I think it is a good idea to work on existing coins and make my name known a bit.
Looks like it is time again to upgrade all the SHA256 merged mined coins, for example. That could be nice routine work you could do to prove you can work well with the common codebase so many coins share...
-MarkM-
Could you point me in the right direction?
CryptoD
Once upon a time folks started thinking there was something wrong, probably a memory leak, with I0Coin, as it was using ridiculous amounts of RAM.
So much so that it got dropped from the merge of mmpool.org, the pool that merges the largest number of the merge-capable SHA256 coins.
Luckily someone followed up on it long enoguh and hard enough to figure out that the problem was not I0Coin's really at all, I0Coin was simply the fastest block speed merged coin merged by major pools, so it showed before slower coins a problem they were all eventually going to exhibit.
Someone (likely the discoverer of the real problem though I don't recall for sure) then came up with a "dirty fix", which I think was applied to all the coins (well except maybe namecoin, I don't know how namecoin relates to this whole excessive-RAM-usage problem). Or maybe some coins skipped the dirty fix and went directly to the clean(er?) fix, as a better, cleaner, more correct fix involves storing in a database the info that the dirty fix simply threw away.
However it looks like GeistGeld only has the so called dirty fix so far, so GeistGeld could benefit from the clean(er?) fix.
But now that a whole new generation of bitcoin classic satoshi code is coming out or already upon us, it would make sense to upgrade all the coins to be based off of that.
Basically, bitcoin only supports being the parent chain of a merge. So to base merged mined coins off of bitcoin code involves adding into it the "be a child chain in a merge" capability.
Once that basic template, bitcoin plus being a child chain in a merge, is done the rest is basically cosmetic, the usual "make a clone-coin" stuff of changing the names, the block times, the magic bytes including what prefix addresses get, the ports, the images, the visible references to the name of the coin, the block-rewards schedule, and all the nitpicky things like exactly which BIPs are supported starting at which block, what if any protections against transaction malleability are to be in there, starting at which blocks, how difficulty adapts to changes in hashing power, what the checkpoints are and so on.
The merged mined coins supported currently by mmpool are bitcoin (as parent chain), namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin and unobtanium. Other old classic merged mined coins are CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, of which the most likely to get into the merge any time soon is CoiLedCoin.
There is also an interesting coin that has a game in its blockchain, huntercoin, which claims to be able to be merged mined using SHA256 but so far no one seems to have that working, so once familiar with the whole scheme of things maybe you could be the pioneer who actually gets that sucker working so it too can get onto mmpool.
-MarkM-
