Of course their can be coins without mining, don't be daft, their are already several alternative mechanisms out their that allow transaction validation without mining.  You could combine PoS with an equal demurrage rate so coins are maintained without adding to existing supply, so you just start with an initial quantity in the genesis block and never 'mine' them at all.

I had really hoped these pointless clones would stop coming out, it seems the flood refuses to abate, but at least they aren't getting the attention that some of the earlier ones like Feathercoin and Chinacoin got.

Question:  Are the hash-rates for PPC reported on vircurex.com/ (3.3 TH/s) correct?  It would seem that this is just a calculation of the amount of hashing necessary to get 10 minute PoW blocks at present difficulty, but because few blocks are PoW the actual rate is significantly lower?  What if any hash-rate numbers do PPC developers trust?

Someone finally attacking all these useless clone coins, hallelujah!!!

The Donut article is rather flimsy on an intellectual basis, it ignores the block-reward halving which did in fact create a supply contraction much greater then an small mining increase from ASICs temporary getting ahead of difficulty.  We have the history of the Mt.Gox order book depth and it has been declining from well into last year and hit a low of just 2 weeks worth of mined coins just before the crash.

I believe the ASIC's are in fact the root cause of the bubble, but they operate by allowing miners to retain more of their coins as personal before-market hoards as they are so efficient few if any coins need to be liquidated to cover marginal electricity costs.  At the same time GPU miners are doing their swan-song and their operators likely want to get a final nest egg of BTC's before they stop mining.  Together these phenomenons dried up the inflow of new coins to exchanges and resulted in a price run up, which then went parabolic via classic speculative greed, new suckers buying a rapidly appreciating commodity in the hole of finding a bigger sucker.

Eventually a high enough price brings enough hoarded coins onto the market to pop the bubble.  BTC don't really circulate, the total monthly commerce in BTC is done with less then the total monthly mining rate of coins so the average new coin gets used in a transaction once before going into cold storage if its lucky.  So it dose not actually take many coins jumping onto the market to crash it, but BTC hoarders correctly perceive that deflation is inevitable due to reward-halving even if use of BTC is flat, and if they just hold longer they will gain hugely so they do.

Interest has nothing to do with fractional reserve lending, interest is a byproduct of liquidity premium and that premium comes from the marketplace not from the lender.  Fractional reserve lending allows more credit expansion then would be possible otherwise so that an expanding economy won't experience deflation as demand for money outstrips supply.

The entire modern attack on fractional reserves by liber-anarcho-austrians is profoundly dumb as they don't even know how credit expansion and contraction actually works and the fail to make distinctions between cash and credit or to consider differences in liquidity.

We can barely even figure that out for BTC let alone alts, raw transactions are one thing but how much is actually real exchange between people and not just shuffling money in your own wallets, who knows.

The myspace-facebook story is one of a first mover with the larger network (myspace) being supplanted by a newcomer which had sufficiently high technical merit that it over-rode the formers network advantage.  With sufficient tech any network effect can be overcome, but a first mover generally will have captured the majority of resources and talent and if it dose not become complacent it will innovate sufficiently fast that no competitor ever opens up a large enough technical gap to supplant it.  The internet makes staying on top a lot harder now then it used to be because things scale so well it gives little time to react and the idea space is so wide open it's nearly impossible to cover it all.  Their is also the open source nature of all the coins which makes it very unlikely that anyone can get a big technical gap.

Now their is another avenue, monetary theory competition.  If a coin with a different and superior monetary theory comes along and it is sufficiently superior to outweigh existing network advantages then it faces a different challenge.  Now in this scenario BTC can't (or more accurately won't) respond because its monetary policy is considered sacrosanct (as I think any coin should be).  If the new monetary theory is superior it should replace the older theory just as money replaced barter.

I think one of our big problems here in BTC-vs-Altcoin paradigms is that far too many people on both sides view the 'value' as being in their particular coins, not in the shared CODE or CONCEPTS and in the service companies/vendors/merchants that exist around the coins, virtually all of the companies could and should be be friendly to multiple coins (it's very easy from a technical standpoint) both from a business diversification standpoint but on a fairness standpoint as well.  But most of the companies are in the hands of BTC holding/promoting individuals who I fear may try to shut out other coins so as to create or maintain a monopolistic position on existing networks, this has caused a tendency for re-implementation of many BTC services for alt-coins.

BTC is not actually serving those 3 functions well if at all, and your assessment that different groups provide these functions is quite silly, all those groups need to work in concert for any of the functions.  

BTC is not a real unit of account as prices in BTC are constantly altered to reflect a dollar price that both the buyer and seller actually evaluate a purchase upon, everyone recognizes that BTC is too volatile to serve as any kind of accounting unit.  Store of value is also poor in BTC, deflation is as antithetical to store of value as is inflation, a deflating commodity is absorbing value not storing it.  The value that BTCs are absorbing is from a combination of media driven growth of new users with a crippling shortage of coins, the deflation is essentially a tax being payed by everyone who uses or adopts BTC now and it is payed to the earlier adopters, speculators and exchanges.  What most people don't understand about store-of-value in currency is that it is not a prerequisite to HAVE a thing that's value remains constant merely for it to be currency, ALL currencies have fluctuated to some degree and some have been inflationary and some deflationary, all were capable of performing the role of currency.  Stable valuation is a prerequisite of FAIR currency, mildly unfair currency still gets the job done just like mildly unfair contracts or courts or marriages or any other imperfect human institution.  Now their obviously come a point ware some level of unfairness causes the system to break, and I'm of the opinion that hyper-deflation is just such an unfairness.

So all that left is medium of exchange.  Now here you could made an argument that BTC is fulfilling that but I think this not quite right.  BTC is acting more like a payment-service for dollars and other fiat money, virtually ever BTC purchase is really a dollar purchase that is 'tunneling' though BTC as an intermediate carrier of the dollars value.  So I'd say that BTC is a "medium for the medium of exchange".  If BTC could satisfy

Distributing coins for free on faucets will help a great deal to solve the 'who first' problem.  Also we expect low interest loans in FRC to be a major driver of wider demand once markets have enough depth, prior to that merchants should find FRC attractive because they will not need to give the deep discounts to customers that are soon going to become the norm in BTC.

sal002:  Just noticed NVM isn't listed on the relative mining pie chart, did you need block-time for it, I think it's standard 10 minutes.

Also it seems I've made some errors in the PPC rate when I first made the chart, I didn't realize that its the combined block rate that converges on 10 minutes not the PoW block rate.  When I look at the last 500 blocks of PPC the growth in money supply is averaging only 74 PPC.  This would make the mining rate roughly .82 BTC per hour.  This is substantially lower then the ~2500 PPC that would theoretically be generated per hour if all blocks were PoW, the effective rate is only 3% of the theoretical maximum.  Conversely the PoS mining limit should be around 22 PPC per hour based on a crude division of 1% of the current coin base over all the hours of a year, it is considered unlikely that that rate is being fully realized.

Similar math for Nova coin (last 500 blocks) shows a mining rate of .46 BTC per hour on a volume of 14.65 NVC per hour (vs a theoretical 70 from all PoW, a rate of 21% indicating that NVC is not as far along in the transition to PoS as PPC which would be expected givens its shorter age as a chain).

Scraping the necessary numbers to perform these calculations for a hybrid PoS/PoW coin may be tricky, I can get them off of crytocoin explorer by just going to the 500 block list and getting the difference between the market caps at those times and dividing by 500 blocks, multiplying by 6 for the hourly rate and then multiplying by exchange rates.

Just scroll to the bottom of the https://vircurex.com/ page, it has hash rates for most major coins, the coin-of-the-day won't be their of course but they pop up too fast for virtually anyone to monitor.

Personally I can't think of anything sillier then making 'physical' crypto-coins, it's just such a throwback, a person has to be a real metal-bug with no idea how cryptography works to even find the idea attractive.

I fear we are derailing the thread but I will respond once more.  I find your statement a bit irronic when BTC itself was a codification of the social justice standards of the Austrian 'hard' money school of economics and it enforces that code amongst it's users quite effectively.  Everyone's got their own sense of social justice and the source code is open source so all alternatives will eventually be created and will likely coexist alongside each other, demurrage was one of the more obvious things to do with BTC because it solves much of the difficult book keeping with demurrage.  In fact the first thing I did upon learning of BTC was look to see if anyone had done a demurrage implementation and discovered the Freicoin project when it was still in it's infancy.

As for innovation, we at FRC credit Gesell with the monetary theory behind demurrage, it had already been implemented in paper form many times and we were just the first to implement it in cryptographic currency.  maaku can attest to considerable technical challenge involved their, it was not simply a matter of tweaking some values in BTC.  Other features maaku has implemented for us include a smoothly declining mining reward curve which avoids those sharp drops that add unnecessary volatility to the market.  We also have a shortened 3 year period to reach full coin-base, our purpose here is to try to see if cryto-currency really is sustainable with a fixed supply.  Lastly we have our foundation which will distribute 80% of the coinbase, the mechanic we implemented of splitting each blocks rewards between miners and foundation addresses is public and entirely traceable as those addresses are compiled in the source.

P.S.  mindtomatter, if your at all interested in hearing more about FRC or are looking for a guest to interview, maaku and myself are available.

Well besides the fact that were discussing technical innovation levels of alternative coins (an area in which FRC is clearly achieving) and not their economic philosophies your somewhat off topic.  Second Silvio Gesell was in fact a staunch anti-Marxist who embraced private property, private decisions on what and how much to invest or produce and the prices to sell at, aka the Free-Market.  Gesell opposes only wealth accumulation by usury aka interest, wealth acquired by work, risk and innovation are all legitimate and encourage by Gesell and by the developers of Freicoin.

Did a second exchange with Chuck, again very fast and efficiency, would recommend.

Well in a sense any legitimate alt exists to do things that explicitly prohibited be hard-forks in BTC.  Any one making such a coin is by definition exploring a design space outside of the prescribed envelope of permissible changes to BTC and will thus have as their primary focus things not on the BTC hard-fork wishlist.  As a secondary priority sure but we shouldn't be surprised that they leave these issues to core BTC developers such as Gavin, he's the one trusted to do this work, and he's paid for it too.

Now what we have seen is alt-coin developers doing a lot of innovation in areas that are THEIR high priorities for their own survival, paramount amongst these is difficulty adjustment.  PPC, TRC and most recently FRC have each altered their difficulty algorithms from basic BTC algorithm in response to violently fluctuating hash-rates as miners jump from coin to coin based on profitability.  BTC (and to an extent LTC) because of their large network sizes don't need this kind of change so it's not on their wishlists.

Occasionally though other coins will create something that can be ported back to BTC.  Over at FRC we have set our the goal for our next hard-fork to adding a block-chain compression feature originally proposed by etotheipi that will solve the notorious huge-download-barrier-for-new-user problem.  Our lead programmer has secured 3 months funding generously provided by evoorhees on behalf of SatoshiDICE on the promise the code will be back compatible with BTC.  Our motivation at FRC is that while our block-chain is small now we expect to be around a long time and don't want to have that download problem in the future so it's in our interest to solve this problem.


You can read more at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204283.0

On the miners portion only, else it wouldn't be a profitability calculation at all.  Also the present split is more like 1/3 for miners, the 80/20 is the cumulative split over the whole duration of coin creation as miners rewards decline gradually.

FRC reaches 10 minutes block time target!!!

In an amazing display of technical proficiency the FRC difficulty fork brings the block chain to the target 10 minute time frame in just 19 hours by a combination of lower difficulty and profitability-induced return of hashing power!

Their will now likely be ~6-12 hours of modest under-shoot followed by rapid stabilization at what ever hash rate corresponds to what ever price the marketplace chooses for FRC (at a .00038 rate that would be roughly 350 GH/s to be at parity with BTC profitability).  We should never see such a slow block rate again as the new algorithm can adjust rapidly enough to accommodate virtually any future shifts we are likely to see.  We believe our algorithm will become the new gold standard for any alt-chain and may even be of use in BTC itself.

The next major development goal for FRC will be a block-chain compression which will alleviate the massive download necessary to become a user of any crypto-coin.  Our lead developer has been funded for 3 months to work full-time on it by evoorhees on behalf of SatoshiDICE.  Again this will be back compatible with BTC and may find it's way upstream.  You can read more here

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204283.0

Make no mistake FRC is back and isn't resting on it's laurels.

Hash rates are around 150 GH/s now, with 205 as the target rate so were at 75% of needed hash-rates.