so, i'm writing the electrum-based block explorer myself now, mostly out of boredom (and also due to lack of volunteers).
the code is a major mess and still WIP (eg. no search box and no address handling so far), so consider this an early alpha preview.

http://yacoin.unsha.net/

PS: i know that i suck hard at writing javascript

This one claims to support YAC: https://github.com/ahmedbodi/stratum-mining/
https://github.com/moopless/stratum-mining-litecoin/issues/29

just a reminder: i'm still looking for buzzword javascript web dev to do a simple front-end for a block explorer. (jquery, angular.js, twitter bootstrap or whatever you prefer; websockets required)

and there i was hoping it would be up & running by the end of the month, silly me

TL;DR: no

The long answer:
I don't think so. Server can't lie to you about blocks (it's computationally infeasible, similar to 51% attack). You as a client can always verify the transactions provided by electrum server by following their history back to the coinbase transaction (though a simple electrum wallet does not do this, it just blindly trusts the server, which is ok for just a wallet - but to generate a block AND have it accepted by the network, you need to be 100% sure). Transaction hashes from a block are connected to the block's hash through the merkle tree hash, so you can verify that the list of txs provided by the server really belongs to a given block ('cause a block "can't" be faked).

(This would kinda require you as a client to keep a few full blocks somewhere for quick reference as it's impractical do re-download the same block over and over again while verifying a single tx's history. Potentially, the client can have a trusted checkpoint hardcoded and not check history before that, which would speed things up even more.)

So, if the server can't fool you into something that's wrong, it could try simply denying service to you - ie. pretending that the current network block height is just 123 while the real network is already on block 500. The solution for this is also quite simple from the client's perspective - just do a little of p2p communication with a few random peers (provided by eg. dnsseed server, or from its own cache or something) and just asking them for the number of blocks they've got (quite simple). And if the server has a lower height than the random peers agree on (needs filtering as even a peer can send you a bad number), then either it's stuck on a bad fork, lagging or lying - either way, a bad idea to use that server for PoS mining.

As for the lagging problem, the possibility that the PoS blocks you mine will be orphaned is somewhat higher than if mining with a full node - tho it's not as bad a problem for PoS, really - you can simply reuse the coinstake (ie. try again) a few times within a certain time period (and also, it's not like you don't have whole 2 months of time to collect your interest).

However, I think of it like the PoW mining pools we have today - with a bunch of electrum servers, you can choose your "PoS pool" (it can be automated) and just trust that it doesn't tell you bullshit (you just validate the chain work and txs of interest, and the standard electrum client already does that). This saves you as a client a lot of work, you don't have to connect to p2p nodes (which can even be impossible from the internet connection you're on - electrum was designed to also work over heavily restricted connections by utilizing eg. the http port 80 for its protocol and most firewalls allow at least that). You can also check with other servers whether your PoS block has gone through the network successfully. Or even utilize more than one server at a time, whatever.

Although the server does not seem to have an incetive for you to PoS mine, it's not quite true. It can either choose to serve you a lil' bit of valid data OR a thousand times more data for you to verify everything yourself (which costs the owner of that server performance and bandwidth). Even if someone didn't care about the costs and tried to fool you anyway, you wouldn't really be harmed (you can always earn your interest later via another server or even a full node if all the servers were bad for some reason). So a bad provider can't make you lose anything while he loses substantially more resources than by playing fair.

As far as your question goes, centralization of PoS mining would IMHO be something like one server with a big wallet (like a bank) where a lot of users send their money to accumulate interest. While the electrum server has absolutely zero control over your funds/interest and you can always effortlessly switch to another server for whatever reason.

whew

just FYI - we now have dns seed code available for yacoin. however, i can't run the server myself on the same VPS block explorer is running (amazon won't let me access the dns port from outside for some reason even though i enabled it in all firewalls). so, if anyone has the resources to do it here's the link https://github.com/saironiq/yacoin-seeder. you don't need anything fancy, really - just access to your domain's authoritative NS record and a linux box, the daemon itself is VERY light on resources

FYI #2: i'm working (again) on bringing electrum (with a twist) to yacoin. merged in latest upstream commits from electrum-server and i'm now testing it (had some problems with buggy rpc interface of yacoind >.< ...it's solved worked around now, hopefully). besides just changing a few bits i added a few methods to the ones the server exposes, so it's now possible to create an entire block explorer based on electrum (even with graphs and stuff) - that means my explorer will be getting an overhaul soon-ish that would make it lightning fast (at least i hope so lol). now the bad news: the client side of electrum got a lil' more difficult as of version 2.0 to port over to yac, so i'm looking for someone to help me with it (though it's mostly "gui" work, i think the hardcore pieces i've written earlier can be reused). AND after this bit of bad news comes some GREAT news: with the server interface enhancements i've made it should be possible to PoS mine directly from a thin electrum client (though it's definitely not the best way to mine... but at least you don't need slow client with big blockchain. the worst thing the server can do to you is not broadcasting your block, but that can be worked around by broadcasting it yourself by getting active node IPs from a dnsseed server )

FYI #3: i'm looking for a web developer/javascript wizard to create a front-end for an electrum-based block explorer (something like blockchain.info with fancy live block/tx streams and whatnot). if you're interested, shoot me a PM!

sure, here's a short FAQ

Q: OMG I GOT 50x LOWER HASHRATE WITH YAC THAN I HAVE WITH LTC!!!!1
A: don't look at hashrates, compare your daily profits (learn2math)

THE PRICE OF YACOIN

IS TOO DAMN LOW

 

TL;DR: unlimited

reasons:
* no block reward halving as in bitcoin, the reward is simply inversly proportional to current difficulty (max possible yearly supply growth is 52`596`000 coins)
* proof of stake minting also increases the total coin supply (at a max possible rate of 5% per year for the whole network)

so the worst-case scenario (inflation-wise) for a one year period is a supply growth of roughly 52.6 million (lowest possible PoW difficulty) + 5% of all previously minted coins (everyone is just hoarding and PoS minting)

(the calculation above does not account for interest generated from coins minted in the "current" year for the sake of simplicity)

however, the maximum amount of coins that can be sent in a single transaction output is limited to 2`000`000`000 coins (defined in the code as MAX_MONEY constant - so I assume some people incorrectly assume that's the coin supply cap )

or, you know, you just have to wait for the blockchain to actually download
 

Oh how I hate ubuntu... I guess it broke after I updated some packages. Will fix it in a bit.

As far as making the explorer faster goes, well... It's not an easy task as the Abe block exporer source code is a nightmare performance-wise. There's no proper caching, everything is recalculated from raw data on every single page load. Adding caching proved fairly difficult as the code is just not modular enough, so I kinda gave up.

looking at your post history you sure have some weird coin tastes.

the code is open-source so you can inspect and compile it yourself.
binaries are just a convenience for the less tech savvy people out there.

wow didn't expect it so fast
great job!

Been there, done that.

https://github.com/saironiq/yaddress

Just needs to be rebranded from LTC.

someone apparenty sold 10k shares at 1 satoshi

handholding, really? 

haha, true that 

doesn't make a lot of sense to me, it's not like the share prices have skyrocketed recently.

my bet is on either a major shareholder's account hack or some fuck-up in the ledger managed directly at lmb-holdings.com (didn't check what the number of shares from public ledger listed there add up to tho, it's just a wild guess)

that said, i'm holding

could be a hacked lmb account and he was trading stolen shares for "clean" ones on havelock maybe? that would explain the lower price

I suggest making a separate thread for the guesses and stating that edited posts will be disqualified (you can see whether a post was edited by mousing-over the post's timestamp).

edit: Huh, apparently that's not always true...

edit2: maybe there's some sort of grace period for editing?  

edit3: nah, still nothing

maybe locking the topic would work? not sure if posts can be edited afterwards, but i suppose not

edit4: finally the "last edited" notice showed up \o/

Why bump this thread if you want it to die, then?