Slimcoin | First Proof of Burn currency | Decentralized Web

[gjhiggins]

Are you testing Graham's instructions above?

yes, it works with v6 only, compiling v5 still breaks with error
now i started sync from zero then i will try again import my privkeys
if all ok, i will forget for v5

I'm not at all clear what you're trying to do here. Reverting to earlier, unsupported versions of the Slimcoin codebase isn't going to clarify matters, rather the reverse.

very problematic coin   

It's a very old codebase which is being severely taxed by the consequences of choosing a 90s block time, calculating a UTXO set is requiring more and more computation as the blockchain continues to grow.

version 5 has subversions
for Graham's instruction here is v5-268
i have v5-232 on windows and seems like my wallet.dat and blockchain are compatible with 232 only
how to compile 232 ?

The instructions are for 0.6.0 (https://github.com/slimcoin-project/Slimcoin/releases/tag/SLMv0.6.0). Any later version of bdb will load a wallet.dat file created with an earlier version but an earlier version of bdb cannot load a wallet created with a later version of bdb. The cross-compiled WIndows binaries used to use the recommended bdb-4.8 but as this just creates yet another factor potentially slowing the wallet's processing, I subsequently enabled the use of whichever version of bdb is provided by MXE. I'm not sure why older Windows versions of the wallet are being referenced, it's not as though they're any more reliable or faster or anything other than potentially problematic.

Only the latest release of Slimcoin is supported --- the current practical meaning of this is: "successfully compiles on Graham's laptop running Mint Ulyana (Ubuntu 0.20), on a VirtualBox VM of Ubuntu 18.04 and cross-compiles to Windows64/32 bit on VirtualBox VM of Ubuntu 18.04 using MXE". Unfortunately, I can no longer successfully cross-compile OS X binaries, so Mac users will have to make do with older (but nevertheless adequately functional) versions of the wallet.

If you're trying to compile code from older releases (which I don't recommend) then you're unlikely to be successful unless you're using a Linux version contemporary with that release.

i wouldn't ask so many questions if I didn't have so many burnt coins that I don't want to lose
which, apparently, are not supported even in different versions of the 5 release, especially in the 6

You haven't lost any burned coins, it's just that the GUI wallet overview page is erratic in its display of the totals, sometimes showing wildly incorrect values. Again, the likely root cause of this is the  consequence of a slow, elderly codebase (lacking the efficiency gains from the generic optimisations of later improvements to the Bitcoin codebase architecture/implementation), exacerbated by the high processing demand imposed by continuously calculating UTXO sets for a blockchain of 2.2 million blocks and an even larger number of transactions. However, if your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that if you just leave it to crunch its numbers, it'll eventually show you the correct totals - once it's synced, leave it overnight and check in the morning.

It's worth reflecting on the fact that Slimcoin is a clone of Peercoin and the Peercoin blockchain is currently just over 500k blocks.

There is an unfortunate consequence of the design of the Slimcoin burn approach - coins are burned in a transaction and any unspent burn rewards will qualify as staking coins and if allowed to stake, those stake rewards themselves will qualify as staking coins, which if allowed to stake ... and so on, and so on. Setting a reservebalance merely limits the amount of stake processing, it doesn't stop it entirely. The computational demand of stake processing (effectively, continuously calculating the UTXO set) isn't such a significant factor with Peercoin with its shorter blockchain but with Slimcoin the (not entirely unpredictable) computational consequences of a 90s block time on the PoS staking calculations are starting to kick in quite sharply for those with well-funded wallets. It's not even clear whether an update to a later clone of Bitcoin would provide any actual solution - Bitcoin, being pure PoW, has no specific UTXO calculation optimisations that the PoS staking calculations could benefit from.

Cheers

Graham

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[johnwhitestar]

There is an unfortunate consequence of the design of the Slimcoin burn approach - coins are burned in a transaction and any unspent burn rewards will qualify as staking coins and if allowed to stake, those stake rewards themselves will qualify as staking coins, which if allowed to stake ... and so on, and so on. Setting a reservebalance merely limits the amount of stake processing, it doesn't stop it entirely. The computational demand of stake processing (effectively, continuously calculating the UTXO set) isn't such a significant factor with Peercoin with its shorter blockchain but with Slimcoin the (not entirely unpredictable) computational consequences of a 90s block time on the PoS staking calculations are starting to kick in quite sharply for those with well-funded wallets. It's not even clear whether an update to a later clone of Bitcoin would provide any actual solution - Bitcoin, being pure PoW, has no specific UTXO calculation optimisations that the PoS staking calculations could benefit from.

If I understand correctly you were trying all these years to mitigate the consequences of the decisions of the other people, that have left this project years ago.

Maybe it may make sense to change the architecture that is creating all this resources usage, since we are presumably in the middle of the upgrade to the latest Peercoin's code?

[gjhiggins]

If I understand correctly you were trying all these years to mitigate the consequences of the decisions of the other people, that have left this project years ago.

Not mitigate, no. My skillset doesn't extend that far. Apart from adding a few GUI/RPC-API enhancements, the majority of the changes I made were basically to bring the Slimcoin codebase up to date with Peercoin development - as far as I could. That activity came to an end when Peercoin hard-forked its protocol and I couldn't see any support for that in the Slimcoin community. iguanadon1's PoS optimisation does mitigate the computational effort via caching of the computational results, thus reducing the load and enabling the client to be responsive to user commands.

Maybe it may make sense to change the architecture that is creating all this resources usage, since we are probably in the middle of the upgrade to latest Peercoin's code?

If you've any concrete suggestions to make on how this might be achieved, this'd be a good place to air them.

Cheers

Graham

[d5000]

Just to throw in an idea: Could it be possible to require UTXOs to be "whitelisted" for them to be enabled to stake?

This would change the standard mode of "stake with all UTXOs you find in the wallet" to "only stake with UTXOs that are specifically enabled to participate in the minting process". So if new staking/mining/burn rewards come in, they would not be used for staking, giving the owner time to consolidate the wallet.

If this was possible, and along with iguanadon's optimizations (which obviously are another "item" that would have to be ported to the new wallet), this could result in less computational load.

[casper77]

Are you testing Graham's instructions above?

yes, it works with v6 only, compiling v5 still breaks with error
now i started sync from zero then i will try again import my privkeys
if all ok, i will forget for v5

I'm not at all clear what you're trying to do here

i started it because wallet began to freeze very often for a long time and I decided to reduce the size of wallet.dat (4 mb now)
with Linux, I started experimenting because subjectively it seems to me that synchronization there is much faster

[johnwhitestar]

Maybe it may make sense to change the architecture that is creating all this resources usage, since we are probably in the middle of the upgrade to latest Peercoin's code?

If you've any concrete suggestions to make on how this might be achieved, this'd be a good place to air them.

I'm not a developer, so I'm afraid I can't make meaningful suggestions here, but generally speaking I was thinking whether it can make sense to launch a new coin, let's call it Slimcoin-Plus, with the same idea of PoB and with a swap premine for all the willing Slimcoin owners in which we'd change all the parameters that you mentioned in order to make it more "slim".

[gjhiggins]

i started it because wallet began to freeze very often for a long time and I decided to reduce the size of wallet.dat (4 mb now)
with Linux, I started experimenting because subjectively it seems to me that synchronization there is much faster

Yes, that's my experience too. Immediately after startup and at arbitrary times the GUI is so sluggish that it appears to freeze (even with iguanadon1's PoS optimisation). I haven't found it to be unreliable, just very, very slow for a while after initial startup but if I let it run for a while, the response improves after it's finished its initial staking frenzy. The latter is an unfortunate but obvious side-effect of running a PoS v1 coin where staking isn't tied to the time online but to having UTXOs. The Slimcoin community (as with the Peercoin community) has shown no interest in moving to a PoS v2 staking kernel (a la blackcoin) where the node has to be permanently online in order to accrue opportunities to stake.

Cheers

Graham

[johnwhitestar]

i started it because wallet began to freeze very often for a long time and I decided to reduce the size of wallet.dat (4 mb now)
with Linux, I started experimenting because subjectively it seems to me that synchronization there is much faster

I've solved this a bit buying more RAM for my computer. The launch time of my wallet is about 1 h 20 minutes with almost fully synchronized blockchain's snapshot when I launch it for the first time, the next times it becomes much quicker, with additional RAM.

The Slimcoin community (as with the Peercoin community) has shown no interest in moving to a PoS v2 staking kernel (a la blackcoin) where the node has to be permanently online in order to accrue opportunities to stake.

I think switching to this model would make more sense. Maybe we can create SLM+ based on blackcoin?
To launch a new coin we don't need to ask the Community if someone wants to switch he'll be able to using swap.

[gjhiggins]

... generally speaking I was thinking whether it can make sense to launch a new coin, let's call it Slimcoin-Plus, with the same idea of PoB and with a swap premine for all the willing Slimcoin owners

Given the number of Slimcoin addresses in the top 100 that have been active in the last couple of years (https://chainz.cryptoid.info/slm/#!rich), it would appear that the majority of Slimcoin owners are fairly comfortable with the approach of occasionally firing up the wallet in order to collect their accrued stake. I have contemplated your suggested approach but, given the apparent fact that the majority of the community seem to be uncomplaining hodlers, I find it difficult to see any significant demand for a new Slimcoin chain, which makes the personal ROI very doubtful.

Cheers

Graham

[gjhiggins]

I think switching to this model would make more sense. Maybe we can create SLM+ based on blackcoin?
To launch a new coin we don't need to ask the Community if someone wants to switch he'll be able to using swap.

No, for a PoB coin it would make no sense at all as Blackcoin derivatives are pure PoS. Only Peercoin derivatives are hybrid PoW/PoS and they necessarily inherit Peercoin's PoSv1 staking kernel. You can dismiss all thoughts of a PoB/PoSv2 chain.

(I didn't realise that by mentioning blackcoin, I'd be creating quite so much confusion, sorry)

Cheers

Graham

[johnwhitestar]

... generally speaking I was thinking whether it can make sense to launch a new coin, let's call it Slimcoin-Plus, with the same idea of PoB and with a swap premine for all the willing Slimcoin owners

Given the number of Slimcoin addresses in the top 100 that have been active in the last couple of years (https://chainz.cryptoid.info/slm/#!rich), it would appear that the majority of Slimcoin owners are fairly comfortable with the approach of occasionally firing up the wallet in order to collect their accrued stake. I have contemplated your suggested approach but, given the apparent fact that the majority of the community seem to be uncomplaining hodlers, I find it difficult to see any significant demand for a new Slimcoin chain, which makes the personal ROI very doubtful.

I think people hodl without informing themselves about what's going on. They are also not participating in anything that has to do with SLM hoping someone else will solve for them or something will miraculously happen and the price of SLM will go up. And in any case it's free internet money for them till there is someone ready to buy on the market.

We don't have to incomodate them with anything new. If they are comfortable with the things as they are they can carry on like that for as long as it will last, anybody of us can also have a look into the things and adjust if there is something to adjust. Maybe someone of those people will like to work on developing SLM as well.

But in the same moment we'll have another coin, (like people that have BTC and BCH in the same time) that carries on the original idea of PoB and develops it into direction that can help it recover the community and the market price.

I'm thinking about it because we are near to PoD launch, which is the idea I was working on for the last years and I wouldn't like to see it failing or maybe being much more successfully implemented by another community only because we are approaching the technical limits of SLM, as it was thought in the beginning, and nobody (or very few of us) really cares about its fate.

No, for a PoB coin it would make no sense at all as Blackcoin derivatives are pure PoS. Only Peercoin derivatives are hybrid PoW/PoS and they necessarily inherit Peercoin's PoSv1 staking kernel. You can dismiss all thoughts of a PoB/PoSv2 chain.

(I didn't realise that by mentioning blackcoin, I'd be creating quite so much confusion, sorry)

Blackcoin by himself is not the point for me, the point is if we can implement something or even launch a new coin that would solve the issues and let us advertising SLM as it should be advertised, without fear to have hoards of people complaining about the code, we should consider that option, at least from my point of view.

[gjhiggins]

But in the same moment we'll have another coin, (like people that have BTC and BCH in the same time) that carries on the original idea of PoB and develops it into direction that can help it recover the community and the market price.

I'll emphasise this point until its significance is acknowledged and the issue addressed ...

I find it difficult to see any significant demand for a new Slimcoin chain, which makes the personal ROI very doubtful.

Cheers

Graham

[gjhiggins]

Just to throw in an idea: Could it be possible to require UTXOs to be "whitelisted" for them to be enabled to stake?

This would change the standard mode of "stake with all UTXOs you find in the wallet" to "only stake with UTXOs that are specifically enabled to participate in the minting process". So if new staking/mining/burn rewards come in, they would not be used for staking, giving the owner time to consolidate the wallet.

If this was possible, and along with iguanadon's optimizations (which obviously are another "item" that would have to be ported to the new wallet), this could result in less computational load.

Reasonable at first glance but I'd prefer to find out first how an 0.16.3 Slimcoin reference client performs with a lavishly-funded wallet before adding more potential for bugs. There's also the possibility of riffing off've (or ripping off) John Doering's dual-thread staking solution for Orbitcoin https://github.com/ghostlander/Orbitcoin/commit/a846b5d8b55bc09cc0fb20f86cc1ef4426b450f9 - a rather well-executed  Peercoin clone that still has a respectable profile on freiexchange (https://freiexchange.com/market/ORB/BTC).

Cheers,

Graham

[johnwhitestar]

But in the same moment we'll have another coin, (like people that have BTC and BCH in the same time) that carries on the original idea of PoB and develops it into direction that can help it recover the community and the market price.

I'll emphasise this point until its significance is acknowledged and the issue addressed ...

I find it difficult to see any significant demand for a new Slimcoin chain, which makes the personal ROI very doubtful.

I understand your point, but if I think about BTC it doesn't have any ROI at all, and many other coins as well and in the same time there is no point in seeing the main capital's market value decreasing in order to have some tiny ROI, that any case doesn't compensate the capital's loss.

There are people who are looking for a kind of permanent ROI, but I wouldn't say they are arriving in great quantities here, there are other people that are investing into the coin they believe will increase in its value. Without the later we can't hope to see the price of SLM growing. And to have them we need at least to improve the code in order to be it smoothly usable by not technically savvy people. And then, with the help of the PoD token, we'll be able to begin thinking about development.

[gjhiggins]

I understand your point

I don't believe you did. I wasn't referring to ROI for others but personal ROI for me. I'm never sure who these "we could" suggestions are aimed at. As far as I know, I'm the only member of the community with the requisite skillset and without any kind of disambiguating "this is how we'd do it" context, they come across as implying that I should undertake the work and if that's the case, I'm the one you need to convince that the time and effort would be worthwhile.

Creating new coins isn't all that demanding, technically speaking. For several years now, I've kept Minkiz' Foundry up to date with the latest Bitcoin version (now working on the 0.20 template).




Minkiz' Foundry started off as a non-functional ironic comment on all the algo-variant altcoins released a few years ago which were basically the same Bitcoin codebase except they used a different PoW algo. As this was a relatively trivial change to the codebase which could be easily automated via a template-based solution, it amused me to make the tongue-in-cheek offering secretly real. (You'll notice that the Dcrypt algo is one of the offerings.)

I used a Foundry 0.16.3 template as the base for an upgrade of Gapcoin from 0.9 to 0.16.3 (https://github.com/gjhiggins/gapcoin-core) and similarly for Datacoin, upgrading Crossverse's 0.15.99 upgrade of the 0.8.6 client to something more maintainable (https://github.com/gjhiggins/datacoin). Unfortunately, neither community is what you might call enthused.

It's easy to launch coins but these days it's far more difficult to attract the interest and engagement of a new community (one recent example here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293602.0)

Cheers

Graham

[johnwhitestar]

I understand your point

I don't believe you did. I wasn't referring to ROI for others but personal ROI for me. I'm never sure who these "we could" suggestions are aimed at. As far as I know, I'm the only member of the community with the requisite skillset and without any kind of disambiguating "this is how we'd do it" context, they come across as implying that I should undertake the work and if that's the case, I'm the one you need to convince that the time and effort would be worthwhile.

I was thinking these days about how you should feel when people like me arrive and begin to speak without having technical knowledge.
Probably you'd perceive it as funny if it weren't annoying because people just basically don't understand what each quick suggestion they have would imply to you in terms of time and effort. Sometimes they even just don't know and care who would lose that time for them. And most part of the times their suggestions have been already thought and pondered many times.  

So I apologise for all the times I've spoken like that. The profane thinks always he knows better than the expert.

Having said that, I think when we speak about your personal interest there are two kind of personal interest, and I'm not sure which one you are referring to: the financial and the ideal one.

If you are considering the financial interest. I'm seeing two kinds of possible financial interests:
1) Direct payment for the time and effort dedicated;
2) Indirect benefiting from the market price change.

The ideal interest is for me that kind of thing that makes you feel you've done something that was worth doing regardless of the personal financial results.

I'm describing it all in the detail because I'm not sure which of the above we are speaking about or if it's a mix or just something completely different.

However if we speak about the ideal interest, I think I've described my PoD idea a bit in the past. I'm working on it because I believe the PoD token will become the game changer in the cryptoworld. Maybe it won't shine in the context of SLM, because we may not be able to convince people that the PoD token can function in this context, but I hope it will influence people to do great things that will help the mankind:

1) Helping the most unfortunate people out of their situation;
2) Increasing the circulating information transparency;
3) Improving the educational processes;
4) Encouraging the scientific research;
5) Finally stimulating the economy and the progress;

To dimostrate what I'm saying I need to produce the documentation, but if any of these points seem to worth discussing for you I'm open to speak about.

Possibly speaking about the direct financial interest, p.1 above, I don't really know what is your financial situation and what can be interesting for you, but we can discuss about it as I'm trying to invest into SLM and I believe that without being paid the good professional won't contribute in a long run.

If we are speaking about p.2 above, here I have more difficulty to consider any hypothesis, because I don't know how much involved you are in SLM and of course it's difficult for me to stimulate your expectations, because you have much more experience in the cryptoworld than me. If you are quite involved in SLM maybe seeing the SLM price increasing would be the best way to convince you, here I can only wait and hope (there is no better argumentation than results).

It's easy to launch coins but these days it's far more difficult to attract the interest and engagement of a new community (one recent example here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293602.0)

I think that the time of the coins that are just clones, a mix of existing technologies and even of existing ideas is over.
Only the coins that have something really new will get the necessary attention. People are literally fed up with all this mixing and relaunching of the old stuff without sense.
And I believe the PoD token idea is that kind of new thing.

[logictense]

There is an unfortunate consequence of the design of the Slimcoin burn approach - coins are burned in a transaction and any unspent burn rewards will qualify as staking coins and if allowed to stake, those stake rewards themselves will qualify as staking coins, which if allowed to stake ... and so on, and so on. Setting a reservebalance merely limits the amount of stake processing, it doesn't stop it entirely. The computational demand of stake processing (effectively, continuously calculating the UTXO set) isn't such a significant factor with Peercoin with its shorter blockchain but with Slimcoin the (not entirely unpredictable) computational consequences of a 90s block time on the PoS staking calculations are starting to kick in quite sharply for those with well-funded wallets. It's not even clear whether an update to a later clone of Bitcoin would provide any actual solution - Bitcoin, being pure PoW, has no specific UTXO calculation optimisations that the PoS staking calculations could benefit from.

If I understand correctly you were trying all these years to mitigate the consequences of the decisions of the other people, that have left this project years ago.

Maybe it may make sense to change the architecture that is creating all this resources usage, since we are presumably in the middle of the upgrade to the latest Peercoin's code?

A peculiar thought just culminated in my foreheadal area - a rapid and jingly draught of electric current destined to reach the foremost neuron claster where thought production is normally carried out. Here is the nature of my thought, why dont u start paying gjhiggins guy for his work? This walton goggins fellow, or call him walton higgins, he is here to donate his life to u. His stint started twenty years back and has never ended since then.

[johnwhitestar]

...higgins, he is here to donate his life to u....

Indeed Graham is a very important person here.

...why dont u start paying gjhiggins guy for his work?

It's what we were speaking about and with the PoD token we'll have the possibility to do it even better, but I wouldn't like to make proposals that don't make sense to Graham. That's why I'm trying to understand whether there is something he could be interested in and what is that thing.

[gjhiggins]

... begin to speak without having technical knowledge ... what each quick suggestion they have would imply to you in terms of time and effort

So I apologise for all the times I've spoken like that.

Thank you for appreciating that, creating detailed esponses to unconsidered "why don't we ...?" suggestions is getting more tedious to me as time goes on. Without at least a basic technical grounding it's all too easy to indulge in flights of fancy.

I think when we speak about your personal interest there are two kind of personal interest, and I'm not sure which one you are referring to: the financial and the ideal one.

Neither, it's far more prosaic than that. As I've mentioned previously, I'll be 70 next year and I literally don't have time to waste pursuing other people's fantasies.

I believe the PoD token will become the game changer in the cryptoworld. Maybe it won't shine in the context of SLM, because we may not be able to convince people that the PoD token can function in this context, but I hope it will influence people to do great things that will help the mankind:

Many people apparently hold similar personal beliefs and some have used them as justification for the launch of a crytpocurrency. One thing that has become evident is that belief isn't enough on its own. If your notion is to have even a chance of success then it needs to be grounded with solid market research, else you're basically dealing in the realm of fantasy.

I think that the time of the coins that are just clones, a mix of existing technologies and even of existing ideas is over.
Only the coins that have something really new will get the necessary attention. People are literally fed up with all this mixing and relaunching of the old stuff without sense.

Again, solid market research would give you the facts and figures on which base reliable inferences and conclusions. It will also inform your marketing tactics and strategy.

As regards the Slimcoin community, I'll leave you to reflect on what the occasional staker's experience might be if the listening nodes all switched over to using an 0.16 client which ignored connections from old clients.
 
Cheers

Graham

[gjhiggins]

why dont u start paying gjhiggins guy for his work? This walton goggins fellow, or call him walton higgins, he is here to donate his life to u.

Had you more respect/regard, you might have questioned the reliability of your assumptions. I'm not for hire.

Cheers

Graham