If that were so it would not matter that the bitcoin miners are the coin miners in general, that each and every coin that comes along it is the same miners mining them all.

Thus it would not matter that all the miners all use ASICs, nor would it matter than kids with GPUs in their mom's basements cannot compete at mining.

Kids with GPUs though seem to think it does matter, hmm I wonder why and whether they are, in the grand scheme of things, correct?

-MarkM-

The last I heard, no one had actually implemented any of the methods of implementing proof of stake that seemed at least theoretically to be potentially able to be secure.

That is why ppcoin for example is a hybrid; proof of stake is not secure, and even being hybrid it still apparently needs a centralised potential-attacker who gets to control which branch of the chain to promote as being the "real" one. (Some kind of central bank or whatnot that gets to create checkpoints that the clients blindly accept as correct, or something like that? Much like realsolid's solidcoin except its maybe not a bunch of special nodes doing it but just one guy/company?)

-MarkM-

Whichever spends the most on ASICs, moderated slightly by which is able to generate electricity cheapest.

Also, though, probably moderated by which has miners who are most dedicated as compared to which has more miners who aren't actually in the business of securing blackchains but, rather, are in the business of bait-and-switch mining, in which they mine one chain a while to fool investors into thinking that chain has a lot of hash power thus is more secure, then jump to some other chain, basically switching which chain is actually being secured; such miners tend to be serial bait-and-switch miners, and even sometimes after baiting on one chain leaving the investors in the other in the lurch later go back to baiting one they already baited and siwtched in the past.

Even with merged mining some miners will likely try to manipulate markets by such bait-and-switch tactics, dropping some coin from their merge to drive its price down due to investors noticing its hashrate drop, then after buying up the coins cheap adding it back into their merge...

So having huge transactors who invest a lot in mining operations because they and/or their customers do a lot of transacting on a given chain will probably be helpful, as will having massive holders who invest in mining gear to help secure the coins they hold massive wealth in.

-MarkM-

Remember that mining should not be profitable for most businesses/people.

It is intended to tend toward no profit. Even toward lower and lower wages for the labourers employed to install and maintain the machines, lower and lower prices for the machines themselves and so on.

It needs to be distributed, yes. That means ideally we should try to ensure every nation has some form of cheap electricity so that mining can feasibly include that nation in its distributedness. Maybe that will even lead to better ways of generating electricity cheaply. Some geographical areas though just might not have practical ways of generating electricity cheaply, so might have to resort to renting or buying space or land elsewhere to conduct mining operations.

-MarkM-

But not one that the same people can do that same thing to. Design an ASIC for a new proof of work, get it into mass market stores ready to open sales of it the same moment you release the genesis block or the decrypt key for the client.

Any proof of work that caters to CPU, GPU or FPGA is basically the same deal, the botnets, GPU farms and FPGA farms just run different code is all.

-MarkM-

It is not just theft, I could for example discover when I compare my wallet keys against the blockchain that it was not I who mined those coins at all but someone else.

Until I actually go get those coins I do not know who my machine has really been mining for since last I checked it was really me it was mining for.

Maybe though it would be useful to have an "at time the block was solved" price of bitcoin chart somewhere, adjusted if the chain is re-arranged, so that the value of each block's minted coins can be determined?

-MarkM-

That one sounds problematic. There are any number of reasons why the coins are not worth, in your mining machine that mined them, what any market happens to be offering for someone else's bitcoins already on that market at that time.

You might not even actually have any bitcoins by the time you actually go to move them off the mining machine to somewhere else, let alone by the time you actually get clearance at an exchange to exchange them.

So it seems unreasonable. Until you sell them you have no idea whether they are worth anything at all, they are a digital fiction that might someday turn out to be worth something but then again might not.

Same thing when you "farm" a magic sword or a pile of gold in World of Warcraft. Until you actually manage to sell them they are more a waste of time effort and money than any kind of gain, regardless of how many "exchanges" exist at which you hypothetically "could" sell them or exchange them.

Mining is like growing pork bellies, or milking cows, or growing wheat. Until you actually trade the stuff you won't know if it was worth anything at all.

For that matter how does mineral mining work?

Do coal mines pay tax each time a miner swings a shovel and mines another spadeful of coal?

In bitcoin mining I pour my capital into hardware and electricity (and hopefully into electricity-creating hardware) and someday hope to sell coins for more capital than I spend mining them.

-MarkM-

I thought that how capital gains work is that come tax time you you add up how much you have and if it is more than you had then you pay tax on the difference?

Or actually come to think of it I also had the impression that until you sell, it doesn't even count?

If I own stocks and shares, do I pay tax each year or declare a deduction each year due to its purported market value changing?

Or take for example a house.

I bought a house, fine and dandy.

I do not pay capital gains tax each year when the house changes in market value, nor do I pay capital gains tax when I sell a few hours days or months of the house or a room in the house.

Nor do I pay capital gains when I pull off a piece of its gutter and sell that, nor when I knock down a wall and sell the bricks or lathes or whatever.

I do not even pay capital gains when I mow the garden and sell the resulting hay, vegetables and such, nor when I dig up some soil and sell that, nor when I grind some rocks from the garden into gravel, and so on and so on and so on.

Thus my impression of capital gains tax is that at tax time when I add up how much fiat I acquired and how much fiat worth of goods and services I acquired (such as by barter) and subtract how much fiat (or fiat value in barter) I spent on expenses in order to perform my business of acquiring such things, if my gain/income minus the necessary/declarable expenses is a positive sum I need to pay income or capital gains tax on it. Thus the only burden of bitcoin sales/barter counting as capital gain rather than income lies in my desire to pay lower taxes by mentioning that some of my gain was a capital gain instead of a plain old income?

-MarkM-

This is a non-issue, since people who want hand-holding companies to hold their hands for them will use credit cards or debit cards or similar off-blockchain transaction processing services, they will not deal directly with bitcoins. If they chose to have accounts denominated in bitcoins with such services those services will deal with the blockchain, or maybe even they will act at a degree of remove such as by dealing with ETFs or somesuch.

This whole thread is like complaining back in the days of the gold standard that no one would use dollars because no one wants to have to live in Fort Knox and scratch  their name on which bars in Fort Knox are theirs and make sure no one scratches their name off a bar and replaces it with their own name.

-MarkM-

Two of the fairest coins are CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, because anyone, even with jsut a GPU or a block eruptor, has had years to mine them, even to mine both at once while also mining bitcoins, using merged mining.

Even right now they are still easy to mine though that might not last much longer as people become more aware how insanely vulnerable non-merged-mined coins are thus drawing more attention to the benefits of merged mined coins.

-MarkM-

No way. It is merged mined, so there is no reason to stop mining it.

All the merged mined coins did however have a RAM usage problem which was far more apparent in coins with faster blocks, so both I0Coin and GeistGeld were dropped by some pools that felt their RAM usage to be exorbitant.

I0Coin however found and fixed that problem, and its fix has already now been propagated to GeistGeld, IXCoin, DeVCoin and possibly other merged mined coins. The slower their blocks the less urgency there is in getting around to adopting the fix.

Being the faster block speeds among merged mined coins actually made I0Coin and GeistGeld very important to the merged mined coin family, because by their faster blocks they drew attention sooner to the RAM problem that all merged mined coins would eventually have been forced to notice.

The people who blindly threw away I0Coin and GeistGeld with vague claims that they must have memory leaks did a dis-service to the whole merged mined coin family, project, and research/experiment/development/testing by ignoring the problem instead of delving deeper and deeper to find out what it actually was; their deliberate ignorance would have led to the problem remaining in place until the slower block coins started to notice it. As it is, the slower ones can be fixed long before the problem causes them to use "inordinate amounts" of RAM themselves.

-MarkM-

Capital gains tax is better than income tax isn't it? So being a capital gain instead of an income is actually good news, surely?

-MarkM-

The biggest problem with litecoin and DOGE seems to be the mentality of scrypt miners in general; they seem to be determined to run "bait and switch" scams whereby they pretend to support one coin, momentarily making it look like maybe that coin might have some hope of eventually securing its blockchain, then abandon it for another, in a long stream of serial bait and switch scams.

If either litecoin or DOGE does actually have dedication to securing its blockchain, as in miners who are going to stick to it regardless of any momentary profit that they might for a moment make by abandoning it for some new bait-and-switch scam, then maybe one of them might have a chance; or of they adapt so that both litecoin and DOGE can be merged mined together, so that both can reach decent hashpower levels together instead of each in effect undermining the security of the other.

-MarkM-

That is what p2pool is for.

Hence the wondering which coins have the most p2pool nodes running.

-MarkM-

Block eruptors are dirt cheap, heck I would not be surprised if some folk are giving them away, yet they can still merged mine both CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld quite effectively so long as the short-sighted pools continue to fail to include those coins in their merge.

Little USB plug in miners in general are probably much more affordable for normal folk than GPUs are.

The problem though with distributing mining power to normal folk is that botnets are based on normal folk's computers, so whatever normal folk have on hand botnets have vast amounts of.

-MarkM-

Merged mining helps because you do not have to abandon the coin(s) you are already mining in order to also help secure more blockchains also at the same time in other words to also mine other coins at the same time.

This jumping from coin to coin is an artifact of the failure of the coins to implement the ability to merged mine as a secondary chain.

If the new coins could be merged mined each one a miner starts mining they can keep on mining at almost no cost "forever" so newer coins coming out would not need to undermine the security of the existing ones by luring miners away from them. They would simply compete on features for a place in the merge, then just keep on chugging along forever like Namecoin, Groupcoin, Devcoin, IXCoin, I0Coin, Coiledcoin and Geistgeld.

-MarkM-

Merged mining.

-MarkM-

A promising coin is one that seems like there might be some chance its blockchain can and will actually be secured.

Namecoin for example might have promise if there is any chance that merged mining will become more widespread as margins on mining get tighter. At some point with profit from mining being harder and harder to make, the extra percent or fraction of a percent that one can get by merging could become pretty much the only profit miners are likely to make, at least those who don't have the cheapest electricity on the planet. So maybe merged mined coins, or some of them anyway, might someday have hash rates closer to those of bitcoin. That is more promise than any other coins so far it seems.

Basically some day it might happen that very few bitcoin miners are able to eke out any profit at all except by merging, since only mining bitcoins would not counter the profitability edge that people with slightly cheaper electricity have.

Even then though that would only make up for a rather small difference in electricity cost, unless some of the merged coins also enjoy a price increase relative to bitcoins so they contribute a larger percentage to a merged miner's income.

Thus I am buying I0Coins, DeVCoins, and even - although the question of whether pools will continue to merge them once they are not being minted anymore is a worry - IXCoin, and plan to start also buying NaMeCoin when I have enough bitcoins on the exchange to start into buying that relatively more expensive coin; and am of course merging all eight merged mined coins in my mining.

I would probably also be buying GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld if they were on any exchanges. (Though I can of course by dGRP from users of my Open Transactions server.)

-MarkM-

Primecoin is a botnet coin. Of course it gets dumped cheap, its miners don't have any meaningful expenses to deal with in mining it.

-MarkM-

Or any other coin, yes, even the purportedly ASIC-proof ones.

That is why it is so important to focus, to get such a massive amount of ASICs deployed that even a government would find it hard to deploy enough to attack it.

-MarkM-