Zetacoin Express has it right. Instant gratification attempts just put you up against all the other no-patience types, all screwing each other in an un-winnable hash-rate-war.

Unless you can find folks who are able to be polite, all restraining themselves to using only one or two cores or such, and don't get noticed by someone with lots of cores or a botnet, or someone greedy who fires up a GPU instead of restraining themselves to a core or two, you end up driving up difficulty, and thus electricity expense, for everyone.

You probably do not want an actual per se "CPU coin" because those are what botnets and CPU-multipools will be raping.

Best is to quietly collect a stable of "abandoned" coins no one is mining, or no-one who wastes electricity using any more hashing power than necessary anyway.

Once someone throws a GPU or ASIC at a coin, everyone else tends to have to also, which is just wasteful. If you are going into a hashpower war, stick to merged mining, so your hashes mine as many coins as possible all at the same time using the same electricity.

The best profit I made was with BBQcoin, during the year that one could mine it perfectly well using just one CPU core. We were lucky that the first person to again point a GPU at it was sensible and on the IRC channel, so we were able to convince him to just use a CPU or two to save all of us electricity. When the coin emerged into the public eye again we made fortunes.

Seriously, if an abandoned coin you are considering would need you to point a GPU at it to get a reasonable flow of blocks, just walk on by. Point your GPUs at Blake256 merged mining pools maybe or something like that. (As they don't have ASICs yet. Basically any algo that has no ASICs and has many coins all merged mined together.) For your CPUs just keep picking through purportedly dead coins. The ones that are only being mined by a few CPUs at the moment you can probably point a core or two at without starting a big hashpower war. Don't throw umpteen cores at it though; if you have 24 cores you should be able to mine 12 to 24 "purportedly dead" coins without driving the existing stealth miners into deciding they are no longer getting a large enough piece of the pie thus it is time to bring the coin back into the public eye to cash in what they managed to stealth mine before some rude barbarian barged in and started a hash-power war...

The goal is to mine steadily for as many months or years as possible before either some idiot barges in with too much hashes driving the costs up or someone gets too impatient and decides to bring the coin to the attention of the public, get it on an exchange and so on so they can cash out the months or years of stealth mining they have already invested into it.

-MarkM-

It would be nice to implement merged mining in Cubits3, especially nice given that we so far have no hybrid PoW/PoS coins in the merged SHA256 family.

-MarkM-

I noticed some FPGAs now had ability to mine Blake256, so thought I should check whether Klondike boards can do that yet?

-MarkM-

Vlad, IXCoin is not going to be perceived as fast, thus not as a fast lane, as its blocks are 10 minutes, same as bitcoin's, I think.

The fast merged mined coins are I0Coin at I think one and a half minutes or so, and GeistGeld at something like twelve seconds, which no public pool merges because its miners would all need new work every 12 seconds!

How fast of a fast lane do you want/need?

Also, a black swan might imply someone thought what you accomplished was a "black swan event", as in a "dark horse contender" and suchlike terms.

Cinnamon, if you are not already a tenured recipient of a DeVCoin share per cycle for being a lifestyle free open source coder who is always working on *some* free open source project or other, get on there. I think it is distinct from the "oh you are working on a specific project, here are DeVCoins while you work on that project" grants.

-MarkM-

P.S. Presumably who-ever just dumped 6k+ IXC on my buy-side orders on Cryptsy didn't get the memo? Yum yum, "cheap" IXCoin, back on the sell side they go to keep providing liquidity...

(The painful thing about being a liquidity provider is now I am selling the darn things at less than 10k satoshis apiece! Arg!

I only manage to do it by telling myself they aren't my real IXCoins, they are just a float on Cryptsy doing the liquidity thing.)

DOGE showed how insanely vulnerable/weak Litecoin was... So pathetically weak hashing power that just some stupid internet-meme could whip up more hashing power than Litecoin had almost overnight!

After seeing that, who wants to wait for the next meme to come along happening to say "lets trash all the scrypt coins, its easy to beat their pathetic hashing power, lets do it!"

-MarkM-

Oh yeah right. Sorry.

-MarkM-

Oops sorry, give it some time I just re-started ixcoind on one of those nodes, turns out it was not running on either as I am still trying to get all those machines converted over to Ubuntu. Evidently in the process of moving stuff off of there I had killed ixcoin on both machines without noticing. (It has so many nodes I didn't think mine were going to make or break anything.)

If your old wallet gets connections though you could copy its nodes.dat over...

...That might seem like messy clutter as likely it is full of long-dead nodes, but someone out there will know about thousands of long dead nodes anyway and tell you about them once you do connect so what the heck, dead nodes are going to always be cluttering up node files probably, no point worrying about that.

-MarkM-

dvcstable01.dvcnode.org and dvcstable02.dvcnode.org

-MarkM-

The Galactic Milieu seems to be facing a large platform-migration problem thanks to the fact that Open Transactions did eventually get around to making breaking changes in how it does things.

These changes in Open Transactions mean that all contracts (including server contracts and asset contracts), accounts and pseudonyms ("users") that we have been using for years are not going to work in the new version(s) of Open Transactions.

So it all has to migrate, even if sticking with Open Transactions.

Thus this seems like a good time to re-think whether in fact Open Transactions remains the ideal platform for our needs.

As you can see from the various links at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html there are a number of assets involved.

Those links show much of the relative-price history of the assets but luckily one of the features of Open Transactions is that it does not need history.

Once both parties to a transaction, and the notary server (Open Transactions server) sign off on a transaction, the past is no longer needed as all relevant parties have agreed, bindingly, upon the new balances involved. That is great for games because really, in games all we care about is what is in our pockets, not how long it has been there, who put it there, or why they put it there. (Nor even whether it is proceeds of crime, afterall some characters are probably intentionally criminals, thieves, etc, so what, what is in their pockets is in their pockets. ) Keeping years of historical records of who gave what to who is just not really very useful or relevant in games, and indeed could be undesirable.

One key feature of Open Transactions is that your balance cannot be changed unless you sign off on the change. Thus for any change of balance there is a signed, notarised receipt proving (cryptographically) that you agreed to the resulting balance. So basically, the players and the game-master agree, so what else matters, in a game?

Another nice feature is scaled markets. Markets exist not only by asset-pair but also by scale, so you can have egg markets for trading single eggs, hundred-egg-markets for trading boxes/bundles of 100 eggs, and so on. This is great for issuing large chunks of currency/assets to nations, megacorporations and other whales while leaving room for smaller scale asset/currency merchants to re-sell at retail prices to smaller folk.

(Like, you can offer blocks of 100,000 of a coin on a 100,000 scale market, at prices that allow your customers to re-sell each block of 100,000 they buy from you as blocks of 10,000 coins at a higher markup to their own customers.)

I have taken an initial look at Bitshares, NXT, NHZ (Horizon), but I expect I am missing other similar systems as once the annoucements got split off from the main altcoin discussion section I only recently got around to taking a look into the announcements section. (It moves so incredibly fast due to spammers bumping their coin ass a marketing technique that even if I had tried to follow that section I would have been constantly missing things as they popped to the top and got scrolled off the bottom so fast I missed their rise and fall...)

-MarkM-

NOTE: Also up for discussion is cloning something instead of using its existing network, such as making yet another NXT-clone to run this stuff instead of just putting it on an existing NXT-or-NXT-clone network.

NOTE2: Horizon looks interesting because all players/nations/guilds/etc who wish to could fire up nodes right now to start getting free NHZ to eventually use to pay transaction fees with for transacting on that network, so it could maybe be used as is instead of making our own clone network.)

Complicated? Having taken a look at Bitshares, I don't see NXT as complicated at all...

-MarkM-

Could you create a thread discussing the purported unsustainability of Bitshares, or point to one?

Having mined some protoshares back in the day and recently fired up recent version Bitshares-PTS and Bitshares clients, it turns out I am a stakeholder. So if I ought to consider trying to take a position in NXT, it could be nice to know whether and why I should consider decreasing my position in Bitshares to do so...

-MarkM-

I used to figure it simply wouldn't really be worth the time of firing up the daemon and waiting for it to catch up to the blockchain, so as to check how many IXCoins I actually owned (which I vaguely knew to be 20,000+) unless I was going to get at least a dollar fiat per coin.

So basically I just sat and waited to hear they were up to a reasonable price, meaning a dollar or more a coin.

Afterall, namecoin and litecoin were over a dollar. Why waste time mucking about with catching other coins up with their blockchains if they aren't even at a reasonable price yet?

Once I had enough bitcoins on Vircurex that I could branch out beyond simply trying to build a strong deep buy-side order-book for DeVCoin though, I started working on trying to build buy-sides for IXCoin and I0Coin; and now that they sill have not credited me the last two bitcoins I sent them that has means having to put some coins on the sell side simply as the only way to get bitcoins onto the buy side.

Really if Vircurex would fix its deposit-bitcoins routine (meaning, have the last of many many depositis of two bitcoins actually show up in my account so I can go on to risk sending another two, and if those arrive another two after that and so on) selling coins would not be necessary as I could just keep sending new bitcoins with which to build the buy-side order-books.

I mean really, come on, pennies per coin? A milion coins would only be worth $15000 to $30000 dollars? That is absurd.

The buy side for IXCoin is still pathetic because of the unable-to-deposit-bitcoins problem. An offer each 25 satoshis of price. A proper buy-side is like I0Coin's and DeVCoin's: an offer at every satoshi of price.

-MarkM-

Right now I still have GeistGeld running on one or both of DVCstable01.DVCnode.org and DVCstable02.DVCnode.org so put them in as addnodes for now.

Soon though I hope to upgrade those machines which will mean everything on them going offline for a while. Maybe even both at once as gettign anything at all done to those machines takes forever so I might get them all done at once when it finally gets done.

I also have it running on CrossCiv.no-ip.org and UFBSH.no-ip.org ready for when the DVCstable nodes go down.

But so far the UFBSH one has no open ports because the router there apparently isn't fooled by socks tunnels into thinking a remote browser is actually in the building so I cannot set up its router until next time I am physically out there.

GeistGeld nodes are able to find one-another via IRC though. One hears that IRC servers don't allow coin nodes to meet on them but I guess that doesn't apply to all IRC servers or maybe not to all coins.

-MarkM-

How are folks mining altcoins that have block versions beyond the version numbers used by Bitcoin so far?

I just built cpuminer for example and its minerd program chokes on a coin thatminerd claims has a block version of 6.

I believe the block version 6 might be something to do with proof of stake? Some hybrid proof of work / proof of stake coins use that version number for their blocks?

What do people use to CPU-mine such coins?

(Please, no "the difficulty is too high for CPU mining" claims, not every such coin stays popular enough to keep ASIC and/or GPU folk mining it forever, and I am looking into purportedly-dead coins here so... )

(Also, authors of bitcoin miners are often, it seems, against alt-coins, so I will not be surprised if when I set up GPUs I find GPU mining programs have the same problem; I have no GPU machines running right now and have no scrypt ASICs and this particular coin happens to be scrypt so I cannot check whether ASIC-mining programs also have the same problem...)

-MarkM-

Is ASIC mining gear still available? For either algorithm, SHA256 or Scrypt?

I had the impression the manufacturers just sold a few to the masses to cover their startup costs then moved to keeping all the hardware themselves to mine for themselves or rent out hashpower or both?

-MarkM-

Why does what you posted say "Algorithm:scrypt-jane", while the first post of this thread says "Proof of Work: Scrypt-N SHA-3" ?

What algorithm or algorithms does this coin actually use? Has it changed since the first post of the thread without that post being updated accordingly?

-MarkM-

So is this a closed-source clone of Ripple? Or of one of the other such things, Bitshares, NXT, NEM or whatnot?

-MarkM-

Is it just taking a while to get it perfect or is this project actually dead afterall?

Isn't there any free open source software yet, that is actually secure, for running an exchange? That these guys could use for now if it is going to take forever to make their own custom code?

-MarkM-

Aaaaand now the block count is at 4031721

Yes, GeistGeld is still chugging along.

However, its extremely short block-times combined with its very rapid adjustment of difficulty cause a nasty problem with p2pool when merged-mining it.

Basically if you let the difficulty fall too low compared to the hashing power of your p2pool instance, it eats up all the operating system's connection handles, so p2pool cannot connect to anything.

I used to solve this by removing GeistGeld from my merge and solo mining it slowly back up to a high enough difficuly to not choke my p2pool.

Once difficulty is high enough, it can be added back into the merge.

I had this problem several times when nearly everyone else stopped mining it and my miners or p2pool screwed up.

The difficulty would plummet rapidly then p2pool would choke up.

The best way to solve this would be for more people to include it in their merge.

But we need to get the dificulty high enough first or they ned to start their p2pool's hashing power low and slowly ramp it up as it brings GeistGeld's difficulty up.

Then once we get the difficulty back up there, never have to many of the pools not working! We need to keep the difficulty up all the time, it drops very rapidly in response to lowering of hash rate.

Hopefully mmpool will be able to include it in their merge once we get it back up to a reasonable difficulty.

-MarkM-

This might be an ignorant question but just in case it is not... Can PoS blocks cause PoW blocks to get orphaned?

I dug out an old massive-stake wallet of another different coin entirely last night and have been watching in amazement as it chugs out blocks, so wondered if maybe some whale did something like that with Yacoin...

-MarkM-