Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference.

[mr_random]

Alt-topics and scam-topics, know the difference.

Why don't you apply your own logic to Litecoin I wonder...

[bitdwarf]

YAC's POW innovations:

• SHA3 (Keccak512) instead of SHA256
• Chacha instead of Salsa in scrypt
• scrypt(N,1,1) instead of scrypt(1024,1,1)

[Hibero]

You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.

[ecliptic]

You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.

Which bounties though?  I am not as familar with them

I mean, anyone can put a bounty down for any purpose.

I think if the developer puts a bounty for an exchange this is bad

bounty for services which use the coin.. maybe also bad

bounty for pools or block explorers or things like that.. maybe not as bad

In my opinion, any altcoin launch now needs to use a low reward for the initial day or two of mining to prevent absurd # of coins and to combat the massive sudden influx onto the mining network that all coins get.

this means that sure, the developer could put a bounty up, but the only way he would have a bunch of coins is if he legitimately had some 10,20,50 MH/sec running on the network for a day.  And that is going to be worth coins and $ no matter what network you have it on.

This is what i put at the moment

* Low reward at start to offset 'premining' and early hash power consolidation which leads to orphan-mania.  Based on how much hash power gets thrown at basically any coin when it launches, you probably cannot combat the orphan rate, but you can minimize the absurdity of how many coins  they can farm.  Also reduces problem of mining large numbers of coins early to bribe people with bounties unfairly.  Bounties should require honest work and hashrates to achieve, just like on a mature network like current BTC/LTC

[ecliptic]

YAC's POW innovations:

• SHA3 (Keccak512) instead of SHA256
• Chacha instead of Salsa in scrypt
• scrypt(N,1,1) instead of scrypt(1024,1,1)

Interesting, i will add it as novel

However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done

[Hibero]

You may want to add something about bounties. I personally do not like them due to the somewhat necessary condition of pre-mining but you can decide for yourself.

Which bounties though?  I am not as familar with them

I mean, anyone can put a bounty down for any purpose.

I think if the developer puts a bounty for an exchange this is bad

bounty for services which use the coin.. maybe also bad

bounty for pools or block explorers or things like that.. maybe not as bad

In my opinion, any altcoin launch now needs to use a low reward for the initial day or two of mining to prevent absurd # of coins and to combat the massive sudden influx onto the mining network that all coins get.

this means that sure, the developer could put a bounty up, but the only way he would have a bunch of coins is if he legitimately had some 10,20,50 MH/sec running on the network for a day.  And that is going to be worth coins and $ no matter what network you have it on.

This is what i put at the moment

* Low reward at start to offset 'premining' and early hash power consolidation which leads to orphan-mania.  Based on how much hash power gets thrown at basically any coin when it launches, you probably cannot combat the orphan rate, but you can minimize the absurdity of how many coins  they can farm.  Also reduces problem of mining large numbers of coins early to bribe people with bounties unfairly.  Bounties should require honest work and hashrates to achieve, just like on a mature network like current BTC/LTC

Sounds good to me. I feel the best way to have a bounty is to have a large donation driven bounty. That way the community as whole can set the bounties that it wants. Of course there will be freeloaders but if you want your coin that you are mining to succeed you may need to invest in it. Pools and block explorers can fall under this.

[Tobius]

Coins which have actually tried something fundamentally new and novel, for better or worse.  In order of their introduction.


Coins which use a novel POW:

Bitcoin -- 1/3/09 -- SHA256 originator
Tenebrix -- 9/26/11 -- Scrypt originator. Was premined and thus died off.  Don't premine.
Litecoin -- 10/9/11 -- Scrypt  Gold standard for scrypt coins as Tenebrix was premined
PPCoin -- 8/19/12 Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake

Distributed p2p domain system:

Namecoin

Coin redistribution to open source projects and developers

Devcoin -- 8/5/11 -- Redistributes 90% of block rewards to open source projects chosen by the developers of Devcoin(?)

Coins which have used ascending rewards to mitigate premining/early mining of the network:

Nibble -- 5/18/13
Digicoin -- 5/18/13

Bad Coins that were premined, but otherwise worthy of note
GeistGeld, Lolcust premined 7.7M(?)
Tenebrix, Lolcust premined 7.7M(?)


Multiple coins launched with a feature nearly concurrently are listed with their approximate dates

How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>

[ecliptic]

How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>

this is very much a work in progress.  i'm adding it next

...
edit: does anyone have a link to an official bitcointalk on freicoin?  I haven't found one thus, just one on the crowdfunding and some other pre-release work.

[Tobius]

How do you not add Freicoin into this >.>

this is very much a work in progress.  i'm adding it next

...
edit: does anyone have a link to an official bitcointalk on freicoin?  I haven't found one thus, just one on the crowdfunding and some other pre-release work.

Not sure if they have one, just link to their homepage/coin fourm

[justabitoftime]

I'm a projects guy, so I might see this from a different perspective.  If people took  40 percent of the energy spent discussing the same nonsense on this forum and applied it to the coin they actually supported, I wonder what the value would look like over 90 days.

Just a thought...

[sor.rge]

This is good, this is bad...

That’s just like, your opinion, man. You are trying to enforce all altcoins to be copies of bitcoin. Different hash/encryption algorithm is no innovation, if the base software was any good that could be achieved by changing a single line of code. "Bad" list is mostly just your bad feelings.

[Joe_Bauers]

I'm looking to redesign the box completely with ScienceCoin, so if anyone is willing to help - let me know.

[ecliptic]

This is good, this is bad...

That’s just like, your opinion, man. You are trying to enforce all altcoins to be copies of bitcoin. Different hash/encryption algorithm is no innovation, if the base software was any good that could be achieved by changing a single line of code. "Bad" list is mostly just your bad feelings.

Edit : Good point, i looked back and removed the 'inflationary / infinite reward' from OP.  While i'm sure that the community strongly distlikes these things, and a coin with them will probably fail because of it, it's not as bad as the other things, which i think everyone can agree on should not be in a legit altcoin.

But if you're talking about the list in the 2nd post -- i don't say anything there is good or bad.

[sor.rge]

Nothing is wrong with centralization. Centralized systems are much more secure in many ways.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

Nothing is wrong with unbounded number of coins. Indeed it's the bound which is arbitrary and requires justification.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Testing is a good point.

[ecliptic]

Junkcoin introduced the concept of "random" (albeit still deterministic) bonus blocks for miners.  I think it deserves an honorable mention for that

Adding

[bitdwarf]

However I think that scrypt() idea is fundamentally bad.  It sounds like it will be another litecoin scrypt() cgminer gpu catastrophe.

I would not be surprised if people, maybe even many people independently, have forked and created their own cgminer in secret which is capable of utilizing GPUs, giving them several order of magnitude advantage over everyone else.

or am i wrong?  even the devs seem to say it is possible.  simply saying "well the code doesn't work right now" is not going to prevent someone from doing it.  and it's much, much faster.  if the coin has/had any worth it will be done

I've heard it's possible and that at least one forum user had a working implementation after a couple weeks, but AFAIK all of the 23 days since the coin's creation, save for the first hours (and by several people's experiences CPU mining the first 8 hours, it didn't seem like there was anyone GPU mining at that point), it's been more profitable to GPU mine about any other GPU coin rather than YAC.

As I understand it, if YAC's price rises there may a window of GPU mining being profitable, till N increases so much it becomes too memory heavy for GPUs again. I don't have the theoretical knowledge to assess this, though.

Incidentally, exchange price has remained so low for the whole first month that anyone could buy easily as many as the top hasher can mine (dontmine.me's top hasher has been mining 1500 YAC a day, or 0.67 BTC a day). Renting servers was also profitable for a while. So, there's surely a lot of people with thousands of coins they got without using GPUs at all.

When PoS starts to kick in it will decrease GPU miners' share of the total minting too, but I don't know by how much.

[ecliptic]

Nothing is wrong with centralization. Centralized systems are much more secure in many ways.

Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software

Nothing is wrong with unbounded number of coins. Indeed it's the bound which is arbitrary and requires justification.

Agreed, removed that from OP.  I could add something to the list of coins if there's a novel one that uses inflationary or infinite coins, but i don't know which came first for that.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.

[sor.rge]

Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software

I understand your point of view, but such philosophical arguments don't affect the success of a coin. It's like saying "don't write closed source software, it's bad", that's not going to change anything. Almost all the currencies currently in use are centralized, and before bitcoin there was some research on p2p currencies with limited degree of centralization, say just for registering new users and exchanging coins for other currency. This was all called "cryptocurrency" as well. I think you are biased by bitcoin here.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.

To the "inflationary reward" remark. I don't think it's easy to predict what kind of reward will lead to inflation, that's all.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.

Yes, but it's this behavior, this attitude which is at fault here. Of course, if the creators don't have any interest in the coin, it's doomed, independently of whether it hits the exchanges.

[ecliptic]

Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software

I understand your point of view, but such philosophical arguments don't affect the success of a coin. It's like saying "don't write closed source software, it's bad", that's not going to change anything. Almost all the currencies currently in use are centralized, and before bitcoin there was some research on p2p currencies with limited degree of centralization, say just for registering new users and exchanging coins for other currency. This was all called "cryptocurrency" as well. I think you are biased by bitcoin here.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.

To the "inflationary reward" remark. I don't think it's easy to predict what kind of reward will lead to inflation, that's all.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.

Yes, but it's this behavior, this attitude which is at fault here. Of course, if the creators don't have any interest in the coin, it's doomed, independently of whether it hits the exchanges.

By Inflationary reward i mean literally that the reward for blocks inflates, or goes up over the long term.

Not like the 2->4->10->15->20 or whatever progression used for the first few days to combat early / premining.

I meant like, if the bitcoin block reward doubled instead of halving.

It should either stay the same or decrease.

I don't have anything against centralized systems per say, of course most existing institutions and systems are such.  but discussion and creation of them is meant for another forum.  cyptocurrency as we use it inherently means that it is decentralized and open source.

It would be like writing some closed source Open Source Software.  contradiction in terms. 

[ecliptic]

Litecoin isn't the "gold standard" for scrypt. Fairbrix was the first non-premined scrypt coin, Litecoin just copied it and changed the name.

updated

Coins which use a novel POW:
Bitcoin -- 1/3/09 -- SHA256 originator and novel in nearly every regard.  Gold standard
Tenebrix -- 9/26/11 -- Scrypt originator. Was premined and thus died off.
Fairbrix -- 10/2/11 -- Scrypt.  Initial launch crippled by bad config.  Second launch attacked.  These problems led to its demise.
Litecoin -- 10/9/11 -- Scrypt  Current Gold standard for scrypt and altcoins.  Avoided problems of Tenebrix and Fairbrix
PPCoin -- 8/19/12 -- Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake
YAC -- 5/5/13 -- SHA3-512 instead of SHA2-256.  Cacha replaces Salsa.  scrypt(N,1,1), N increases over time.