Why sell 50%? Why not just give away the code (for a no work secure system) so anyone can make a secure currency without need for masses of hardware and electricity consumption?

-MarkM-

Why? It makes no sense. The coins you have mined should go up in value as the blockchain becomes more secure.

So you should be happy that all the worthwhile scrypt coins can all become massively secure if you have been mining worthwhile scrypt coins.

Of course that assumes there are any worthwhile scrypt coins in the first place. Are there?

-MarkM-

When a coin skyrockets is the time to sell high while you can, not to buy low while you can.

The time to buy low while you can is while a coin that is going to skyrocket someday is crashing in price.

-MarkM-

ASIC miners are devoted to securing the blockchains that use the type of hashing their ASIC is built to mine.

Thus scrypt ASICs mean all scrypt coins can all be secured, up to whatever the limit is of how many chains can effectively be merged mined together.

So far the limit to how many can be merged has not been found. But admittedly hundreds might be too many to be practical.

Nonetheless most likely all scrypt coins worth bothering with can all easily be merged at once.

Only those that are incapable or unwilling to implement merged mining need suffer, all others stand to gain much security, which in turn should lead to much more value, at least once initial mining of coins slows down or stops or once enough years have passed to make even constant steady minting amount to only a small amount of inflation of the coin supply.

-MarkM-

I am not specialised in ASICs nor even in proof of work mining. My interest is securing distributed ledgers and financial networks.

If that can truly be done without proof of work mining that would be great.

All this proliferation of insecure not-enough-work proof of work chains can stop and people can clone whatever actually works to secure currencies / ledgers/ financial networks of people unwilling or unable to work.

-MarkM-

Well so much for the old claim that what is so great about GPUs is you can sell them to gamers when something more efficient comes along.

Surely anyone who has enough GPUs to seriously mine/secure a blockchain has more than enough to sell them to gamers and buy more-efficient ASICs instead?

How much money do you make per amp of mains coming into your building using various types of mining rigs, especially in warm seasons, counting air-conditioning?

-MarkM-

Even if they go to one satoshi, so what, provided they retain sufficient hashing power or other means of securing their blockchains to be secure?

Mere drop in price is merely a shaking out of coins from weak hands to stronger hands unless it is due to drop in security of the blockchain/ledger or causes a drop in security of the blockchain/ledger.

GRouPcoin is not even on an exchange yet and it still has quite a bit of hashpower, so price is not particularly important once a coin gets onto a merged mining pool, except inasmuch as increases in price could lead to more merged mining pools adding the coin to their merge.

Drop in price is no reason for such pools to drop coins since merged mining costs such marginal amounts that the simple fact a secure coin is more likely to go back up in value than an insecure coin, momentary memes/hype aside, suffices to make it worthwhile not to bother dropping a coin once you have added it to your merge.

Also once you do not drop it on account of a fall in price, you have also added the cachet of the coin's miners being loyal, like wow, look how much it dropped in price yet its hashing power did not drop, that coin's miners are actually serious about securing chains instead of being fly by night bait and switch scammers scamming people into thinking a chain has a decent amount of mining while really planning all along to abandon it at the drop of a price.

-MarkM-

Also because what you are basically proposing is to make the blockchain less secure.

All so that botnet operators can continue to profit from it using hijacked commodity computers.

-MarkM-

Just line up merged mining pools ahead of launch, so you can have massive hashing power right from launch. And of course launch with commensurely high difficulty so there is no instamining caused by the massive hashpower such pools can provide.

Remember currency is all about secure money for the users, not a welfare state make-work program for kids who somehow can afford a GPU but not a block eruptor.

Also, more and more botnets have more and more GPUs so along with a welfare state for kids with gaming rigs would come a welfare state for botnet operators.

-MarkM-

I thought faircoin was PoS in the first place? Evidently though PoS is not as secure as advertised?

Maybe because they forgot to have the first X number of blocks not require aged coins in order to start PoS mining or something?

-MarkM-

A litecoin fork is proposing to turn X11. Provided enough separation is kept between the real network and the X11 fork network, people could spend their litecoin on the X11 network to buy real litecoins, they'd love that.

After the snapshot of the blackchain is taken, move all your coins to new addresses on the real network, so that only the X11 network will let you spend them. Then use them to buy real litecoins if the X11 fork ever actually gets on an exchange or you can find a sucker willing to trade.

-MarkM-

It does not matter what coins a bunch of kids with GPUs in their mother's basements mine, what is important to investors and to any sane rational person using a financial system, payment system etc is whether the thing is secure.

Enough kids with enough GPUs might be fine using their GPUs to secure a pocketmoney coin to buy marbles and bubblegum and maybe even pop or, if mom and dad don't mind the risk to the lunch money, even lunch. But for real world serious finances something secure is needed.

Ten thousand or even a hundred thousand or few hundred thousand 4chan weenies hardly seems a more secure distribution of hashing power for securing a financial network than even just one world class massive super-datacentre mining operation per sovereign nation, let alone umpteen different major corporations in umpteen sovereign nations plus gosh knows how many serious businesses running mining operations of their own to provide their customers with preferential ability to get their transactions into blocks and so on and so forth.

-MarkM-

Scrypt is such a fragmented space that it is a disaster zone, even ASICs likely cannot save it unless the vast majority of scrypt miners merged mine the same collection of merged mined scrypt coins, and how likely is that?

Will scrypt and DOGE, or even either one of them, implement the ability to be secondary chain in a merge?

-MarkM-

I am not actually bothering to use any of my GPUs, let alone for scrypt mining. I probably will not even bother with scrypt ASICs if litecoin and DOGE continue to fragment the scrypt space by failing to enable themselves to be merged mined together.

Unless maybe one of them becomes such a trivial fragment of the space that the other, merged alongside all the coins that do implement the ability to be merged mined as a secondary chain, is clearly far and away greater in hash power thus maybe potentially possible to secure.

Litecoin was already dubious even before DOGE showed that just a stupid meme could conjure up more hash power almost overnight. That demonstration by DOGE basically made it clear that neither DOGE nor litecoin is convincingly secure yet and probably will not be at least until they are merged mined together, and maybe even then only if kids of meme/4chan sensibilities do not divert enough of the scrypt hashing power from that merged family to make it weak enough that a meme appealing to such types could come up with enough hashing power to PWN them.

-MarkM-

Several SHA256 coins survived ASICs simply by using merged mining. It is not hard to do.

If DOGE and litecoin were merged mined together, along with any other scrypt coins interested in actually securing their blockchains, ASICs should be very survivable.

You don't even need ASICs to create the need for merged mining, just the proliferation of coins using the same hashing algorithm suffices.

-MarkM-

The scam is simply the fraudulent pretense that an totally insecure financial system is secure enough for actual use.

That simple, really, It is deliberately designed to be insecure, It deliberately avoids simple precautions that could help it be secure.

It is gross negligence, irresponsibility, to perpetrate such an insanely insecure thing for actual use.

The problem IS the insecurity of the blockchain.

It is INTENDED BY DESIGN to be insecure and to make it as hard as possible to secure.

-MarkM-

So everyone's financial details should be spied upon in deep detail by Big Brother so that Big Brother can manipulate the currency "properly" ?

-MarkM-

Why would I shudder? Is X11 just another pathetically vulnerable amount of hash power thus just another scam waiting for a meme to conjure up more hash power and PWN it or something?

Oh wait, are you imagining I am against methods of viably and sufficiently securing ledgers that my existing CPU, GPU, FPGA and ASIC collections cannot "mine"? As that is not the case. What I am against is insecure ledgers, such as proof of work blockchains that do not do or have (e.g. via merged mining) enough work to actually secure themselves.

If Ripple, NXT, eMunie or whatnot are actually secure that will be great. No more need for vulnerable not-enough-work blockchains...

-MarkM-

XPM is a perfectly fine botnet-coin, it seems.

It also might have some use for people who are paying for third party server machines but have nothing more profitable to consume their CPU cycles with.

Not sure though if it is the most profitable such coin. I still use it on some of my third party servers mostly through inertia. If something else would subsidise those servers better I'd like to know of it, if it is long term better not just a "right this moment if you could mature some coins and get them to an exchange" better. (I won't be actually selling any of the coins the servers mine for maybe even years yet.)

-MarkM-

Maybe if the attack works that might generate enough interest and credibility that (s)he will display the code used to do it?

Meanwhile, maybe ask for more info?

Such attacks have been done before, BCX has orchestrated or perpetrated successful attacks in the past apparently, or if not then was permitted by who-ever did so to claim the credit in this forum.

The post above this one makes clear yet again that it is necessary to actually perform the attack, and successfully, in order for the claims that these scams are vulnerable to it to be believed.

Maybe though the original discussion of the ancient attempted fix against timewarp contains explications of how the fix fails. Presumably after the fixers had already scheduled their fix and maybe not until bitcoin and litecoin had enough hashing power that it was no longer believed feasible for anyone to muster enough hashing power to succeed with the modified attack against those major hashpower chains?

That the perpetrators of new coins lacking that much hash power have not continued research and pursued it to a real fix before deploying their scams simply adds more weight to the claim they were not intending to create secure blockchains, merely to make quick and easy make-a-fast-buck scams.

They even actually go out of their way to ensure their chain cannot be secured, as if maybe planning ahead to the crash of their chain when they move on to the next so they can buy up all the coins of it at firesale prices then potentially some day go back to it, maybe when they run out of feasible names for new scams or something.

-MarkM-