First and foremost, use sendmany.— I don't understand why you're bringing up bc.i.

Technically you can spend unconfirmed outputs, but it's advisable to avoid it.

For high throughput environments you should also avoid merging your coins beyond the amounts you'll be paying where you can, so that you'll have more outputs to spend.

Yes, an enormous difference, P2Pool doesn't just make the shares 20x more frequent than the blocks: you're credited for a three day long rolling window of shares, so more like a ratio of 8640.... even more than that, p2pool users mine at different share difficulties, when a node gets too many shares in the window it increases its share difficulty to make more room for smaller miners (once you've got a few hundred shares in the window more shares hardly decreases your variance— the variance is dominated by the block finding variance at that point).

The end result would be that the only way to get low variance would be to invest in a hosted mining company. This would not be an improvement over pooled mining.

How did you have the onion address in the first place if you don't have it now?

It was offtopic, posting about DarkCoin and IRS black helecoptors over and over again in an unrelated thread… exactly the sort of stuff that gets deleted every day. Post in the correct threads and your posts won't be deleted.

WRT having contact info for the other coins, the bcn&forks have the nice property that I don't have to constantly change the addresses to avoid reuse as I do in Bitcoin. I didn't have any Bitcoin address listed at all except I have to have one to get the moderator payments from the forum, and so I'm stuck replacing it every time it receives a payment. I posted some design criticisms in the bytecoin thread and I got asked to post a donation address, since it doesn't have the reuse problem. I'd list anything else I tried that didn't have the address reuse problem, at the moment thats limted to the bcn&forks.  Altcoins are a mess but I'm happy to take tips of whatever people want to send. Whoptie do, my profile is open and non-secret.


That things happened which you never expected are all the more reason to not take the concerns or criticism personally.  That people are finding cause to speak out aggressively is because of the promotion other people are doing, ... but you don't control them so you shouldn't worry about it too much.

I'll be glad to look at it when its actually released. I don't have the time or interest to review closed systems.

Your BCT account looks suspiciously like one of the ones that was sold after the bct hacks last year.

Do you have the onion address you were given? Do you still have the bytecoin wallet?

I want you to sha256 all the files you have related to bytecoin and post the hashes, then we can ask further questions about them.

You claim here to have been mining with a laptop, but your posting history doesn't support that, e.g.:

As someone who was there and involved in dealing with it I don't recall any _dispute_, I'm really unhappy about the history revisionism people throw around hwere— it was obvious what needed to be done: there was a chain that was acceptable to all nodes, and a chain that was acceptable to a small minority (which, on quick testing didn't include many major businesses)— because of the consolidation of hash-power around pools the mining deployed software looked very much unlike the systems overall, but even if it had been a slim majority only one was acceptable to all nodes.  Being acceptable to all nodes meant that the issue could be healed back to consensus immediately— as soon as the acceptable-to-all chain was also the longest, the other side would have meant weeks of split consensus as people gradually fixed their software.

Not including the two (IIRC) other OT posts of yours that I outright deleted.

Uh, yea when the coin has no real value to folks and is just a speculative bubble or a speculative hedge... thats what happens. Not my cup of tea at least. As I've said, I normally leave the altcoin stuff alone— except for the rare novel idea, or someone pulling me in for an opinion in one way or another.

I agree that the config change is a hard fork, but the point of my post was to point out that those old versions do synchronize okay, they're just unreliable on reorgs involving large blocks depending on the phase of the moon (really how many BDB pages the transactions being modified span).

That there was non determinism wasn't a surprise. It's not even the first non-determinism, the handling of rewrites on reorgs for duplicate txids was also non-deterministic (behavior depended on which order the node saw a series of forks), which was why it had to be fixed. Absent a formal proof you can't be sure software is bug free— or even with one, considering the bugs that have been found in compcert.

There has never been a single political debate about buggy behavior like that, and I never expect there to be one.  Non-determinism in a consensus system is a fatal error, no one has any impression that it ought to stay. A document also will not reliably resolve non-deterministic behavior, since the behavior that would have been non-deterministic would simply have not been specified in the document.

You can sync up a totally unmodified 0.2.10 node, or initial release if you add a gateway to deal with the checksum on the version handshake. They're just not reliable in the face of reorgs (they'll get stuck on reorgs involving large blocks). If you drop in the one line bdb config change, they're even somewhat reliable (but SLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW).

Fwiw, as far as I know bitnodes.io filters out pre-0.8. There are actually many still running. Though presumably most of the ones that aren't stuck by now have the bdb tweak in place.

I will, if someone remembers to point me to it— ideally if it also comes with a high level design document so I don't have to extract all the behavior from the code (doing so is very time consuming).

As an aside, and apart from the privacy tech—

Whats with the claims here that the subsidy was changed after some millions of coins were created?  Thats pretty damning if true— shades of Solidcoin.

The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year.  If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.

I couldn't figure out what you were saying, thats why I asked.
Because not being open on (or even before, at least in the form of a clear technical whitepaper) day one is bad, but it only gets worse the longer it goes on.

If it were open source and usable then presumably it would have been adopted. Even as an altcoin, if it were something good I'd speak positively of it... even if the system itself weren't open a clear description of the techniques it was using (like zerocash has) in a whitepaper would allow peer review and analysis of the techniques without the crappy competitive landscape of the altcoin ecosystem coming to play. Keep in mind though, 99% of the design of these things in 99% of the cases is straight up copied from Bitcoin. Before anyone is too territorial about their own precious inventions, they should keep in mind that they're just variations of a tune created by giants whos shoulders they're standing on— something only possible because those people released their code and their designs instead of keeping them secret.

Must wouldn't be the right word— should would be more correct.  In systems of money Metcalf's law applies much more strongly than in other things because the value of a money is derived exclusively from its liquidity and from people being willing to accept it. If our hope is that trustless cryptocurrencies are broadly successful, we undermine that effort if we disrupt their network effect over and over again by starting a brand new currency for this feature or that. It's like having to build a separate internet per program, madness. There is no technical justification for it... and it endangers the success of the entire field, at least to some extent.  Some starry eyed folks think this is a revolution which cannot fail, I am more cynical than that. Doubly so when the frequent outright scams and failures discourage people from investing in infrastructure in the space.

If there are actual good things developed outside of Bitcoin, I'm happy to see them.

As an aside— the "so and so has XYZ foocoin" assumptions might be pretty spurious, its completely reasonable for people to sell off large amounts of coins they have while they're nearly valueless— if you have a lot and who knows what the future holds. I know this is true for most people who were involved in Bitcoin early on, it may well be true for other things. Or not.

Bitcoin does not have only one set of developers. There are several complete re-implementations, some with active development bases— something you can't say about (AFAIK) any of the altcoins. Moreover, the permissive licensing of Bitcoin means that you aren't, and shouldn't be, dependent on any particular developers... you can freely fork the code at any point for any reason, and many people have. For similar reasons, people working on Bitcoin generally don't make incompatible changes in the software (with a protocol gateway, Bitcoin is compatible with the very first release, and without a gateway, 0.2.10 from 2010 will still happily synchronize with the network, though old versions are not very reliable anymore).

If you're depending on developers to take an active role in the real operation of you decentralized cryptocurrency then it's not really all that decentralized, it's still controlled by the politics of men instead of math. Having a choice of one master out of many is not really freedom.

Another coin heavy with closedness, its hard to analyze and so you won't see much if any serious review. The initial snippits of code they published had a clear and obvious nothing-at-stake vulnerability, and so far I've not seen any explanation as to how its actually viable at all. Perhaps none of the people who actually understand it speak english, but the people who've recently posted about it in the tech subforum didn't give a positive impression at all to others who are clueful about distributed consensus systems.... but this is totally offtopic here.

Anonymity isn't a binary state, there are degrees. Really strong anonymity is very hard to achieve, and needs more than just some features— it's a lifestyle, even a state of mind. I think perfect anonymity is generally beyond human capability except in very limited circumstances.  _Better_ anonymity, or— perhaps more correctly stated as "better privacy"— is possible... and things like the darkwallet and the other tools that implement coinjoin in Bitcoin let people get better privacy today.  Even stronger privacy is possible, but it comes with tradeoffs, which is why it might not be desirable to implement the stronger systems in Bitcoin even though we know how to create them.

Because some darkcoin pumpers showed up in an entirely unrelated thread and started crapping on other people's efforts in order to promote DarkCoin. I certantly wasn't interested in seeking out this discussion, but since it came to me I don't have any problem in responding to it.

Things can be unfair or a bad deal, or simply a failed offering without being a scam.  I too might too easily lapse into the language of "scam" around here, — and there is no shortage of actual ill motivation in the altcoin space— but I do think more of it is really people getting in over their heads.  Cryptosystem work is very difficult, and Bitcoin seems to have resulted in people thinking that creating this stuff is no big deal since they can just copy the code... but in a cryptosystem the details matter, greatly... a single line changed can have subtle effects that ruin the security properties completely.

Hm?  Thats pretty weird, considering that I've said nothing positive about Bitcoin here, and only positive things about cryptocoins (and proposed cryptocoins) that I have had basically nothing to do with.

There is very little technology development in the altcoin space... but there sure is a lot of deceptive hype from people eager to separate people from their money, no surprise when many of the people creating altcoins hardly know how to work a compiler. Most of the time when there are non-strings changes at all, it's just another worthless ill-considered proof of work variant that hasn't seen a drop of peer review (and which is compromised, e.g. failing to meet its "cpu only" promises, the moment someone does review it). In the rare event that there is interesting technological development that I'm aware of— I credit it— which is why I brought up the bytecoin&forks in the context of privacy technology, even though I think creating an altcoin for it is not a good idea and I'm not involved with its development.

I review many interesting looking things as I have time available, but only if they are open source. I am uninterested in handling anyone's private code, however.

It's getting a little late. This system was created month and months ago, but there is still nothing for me to look at... and now aggressive promoters are spilling into other threads and degrading other efforts that are already delivering or are at least out in the open.  I hope you can understand how this creates a very negative impression from my position.

I can't figure out what you're saying here. Is the idea that I can't say anything at all about something thats closed?

Thats not my position at all. My position is that that a closed source cryptographic currency is inherently centralized (via control of the source), and that experience suggests that most such systems are snake oil (they don't deliver the things they claim to) if not being outright trojans.  Indeed, you can't tell— maybe it's actually great, but great things usually don't need to hide in the shadows. The safe assumption is that they're not great at all.

I've never been involved in Bitcoin to make a profit. If I add up the tips and such I've received for hard technical work I've done it would be well below minimum wage. I've been involved a long time— since before it was worth much of anything, and seemed like an insane dream that it ever would be— because the technology is interesting and important. I've also sold most of my Bitcoins since long ago— was never looking to win the lottery. And yes, I feel completely comfortable looking down my nose at people who showed up late rabid with dreams of effortless profit, at least when they go around promoting zero-sum trades to enrich themselves— not pointing any particular fingers here... I assume the people I'm talking about know who they are.

I'd do mostly what I did anyways— say nothing and see if anything interesting happened. I only piped up recently because of what I perceive to be misinformed heavy handed promotional efforts spilling out into threads where they are off-topic.

No, in fact I already previously _demanded_ they stop promoting it with my name, which they were doing initially.
Yes, you came and trolled all over the CoinJoin thread in a desperate attempt to convince people of your untrue comparative claims wrt darkcoin. While I'm normally content to more or less ignore this hive of scum and villainy that is the altcoin subforum, when it spills over and interrupts discussion elsewhere, pinging my email with report-to-mod hits, it gets my attention.  So… you have my attention now. Lucky you.

Right, this is a centralized approach... a central server can deanonymize people. There may be many of these servers, but you're still trusting them to not be bad.  It may be acceptable— it's probably better than nothing at all.  But things like this is precisely what Ozziecoin is slamming.  Ironically, because the CJ thread post 5 describes how you can deal with the dos attacks while actually being private for everyone:  If the transaction fails, everyone deanonymizes their attempt, and anyone who fails to deanonymize (or is directly shown to be the party refusing to sign) is banned. It's a PITA to actually implement, I agree.

Having something in the protocol doesn't mean that there is an interface to it. I was doing CoinJoins back in 2011-2012, in public too— https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0 ... no software was required for it once the raw transaction interface made it into a release. The point here being that none of this needs an altcoin, yes it may need all sorts of client software and such, but there is no need to invoke another currency except to Make Money Fast.

CoinJoin isn't a service, ... I guess you've pretty conclusively shown you have no clue what you're talking about.

Nor have I promoted Bitcoin here— I haven't said anything positive about it at all.  WRT the Bytecoin & forks I don't really believe that I'm promoting them, they suck in a number of ways unrelated to their privacy features, and the decision to make an altcoin out of it seems shameful and greedy to me... but the privacy part is really quite brilliant, and thats just my opinion as someone who has been working on privacy in this space for a long time.

Nope. I have a bit so I could try them out, and some people have made use of my monero tip address, but its all trivial amounts. I think altcoins are generally inadvisable, and in the long term I have plans that should remove all reasons for having them. I think the promotion or opposition to these things based on profit motives is incredibly sleazy.

I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.

I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.

I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.

You're asserting this but you haven't justified it. I can't counter an assertion because I don't even know what you're saying is centeralized or how you believe it could be co-opted.

Because it's closed source stuff of dubious quality which appears to being deceptively marketed.

This isn't how cryptosystem development works. History supports taking the position that is closed should be automatically assumed to be snake-oil if not an outright trojan until proven otherwise. It's highly suspect. Systems which are good do not need to hide their operation, not if you're going to ask other people to use it.

Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

What are you talking about here?  Nothing I've ever described involved a singular "coinmixing" server.

I'm now suspecting that you've never read the CoinJoin post at all— pointing out that it was part of the protocol was the point. It's also inherently a part of Litecoin or anything else that copied the bitcoin code slavishly. It's a result of how signatures work in Bitcoin. Getting wallet interfaces and such developed for it was the motivation for the CoinJoin post, and now there has been good movement on that front.

Closed source? It's not actually implemented yet, but unlike "DarkCoin" they've extensively described their approach in their academic publications and subjected it to extensive peer review. I'm not a fan of the security assumptions it makes, but the privacy properties the system should achieve are basically perfect.

All cryptographically strongly-private decenteralized cryptocurrencies are going to be unprunable to some degree, which is an unfortunate scalability tradeoff— but considering that no Bitcoin implementation in production today implements pruning anyways, it's hardly a fatal one— at least in the medium term. The tradeoff here is fundamental: if you don't know what coin has been spent, you can't forget any of them.  Of course, a system could have less privacy and things forever out of the anonymity set could be forgotten but thats the tradeoff you get.