I'm working on a new alt-coin called Flexcoin.   My work has been in C# since it was first introduced way back around 2001.    So this is my area of strength.  I putzed around in C++ back when it first came out in 1985.   I know things have changed with C++ over the years, namely things like smart pointers and the like.   But I still see C# as having a huge advantage in programmer productivity.   So for me, I'm strongly considering branching Novacoin to create a starting point for Flexcoin but then using C# as much as possible for new development.   

I see one big con of this being that users installs would be larger (requiring Mono if they are not on Windows).  Requiring Xamarin if they are on android or iOS.    But is this really so terrible?   Am I completely barking up the wrong tree and should I learn C++, Java, and objective C?   

Ok so I'm teaching my kid to program, and we came up with this silly little game that combines crypto currencies and pong.  It is a work in progress Have fun.  

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/11609074/#player

This is a thread dedicated to discussing Flexcoin development ideas and planning.

The main Flexcoin thread is here.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260234.msg2776110#msg2776110

If you are interested in helping.  Please post here and let the team know what you'd like to start working on.   One of the main things is developing the Vault, and also Denominated Addresses.

For developing the Vault, we need someone to identify the code in another coin that does Public Address/Private key generation. 

It has been suggested that we also look into Novacoin for energy efficiency because it does both POW and POS.  I like the idea.  I also like perhaps looking into PPCoin for its energy efficiency.   I do like the idea of POS.

Crypto currency is the coolest innovation ever.  But why aren't crypto currencies being adopted by everyone?  The reason is that security is really difficult for the users.  The best security we have right now are paper wallets, and they are really clunky to use.   We need to make the process of securing coins completely painless for the end user.  To do that we need to introduce a few new concepts.  

Vaults:  The first new concept is a vault.   All this is is a device that is always disconnected from the internet so that it can't be hacked.   This is where the private keys and all the coins are stored.   This device can either be a Raspberry Pi, or a computer.   The Vault device needs to be NFC (near field communications) enabled.   This allows the user to take thier cell phone, and touch it to the Vault to top off thier Wallet.  This is called doing a Sync.

But what is to prevent the Wallet from getting hacked so that it tricks the Vault into releasing all of it's coins to the Wallet?  We need another new concept to handle this.

Denominated Addresses: These are addresses which are capable of only holding a fixed amount of Flexcoins.  For example, a 100 Flexcoin address can only hold 100 Flexcoins, or 0 Flexcoins once they have been spent.  There are still regular addresses that can hold any amount of coins but those are for Wallets, not Vaults.

The user logs on to the Vault to set the maximum number of coins that can be releasd in a single Sync.  

Sync:  There are a number of things that need to happen during a Sync. The first thing is to top off a wallet that has a low balance.  The user tells the wallet what balance it should maintain.    Say 200 Flexcoins.  Suppose the wallet is empty.  When the user touches their cell phone to the Vault, the Wallet asks for two 100 coin private keys.  Since this is under the maximim, the Vault sends two 100 FlexCoin private keys.  But we also need the ability to fill the Vault up with coins.   To do this, the Vault has to be capable of generating Public Address/private key pairs.  And it will send out Public Addresses to the Wallet as needed.  

Easy Backups:  The other thing we do is make Vault backups super easy.   Just plug one or a few thumb drives into your Raspberry Pi or Vault computer.  The Vault app will do backups on a regular basis.  The app will be smart enough to automatically keep enough backups over time to ensure full coverage.  Deleting redundant backups.

So that's pretty much it.  A very simple design that is super easy for the end users.  Just touch your cell phone to the Vault device to top off your wallet while the rest of your coins remain completely safe.  Sure you could lose your cellphone or it's coins could be stolen, but someone could steal your non digital wallet too.   The point is that the amount they can steal is small.

We are looking for developers and other contributors to get in on the ground floor and help make FlexCoin a resounding success.  Reply to this thread if you are interested in joining the team.  There is only one requirement to joining the team, that you treat everyone involved with the FlexCoin team and the broader FlexCoin community with civility and respect, whether they deserve it or not.  The team will decide things like if there should be a premine or not, and how any rewards should be divvied up.

SourceControl: https://github.com/Neuromancer56/Flexcoin
Development Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260510.0

I'm used to using cgminer and pools where I just double click a batch file and I can see my hashrate.   But when I read the instructions on how to mine primecoins all it told me to do was go to the help>Debug menu and click on the console menu and type getmininginfo.
That tells me "primespersec" = 122 and it jumps around quite a bit when I reexecute this command.   So am I automatically mining primecoins just by opening the client or is there something more I need to do?

Also with this primespersec rate, is it even worth my time?  Will I get any coins?

When I buy or sell coins on cryptsy, it defaults to the current best price.   However, I usually only buy/sell a portion of my coins at that price.   Then I have to wait for someone else to come along and meet my original order price.  I had heard that Cryptsy was coming out with a market order feature.  Is this what I am using, or is there a feature that allows your price to be automatically adjusted until all your coins are bought/sold (near) immediately?

I'm a software developer with many years of experience, and I have been kicking around all sorts of ideas, but I find it hard to come up with a scenario where I would make any decent return writing crypto coin code.   Heck from what I understand Gavin wasn't getting fully paid for a long time.  If he isn't getting paid enough, how could any other developer expect anything? 

One area is the alt coin arena.   How do the developers get paid unless they pre-mine and they get raked over the coals for doing so.   From the way I see it, it would be better if a percentage of the mined coins continually went to the developers, so no pre-mine would be necessary, and the coin would keep improving.

Is there any area to get into that makes sense?

Anyone interested in participating in a Milwaukee Crypto Currency Meetup?  If there is enough interest, I will set one up.   I think it would be a good way to exchange trading and mining practices,  buy & sell coins, maybe even work on collaborating on setting up a pool or an exchange or doing software development.

I read the standard transaction fee info at  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

But I still have a few questions:
•   What happens if you do not send the full standard .0005 BTC transaction fee?  How long is the confirmation typically delayed?
•   What happens if you send no transaction fee? How long is the confirmation typically delayed?
(Put another way, is it just a dumb idea to not include the standard transaction fee?  Is it possible for a transaction to permanently get stuck in limbo?)
•   Suppose the total coins you need to send exceeds the value of your individual addresses.  If you send out 1 combined amount from multiple addresses at the same time are you charged multiple transaction fees or just 1 fee?  (It sounds like you could easily combine less than 20 source addresses and get away with using just one .0005 BTC fee)
•   When getting change back for sending out too much,  does the change go to a different address automatically in all wallets? (my guess is: no, but it is possible?)
•   Is there a separate transaction fee needed when the change goes to a different address (a new change address) than the original sending address?  (my guess is: no)
•   Can you send from one address to multiple for 1 standard fee with having it be delayed? (my guess is: no)

I'm looking for a way to get a continously updated current feed of the total supply of as many alt coins as possible.  Is something like this possible?  http://coinmarketcap.com/ has this but they are missing a bunch of coins.

I don't want to get into any discussions on whether or not crypto currencies should be taxed.  But I do have a question on what the US IRS tax requirements will be, especially concerning how to report trades of mined coins on exchanges.   Say for example I want to mine one kind of coin because they are more profitable to mine, but I want to convert them into some other coin because I believe that that coin has a better chance of appreciating in value over time.  So I take my mined coins and send them to an exchange, sell them for bitcoins (because that is all the exchange will allow me to sell my coins for) and then I buy the coin I actually want with the bitcoins.  My question is, is any of this taxable (for example as a capital gain), and if so how do I figure out my purchase price for the coins I am selling?  Both my original coin, and the bitcoins?   The bitcoins are a little easier, because I can go to Mt. Gox and figure out what bitcoins were worth at the time of purchase.  But the original coin slowly trickled in while I was mining it over time.  So how do I price that?   Do I have to figure out the price of the coin when I started mining, and when I finished mining and average it out?   This seems to be an incredibly time consuming task seeing as I will probably have lots of transactions where I only have mined say $15 worth of the original coin over the last several days. 

My tax accountant says not to worry that he thinks the IRS might let me treat the exchange of one crypto currency into another as a like kind exchange.   But I wikipedia'ed "like kind exchanges" and it sounds like the IRS only allows this for certain kinds of assets such as real estate, and that it doesn't allow like kind exchanges for stocks and bonds.  And the IRS seems to be hinting that it wants to treat crypto currencies more like stocks and less like currencies.  Can anyone shed any light on this?   What coin price information should I be gathering and when? 

What does seem to be more clear is that when I sell my crypto coins for dollars/fiat or use my crypto coins to buy physical objects that would be required to be reported as income.

I've been used to seeing rewards fairly quickly for mining other coins on coinotron, but much slower response when mining bitcoins there.   I see a round length of 267 h on the site, compared to :3 hours or less for other coins.   Does this mean I have to mine bitcoins for 267 hours straight to get any rewards?  Or in other words how long do I have to mine bitcoins for at a minimum to get a full return on my mining time?   I'm not a pool hopper, but I don't want to mine for more than a day just to get full credit either.  I don't mind if the rewards are delayed but I don't want them to be reduced because I wasn't mining long enough.

Put another way, what does the 267 h round length mean?

There has been something that doesn't make sense to me.   What does my bitcoin client send to the network to let the network know that I am legitimately spending my coins?

Does it just send my bitcoin address?  I doubt that, because I could create my own client that just takes someone else's bitcoin address and send that and spend their bit coins.  

Does it send my private key?  That would at least prove to the network that I am properly entitled to spend the bit coins, but then would let anyone else spend the remaining bitcoins for that address because now my private key is public knowledge.

So I'm guessing a 3rd option happens, it sends my BitcoinAddress, plus some other derived number that lets the network know that my client has my private key, but it doesn't actually send my private key.    Is that right?  But isn't that public now, and can't that be reused by someone else as proof they can spend my account's remaining bitcoins?  So this number must morph somehow for each transaction and can't be re-used, but based on what?  Position in the blockchain?  Time of day, account balance?

I've been using Bitcoins for a while now, and so I thought I'd give litecoins a try.  So I downloaded the litecoin wallet from github but when I installed it and then ran it for the first time my firewall software warned me that it was trying to write to strange places in the registry, namely in the system registry for every component of sql server that I had installed like analysis services, and other suspicious locations like windows workflow and just about every other MS service on my system.  Here's one example: (hklm\system\controlset001\services\bits)  I blocked these registry entries from being set, but now I'm thinking Litecoin might not be worth the hassle to deal with.    Can anyone shed any more light on this?   Does the litecoin wallet software on github contain a virus?  My antivirus software didn't complain, but something just didn't seem right to me.