No more discord, the bitcoin talk thread does not take replies, and not twitter, no website.
Does anyone know what happened?

My question is about coins that have changed their algorithm midstream, they had one and then changed.
Not necessarily from POW to POS,  but from one type of POW to another.
In the case of the neoscrypt, that is of interest because of the varying block times.

Changing the algo programatically seems easy, but coordinating with Hodlers and mining pools seems a huge issue. Unless it is not.
Trying to find out.

Wondering if there are services that watch for this eventuality?
Or perhaps some code that checks it.
But after the fact, when the attack has happened, how does one decide on a rollback?
To what does one rollback too? And what does that mean exactly?
Telling the exchange to modify the blockchain or giving them a bootstrap?

I someone starts an exchange, or if someone wants to use a new exchange, the fear is that it is an exit scam.
Well, one way to prove it is not is to have collateral in escrow.
Or some government assurance, or some insurance company assurance.

But, that is way too expensive and difficult.
And in the cryptomarket, KYC is not that attractive.

So how can an exchange demonstrate the fact that it is trustworthy?

For a Dash based altcoin, who can create and maintain mobile wallets?
I could probably build one but supporting and maintaining seems a little much.

Yes, the source code exists, but it takes a long time to imagine the whole interaction.
The ranking, the governance concepts, and then the standard mining Pos or Pos.
Everything in one book.
I have not seen it.

By best, I mean good in any way like reliability, speed, convenience.
Sometimes an escrow may be the best way.
But then there are OTC markets.
They don't seem to show up on coinmarketcaps. (they do have rankings for exchanges)

And "easy to find" is another "good" thing about them.

The best deal if you lost cryptopia and need a decent exchange but no premine to spend, so has to be cheap.

There are a few projects on Github that claim to be templates for an exchange. But there is no rating system. Nothing reliable to say if there is a backdoor or some danger. Of course, there is a legal issue, but I am first asking for technical viability.

I know of Peato for instance.

Some big miners come in, put in a lot of has, then go away. Block times can get very high.
I was wondering if some coins have been successful at dealing with this. Either modifying their DGW or replacing it.

I read somewhere that bisq does not allow for trading fiat for an altcoin.
Let us say someone wants to trade for dash or a derivative, pivx perhaps.
Would that require two trades, or just one?

I hear Binance is bringing one online but was wondering about the KYC that it would require.
In General, it seems that the advantage of a DEX is the lack of KYC although maybe that will be changing.
The fundamental problem that people have brought up is the fact that setting up a DEX for their coin seems to be hard.
Are there simple ones out there?

If you have a coin that does not want to use the governance features, has a Dash clone gotten rid of Sentinel? Is it possible?

Cryptopia fell apart. But before it did, it was an easy to use exchange with fairly high volume.
Who is replacing it now?

There are books on how to build altcoins but I don't see any in-depth guidance on how to build a gambling site.
It seems to be all trial and error.
If you know of any technique or site or forum I would appreciate hearing about it.

There are some coins that don't need sentinel and some do.

At some point Dash did not need it, then they started using it. But my question is if your coin uses sentinel, how does one get rid of it.

There is no clear and detailed explanation of what Sentinel does. Now there is talk that it will never be used to do what it was supposed to do.

I have also heard that "once you use Sentinel, you can never get rid of it". I wonder if that is true.

Is there a coin that used to use it and does not anymore. I believe going to POS is one way. But what about POW coins that are dash clones that stopped using Sentinel.

Can one coin read the blockchain of another coin?

Let us say you have a coin that needs the functionality of another coin.
You change it to the code of another coin except with chain parameters matching the old coin.

Let us say, you had a dash based altcoin and you changed your code to match let us say bulwark.
Would the new bulwark based code (proper chains parameters) be able to read the blockchain and move forward?

Or does the blockchain have to be modified first?
If that were the case, in theory, a coin-swap is simply modifying the old blockchain to work with the new coin software.
So, in theory, one could swap one blockchain to be modified to work with another, right?

The final choice (as a novice thinking) would be to be able to read both coin's "file formats". If it is the old format read it this way, if it is the new format (after block x) write it this way.

./linearize-data.py linearize.cfg
Runs fine and reads all the blocks but seems to try to read the next blk file that does not exist.
I do get a bootstrap.dat file but I also get a "Premature end of block data". I can't tell if this is a normal ending to running the script or not.

How does one confirm that a bootsrtrap.dat is, in fact, accurate or properly done?