If these are legit, it would be a confirmation that Satoshi mined the block #5326, as block reward from that block is sent by Satoshi to Mike Hearn.

Mike: I sent you 32.51 coins, my bitcoin address is 1JuEjh9znXwqsy5RrnKqgzqY4Ldg7rnj5n

Satoshi: I sent back 32.51 and 50.00. (https://blockchain.info/address/1JuEjh9znXwqsy5RrnKqgzqY4Ldg7rnj5n)

This is interesting, because if you go back to the old ExtraNonce analysis by Sergio (https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/), block #5326 fits the pattern of this early miner with a distinct ExtraNonce pattern, and would be the first (?) direct evidence, that this miner was in fact Satoshi.

Artforz finally cashing out?

To contrast some reports that SEPA transfers are now fast, I just yesterday received a 1000€ SEPA withdrawal that I made on May 8th 2013 (so almost 4 months). Previous payment I received was on Aug 14th for a withdrawal made just day before on May 7th (also 1000€). I have 2 more 1000€ withdrawals pending made on May 10th and May 14th.

Since apparently some people are receiving SEPA withdrawals with minimal waiting, the claim that Mt. Gox is working on a "queue" is quite laughable from my perspective. My theory is that everybody receives "something" every few weeks in effort to calm people down.

That's funny, since I'm still waiting for three SEPA withdrawals from mid MAY. So apparently there is "some" variance in withdrawal times.

My next withdrawal just changed to pending today, so there were 3 days between withdrawals and 10 days between them being processed. So it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, if ever.

2013/05/14 confirmed
2013/05/10 confirmed
2013/05/08 confirmed
2013/05/07 confirmed
2013/05/06 pending
2013/05/03 processed

I have had multiple 1k€ SEPA withdrawals waiting for over 2 months now, and the first one changed from confirmed to pending just today, so apparently the money is coming (no money in my bank yet). My status is:

2013/05/14 confirmed
2013/05/10 confirmed
2013/05/08 confirmed
2013/05/07 confirmed
2013/05/06 confirmed
2013/05/03 pending

Good timing too, I was just about to ask them to cancel my withdrawals.

One interesting observation about this graph is about two months after "Satoshi disappears". At that point a new, and from the looks of it, very efficient miner starts working, with a very similar (identical?) "slope" as with Satoshi miner. Lots of those coins are spent.

Of course, any vertical looking slope will look a lot like Satoshi miner.

Vast majority of those 250000 transactions are going to be small transactions that need instant confirmation, which means they will not be handled directly by bitcoin network. There will be a bunch of payment processors who will provide instant confirmation functionality, and use bitcoin network itself to regularly balance the books between themselves.

Not saying that I believe gold will drop below that, but I don't see how production cost forms any real barrier for gold price. Surely the newly mined gold is only a very small part of the overall supply in the gold market? It doesn't matter if the miners refuse to sell below their production cost, if everyone else is. Or perhaps you meant something else?

Wouldn't it be easiest to keep the original retarget algo (with 2016 block window etc), but just do the retargetting more often so that retarget windows overlap? You could retarget every block if you wanted (or every 10 or whatever).

With system like this, for example Namecoin difficulty would have dropped to "profitable" levels a long long time ago, and it would have suffered only a temporary slowdown.

Is there a downside to a system like this that I don't see? Some problem it doesn't solve or some exploit it introduces? It seems so simple :-)

I think it's likely that he did test it offline first, but in order to easily notice the DB bug, you needed to run out of disk space (or memory?), which he probably didn't. But whatever, I find it unlikely that I can convince you on anything on that front.

Overall I find that you are grasping for straws, trying to find something or someone other than CoinHunter to blame for all the bad things happening around Solidcoin.

Vast majority of people here have zero problems with alternative currencies. They are a good way to experiment with new approaches to cryptocurrencies, and there are some good ideas in Solidcoin, like trying to fix the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment system which has been shown to have issues (though Solidcoin system is not perfect either).

People don't hate Solidcoin. They hate CoinHunter, and all that bad mojo just rubs on Solidcoin. People who don't want Solidcoin to succeed, are usually not against it because they are afraid their BTC investment are in danger, but because they are afraid that some cryptocurrency with a person like Coinhunter in charge might gain some foothold, giving a bad name to us all.

Whether true or not IRL, the online image Coinhunter gives of himself is of someone who is paranoid, narcissistic and delusional. He might be a competent coder, but it's just impossible to trust him on anything, let alone my finances.

AFAIK currency is destroyed only in the beginning to discourage domain name hoarding. Network cost of domain name registration goes steadily down as the time goes on, eventually going to zero.


Something to consider is that what ArtForz actually did was not intended to have the consequences that it had, but was supposed to be more like a proof of concept of more serious attack. What ended up causing all the real problems was not the security vulnerability ArtForz was trying to demonstrate, but a previously unknown (to everybody) bug that caused uncontrolled database writes in a situation like that.


So when you judge the "morality" of someones actions, you should concentrate more on what the intent was, and less on accidental and unforeseeable consequences of those actions. Without that bug, the demonstration would have gone largely unnoticed, and served the purpose of showing the possibility of a more serious attack.

This database bug can be fixed with this patch:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/491

which you can use in Solidcoin as well.. You know, without asking a permission from ArtForz (who ended up fixing the bug for everyone's benefit) or anything.

Heh, I can imagine this pissed you off. Here you are waging your little war on Bitcoin, thinking you are the center of the universe. It must have been hard to notice that Solidcoin had not even registered on Gavins radar.

Well, my reasoning was that the difficulty is calculated from the time it takes to generate 240 blocks, and that time varies +-20% all the time. However, you are correct that limiting increases to 2%, 6% and 10% stabilizes the difficulty, but it stabilizes it to a level below where you would get a block every 3 minutes. But apparently that's what is wanted?

I still claim, that difficulty drops can be quite big just from the variance, if not as big as in my example (33%), but say 20%. It certainly will not "maintain that level within 2%", or I'm completely misreading the source. However, since those kinds of drops are corrected very fast, it might not be a problem in the end.

Don't know if this issue has been already brought up, but as I understand it, there is a problem with SolidCoin retarget algorithm that will manifest itself when the difficulty reaches the hashrate. Since it considers only the last 240 blocks when retargeting (correct me if I'm wrong), there will be huge fluctuations in the difficulty level. I ran some quick simulations, and you can expect the difficulty level to regularly fluctuate between +-20% where it "should" be, and more than that in some rarer cases. So every once in a while, you'll have situations, where the "real" difficulty according to the "real" hashrate should be 10000, but SolidCoin target is actually 12000 and drops to 8000 with one retarget (33% drop), and all this while the hashrate is static.

It's certainly not a showstopper, but hardly what I would call optimal, and something to consider if you are planning on copying retargetting from SolidCoin for your own project.

If I were to design a retargetting algo, I would find the first block that has a timestamp a certain amount of time in the past (say 2 weeks), see how many blocks were generated in that time, and adjust accordingly and often. Not the other way around as it's done in all current chains.

I'd be surprised if anyone in the mainstream media ever even hears about these dime in a dozen forks.

Why?

I believe that vast numbers of Bitcoins were found and lost in the early days, because back then, people were mining just because Bitcoin was an interesting technology project. When they lost interest and quit mining, wallets were easily lost in OS reinstalls etc. because why would you bother backing up a bunch of funnymoney?

So I predict that a big portion of those early Bitcoins that have not been moved, will never ever be moved, because the wallets are just lost.

You forget that you get almost twice as many Ixcoins as Bitcoins per block.

So when you take that in to account, difficulty ratio is about 0.000282133, and Ixcoin seems to be trading a bit above that right now. So it's still slightly more profitable to mine Ixcoins. That said, I don't see it continuing for too long. Was a fun day mining :-)