I've been watching flappy circling the drain. 

Which pandacoin are you talking about?  50Cent_rapper's original (PAND), Wolong's/Sevoque's (PANDA), or Slaithe's (PND)?

Pandacoin is kind of a screwy situation given that there are three of them.  50Cent_rapper's appears to be a sincere effort.  Wolong's appears to be a market-manipulation scam.  And Slaithe's appears to be a reaction to Wolong's scamming attempt. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=399127.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=460037.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=464476.0

Are there two different cryptocurrencies both using the name Aircoin and the ticker AIR?

I'm seeing it with market cap $40526 on cryptocoinrank and at the same time with market cap $5559 on coinmarketcap.

Same thing with AIMcoin, ticker AIM.  on cryptocoinrank it has market cap $58823 and on coinmarketcap it's $13418. 

If they're talking about the same things, there must be a terrifyingly inefficient market somewhere.... 

Down by 90% from its high, but yes, you're right. 

Hmm.  I'll go look at notes and see if I can figure out what went wrong.

Okay, in some trivial sense all lost bitcoins are already excluded from the altchain, because any corresponding altcoins can never be claimed. 

But the important thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that there needs to be some point in the future when potential investors can stop caring about whether or not they still include those potential coins in their analyses.  The simplest way to do that is with some kind of claim window, where if it's not claimed by some particular time it won't be claimed, but that's certainly not the only way to do it.

F'rexample you could also do it with an inflationary model.  Let's say some altchain spins off all twelve million or whatever it is right now Bitcoins, and then sets up a block reward that distributes 1.2 million new altcoins this year and increases it by ten percent annually.  In the long run, they converge on ten percent money supply inflation.  And that means that the unclaimed coins become a ten percent less significant part of the money supply every year.  Meaning, seven years approximately to halve their value, another seven to quarter it, another seven to make it the eighth part, and so on.   So, thirty years on, the unclaimed coins are such a small fraction of the money supply that they don't mess up the analysis any more.

Or you could have a diminishing claim, where the longer it takes someone to get around to claiming their coins, the less they actually get.  That's essentially the same idea, just using a different set of numbers. 

I share your pessimism as regards the odds of completely getting rid of web wallets, exchanges, brokerages, etc.  It just won't happen. 

But there is still a lot we can do in that direction to take away opportunities to steal.  Businesses that are mainly doing some kind of accounting etc, don't require anything that intrinsically has to take place off the blockchain.  So while the blockchain can't enforce that, eg, someone gets a pack of gum or a pizza or a suit or something physical like that when they pay bitcoin, it could enforce that, eg, someone gets a futures contract or a bond or a stock or a title deed or something.

So while the blockchain can't be extended to cover commerce in physical goods, it could be extended to cover most uses of an investment portfolio and wealth management.  And in doing so it could remove well over half the opportunities to steal currently endemic to the system.

I voted yes. 

It's bad enough to have the 'lost coins' issue with Bitcoin, where investors never know whether those ancient coins are dead or just resting.  I don't want to import dead coins and lost keys into an altchain.

Ultimately what we have with bitcoin is the blockchain protocol.  

It means that whatever rules we all agree to (at least about things that can be checked via the blockchain) can be enforced by the laws of mathematics.  No temporal authority is required to prevent violations of those rules.

But there is a difference in kind between that clean, simplistic mathematical universe and the physical and contextual universe that everybody actually lives in.  

Banks etc. exist in a world of temporal security.  The mechanisms that (mostly and most of the time) prevent them from stealing their customers' money are all about laws and licensing and legal conformance and barriers to entry and professional accounting practices and, yes, courts and fines and possibly even jail time.  

Both of these models are limited.  But for particular subsets of applications, both work.  So far the biggest problem is that the handoffs between them have been abysmally bad.

It's the brokerages and exchanges and banks, err, excuse me I mean online wallets - people who handle other people's bitcoin - who have been the biggest stealers of it.  At some point it comes out of that mathematical-security world because someone is holding bitcoin on behalf of someone else.  And that is where it gets stolen, so far because it's not going from there into an environment with a solid framework of temporal security.  

So we need to figure this out.  Either we need businesses at the endpoints (meaning brokerages and exchanges) that are fully a part of that regulatory framework, or we need to extend the mathematical security model until those businesses have nothing left to do and can be done without.  

You may believe I'm wrong.  You may even believe I'm disrespectful.  That's okay, I don't mind.  You might even be right about that last; if you keep putting that giant stupid-looking graphic into all your conversations, it's true that I will get increasingly disrespectful. 

But so far I've been treating you as though you might not be a scammer.  That's basic, minimal respect, since I haven't seen you actually trying to trick anyone into giving you money, which is what scammers do. 

And now you are calling *ME* a scammer?  I have not been developing a coin with a premine,  I have not been developing a coin that could turn out to be a pump & dump, I have not been trying to trick anyone into giving me money, and I haven't been promoting anything that even *MIGHT* be a scam. 

Where the hell do you get off with this?  And how do you think this supposed scam you've invented for me is supposed to make me a profit??  If I wanted to call you a scammer, I can think of a dozen ways you could trick people with POP and make a profit off of them.  I haven't seen you actually doing those things yet, but it doesn't mean you aren't.  You're the one holding the most probable method for scamming, not me.

I was thinking the other day (a dangerous pastime, I know...) and I think I've come up with a way to address cryptocurrency volatility.

1. The hashing power allocated to producing a block in any proof-of-work altcoin, as a proportion of total hashing power available, is approximately proportional to the market value of the coins awarded for hashing, as a proportion of total cryptocurrency value that can be produced by that hash power.

2.  Because the hash rate is visible in the block chain (via difficulty and timestamps) and the total applicable hashing power changes only fairly gradually, that means the block chain has a fairly strong indication of the current value of the cryptocurrency relative to the basket of other cryptocurrencies that could be mined using the same hashing infrastructure.  That is, if the hashing power is spiking much faster than new hashing power is being manufactured, it means the market value of the coins a block produces is spiking, and if the hashing power is dropping, it means the market value of coins you'd produce per block is dropping.

3.  So it should be possible to use this information to stabilize the value of a cryptocurrency, preventing giant spikes and troughs by adjusting "interest rates" paid on short-term securities.  These short-term securities can amount to just spending your 'stake' input to an output that is time locked a few thousand blocks in the future, and getting paid a small amount of "interest" for doing so.

This wouldn't get any blocks made without a proof-of-work component, but it could be a good way to split coin rewards between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, while stabilizing the value of the cryptocurrency. 

One caution about this idea; I haven't worked it out fully yet, and this is kind of circular in that you'd be relying on observations of miner's behavior to set a rate which miners could profit from.  So you'd have to be very careful to avoid creating perverse incentives for someone to manipulate short-term interest rates by reallocating hashing power in a way that destabilizes the system.

I say make just make up a nonce word and go with it. 

Relipmocoin!

Because it doesn't mean anything!

I mean, really, it's hard to be original when you're trying to mean something.

Of course, the claim window works however the guy doing it wants it to work.  If he excludes bitcoin addresses that haven't been used in the last year from his 'spinoff' that's still completely fair, because it's still changing nothing ex post facto; that's just the way that particular spinoff coin works.

Okay, I have to ask:  what's the hash rate on a Raspberry Pi if you set generate coins to true?   

How is solving a problem by watching to see what the community does, not "using the community to solve the problem?"

If you're spending a large output, and it's been sitting in your possession for a long time, your transaction will have a  high priority.  If the priority is higher than all of the other potentially-free transactions, it will usually get into a block immediately, even without fees. 

I recall this happening once last year when some very old coins moved - there was a single input of well over 1000 BTC, which was more than 18 months old at that time, and the transaction was sent with no fee whatsoever.  Of course it got into the very next block, because the priority was in the millions! 

In practical terms if I have a simple transaction that uses over 100 bitcoin-days, I assume it will go through immediately whether I add fees or not.

I think the way to do fee discovery is to use data mining.  

I mean, given a set of assumptions and conditions, we want to predict the correlation of fees and delays?  We should be monitoring what the relationship of fees and delays is in correlation with those conditions.  IE, instead of getting miners to promise a particular behavior, we should be monitoring what miners actually do.

Important conditions are probably

• number and size of tx currently not in a block
• recent hash rate to difficulty ratio (block rate)
• the priority (bitcoin days destroyed) of the current transaction
• time of day (I bet strong repeating cycles show up on a 24-hour frequency)
• time of week (I bet strong repeating cycles show up on a weekly frequency too)

Anyway, set up a statistical regression on those variables and I bet that with you'll get a good solid basis for statistical prediction.  

The only reason I went and got the coingen list in the first place was because it was one of relatively few lists of cryptocurrencies that wasn't getting erased as the cryptocurrencies died.  I figured if I didn't look at the coingen list, I was going to miss several. 

A developer works with a codebase, and whether or not he just downloads one and does the rebranding himself, or spends a few bucks to get coingen to do that first little bit of the work, doesn't make any difference.  It's what happens after that (if anything) that makes it a non-clone.

Anyway, it seems like a lot of people are reading a hell of a lot more into a note that something was started at coingen than that note actually says.  I don't know what it means to them, but when we get a situation where someone who actually paid them the money for a codebase then claims he didn't, or wants it known that he wasted his money and what he eventually developed wasn't derived from that purchased codebase, I'm just baffled.  It doesn't matter what you start with, it matters what you end up with. 

Also I keep hearing things like "It couldn't possibly be a coingen coin because the distribution function doesn't work like coingen's!"  And I'm thinking, duh, lots of cryptocurrencies' distribution functions don't work like the distribution functions in the code they were based on.  That's what developers do, they change code.  If you're working from some kind of assumption that because coingen was ever involved, then the code downloaded from them is unalterable, you're failing to comprehend what code is in some profound way.  That's completely not the way it works. 

So anyway, I want to ask; what the heck does coingen-generated mean to you all?  'Cause if most of you are thinking wrongly that it means nothing else was ever done to the code or that no further modifications could have been made?  Then I shouldn't be putting it there in the first place because even though it says nothing of the kind, people are reading it in a way that's misleading them. 

Oh, come on.  "has traded above a market cap of $5K for one hour out of the last week" is not nearly the same as "alive and well."  Why did you get me to waste my time going and looking at that?  Heck, why did I fall for it?

If something isn't just circling the drain, it can stay above the mark for 90 days.  If it hasn't, it's not coming off the list.  These are the ground rules here: If I was taking crap off and putting it back on every time it transited the line I'd be spending my whole life on this. 

Heh.  True, some get on a bit early due to random fluctuation. 

But seriously, do you think *anything* on this list isn't on a one-way trip to the trashcan?

The $5K mark is there mainly so I don't miss them before they're gone.   And, well, because anything which has fallen that far is not really all that likely to recover. 

I expect Hobbitcoin to come bouncing back down -- and if it doesn't, I'll take it off of there eventually.

In other news, Hobbitcoin appears to be on a pump.  It has risen %2540 in four days. 

Seriously, go for it.  Honestly, I wish you well.  You don't need my permission, my support, or my optimism about your chances.  If you've got what it takes to succeed, then succeed.  I'll be taking it off the "dead and dying" list when it isn't "dead or dying" anymore.

I don't think it's likely, but understand that there is zero ill-will here except toward the all-too-common genuine scammers who have left a legion of dead alts in their wake. I have no vested interest in your failure, and I'm genuinely enthusiastic about anything that's good enough to displace Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc.

And no, I haven't reviewed the source code of each and every one of the two-hundred-odd cryptocurrencies on my list.  Usually I only take trouble to inspect something that closely if I'm pretty sure something is actually a scam and I'm looking for facts about how the cheat worked.