So— because I'm in the 'unknown' I'm the "dark pool"?

Awesome.

Adding a TXN fee is a bit unwise because if the chain splits the rest of the network, who will have heard of the txn with the fee via the orphaned block, will include it in their own.  I suppose for 1/2 BTC it wouldn't matter much though.

The difficulty algorithm is linear (well, except for the clamps at 1/4 and 4x). Assuming constant mining power, this means speedup next cycle plus the slowdown on the cycle after it would only match the work not done on this cycle. You come out the same.  And someone defecting from the voluntary slowdown would make more (they'd still get the benefit of whatever shift the slowdown did achieve, plus they'd mine during the 'down' time).

Please stop saying that he's rolling back blocks.

He has not reversed any confirmed transactions or performed any double spends. He's just continually producing a longer chain that includes only his own blocks (and doesn't process transactions).   You can't use a checkpoint to cut him out because he'll just mine from the top of whatever chain is new can out pace that one too.. not unless you plan on distributing a checkpoint for every block, which makes the system not decentralized at all.


DeathAndTaxes is right about the automatic locking— but it's not just one block thats a problem. Say you lock after six.  Say I'm mr. mischievous and your network locks the chain after 6 blocks.  I get (beg, borrow, steal, build) a bunch of hash power and I mine 12 block— six forking left from some point, six forking right.  then I pick a node in Denver and one in Sydney, and I give each one of the forks... what was one currency is now two, as the two halves (closer to denver nodes vs closer to sydney nodes) will never come to agreement— and any coins that existed before can be independently spent on each half.  I can even target this attack to isolate single nodes or groups of nodes... and I can repeat it to fragment into ever smaller groups.

Locking at one would just make it trivially easy to pull off, but there is no automatic locking height which is technically safe.  You can invent fancier schemes, but they all fall to similar race attacks and allow devastating network partitioning.

Thats not true, --merged-url   and I've mined 3 blocks with it.

Because for the low price of 250 BTC per event I could knock down bitcoin world wide as often as I want.

Also— please take care here, Luke did not roll back anyone's transactions or double-spend or anything like that.  He's simply mining all the blocks and not processing more transactions.

As it should be.


Namecoin merged mining with p2pool is solo right now. It works fine but its not pooled. So you get the benefit of pooled earnings for the bitcoin you generate but not the namecoin.

Thank you.  I've worked for years on my rhetoric so that when the new world order came I could at least find a place for myself as a an author of propaganda for The Authority.


The challenges here were previously forseen: This is why litecoin uses an alternative POW, merged mining is the opposite extreme: You don't even have to stop mining bitcoin to mine a merged coin.  Part of the argument for bitcoin's security, since day one, has been that it's more profitable to cooperate than it is to defect. At the introduction point of competitive bitcoin clone which is merged-mined the opposite is true.  This is a class of error that the altchains make over and over again: Starting up another copy of bitcoin without really understanding the first ones.

But to be clear, I'm not talking about paying people not to attack. I'm talking about paying them to be positive instead of indifferent. Paying them to take the currently non-trivial cost of setting up another merged mining chain and mining it with default rules.  There is no reason to mine the obscure currency altchains except for the hope of getting in on a ponzi scheme, or a fringe hope that they eventually mature to compete with bitcoin— and for people who care about Bitcoin's value and credibility those are the last things we want.  If you offed people some bitcoin, that might easily overcome these reservations (after all, chances are no one will hear about any of these alt-cryptocurrencies) and help out providing the startup security that you need.

The problem of indifference making new merged chains trivial to attack exists even without any pool centralization. If you subtract the big pools from the hash rate that CLC reached, what would it take to 50% it?  10GH?   How many CLC advocates are solo bitcoin miners with a merged mining setup that could compete with that?

People who deceive others about the security of alt-chains in order to make a quick buck are rats in mine. Er, well rats is a bit too intense. I think there are a lot of misguided people and a few greedy people (and even more who wonder wtf all this noise is).  ... People who are making all this noise instead of doing something innovative and fixing the problem (hell, I gave several probably adequate solutions) strike me as kinda whiny.  It's like you want your get rich quick without even putting some effort into it.
 

Luke is sometimes little crazy but he's intelligent, committed, straight-forward, hard working, and he usually seems pretty kind. (Though I agree blowing up makomk's work so quickly wasn't exactly kind— but neither was Makomk's surprise introduction, surprise altchain introductions maximize the get-rich-quick factor) I've certainly disagreed with Luke, sometimes I think he's overly pedantic and difficult to compromise with. But he's done a number of good things for the Bitcoin community, and I respect him for it. I think it's ironic that more of the code in CoiledCoin was written by (designed by, argued for, and tested by) Luke than the proponents of that chain.

If that makes me a cronie— well, I've been called worse things. Last week I was a patsy to the state or something. I'd wear you allegation with a badge of honor, but it would be too inscrutable to anyone outside of this bizarre little niche of a niche that some people seem to feel is so important.

I don't believe I advanced any positions there that I haven't advanced here.  Thanks for the retractions of your false allegations, by the way, oh wait. You didn't bother.


My involvement is limited to disagreeing with the people who are very upset about this.  Instead I think this is an interesting and informative exercise in the area of bitcoin and alt-chain security which was conducted in a non-harmful (/minimally harmful, I regret that my positions have upset Makomk) manner, and I hope it will be a useful learning experience for all involved.

T'wasn't me. Though I doubt that is going to discourage your attempted character assassinations in the slightest. Apparently, the ALT-coin way is to ineptly try to make people afraid of being critical, or of pointing out (/demonstrating) the fragility of the alt-coin ecosystem. :-/  

(Not to mention the fact that the thread in question is right here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56791.0)

But as I pointed out before (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23768.msg677202#msg677202), the apparent effort to get away with horrific over the top verbal abuse by attacking your critics and then claiming a conflict of interest simply isn't going to work.

People who didn't do their work in secret have been told that simply going merged had these kinds of risks.  It is not everyone elses fault that you didn't talk to people or realize this for yourself.

Merged mining namecoin has worked out really well, because namecoin already had value— the economics were different.

You could achieve acceptable security in a new merged mining chain at its valuless birth in quite a few ways... off the top of my head:

* Pre-announce it and build excitement well in advance, convince people of its values, make sure it scratches their itches— and then when it switches on there will be a lot of people supporting it and it will be well decentralized.  (Litecoin did a bit of this, but it could be better done than that)

— but doing this will require some real value from the start.  Beating the bitcoin developers out of the gate in deploying new functionality they invented and coded probably won't cut it.

* Start with an initially high difficulty, so that the system doesn't do much (and thus can't be attacked much) until it has a reasonable amount of decentralization.   (bitcoin itself did this, though it could have done more of it— while diff 1 sounds low today, computers and esp. software of _a lot_ faster, though the big MMed hash concentrations make this harder)

* Reduce decentralization initially— program it require frequent signed checkpoints (or something like SC2's alternative blocks) _until_ the system has a high enough difficulty to stand on its own (enough is easy to figure out for a merged chain, since you know how much hash power is out there), or until a certain number of blocks pass.

or

* Raise some BTC and pay existing miners on the merged chain to cooperate, until your chain is big enough and worthwhile enough to survive on its own merits—  setting up a new merged chain has a cost, a fairly high one right now because the support is not well integrated. Your own system didn't work with a lot of popular software. You can't expect disinterested parties to just mine your coin because its easy to do so, — hell, for most pools mining it requires writing new code. So you get only the interested parties and with that comes good and bad.

The last is probably the most interesting, simply because for any decenteralized system which doesn't claim to be a deflationary (or at least effectively deflationary for early adopters in the short-medium term) currency, externally paying miners to support it is probably the only way to bootstrap.

Though, you may note that all of these tactics reduce the ability to pump and dump new clone-coins.  I consider this a ecological feature, rather than a bug.

(To be clear— I don't have reason to think _you_ were trying to build a pump and dump altcoin scam, I don't know what you thought you were doing— but _other_ people in the altcoin community were super eager to participate in one, and I think the evidence is basically clear enough on that. It just turns out that they care so little about doing so, or are so greedy about it, that they won't put in the resources to undo the attack against coiledcoin)

LOC wise the SC code is something like 99% bitcoin code, be realistic here.  And these great rewrites all added security vulnerabilities like the trust block rebindings.

"Secure" depends on your definition of secure. If people think that cryptocurrencies ought to be decentralized, which was the point of bitcoin of course, then SC2 is not secure at all.  Of course, bitcoin has centralization problems now due to big pools— though there is a fix for that maturing nicely. ... if you don't care about decentralization at all then SC2 is a pretty poor implementation of one:   The POW hashchain stuff exists purely to have a decentralized decision. It's a fairly inefficient approach compared to e.g. just having trusted nodes sign transaction records.

What the current percentage of newly mined SC's which are diverted to your 'protection' account? I haven't been keeping up with all the forced changes made possible by the central control of SC.


Do you usually call people who disagree with you a scumbag?


Identical is a liability, not an asset.  Taking the pre-release version of bitcoin and slapping a few tweaks (and far from enough, in fact) and a new name on it creates something which is pretty valueless.  Decentralized systems depend on their users perceiving them as valable in order to expend resources contributing to the system instead of ignoring it, or using resources to make sure it doesn't distract attention from the established cryptocoins.

The more different your system is the more likely it is on both technical and economic reasons to survive and find its niche; the more it's just a stupid ripoff of something else exploiting the liberal licensing to make an identical clone the less likely.   Even the SC2 folks know this: They restrictively licensed their fork of the bitcoin code because they knew that something just like SC2 but run with people with better reputation, or executed with slightly more intelligence (e.g. centralization that really did go away in a meaningful way as it grew) would replace them overnight.

They're not yet because it takes time to do things right, but there is no evidence that they won't be.  We can see here what can result from not taking the time to do things right.

Why would I use solidcoin over paypal?  Both are centrally controlled systems of exchange subject to unilateral whim.  At least if paypal screws me I know where to track them down and can take them to court.  ::shrugs::

So?  Fight back.  Fix your technology.  Raise enough BTC to pay two or three small bitcoin pools which are together larger than luke to incentivize them to merge mine this coin.  Had this been done— hell— had this been announced in advance of going live,  then it wouldn't have been vulnerable to this attack.   

Altchains like this are vulnerable because they have no value, especially initially... Merged mining takes effort to set up— contribute to making it cheaper— otherwise only people who are looking to ponzi a new coin or are looking to burn it down have much incentive to join it.  A little payment money for mining would go a long way to tiping the incentives towards cooperating rather than defecting against it.

If you're going to be an altchain you should innovate— not just copy bitcoin code. Here is a chance.

I'm laughing at CH's claims— as if SC weren't the most repeatedly exploited coin of them all. That it says around at all speaks to the amazing power of hope. Sadly, things don't seem to change.

Woah, you're making it sound like you wrote any of that to begin with. As far as I could tell, your contribution to CoiledCoin was primarily rebranding (and the marketing of it as an altcoin).  The more interesting features should be available in bitcoin because thats where you got them from.  Luke wrote more of CoiledCoin than you did.  I'd repeat the github link to the source, but you've had it taken down.

(Though, yes, sorry for not crediting you with finding the AreInputsStandard bug. Since you reported it privately and gavin just fixed it, it wasn't super-apparent— the the QA of someone using the functionality is very much helpful.)

You're misrepresenting Luke's position wrt legacy transactions, which pretty much shows how little you've actually been following the discussion. Luke has been against P2SH, though after a lot of discussion he came around to the position that if there would only be P2SH in an hypothetical future bitcoin replacement that he'd support pushing to that behavior because it cuts down spam.

I'll part by quoting another popular pool operator on the subject: "Wow, luke defended users from the new altchain while I was sleeping " People here who are irritated that they won't get to make-money-fast on a new altchain should realize that most bitcoin users will not share their outrage.

Yes, but luke intentionally did not do that. And on new and volatile high rate coins, you can naturally expect a lot of orphans.

The purpose of the maturity limit is so that people can't lose money they actually had control over without a really big split. Luke could have created a deep fork, but didn't, because contrary to claims here: he's not a thief or a scammer.

Just in case the people following along at home are getting confused — Apparently, because I have the mod bit set I'm not allowed to participate in a discussion and disagree with people.  At least according to the above.

Meanwhile, the kind folks here are creating all kinds of great reasons to moderate— including outright libelous stuff, and totally offtopic posts (e.g. posts calling for luke to be banned on bitcointalk in the thread about the pool, posts calling for my mod rights, etc).  I guess the idea behind attacking me here is to somehow attack everyone who could demand civil behavior in the hope of making yourself immune to enforcement.   It won't work, but feel free to try.

(and, I give explicit permission for any moderator cleaning up these threads to move or nuke my posts as required to shepard things things back on topic)

I'm not aware of any "undercover on the downlow"  Luke was pretty up front about it.  If he hadn't come right out and said what he was doing I'm guessing that most people simply wouldn't know at this point, I guess doublec would be figuring it out by now (esp given what luke has been saying lately about MM alts).  Obviously you didn't see any big discussion about CoiledCoin because the whole chain appeared out of nowhere a few hours ago with an exchange and such.

The religious thing is tired trolling.