I have explained many times by now that the best way to create a new coin as a variant of an old coin^* is to set the cutoff date well in the future, and shortly before the actual launch of the second network (theoretically at the same time but practically a short interval might be preferable).

Anyone buying CLAM before the launch of the other coin would also receive the new coin, so there is no loss of trust or value. Regardless of which coin thrives (or if by chance both do), anyone who bought in before the split would receive the same value.

This approach is economically the same as forking the chain with an update, without the technical risks associated with transactions that are portable between forks. The trade off is some extra effort needed to get buy in from exchanges and other participants to handle the split correctly, but this largely substitutes for the effort necessary to get consistent upgrades across the entire network for a fork. So in the end, especially for a smaller coin with only one exchange and a few sites, the extra effort seems small.

Once the new coin does exist, then both would trade independently and people can buy whichever one they like (or both or neither).

Of course, I've also said that anyone can create any coin at any time, or for that matter fork code and create update clients that fork the existing network if they want (as long as they can get people to use their code). So following my proposed procedure is not and can't be made mandatory. It just has the least negative effects all around.

^* Except when it is clear that virtually everyone prefers the variant in which case it is perfectly fine to make the change "in place" on the existing network.

Yes that is right. The block time and 60 KB full reward zone (minimum amount of transactions allowed in each block without any penalty) can't be changed without a hard fork, so that will wait until April or so. Most of the features of 0.9 will be active right away though.

Stock in major public corporations is more liquid than cryptocurrencies (particularly smaller alts) and fees are as low or lower. Smaller corporations and private corporations are less liquid to illiquid of course.

I don't understand the relevance of what you are saying though. If stock or coins change hands, nothing about that process allows stockholders or coin holders to exercise authority over the corporation or the coin network itself. All that happens is one owner is replaced by another.


I don't understand this paragraph at all


You are entitled to disagree of course, but everything I said about the mechanism by which blockchains function was correct (as far as I know -- if someone spots an error please point it out so I can correct it).


I don't know what points we are debating. I'm making observations about how blockchains function and the dangers of 51% attacks.

Most of the soft forks I know about have happened in the context of Bitcoin where the typical threshold for activation has been 95%. This serves as a proxy for widespread, essentially universal, acceptance and adoption of the change. In no case of which I am aware has a contentious change been made as a soft fork prior to widespread acceptance of the change.


I already answered this. You don't like my answer. It did not involve shills on bitcointalk.

1. The block time change that was previously done for AEON has informed the work to change Monero.

2. There was a bug fix to align the depth requirements between spending outputs and mixins (avoiding a potential privacy leak) that was done in AEON and then merged into Monero for 0.9.

I don't remember any others at this moment, but it's possible I forgot something.

No, I expect well before that. There are already some beta binaries and there are tests going on this week to try to finalize a release candidate.

Here's the chart I remember. It looks like eliminating the lottery slightly increased the overall staking rate. I don't see any evidence that staking during the lottery period was an advantage compared with after the lottery period. But I could be wrong, and I'm relying on information that is posted to the thread. I have not checked any of this myself.

SuperClam, coins are not corporations. In the latter case, there is a legal right to elect a board, which in turn gives control over management and ultimately the assets (shareholders can even vote to dissolve the corporation, which gives them access to the assets directly).

There are no such powers that exist on the part of coin holders. There are really only two things that coin holders can do:

1. Stake according to the network rules and their own individual best interests and without collusion, which makes the network secure provided that the stake is adequately distributed.

2. Individually or in collusion with other coin holders, stake maliciously and "51% attack" the network. This can include: a) blocking all transactions in a sort of doomsday button to destroy the coin, b) selectively blocking transactions (and/or blocks) to gain some advantage for the attacker, c) rewrite the chain to perform double spend attacks.

This idea of coin holder voting is creating a system that facilities and to an extent legitimizes #2. It makes the entire system less secure and therefore ultimately less valuable, even though it may seem expedient in the short term for the purposes of "governance", especially if you happen to be in the majority.

As I've already stated earlier, the best ways to make changes to a coin are:

1. By overwhelming consensus of the community (such that there is no significant opposition and everyone just goes along with the change). This obviously does not exist for rewriting the digging rules. It does often exist for other changes that are routinely made to coins such as bug fixes, tweaks to transaction fees, some forms of new features, etc.

2. By creating a new coin with different rules such that the people can decide via a market process which to support. This requires permission from no one since anyone can create a new coin.

You can do that with simplewallet and a remote node. You give up some privacy but that will likely be the case with any lightweight wallet as well.

There is no "inflation" being introduced by the digger. All of those CLAMs already exist on the blockchain, and the fixed (other than staking rewards) supply number is listed on the OP. It hasn't changed.

The only thing that happened here is that investors had an incorrect view of how many of the undug CLAMs would be dug, and/or when they would be dug. That view is being reevaluated and with that reevaluation the price is adjusting accordingly.

That and perhaps all this discussion about wiping out peoples CLAMs has spooked the market and increased the likelihood that the community will fall apart and the coin will fail altogether. I don't know to what extent that is a driving the price action, but it is certainly consistent with it.


If the economy of CLAM doesn't grow a lot the whole thing is stupid. Most of the active supply is in the JD bankroll. A (supposedly) decentralized cryptocurrency used to largely support a single site, being secured using proof-of-stake where nearly all of the stake is under the control of one individual is pointless nonsense.

The only good reason to support this project is in the hope that its economy does grow to where this currently-pointless nonsense is in the past.

The idealism isn't naive if it is the only thing that gives something potential value. Yet another politically manipulated economic system is really quite worthless when the world is full of them already.

I'm not sure why you think going "down with the ship" is a certainty here at all. Many have expressed the view that CLAM will survive the digger and ultimately thrive. Obviously, not everyone agrees with that. I don't even have a view on whether it will survive or not (though ultimately I believe most coins won't so we may be disagreeing only on the path to failure, not the eventual destination). I do believe that if it survives without manipulation it will be worth far more than if it survives with manipulation.

As for the lottery, as I understand it, the rate of staking (per day, per week, etc.) was essentially unchanged in eliminating the lottery. I may be wrong about that as I haven't checked the math, so if I am wrong, please correct me. That is enormously different from the idea of wiping out or significantly impairing 95% of the supply. Furthermore there is no "bug" or "expliot" having to do with digging that would motivate a fix. It is working exactly as designed.

There is a solution. Don't make changes to the fundamental economic properties. Treat a coin as an experiment where these rules are "set in stone" to quote Satoshi, not subject to the whims of a potentially-tyranical (sort of) majority. If the rules turn out to be bad rules, the experiment fails and the lessons of that failure can live on in a new coin (presumably with somewhat different rules). This is messy perhaps, but less messy than all the other alternatives.

That's the whole damn (important) thing that Satoshi invented as an alternative to a politically-manipulated economy. It is very underappreciated apparently.

This is largely incorrect, and if you are operating under this misunderstanding you will eventually break the coin and destroy its value entirely.

You can not have any significant minority running an incompatible client or you will have transactions that confirm on either or both chains and it will never be possible to agree who owns which coins. The coin will be entirely destroyed.

A majority of network stakeholders is useless for determining the network rules. You must have either near-unanimity on the rules, or any disagreements must be resolved by creating a new coin on a separate network.

I can't argue against the idea of conducting polls, as that is just free speech, but if your idea is to deploy a contentious change to the system (and taking away coins away from people who own them will certainly be contentious whether voted for or not) on the basis of a majority vote, then you are misguided.

In all seriousness on the AEON vs BBR thing, I think both coins are seriously undervalued and BBR is even more undervalued. Just take a look at the crap coins on the list that have similar values, some with zero development or community, dead/abandoned ANN threads, etc.

Both coins should be in the top 50 to top 100 right now IMO. Exactly which should be higher than the other I don't know. Both have good potential to do well in the future, so we'll just see how it works out.

Quite a few coins have been removed from Poloniex even while it has been inactive. I know this because several people who weren't able to run the wallet asked me to hold their coins from Poloniex and then send them to Bittrex. I'm sure there are others who were able to do it themselves. Of course I have no idea how many are left, but I doubt it is a huge amount.

When banks create money of thin air doesn't go proportionately to the people already holding the existing money, it goes to some insiders when then profit on distributing it at a higher price. The two are completely different.

The only issue here is whether it is legitimate to exclude the people who already own undug CLAMs. I don't believe it is but clearly some people do believe that, so let them create their own coin with their own idea of what the rules should be.

4 letter names > 9 letter names?

I'm pretty sure I said well in the future. People don't necessarily sign on every day or even every few days. Give them some time to learn about what is going to happen and decide what if any actions they want to take.

I mostly agree that doesn't make a huge difference and I did say earlier that if creating a new coin you can choose whatever distribution you want, but I do see a significant issue in terms of uncertainty and turmoil with coins on Poloniex. Until Poloniex makes it clear what they are going to do, people have no idea what it is they actually own.

X11 was launched crippled. The hashing library used was and is very unoptimized, and there was zero basis for believing it would be GPU resistant at all. The algorithm was in fact very GPU-friendly (all of the hash functions were already known to be easy to compile on a GPU) and Evan even stated this shortly after launch. Yet there was no optimized CPU miner or GPU miner at launch. Private GPU miners were rumored to be on the network (probably correctly so) within weeks.

Just choose a block well in the future and let the market sort it out. People who want to buy or sell before the cutoff will do so. People who want to wait until after and just buy or sell one of the coins can do that. That is completely fair to everyone. No one gets any particular potential advantage from the choice of the block.

Furthermore it is also important to get a statement from participants such as Poloniex about what they are going to do, again well ahead of the cutoff. If they are going to honor the spin-off by retrieving the new coins and assigning them proportionately to customers' accounts people may want to take completely different actions than if they are going to keep the new coins for themselves (sounds silly perhaps, but another exchange actually states that explicitly in its Terms of Service) or not claim them at all.