[ANN][YAC] YACoin ongoing development

[sairon]

A thread dedicated to yacoin client with coin control: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948

[ivanlabrie]

Great work!

Waiting for x64 windows version...

[sairon]

A thread dedicated to yacoin client with coin control: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948

In a way related to CC, pay attention to individual unspent inputs! Lowest PoS reward seems to be 0.05 YAC and, based on already mined
PoS blocks, it seems minimum amount input should hold to make sure at least 0.05 YAC will be staked later is around 10 YAC. There were few
inputs bellow 10 YAC that got PoS reward (0.05 YAC or slightly more) but generaly speaking if you want PoS coins you should gather coins
on 10+ YAC piles. Use CC to select small unspent inputs (like 1 or 0.025 YAC) and send them to one of your addresses in such a way that
transaction amount is 10 or more YAC.

Put differently, all those individual 1 YAC or similary small payouts you received will never ever return any PoS rewards! If you are holding
other PoS altcoins than you should check already mined PoS blocks there. The worst case seems to be BTB, where very few people actualy
got PoS rewards. Bellow is data for 3 latest BTB PoS blocks at time of this post, notice that in all 3 cases PoS reward is 0 coins.

Block 20489 > http://btb.cryptocoinexplorer.com/block/a9a901000bcabec26a9b56c2580103ecbb1a1496470bca9664eb9e90f5684892
Block 20476 > http://btb.cryptocoinexplorer.com/block/16e867402961e36dcbe21850436d0a006d29477a1265194381b3a09d6def52df
Block 20470 > http://btb.cryptocoinexplorer.com/block/077442322b5a11c6c232d2aabba33a2e0e536fe7e4a6caf2cd3479d431fdbb16

Nice find! This should definitely be added to the wiki.

[sairon]

Great work!

Waiting for x64 windows version...

Well, you know, you can run 32-bit version on a 64-bit Windows just fine.

[loucy]

Nice find! This should definitely be added to the wiki.

No. It should be fixed.

[cryptrol]

Put differently, all those individual 1 YAC or similary small payouts you received will never ever return any PoS rewards!

Great news for people with p2pool inputs then.

Also, is this also an issue for every other PoS coin (including the original PPC) ?

Nice find! This should definitely be added to the wiki.

No. It should be fixed.

AFAIK, No one but @sairon is working on the YAC wallet (awesome work with the coin control feature btw).
Behind adding checkpoints (on the @Windmaster fork), nothing else has been done on the client since the official release.

[loucy]

Also, is this also an issue for every other PoS coin (including the original PPC) ?

I have PoS-mined NVC with a total balance of 0.99 NVC.
 

[St.Bit]

Nice find! This should definitely be added to the wiki.

No. It should be fixed.

Actually I like the minimum PoS reward. 0.05YAC are currently less than a tenth of a cent so it wouldn't change anything.

Could someone troll the network by making a lot of small adresses and a good network connection?

[ivanlabrie]

Great work!

Waiting for x64 windows version...

Well, you know, you can run 32-bit version on a 64-bit Windows just fine.

of course! Just messin with ya...appreciate the work man.
I'll fire it up now.

[sairon]

Nice find! This should definitely be added to the wiki.

No. It should be fixed.

Actually I like the minimum PoS reward. 0.05YAC are currently less than a tenth of a cent so it wouldn't change anything.

Could someone troll the network by making a lot of small adresses and a good network connection?

I personally don't feel the need to "fix" this, IMHO it's a non issue as you'll only be generating satoshis anyway (and YAC isn't worth THAT much for this to be any significant amount). Also, AFAIK if you are p2pool minig and have a LOT of sub-YAC unspent inputs in your wallet (presumably at one address), they'll be grouped into one PoS transaction when you have enough of them older than 30 days AND they cummulatively exceed the 10 YAC minimum (please correct me if I'm wrong, haven't looked at the actual code for this yet).

As for the PoS blocks not meeting the 10 YAC minimum input: I think those were actually older than 30 days and thus eligible for a higher percentual PoS reward (5% per year, remember?), and those few extra days made a difference. There's a hardcoded maximum of 90 days, however, so be sure not to wait more before staking or you'll be losing out on that (that means if you have a stake-eligible pile of coins that's, say, half a year old; you'll still be getting a reward corresponding to only 90 days old coins).

[WindMaster]

AFAIK, No one but @sairon is working on the YAC wallet (awesome work with the coin control feature btw).
Behind adding checkpoints (on the @Windmaster fork), nothing else has been done on the client since the official release.

Umm, I think there are somewhat more changes in my fork than just adding checkpoints..  See if you can get the original official release to compile on Windows, and if you succeed (without replacing all the scrypt-jane library source with a newer version altogether), also keep score on how many times you see unchanged "Novacoin" and "NVC" text plastered all over the original client.  Or try to get an estimate of the network hash rate out of the original client, or find out the current N or Nfactor without looking up the time-vs-N table I generated (and everyone else reposted in various places).

Hey sairon or Joe_Bauers (with Joe being the only one who has ever contributed code to my version of the client), want to take over my Github repository (github.com/yacoin)?  My enthusiasm for continuing development is decreasing, given the number of people that constantly send me private messages that the sky is falling if we don't immediately hard fork to change {insert random non-critical thing here that is different in YACoin than any other coin and/or doesn't work exactly how someone wants it to, or that we need to protect against hypothetical attacks that only exist in the sender's imagination due to misunderstandings of how the code works}.  My favorite is all the PM's I get demanding we hard fork to change the difficulty calculation so after Nfactor++ events, average block time won't temporarily rise from 1 minute to 2 minutes for a few days while difficulty adjusts (oh no!).

I no longer hold any appreciable amount of YAC (well, other than a few thousand laying around somewhere) and haven't for quite a while.

[St.Bit]

I no longer hold any appreciable amount of YAC (well, other than a few thousand laying around somewhere) and haven't for quite a while.

That's definitely something I don't like to hear.

Why did you decide to sell your coins? As far as I recall you missed the lauch but bought significant ammounts later on. I understand that people can be anoying, but that'd be no reason for me to be not invested yourself. Maybe I'm overvaluing YACs features, but I still see them far better than some altcoins with a far higher marketcap. A nicer GUI, some minor fixes and Yac is good to go, or am I missing something important here?

Nevertheless loosing the main developer (again) will be a big hit to it.

[Joe_Bauers]

Hey sairon or Joe_Bauers (with Joe being the only one who has ever contributed code to my version of the client), want to take over my Github repository (github.com/yacoin)?  

WM - I will take it over if you can't do it anymore. Either in conjunction with sairon, or solo if they are not interested. Either way, I appreciate all of the work you've done on YACoin so far and am looking forward to seeing where we can bring YAC to in the future. Let me know.

[cryptrol]

AFAIK, No one but @sairon is working on the YAC wallet (awesome work with the coin control feature btw).
Behind adding checkpoints (on the @Windmaster fork), nothing else has been done on the client since the official release.

Umm, I think there are somewhat more changes in my fork than just adding checkpoints..  See if you can get the original official release to compile on Windows, and if you succeed (without replacing all the scrypt-jane library source with a newer version altogether), also keep score on how many times you see unchanged "Novacoin" and "NVC" text plastered all over the original client.  Or try to get an estimate of the network hash rate out of the original client, or find out the current N or Nfactor without looking up the time-vs-N table I generated (and everyone else reposted in various places).

I forgot about all the new API calls, you put a nice amount of work on the original client. My apologies.

[sairon]

Also, AFAIK if you are p2pool minig and have a LOT of sub-YAC unspent inputs in your wallet (presumably at one address), they'll be grouped into one PoS transaction when you have enough of them older than 30 days AND they cummulatively exceed the 10 YAC minimum (please correct me if I'm wrong, haven't looked at the actual code for this yet).

PoS does not group anything.

I believe it does, or at least it should try to (but only coins that belong to the same address). The number of stake inputs is limited to 100, constrained by the nCombineThreshold variable (dunno what exactly this does, but it says in the comment that it's important for security reasons - however, I didn't find anything about this in PPCoin's paper). EDIT: It tries to combine inputs up to slightly over 11 YAC.

From wallet.cpp, line 1470:

Code:

    BOOST_FOREACH(PAIRTYPE(const CWalletTx*, unsigned int) pcoin, setCoins)
    {
        // Attempt to add more inputs
        // Only add coins of the same key/address as kernel
        if (txNew.vout.size() == 2 && ((pcoin.first->vout[pcoin.second].scriptPubKey == scriptPubKeyKernel || pcoin.first->vout[pcoin.second].scriptPubKey == txNew.vout[1].scriptPubKey))
            && pcoin.first->GetHash() != txNew.vin[0].prevout.hash)
        {
            // Stop adding more inputs if already too many inputs
            if (txNew.vin.size() >= 100)
                break;
            // Stop adding more inputs if value is already pretty significant
            if (nCredit > nCombineThreshold)
                break;
            // Stop adding inputs if reached reserve limit
            if (nCredit + pcoin.first->vout[pcoin.second].nValue > nBalance - nReserveBalance)
                break;
            // Do not add additional significant input
            if (pcoin.first->vout[pcoin.second].nValue > nCombineThreshold)
                continue;
            // Do not add input that is still too young
            if (pcoin.first->nTime + nStakeMaxAge > txNew.nTime)
                continue;
            txNew.vin.push_back(CTxIn(pcoin.first->GetHash(), pcoin.second));
            nCredit += pcoin.first->vout[pcoin.second].nValue;
            vwtxPrev.push_back(pcoin.first);
        }
    }

1. Why is reward distributed on two outputs?
2. Why there is additional, empty output?

1. For security reasons, apparently. https://github.com/EskimoBob/ppcoin/commit/720f007714e9f24d10a1f46726fe9f8f56163fbf
2. PoS blocks/transactions are identified by this empty coinbase output.

From main.cpp, line 2052:

Code:

    // ppcoin: only the second transaction can be the optional coinstake
    for (unsigned int i = 2; i < vtx.size(); i++)
        if (vtx[i].IsCoinStake())
            return DoS(100, error("CheckBlock() : coinstake in wrong position"));

    // ppcoin: coinbase output should be empty if proof-of-stake block
    if (IsProofOfStake() && (vtx[0].vout.size() != 1 || !vtx[0].vout[0].IsEmpty()))
        return error("CheckBlock() : coinbase output not empty for proof-of-stake block");

This code also explains why there is a completely empty coinbase transaction in each PoS block, eg. http://yacexplorer.tk/tx/b358e9983a3387ce7993d8757e6be6c4a10613cf69de039194f7237307a92d96 in block http://yacexplorer.tk/block/a781207353e5a8b30c3a271ad135361ecdeb3bc9e7a5b5c5319b4242d32d0f06

Also, wallet unlocking for PoS minting is bugged (inherited from NVC which inherited it from PPC) as explained bellow:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=187714.msg2013737#msg2013737

Looks like this still has not been fixed in PPC: https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/issues/16

Hey sairon or Joe_Bauers (with Joe being the only one who has ever contributed code to my version of the client), want to take over my Github repository (github.com/yacoin)?  

WM - I will take it over if you can't do it anymore. Either in conjunction with sairon, or solo if they are not interested. Either way, I appreciate all of the work you've done on YACoin so far and am looking forward to seeing where we can bring YAC to in the future. Let me know.

@WM: Too bad you're leaving us. Thanks for all you've done for this coin.
@Joe: You've commited better code to the project, so you should keep that repo (it's better security-wise IMHO). I'm comfortable working in my own dev tree and sending pull requests when I finally manage to fix something.

[sairon]

IMPORTANT!
Stop using the published versions of Yacoin with Coin Control - there's a critical bug when NOT selecting a custom change address (the new change address is not reserved from keypool and thus your coins disappear forever). Fixed in recent git commit, updated binaries coming soon.

[Thirtybird]

Hey sairon or Joe_Bauers (with Joe being the only one who has ever contributed code to my version of the client), want to take over my Github repository (github.com/yacoin)?  My enthusiasm for continuing development is decreasing, given the number of people that constantly send me private messages that the sky is falling if we don't immediately hard fork to change {insert random non-critical thing here that is different in YACoin than any other coin and/or doesn't work exactly how someone wants it to, or that we need to protect against hypothetical attacks that only exist in the sender's imagination due to misunderstandings of how the code works}.  My favorite is all the PM's I get demanding we hard fork to change the difficulty calculation so after Nfactor++ events, average block time won't temporarily rise from 1 minute to 2 minutes for a few days while difficulty adjusts (oh no!).

I no longer hold any appreciable amount of YAC (well, other than a few thousand laying around somewhere) and haven't for quite a while.

I'm sorry to hear this, and obviously this explains why you have been fairly quiet of late.  I thought I was helping by suggesting the difficulty adjustment in the thread - it appears to have had the opposite effect (though I still maintain it's not a horrible idea when you think about more real-time transactions)

[sairon]

Fixed windows binary up, grab it at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948 (in the OP).

[ivanlabrie]

Thanks!

[WindMaster]

WM - I will take it over if you can't do it anymore. Either in conjunction with sairon, or solo if they are not interested. Either way, I appreciate all of the work you've done on YACoin so far and am looking forward to seeing where we can bring YAC to in the future. Let me know.

I think that'll be the best.  So, everyone, I'm going to go ahead and turn the Github repository over to Joe_Bauers.  Joe has already demonstrated an understanding of the code (just look at the commit history on the repository, he's the only one who was contributed) and I consider him trustworthy, so I'm comfortable passing the torch on to him.  At this point the YACoin client needs some good UI improvements, and Joe is a lot stronger with QT, so the future of the coin will be better in his hands.  Part of the job of being the developer on an open-source project is knowing when to get out of the way of progress.  Hey Joe, I'll catch up with you to hand off the repository password.


Some kind words from someone on yacointalk wishing me well on my departure:

If you take on a public project and announce it like he did, then Dont whine that you get attention and PM and feature requests. I was not impressed with his presentation from the beginning. He mentioned his coding skills as moderate. .So now im just very disapointed by the additude thath he gets discouraged with the stupid feature request. Which is,imho,only showing the coin still gets attention from the less educated, a positive thing.
One of his main reason was to keep the project development alive becouse he had some coins (from the FPGA instamine). So now that he aperantly sold those he looses interest. Very Very weak, he got no vision.  let him leave, he is negatively affecting the project with this additude. Or hopefully he is just having a blue monday.

...

founder and contributor of yacoinwiki
http://www.yacoinwiki.tk
please donate @
BTC 1MerynXhXJ2nBFXW9FBc6GZszfP4hU63LH
YAC YLJHSjvKLai7xGAa4a9FVpswTYYNwfFWpY

Thanks for the kind words merijnk, the feeling is mutual!  Your contributions were invaluable (especially all those git pull requests you sent!), which is why I almost added your name alongside Joe_Bauers and sairon as candidates who I would trust to protect the integrity of YACoin as they take over development and work to bring the coin to the next level.  I look on with admiration each time I see the high quality work and apparently above-moderate coding skills that went into yacoinwiki.tk!

Well, I'll be on my way now so I stop "negatively affecting" the project.  So long and thanks for all the fish!