[ANN] official NovaCoin thread - the original PoS+scrypt coin.

[Balthazar]

There are several factors that weren't taken into account.

1. Old inputs has an ability to recombinate into the larger one. So, inputs count would regulate itself depending on the difficulty and sum.

2. Proof-of-Stake system is not an enrichment tool, it's just a network protection mechanism. It doesn't matter how much time would take the specific block generation. All that matters is how many blocks created by a whole network, with an established difficulty factor.

3. We have no thin clients implemented yet, but I guess that the most part of users would prefer these because they don't need a full database for payments processing. So, a few thousands of mining nodes that's quite enough to provide an acceptable level of decentralization.

4. Nobody forces user to participate in mining, but if he wish to participate then it's required to accept and follow the rules and restrictions. Just like a PoW miner accepts the PoW difficulty. But unlike PoW mining, everybody has a chances here, because Proof-of-Stake mining consumes almost zero resources amount.

[yonillasky]

Regarding item (2), in general I agree with that, but so long as it pays significant interest, it cannot be dismissed as merely an infrastructure component. Once the stake interest drop to a few %/yr it won't be a problem, but right now it does have some drawbacks,

1) constantly dilutes small holders, or those who would keep some or all of their balance at an exchange, at least until someone opens an exchange that pays some or all stake rewards to its clients - there's an idea, but I doubt anyone will bother, sadly
2) it works as a disincentive to actually use the coin (you know, transact with it) as that resets coin age.

[Balthazar]

That's correct, but we are still at the initial emission stage. It's only a matter of time when a proof-of-stake reward will be dropped enough.

This would be mean that formation of the initial stakeholders community was done successfully. Then we can dedicate some time to think about adjusting a minimum level of the proof-of-work difficulty, if it would be required to make an adoption easier. Such decision could be made with block versions voting, like we already did before. Time will tell.

[Bitinvestor]

Old inputs has an ability to recombinate into the larger one. So, inputs count would regulate itself depending on the difficulty and sum.

I didn't know this. Under what circumstances will small inputs recombine into a larger one? Can you show us a transaction where this has already happened?

[Balthazar]

Old inputs has an ability to recombinate into the larger one. So, inputs count would regulate itself depending on the difficulty and sum.

I didn't know this. Under what circumstances will small inputs recombine into a larger one? Can you show us a transaction where this has already happened?

It happens when inputs has age greater than 90 days.

http://nvc.cryptocoinexplorer.com/block/9ccd03672b05dcec1ad63076a408fcbc8b3affc6e28a0ffdaafc0097e3855c80


But there are some limitations:

• Only inputs with an equal destination are combined;
• Maximum sum of combined input is defined as a linear function of the proof-of-work block reward (PoW/3).

[danbi]

a new permanent node running 0.4.4.6 at 193.68.21.44

new (still experimental, but testers welcome!) NVC mining pool at nvcpool.digsys.bg
proportional payments, full block rewards, no fees, vardiff stratum

[glendall]

Hey Balthazar, just to confirm, I should be all fine with the blockchain issue with version v0.4.4.5-2-gde717f9-beta right?   Thanks.  I updated to the latest version but it crashed with an error so I went back to this one.

[forzendiablo]

my cleint says:
some clients were affected by chai nfork issue. and send me here but i dont see what shoild i do?

[Balthazar]

Hi guys.

This message is just a notification which was used to send users read the FAQ in this thread.

Check your client version, if you are running 0.4.4.5 or higher then it's safe to ignore this message.

[Balthazar]

I updated to the latest version but it crashed with an error so I went back to this one.

Q: Why I'm getting runaway exception while trying to start 0.4.4.6 client?

A: That's normal, it's happened because 0.4.4.6 update makes blockindex code incompatible with previous versions. You need to remove old blockchain files and resyncronize with a rest of the network.

Q: How to remove the old blockchain database files?

A: You need to remove everything except wallet.dat from your client data directory. Data directory is located at

Windows Vista/7/8/2008 Server: C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\NovaCoin
Windows 2000/XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\NovaCoin
Linux/*BSD: ~/.novacoin

You can continue using 0.4.4.5 like btc-e does, but it's better to apply 0.4.4.6 because it works much faster and ignores the current notification.

P.S. "Much faster" is up to 20x speed up on a slow CPUs like Intel Atom or ARMv6.

[Balthazar]

Just a little piece of info...

As far we know, some payment processors and users accepts 0/unconfirmed transactions. But this solution is not secure, because it's possible to create two transactions with the same inputs, but different outputs.

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248.pdf

Attacker is able to send a first transaction directly to victim, and then broadcast a second transaction over the network. This couldn't be prevented using the proof-of-work design, but it's possible to fight with such manipulations through using an extension for our proof-of-stake system, and we even don't need a chain fork to implement this.

Block candidates submission concept

This would allow user to check that his unconfirmed transaction is accepted into the specific stakeholder's memory pool.

It doesn't provide guarantee of fast confirmation, but it makes a double spending of 0/unconfirmed transactions much harder. It will be required to use some stake in order to perform such type of double spend attack.

How this could work?

1. We have a blockchain, so we can get a full list of stakeholders with suitable inputs weight (i.e. users who are able to generate proof-of-stake blocks and allowed to submit the block candidates);
2. We can check a signature of received block candidate;
3. As a result, we have a proof that specific stakeholder has a declared list of transactions in the own memory pool. Or seen those transactions, at least.

How is this supposed to work?

Stakeholder will be allowed to send proof-of-stake candidates over the network. Candidate is required to satisfy a difficulty, which would be set separately from the main chain. And then there are few different approaches could be used to handle this.

• Block candidates map;
• Temporary pseuso-chain for block candidates;

Maybe we'll think about implementing this in the future version...

[danbi]

• Block candidates map;
• Temporary pseuso-chain for block candidates;

Both of these will require resource allocation at each (?) wallet. Do you have estimation of how much that could be?
It might be reasonable to only let some of the nodes do this kind of work. Presumably, whoever handles payments will run more or less a dedicated node with enough resources.

[Balthazar]

We need candidates for the current prevhash only... It's not necessary to store old candidates, we are free to drop all of them immediately if prevhash was changed (i.e. new block was found). It would require something like 10 megabytes of additional RAM, I guess.

You are right, not everybody need such functionality. But for some purposes (e.g. payments for fastfood) it's almost equal to immediate confirmations, so I presume this would be useful.

[mrbickle]

Hello,

Come make us a visit!! Still 0% fee.

http://novacoin.ecoining.com

Stratum, VARDIFF tuned to allow small miners, MPOS and once we soon fast payments.

[Balthazar]

It seems that some stupid scums are trying to promote their "point of view" in the WoT database.

https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/novaco.in?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc
https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/novacoin.su?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc
https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/novacoin.ru?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc

There's no forms, there is no registration. How is this supposed to be a spamtrap? I didn't seen something so stupid ever.

[Balthazar]

It was decided to update some libraries, which are used for Windows builds

libminiupnpc 1.6 -> 1.8
openssl 1.0.1c -> 1.0.1f
libdb 4.8.30 -> 5.3.21

New builds are backward-compatible, but wallet.dat becomes unreadable for old builds once it was opened by new client.

Testing builds for compatibility checking: [AMD64  | i686]

[Balthazar]

Experimental builds are updated again.  [AMD64  | i686 | src]

Changes list:

• Core: New proof-of-stake miner implementation. Performance issues resolved, almost 100x faster with massive inputs amount;
• Qt: Coinbase/coinstake transaction records appearance unification;
• Lib: update to Berkeley DB 6.0.20.

[ryanb]

i started the PoS on nvc istarted with small amount after around 50 days i received a an orphan stake and then i got a message that the blockchain is forked and need to update

i updated 4 days ago and still nothing has been staked

so did i waste 50 days?

[Eugen3]

I am curious of opinions from the community about mining Novacoin VS. pointing my miners at the currently most profitable coin and then buying novacoins with the earnings.  Mining on Novacoin will be better for the network, but buying it on BTC-e with earnings from one of these multi-pools will get more NVC in the end, and in theory will raise it's mining profitability attracting more hash power.  Which do you think would be most beneficial to the coin?

Another thing that I would like to comment on and is somewhat related is the ramifications that scrypt FPGAs will have on the NVC block reward  

When the more powerful ASICs really started hitting the pools, PPC hash rate would spike every time BTC difficulty adjusted which in turn pushed the block reward down.  It seems many miners took an interest in PPC after these profitability spikes happened.  This appears to have benefitted PPC greatly regarding the market price.  Many thought PPC would be super plentiful, because people didn't imagine how much the block reward would change.

I think it is safe to say that there are currently scrypt FPGAs in the wild or at least a dump truck full of new GPUs mining scrypt from profits of the past months.  As these FPGAs start to ship out, the NVC difficulty will more than likely increase which will make the block reward smaller.  Anyone else think we will see < 1 NVC PoW block reward in 2014?  Talk about a rare coin!

Novacoin, it's like gold bullion bars to Bitcoin's 1oz round

[Balthazar]

i started the PoS on nvc istarted with small amount after around 50 days i received a an orphan stake and then i got a message that the blockchain is forked and need to update

i updated 4 days ago and still nothing has been staked

so did i waste 50 days?

No, your coin-days are still available. You need to wait until block will be generated.