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My guess is not much, this is not specific to LTC, it's to all altcoins.
In my observations the altcoins must stand on their own merits, not as safe harbor of obsolete technologies. You can create another altcoin of yet another hash function resisting GPU/ASIC, but at the end of day you cannot fight economics fundamentals. Obsolete miners have nowhere to hide from the onslaught of technology advancement and profitability would drop regardless of altcoins (as proven when bitcoin profitability dropped by half last November). Market has spoken that it doesn't need or want everyone to be miners just like the case with gold. You have to earn the living that the society needs and wants, if everyone mine for a living there would be no market and no society.
On the other hand, debut of ASIC will make both bitcoin and litecoin more secure against 51% attack.
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An user pmed me about paper wallet. For now you can use command ppcoind dumpprivkey <ppcoinaddress> and then print it to paper Later you can import it back to another wallet: ppcoind importprivkey <ppcoinprivkey> I am not familiar with paper wallet and QR code etc. Anyone has a good idea of how it works and maybe start a project to convert such a bitcoin tool for printing paper wallet? Hi, I was wondering how do you generate a ppc address and matching private key for paper storage?
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The only way I can think of fighting squatters is to raise the registration and renewal fees, but that's not very likely to happen with namecoin.
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It seems though that the coin generation schedule is a bit off. Sunny once estimated that the coin generation should average 15-20 million PPC per year. With a fluctuation between 40k-5k, averaging 20k/day we're at 7.3 million PPC per year. So even without asics in the wild, it seems that coin generation already massively slowed down.
Yeah current estimate would be 5m-10m coin production in 2013. |
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A quick look at Chris's devcoin repository shows that devcoin difficulty is derived from previous 144 blocks (average over one day, they started this continuous adjustment at block 10700). While ppcoin's difficulty is derived from previous 2 blocks (exponential moving average over one week). https://github.com/doublec/devcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L678 |
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Here's a question for you, how is PPCoin going to remove the centralized checkpoint sharing when difficulty target is based on the immediately preceding block? What happens to a coin that does this and has a reorg? I guess that means Freicoin can't use your difficulty adjustment algorithm. This is the reason for the 8 block delay for the filter output.
I don't know why you think deriving difficulty from preceding block(s) would cause any problem with reorganization, are you suggesting that bitcoin's block 2016*n would also have problems with reorganization? Difficulty is checked when connecting block, and it doesn't matter if you derive it from last two blocks or from last 2016 blocks. As for Jorgeminator's difficulty chart I can't vouch for it's accuracy 100% but indeed there were several major peaks over 200ghs, because I basically check coinotron and bitparking pools pretty much every day. Bitcoin's readjustment gets a rate using two times and uses that to adjust the difficulty within the limiter. The chain with the highest difficulty is the one selected by the reorganization. Every single block in your chain depends upon the last blocks difficulty. We can't use it because we don't have central check pointing to say which blockchain is the true one. It adjusts too often to lead to a stable network without central checkpointing. I think you probably have some misunderstanding here. Reorganization has nothing to do with how often difficulty is adjusted, nor how many blocks are used to adjust difficulty. If you are concerned with difficulty changing every block that would weaken confirmations, yes there is a slight weakening in that attacker can override n-confirmations with his own n-blocks, n>=2, but not for 1-confirmation, as difficulty on both branches is the same for the first branching block. But no, I don't think it means you require checkpoint to protect the network, as bitcoin has the same issue albeit only every 2016 blocks. You can mitigate this problem by using older blocks to derive the new difficulty though, which forces multiple blocks on both branches to be at the same difficulty for the same height. |
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Here's a question for you, how is PPCoin going to remove the centralized checkpoint sharing when difficulty target is based on the immediately preceding block? What happens to a coin that does this and has a reorg? I guess that means Freicoin can't use your difficulty adjustment algorithm. This is the reason for the 8 block delay for the filter output.
I don't know why you think deriving difficulty from preceding block(s) would cause any problem with reorganization, are you suggesting that bitcoin's block 2016*n would also have problems with reorganization? Difficulty is checked when connecting block, and it doesn't matter if you derive it from last two blocks or from last 2016 blocks. As for Jorgeminator's difficulty chart I can't vouch for it's accuracy 100% but indeed there were several major peaks over 200ghs, because I basically check coinotron and bitparking pools pretty much every day. |
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Oh thanks for the compliment  Although the transaction fees cannot be too low as it's the only defense against transaction spamming attack. |
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Vircurex reports network hashrate around 135 Ghashes.
As I have been discussing with Sunny King in PM because of all the variables in the design of PPCoin, everything changes each block, its next to impossible to calculate the real hash rate. I assure you its nowhere near 135 GH/s. I can confirm that vircurex hash rate estimate is not accurate. However its not 'next to impossible' to estimate ppcoin network hash rate. I have already discussed this topic in my weekly update #12 last November: - Regarding network hash rate, since ppcoin is designed with variable spacing target for proof-of-work blocks, you cannot directly compare network hash rate to other block chains based on proof-of-work difficulty. To estimate network hash rate you would need to first get an estimate of current proof-of-work spacing target (in seconds), by counting the number of proof-of-work blocks in the last 24 hours for example. The formula to calculate the total network hash rate is: hash rate = difficulty * 4G / spacing target.
Jorgeminator made a hash rate comparison between freicoin, terracoin and ppcoin, which I believe is reasonably accurate: Here you go   It is also next to impossible to guarantee that for a given hashrate the coin will be at a certain difficulty within a certain period of time. Our PM discussions have made me think I should apply the PPCoin difficulty algorithm to Bitcoin and demonstrate what happens. I imagine Bitcoin's difficulty would be somewhere in the trillions (or worse) with the PPCoin difficulty adjustment algorithm.
Take calculations like the one done by Vircurex, which probably assumes a constant difficulty and a 10 minute block spacing, with a grain of salt.
Why do you want to apply a variable spacing design to a pure proof-of-work coin? There is no need for that. I was only recommending freicoin to adopt the continuous difficulty adjustment, not variable spacing target. Besides I have never claimed that a high difficulty means superior network protection, so why bother? But even if you do, ppcoin only makes proof-of-work difficulty between 0x - 11x larger so I don't know where you get this trillion number. It's true that hash rate is a good indication of network strength for proof-of-work coins, but for ppcoin it's the contrary. A lower hash rate is preferred by ppcoin, as it's an indication of energy efficiency. Indeed even as a hybrid design, ppcoin is a lot more energy efficient to a pure proof-of-work coin of comparable market cap. |
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2+ million coins mined early, yesterday little over 9k ... you really think that most people are dumb enough to buy PPC even at 0.00013 rate?
Coinotron under 10 Ghashes, BitParking under 5 Ghashes, Vircurex reports network hashrate around 135 Ghashes. That is so cool, few people
have the most old and new coins, and have enough stake to do whatever they want to, including limitless free double-spends attempts.
PPCoin is early-adopter scam coin, nothing more.
Sure you are welcome to create a no-early-adopter commie coin to compete in the market. In my opinion it's one of the architect's jobs to protect the interest of 'early adopters' because they deserve it. Welcome to the world of free market The first day mintage is naturally high for any publicly pre-announced coin because miners would pile in at the release. We had already done a couple things to alleviate it, by starting difficulty at 256 and continuously adjust difficulty at every block. So there are less than 1000 initial low difficulty blocks. Compare this to a coin that doesn't take these measures, for example freicoin started difficulty at 1 and has more than 10000 low difficulty blocks. As far as I am concerned ppcoin project is currently the only project in production implementing alternative technology to bitcoin, nearly all other altcoins are carbon copies of bitcoin. So I am sure there are astute users out there that would disagree with you as to ppcoin's value. |
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Our seed nodes would be offline some time next week due to hosting problem. While I look for alternatives, I might need your help to volunteer a temporary seed node.
This means, any node running ppcoind as server (if you have >8 connections then you are definitely running as server). Then I would point seed.ppcoin.net to it's IP (of course static IP is better, but even dynamic IP is ok, as long as it doesn't change very often). Please only volunteer if you can run the node 24x7 for at least one month.
The job of seed node is to help new node with initial download of block chain. The load on seed node is very low I believe so bandwidth shouldn't be a concern.
Let me know if you want to volunteer. Please PM me static/DHCP, IP address and upload bandwidth if residential line. Any recommendation of BTC hosting providers is also appreciated. Thanks!
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Weekly Update #23 - 0.3 protocol is code complete. Testing continues on the release and I have just started testing with testnet protocol switch.
- The hosting provider for our seed nodes infrastructure is undergoing some migration pain and the recent support has been less than stellar. I would need to look for alternative providers next week (preferrably accepting bitcoin, recommendations are welcome). Meanwhile some downtime is expected over next few weeks, for new nodes and nodes redownloading the block chain. Existing running nodes shouldn't be affected.
- If I manage to still have some extra time I might start looking into qt build for the release.
Have fun! |
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This GUI use 100% procesor. It is normal  ? Usually that means the built-in cpu mining is turned on (especially if you have multi-core processor). Have you check the 'gen' configuration parameter in your ppcoin.conf file? Note the default is turned off, so if you don't see 'gen' in the configuration file then cpu mining should be turned off. |
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The gui build in the link is done by xchrix I believe. gui build is not yet officially supported in release due to the complexity of bitcoin's verifiable build system (gitian-builder) that we use and also due to our limited resources. But there is a possibility that an unpolished gui build would be included in the coming 0.3 release (no guarantee though). |
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It is 1 hour, and yes, network hashrate and thus difficulty tends to oscillate wildly but even though manipulators are doubling difficulty often, TerraCoin is showing it's supremacy over most other coins. Not only that manipulator won't get much more TRC overally before difficulty goes up - which is the point when he will jump off the network - but it'll take just 2 hours to have difficulty halved. PPC might be better actualy, I haven't checked it because of security issues - are they fixed yet? Ah yes I stand corrected it's 30-block adjustment interval equivalent to 1-hour. Last I checked I haven't seen any manipulation attempts yet, these large variations right now is probably just due to small sampling size of 30 blocks. When I get some free time I might consider demonstrating the problem with such short adjustment interval, I believe if miners collusion occurs the difficulty can be dramatically reduced persistently, if terracoin did not properly fix the time-travel vulnerability (which looks like they did not but do correct me if I am wrong on this). As for progress of ppcoin's protocol upgrade you are welcome to check my weekly update thread. |
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Good job Fuzzy with the armory wallet for TRC and gratz on the first github project  |
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"Combating Banking" or something
"Department of Crypto-Currencies"
I like 'Land of Crypto-Currencies' and 'Isle of Terra' better. Department just sounds awful to me |
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Although too late now, perhaps a secondary condition for changing the difficulty based on a low average of blocks over a few days might avoid the issue in the future for any cryptocurrency. This is just a quick suggestion and I have not flushed out all the security concerns. This would probably require a hard fork.
There is no need for ad hoc rules like that. I have already presented a solution with ppcoin's continuous difficulty adjustment algorithm. Using a shorter adjustment interval like LTC works to some extent as well. Only TRC's 2-hour adjustment is probably too short and opens up to difficulty manipulation by the miners. |
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It's probably some early investors lose interest or feel uncertain about the 0.3 protocol upgrade.
Not saying that you do it deliberately, but the "uncertainty" is a bit manufactured. Well you are entitled to your opinion. I can only say that I believe I am doing the best work I can, in the most professional and responsible fashion in my opinion. And I am proud of the work I produced so far. Somehow I feel that you have developed animosity toward me and ppcoin project, I honestly don't know what warranted it as I think I have always treated you professionally and with courtesy. As I have said before, why can't people here tolerate petty differences and be united in the cause of liberty? I hope in the future you would have more constructive contributions to ppcoin. Best Regards, |
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Last I gathered from the forum it seems related to either 1) mining pool 2) services with large number of connections. So far it still evades me how to reproduce the issue despite of some attempts.
I restricted my pool to a small number of connections for a couple of weeks and it made no noticeable difference to the memory consumption so I think (2) is out. Are you keeping a cache of blocks or anything like that when a block is found via getwork? The getwork block cache is actually existing bitcoin code and I didn't modify it. The cache is cleared every time a new best block is received on the block chain. I have looked at this code before and didn't find anything suspicious. if (pindexPrev != pindexBest ||
(nTransactionsUpdated != nTransactionsUpdatedLast && GetTime() - nStart > 60))
{
if (pindexPrev != pindexBest)
{
// Deallocate old blocks since they're obsolete now
mapNewBlock.clear();
BOOST_FOREACH(CBlock* pblock, vNewBlock)
delete pblock;
vNewBlock.clear();
}
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