Terracoin. What the hell is going on?

[dreamwatcher]

One day, people will realize that RuCoin is the only crypto with REAL 51% protection built into the client/network and people will use RuCoin not only or the protection against 51% but because it has the nicest GUI/features out of all the clients with btc-e chat/trade built into the client, it's own separate chat system built into the client, miner ID cells which broadcast your miner ID/name to the network when you find a block (people love to have their ego stroked).

RuCoin is best coin.

51 % are not what alt-coins need to worry about.

Difficulty attacks are the real concern.

I just wrote a longer post on it here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164569.msg1828915#msg1828915

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[FJBourne]

"Hi,


Rumours are going on atm, about a terracoin shutdown. Terracoin network
is not going to be shutdown, instead we will try to exclusively depend
on community consensus before applying any major modification.

the following email was sent earlier (12h48 PM GMT) as a follow-up to
previous developer email's recipients ; it should explain everything:

> Morning,
>
> let me clarify the situation regarding this email :
>
> developer overreacted after a week of pressure spent trying to
> frequently patch the terracoin difficulty algorithm, in response to
> hashing power spikes seen recently on the network.
>
> Instead of publishing so many mandatory updates over the last 10 days,
> this should have gone through intensive testing ; the project itself
> uses and relies on 3 distinct "branches" for this purpose : not
> releasing poorly-tested code to the masses.
>
> A test phase was launched for this new algorithm, but with no real
> tester joining (I've heard of 3 distinct users joining the test network
> during that test phase), the code should not have gone live that soon.
>
> That being said, the whole terracoin network is indeed quite small right
> now, making it vulnerable to hashing power manipulations. This is
> especially true with the recent exposure to the public through your
> services.
>
> About the supposed forked chain : this was not confirmed yet, as those
> newly elected longest chains naturally comes from the incomplete or
> partially bugged difficulty algorithm.
> In a few hours, the last build should partially takes care of this, but
> a more permanent algorithm fix has to be discussed and implemented in a
> long-term perspective.
>
> Terracoin network core components were put back on line a few minutes
> after the incident and project files were also restored immediately.
>
> Bug Tracker Issues disappeared in the process. That's something we
> should also discuss with the user community : hosting parts of the
> developer tools at different locations, offering a wider set of features.
>
> From now on, project files, repositories, websites and network required
> components are and will stay on line, later developments will occur in
> dedicated branches & test network until community consensus is obtained,
> before any critical update gets released.
>"
> Sincerely yours,
> Terracoin team.

[philips]

http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=60&hi=104332

Between blocks 104292 and 104326, one hour of 5.25K diff.
What happened, Asic broke?

[crazy_rabbit]

It's interesting to note now that 51% attacks are not the only threat, but that difficulty attacks are just as dangerous to a chain.

[roy7]

It seems like from

http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:3750/chain/Terracoin?count=20

and the last few pages, that 5255 is the new floor minimum difficulty. Which is better than the swings down to <100 and coins ever few seconds.

Perhaps TRC will pull through all of this and I'll launch a TRC pool after all!

[SalvorHardin]

So the Terracoin development team is located in East Coast, United States?

I got into Terracoin at the start of this year to learn about the cryptocurrency network.  BTC is just too valuable to waste on test and experiment.  Believe me, I have learned so much thru TRC (including the current debacle) than I ever will via BTC.  Plus, the few active member such as Crazy Rabbit, Fuzzy Bear, and Walter Rothbard all seemed really nice (note the fuzzy animals and puppets in these user names).  So it is a real shame that TRC has come to this.  

I really don't understand why someone with 500 Giga to 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would attack the TRC network instead of making a load of money mining BTC.  Note that this attack has gone on for many days now, while BTC has gone all the way to USD$250 and beyond.  So instead of making up to $5,000 mining BTC everyday, this person is screwing around with the TRC chain and got maybe 50K~60K TRC coins, worth only $10,000 at the current exchange rate.  So the person basically spent $30,000~40,000 in lost opportunity cost to attack the TRC chain.  That frankly is not rational.  

But in any case, best of luck to the TRC team in trying to find the solution.  

[mr_random]

I really don't understand why someone with 500 Giga to 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would attack the TRC network instead of making a load of money mining BTC.  Note that this attack has gone on for many days now, while BTC has gone all the way to USD$250 and beyond.  So instead of making up to $5,000 mining BTC everyday, this person is screwing around with the TRC chain and got maybe 50K~60K TRC coins, worth only $10,000 at the current exchange rate.  So the person basically spent $30,000~40,000 in lost opportunity cost to attack the TRC chain.  That frankly is not rational.  

Something that makes sense is if the individual has a mega ton of Bitcoins from the oldschool days (millions of dollars worth). That person can afford the opportunity cost of not using the ASIC to mine for bitcoins. And that person has an extremely strong incentive to stop competing coins eating into the market share of Bitcoin.

[SalvorHardin]

I really don't understand why someone with 500 Giga to 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would attack the TRC network instead of making a load of money mining BTC.  Note that this attack has gone on for many days now, while BTC has gone all the way to USD$250 and beyond.  So instead of making up to $5,000 mining BTC everyday, this person is screwing around with the TRC chain and got maybe 50K~60K TRC coins, worth only $10,000 at the current exchange rate.  So the person basically spent $30,000~40,000 in lost opportunity cost to attack the TRC chain.  That frankly is not rational.  

Something that makes sense is if the individual has a mega ton of Bitcoins from the oldschool days (millions of dollars worth). That person can afford the opportunity cost of not using the ASIC to mine for bitcoins. And that person has an extremely strong incentive to stop competing coins eating into the market share of Bitcoin.

Actually there is a way to test this theory.  Using the latest TRC client, there is "banned IP" list of misbehaving clients suspected of hashing/relaying fake blocks.  Just match these sets of IP addresses to those found on BTC's Blockchain.info and you should see some overlap right away, since obviously 0.5 ~ 1 Tera hash/second hashrate would not just come out of nowhere.  Though obviously some of those on the banned list is likely innocent, since they are just relaying fake blocks from malicious attackers, or they could have been spoofed.

[MaGNeT]

Mining in P2Pool I got on the "banned nodes list" while using the most recent client, mining on the right chain and 2700Mhash/s.

Looks like there are at least 2 chains, when I look in the P2Pool statistics:

[dust]

dustcoin.com/mining is on block 104396 with difficulty 12265.71592580.  I think I've been on top of updating terracoind from the latest github source, despite the dev's ridiculous lack of communication and short release schedules.

Is it possible that some services, miners and users are just running older versions of terracoin, and the forks are caused by the frequent hardforking updates to the difficulty adjustment algorithm?

[celkaris]

dustcoin.com/mining is on block 104396 with difficulty 12265.71592580.  I think I've been on top of updating terracoind from the latest github source, despite the devs ridiculous lack of communication and short release schedules.

https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=5168555B.1080905%40gmail.com&forum_name=terracoin-announce shows an email sent yesterday, but that one was indeed quite brutal (24 hours before it becomes mandatory)...

[gyverlb]

Is it possible that some services, miners and users are just running older versions of terracoin, and the forks are caused by the frequent hardforking updates to the difficulty adjustment algorithm?

I'd say many are still using old wallets. Coinotron is updated, but still closed for TRC mining.

People seeing difficulty below 5255 are on an orphaned chain and should update their client ASAP (this is the minimum difficulty supported by the latest client).

[c4n10]

Maybe the TRC devs might be interested in checking out an idea I had: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175858.0

[MaGNeT]

Can anyone explain this?

I stopped mining TRC 3 hours ago (P2Pool) but 23 minutes ago my client suddenly said "incoming!":

Status: 21 confirmations
Date: 13-4-2013 21:17
Source: Generated
Credit: 2.63128957 TRC (matures in 99 more block(s))
Net amount: 0.00 TRC
Transaction ID: 79935ee30009d72cfa42ce400e1f8146d6cb6e5af2d2c021c135c90b1c152e08

Generated coins must mature 120 blocks before they can be spent. When you generated this block, it was broadcast to the network to be added to the block chain. If it fails to get into the chain, its state will change to "not accepted" and it won't be spendable. This may occasionally happen if another node generates a block within a few seconds of yours.

[celkaris]

Can anyone explain this?

I stopped mining TRC 3 hours ago (P2Pool) but 23 minutes ago my client suddenly said "incoming!":

p2pool always worked like that, PPLNS, you gather shares while mining, then every single block solved by p2pool will include you in payouts as long as you have valid shares in p2pool share chain (that number will decrease with others mining after you stopped)

[c4n10]

Can anyone explain this?

I stopped mining TRC 3 hours ago (P2Pool) but 23 minutes ago my client suddenly said "incoming!":

Status: 21 confirmations
Date: 13-4-2013 21:17
Source: Generated
Credit: 2.63128957 TRC (matures in 99 more block(s))
Net amount: 0.00 TRC
Transaction ID: 79935ee30009d72cfa42ce400e1f8146d6cb6e5af2d2c021c135c90b1c152e08

Generated coins must mature 120 blocks before they can be spent. When you generated this block, it was broadcast to the network to be added to the block chain. If it fails to get into the chain, its state will change to "not accepted" and it won't be spendable. This may occasionally happen if another node generates a block within a few seconds of yours.

You stopped mining but the blocks you contributed hashing power to are just now confirming and p2pool is paying you out appropriately as it should.

[gyverlb]

Can anyone explain this?

I stopped mining TRC 3 hours ago (P2Pool) but 23 minutes ago my client suddenly said "incoming!":

It's perfectly normal. P2Pool uses the PPLNS reward system.

Your contribution during a time window is used to compute your reward. I don't know the window used for Terracoin, on Bitcoin P2Pool uses a 24h window or the time needed to produce 3 blocks, whichever is smaller.

You don't have to mine or even run your node to be rewarded if P2Pool finds a block.

[celkaris]

by the way i'm not sure p2pool is the best way to mine TRC now, i remember an issue (now vanished in limbo) where dev said he was contacting p2pool dev about unusual orphan blocks, and per-block retargets

[Simran]

One day, people will realize that RuCoin is the only crypto with REAL 51% protection built into the client/network and people will use RuCoin not only or the protection against 51% but because it has the nicest GUI/features out of all the clients with btc-e chat/trade built into the client, it's own separate chat system built into the client, miner ID cells which broadcast your miner ID/name to the network when you find a block (people love to have their ego stroked).

RuCoin is best coin.

The client doesn't dictate what the coin is. It's a shit coin and not open source, you couldn't even find the latest source code for. Enough with your RuCoin bullshit. Nobody gives a fuck about the coin, it was so shitty that BTC-e took it out. Come on, stop being so stubborn and accept that it's a piece of shit.

As for TRC... yeah... It's dead. I think it would be best not to mine on this chain before people start losing money.

[c4n10]

One day, people will realize that RuCoin is the only crypto with REAL 51% protection built into the client/network and people will use RuCoin not only or the protection against 51% but because it has the nicest GUI/features out of all the clients with btc-e chat/trade built into the client, it's own separate chat system built into the client, miner ID cells which broadcast your miner ID/name to the network when you find a block (people love to have their ego stroked).

RuCoin is best coin.

The client doesn't dictate what the coin is. It's a shit coin and not open source, you couldn't even find the latest source code for. Enough with your RuCoin bullshit. Nobody gives a fuck about the coin, it was so shitty that BTC-e took it out. Come on, stop being so stubborn and accept that it's a piece of shit.

As for TRC... yeah... It's dead. I think it would be best not to mine on this chain before people start losing money.

LOL, like anyone cares what you think Simran... I remember when teenagers used to respect their elders, shame the majority of you are fucking idiots now.

Windows, Java, Flash, many major softwares are closed-source and yet they exist on pretty much every computer in the world without issue.

RuCoin has been around for a couple years now, I've been mining it for over 6 months and I have never had a problem with it not being open-sourced and have had no emptying of my wallets, corruption of my other clients, virus infections, etc...

Do some real research on the coin and go through the forums and you will find that no one else has had any of these problems either in the couple of years that RUC has been around now.

The reason their code is closed-source for the time being is for security reasons, they are not finished doing dev on the client (it is considered to be in Beta right now) and they will not release the current source until they are confident that they have covered all possible exploits.

You can talk all the shit you want about it, but the fact remains it is currently the only client safe from most types of attacks including the dreaded 51%

If you want to keep mining on clients which are susceptible to attack and total destruction should someone have the whim to, be my guest.

But in my personal opinion, having observed you here in the forums and on BTC-e chat, your thoughts and opinions aren't even worthy of mention since most of it is ego-driven, troll-bait bullshit.