Does it support merged mining?

If so, does that include being able to be a secondary chain in a merge or does it support it only in the case of its being used as the primary chain in the merge?

-MarkM-

But not only that, unfortunately.

It will also depend upon whether they are willing and able to outbid all the other scrypt coins for mining services to secure their blockchain, which is a losing proposition for all non merged mined coins since the more such coins there are the more leverage the miners have to extort higher and higher pay for picking any particular coin to momentarily mine - momentarily meaning until some other coin decides to pay even more to bribe them to come defend it instead.

Hiring mercenaries to secure national treasuries didn't historically work out well, did it? At least I recall reading one of the future-war type sci-fi authors such as maybe Pournelle or someone like that illustrating the problem with that, and implying it was a problem already seen in history, by transplanting into the future the basic strategy of how such mercenaries go about exploiting the nations foolish enough to fall into their trap. It began, of course, by having the nations all bid for the services of the alien mercenaries... That is, by "divide and conquer", getting the nations to bid against each other instead of to co-operate (in this analogy, to co-operate means to merged mine instead of letting the miners get them bidding against each other for the services of the miners).

-MarkM-

Part of the idea of Mastercoin is that it will enable many things you can buy with it, such as arbitrary new currencies that people invent and issue by means of it.

-MarkM-

The coins that enjoy at least partially the security (hashing power) that, if they did not exist, bitcoin alone would be paying for.

Either that, or anything that does not depend upon proof of work.

The reasoning here is that proof of work is an insanely, exorbitantly expensive means of securing a distributed ledger, but merged mining permits that vast massive cost to be shared among many chains, thus the chains merged alongside bitcoin save a fortune in overhead expense of securing themselves and also bitcoin itself gets possibly at least some small help toward paying the massive cost of proof of work due to its miners being able to be at least partially subsidised by the transaction fees and/or block rewards they obtain in the secondary chains they merge alongside bitcoin.

Thus bitcoin and the coins merged alongside it have a security advantage over chains that cannot be merged mined along with them and/or an expenses advantage in having access to less expensive security to secure themselves.

By investing in coins merged mined alongside bitcoin you are not financing the fragmenting of the hashing power that secures bitcoin but, rather, might actually still be at least partially financing bitcoin's own security even while diversifying into other coins.

Furthermore in the longer term as bitcoin's block rewards shrink, subsidising its miners by means of merged mining could help motivate miners to secure the bitcoin blockchain aka to mine bitcoins, so helping to ensure the success of the members of its merged mined family of coins could be long term beneficial for bitcoin.

-MarkM-

Blockchains are insanely expensive to secure, and no one seems willing to pay the cost of securing this one.

Thus if you want to secure any value your coins in this one might have, you might be well advised to exchange them for something more secure, such as:

- Coins of a blockchain that is paying the massive cost involved in securing blockchains or that is merged mined, by many miners, alongside a family of merged mined coins that are between them all paying the massive cost and are all enjoying the resulting very expensive security in proportion to how many of the miners are including that particular coin's chain in their merged mining; or

- Coins of some system that does not rely upon proof of work (which is the horribly horribly massively expensive part of securing a proof of work blockchain); or

- Some other store of value, such as gold or education or belly-fat you can live on between meals or whatever; or

- Some depreciating thing that you know is going to lose value but that you might have some use for nonetheless, such as fiat currency.

-MarkM-

Even more so if the exchange pays you to leave funds sitting there.

Doing it all only with profits is important though because of the propensity of exchanges to freeze or confiscate coins from time to time.

(Oh lucky me, I am now a bag uh I mean share holder in the exchange, such wow.)

-MarkM-

Oh yeah, right, they ended up aiming to max the memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and allow both CPUs and GPUs to participate.

How is it though that ordinary folk who have machines with more than 6 gigs of RAM resist becoming botnet zombie machines?

Who is intended to mine this thing? Don't gamers have typically at least 8 gigs of RAM? Are gamers resistant to having their machines captured by botnets?

-MarkM-

Ah, the old "the password was in the source code" scam, gosh old tricks still working after all this time.

-MarkM-

Cool.

-MarkM-

Math already explained how it works and how it is that Aurora is vulnerable to it, all that remains to be seen is whether Aurora's hash power is sufficiently greater than that of the attacker. If that is not what Math said please do translate what he was trying to explain, as it seemed a pretty clear explanation.

-MarkM-

Innovation is not a problem. Scamming fools and innocents into putting real money into insecure systems is.

Deliberately making an insecure blockchain is little different from deliberately making an insecure exchange website.

It becomes a scam when people are encouraged to actually use it in the real world, the purpose of the scam being to cheat them out of money/wealth.

It is fiduciary irresponsibility, gross negligence, or outright fraud/scam.

Exchanges do it so they can pretend they got hacked, having insecure code to point at to show how the hackers must have gotten in.

Not sure yet exactly why coin launchers do it, other than maybe they plan to have dumped all their coins long before the insecurity of the chain becomes a problem so they just cannot be bothered to even try to make the thing secure.

-MarkM-

I too am still waiting to see BCX's attack in action. I do not know how much longer it is expected to take to catch up and take effect, nor even whether it was started yet nor, if so, when it was started.

Maybe the coin failed so hard all by itself BCX decided why bother to attack as it already died, or something like that. I do not know. BCX, what is going on with that?

-MarkM-

Do you mean the system that protoshares and thus likely presumably also bitshares uses, maybe?

-MarkM-

The scam is the fiduciary irresponsibility / gross negligence of trying to pretend a totally insecure system is suitable for use in finance.

Just like all the "exchanges" that get "hacked" because they "turned out to not be secure". Those too are scams, they scam people into throwing their money away on the basis of lies claiming that this that or the other totally insecure software system is viable for real world use.

Deliberately going ahead and using such systems despite their insecurity or even their inability to be secured by the people promoting their real world use is deliberate fraud, scam, etcetera. The perps know full well  the system is not viable yet perpetrate its use regardless, to scam money out of fools and innocents.

-MarkM-

Math's detailed explications were unintelligible to laypeople? What grade are laypeople nowadays in your neigborhood?

Links to detailed discussions were given and so on, didn't you follow them and read the original threads they linked to?

-MarkM-

It is a pump and dump scam, the pump done by pretending it would be a viable coin and of use/value to Icelanders. The pump and dump was already long done by the time the airdrop happened, the whole airdrop and everything after it only existing to "justify" the original scamming of money out of people mislead into buying the stuff before the airdrop even happened. The fact that people even had any available to exchange, let alone that it was on an exchange, prior to the airdrop was a massive red flag screaming scam. It was all about scamming investors prior to the airdrop by pretending the airdrop would not crash the value, or that the thing was actually intedned to be a viable, secure currency Icelanders could actually trust as a ecure store of value and transfer of value mechanism going forward.

This nation coin crap is just the latest greatest scam since the IPO wave of scams.

-MarkM-

Yes,  we do. AUR is not money, 50 AUR is not worth the time it would take to compile a wallet to hold it or even to ask an exchange that lists it to provide a deposit address for it so as to use the exchange as a wallet to receive it.

Try 50 bitcoins, maybe? Or more even?

Basically though you are demanding that the attack take place. So, again, we see that fanbois will not believe their scam is vulnerable until it is proven by attacking it. Someone earlier even mentioned soem pathetic worthless crapcoin no one likely even heard of before let alone imagined might be worth attacking and claimed that the fact it had not been attacked was proof that it was invulnerable to attack.

-MarkM-

It went to 27 satoshis again like the previous low period didn't it?

Usually though it seems best to place at least some buy and sell orders far beyond the lowest or highest you expect to ever see, so that if there is a big surprise in either direction it will be a pleasant one.

-MarkM-

Were customer coins online instead of in "cold" (offline) wallets ?

Were customers informed of that up front?

As the usual practice is to only have "hot" wallet online isn't it? Containing only coins the exchange "can afford to lose", as in, not customer coins, just the exchange's own "float" and maybe some earnings it earned from fees?

How was a hacker able to access more coins than the exchange "could afford to lose" ?

Or did the human operators actually send the hackers the coins in response to faked data the hackers had insinuated into the accounting database seeming to show the hacker legitimately owned that many coins and wanted to withdraw them?

-MarkM-

By what consensus process is the choice of (automated) checkpoints decided?

Or is it nice and simple like each client writes itself a checkpoint each ten or six or whatever blocks?

(Too simple likely; just yelling at the operator if any fork becomes longer than X number of blocks might work just as well as such a simple approach.)

For "distressed nations relief" maybe just a DeVCoin clone would work for however many nations are "distressed", simply adding nations to the "receivers file" when they become "distressed" and removing them once their distress has been alleviated?

(The much vaunted "socioeconomic factors" touted as how national distress alleviation coins are to gain mucho value hopefully making such a clone far more valuable per coin than DeVCoin since DeVCoin is merely a free open source stuff funding coin not a massive international "nations in distress relief fund"...)

-MarkM-