coin at all costs if you still hope to go ahead with using scrypt non merged mining.

-MarkM-

There is no cumulation of difficulty, only of "work".

But, only chunks (hashes) of "work" that meet or beat the difficulty threshold that is their target get into the chain.

Low enough difficulty and every hash would get into the chain.

High difficulty hardly any hashes luck into enough of a "work" value result to get into the chain so most hashes aren't counted in the chain thus aren't part of the accumulated total "work" that determines which chain is "longest".

-MarkM-

They probably do not regard "the mainstream" aka "the masses" as an educated market.

They might be right about that.

The bullshit is probably hoped to be the target market's primary source of "education" on the matter.

-MarkM-

Less difficulty just lets less work make more blocks, doesn't it? The amount of work is no different? Or is work being calculated as the amount more than current difficulty or somesuch instead of just the amount actually done?

I had not thought (or realised?) that the same amount of work becomes more work when it happens to be applied to a lower difficulty block; I thought work is what you actually do and difficulty is whether that is enough for a block.

Does the fact that lower work hash-results don't get onto the chain at all at higher difficulty make the difference? So that more of the attacker's hashes (and thus their work) get onto the chain than do the defender's hashes (and thus their work)?

(The defender more often than the attacker doing work that isn't enough to get a block into the chain thus never gets counted?)

(Which maybe could also be part of why faster block chains get more security sooner out of the same amount of hashpower?)

-MarkM-

What about coloured coins?

Wasn't coloured coins going to be modified to run on the IXCoin chain instead of the BiTCoin chain?

-MarkM-