Ixcoin TODO

[solracx]

Here's an interesting article,  that mentions Hal Varian, an economist from UC berkeley that is studying the nature of money:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2004-01-15.html

"This story illustrates that paper currency can take on a life of its own, even in the absence of government backing. At the same time, it is clear that government backing makes a significant contribution to the value of paper currency: the more likely it became that the Swiss dinars would be valued by a subsequent government, the more valuable they became."

Also: http://uneasymoney.com/2011/07/25/the-paradox-of-fiat-money/

Now from the same author years later about Bitcoin:

http://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/not-particularly-optimistic-about-bitcoin-s-future-hal-varian-113121601025_1.html

"I think something like this technology will take hold in the future but I am not particularly optimistic about bitcoin because it suffers from being the first in the area. "

[FrictionlessCoin]

Nope.

But it is not my system.

I have been using Vircurex to post offers all day without problem.

(Firefox on Fedora 17.)

-MarkM-

It turns out,  I am not the only one having this problem.  Apparently, Vircurex only works with Firefox.   I checked with Chrome and Safari and it does not work.

No wonder they got so low volume over there.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Vircurex: nice idea, but very poor development and assistance / maintenance

e.g. If you exchanged BTC for usd, you could not withdraw your money.
They send a message of confirmation of your trading activity once in a while (unreliable service)
They have a problem of visualization of sell/buy boxes, but nobody seeems aware of it.
Trading volume very low.

I think IXC really needs CEX.io exchange.

Dexter44 got a message from the CEX.IO folks that the IXC exchange is scheduled for February.

The trading at Cryptsty is more dynamic that Vircurex.  The only problem is, there aren't many IXC coins at Cryptsy.  You could by 10 BTC worth and it'll drive the price to go up 100%.

[Vlad2Vlad]

Why does the hashrate for iXcoin spike then drop massively then repeat every few days?

It was at 10 PH and now it's at 6.  I've seen it do this many times.  So who would start heir gear on merge mining then say:  oh, I don't want these coins for free and stop mining iXcoin?  That makes no sense.  Once you set your gear to merge mine you set it and forget it.

So is there a way to do stealth mining?   And are these peaks on hash rate more like blips on a radar, showing the real hash rate?  Kind of odd cause I don't see it on NameCoin nor as much on BTC.  Although DVC Seems to have the same thing going on.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Why does the hashrate for iXcoin spike then drop massively then repeat every few days?

It was at 10 PH and now it's at 6.  I've seen it do this many times.  So who would start heir gear on merge mining then say:  oh, I don't want these coins for free and stop mining iXcoin?  That makes no sense.  Once you set your gear to merge mine you set it and forget it.

So is there a way to do stealth mining?   And are these peaks on hash rate more like blips on a radar, showing the real hash rate?  Kind of odd cause I don't see it on NameCoin nor as much on BTC.  Although DVC Seems to have the same thing going on.

These spikes are occuring for all the merge mined coins and BTC.   BTC hashrate is 11 peta hash rate, but it was like 19 the other day.   

My take is that the 28nm miner manufacturers are testing their equipment. 

I am actually a bit surprised that it is affecting hashrate for IXC.  Could it be another pool is testing merge mining?   Are they testing their hardware using merge mining?

[RoadTrain]

Sorry to say, but the one who's mistaken is you.
In PPC PoS secures the network while PoW is supplementary and helps distribute coins.
PoW blocks are granted score of 1 while for PoS score is computed as

Code:

(CBigNum(1)<<256) / (bnTarget+1)

It means that any PoW block can be overwritten by a PoS one. So PoW doesn't contribute to chain security.
You can check GetBlockTrust method in main.h.

That formula that you show has got nothing to do with security.

High Hash Rate equates to higher security... that is just plain fundamentals.

Claiming PoS secures a network is like saying that NXT with its 100% PoS is the most secure coin ever devised.

So don't give me this B.S. that PoS secures the network.  All it does is it secures the profits of the current stake holders.  Kind of like a Ponzi scheme.

You need to rethink this thing.
Security doesn't mean anything on its own. It only means when there's an attack vector, in this case a hashrate attack.
But in PPC you can't attack the chain with pure PoW. Well, you can in theory, but it's highly unpredictable compared to this kind of attack on a pure PoW system.
So yes, PoS DOES secure the network. And that's plain fundamentals in PPC case.
I assume you didn't bother learning about PPC's approach to security in depth.
I can't blame you, but at least stop posting about something you don't know much about like you do.

[Vlad2Vlad]

For Crying out-loud, can we get Mark, the tie breaker, M up in this MoFo to settle this?

I would but I don't know jack about this stuff.


Mark....M?

[RoadTrain]

For Crying out-loud, can we get Mark, the tie breaker, M up in this MoFo to settle this?

I would but I don't know jack about this stuff.


Mark....M?

I am longing for him to step in

[iampingu]

For Crying out-loud, can we get Mark, the tie breaker, M up in this MoFo to settle this?

I would but I don't know jack about this stuff.


Mark....M?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2e1515l7Tc

I've told you

[FrictionlessCoin]

You need to rethink this thing.
Security doesn't mean anything on its own. It only means when there's an attack vector, in this case a hashrate attack.
But in PPC you can't attack the chain with pure PoW. Well, you can in theory, but it's highly unpredictable compared to this kind of attack on a pure PoW system.
So yes, PoS DOES secure the network. And that's plain fundamentals in PPC case.
I assume you didn't bother learning about PPC's approach to security in depth.
I can't blame you, but at least stop posting about something you don't know much about like you do.

You are simply trying to deflect the obvious argument that IXC with 5,800 terahash of network hash rate is an order of magnitude more secure than PPC with 580 terahash rate.

There are 5,800 1 THs class machines securing the IXC network as compared to a a paltry 580 1 THs machines for the PPC network. 

To even claim that PoS compensates for this gross deficiency is like claiming that a Humvee is more secure than a M1-A1 Abrahms Battle tank because it is smaller.  Give me a break!!!

[VERUMinNUMERIS]

You need to rethink this thing.
Security doesn't mean anything on its own. It only means when there's an attack vector, in this case a hashrate attack.
But in PPC you can't attack the chain with pure PoW. Well, you can in theory, but it's highly unpredictable compared to this kind of attack on a pure PoW system.
So yes, PoS DOES secure the network. And that's plain fundamentals in PPC case.
I assume you didn't bother learning about PPC's approach to security in depth.
I can't blame you, but at least stop posting about something you don't know much about like you do.

You are simply trying to deflect the obvious argument that IXC with 5,800 terahash of network hash rate is an order of magnitude more secure than PPC with 580 terahash rate.

There are 5,800 1 THs class machines securing the IXC network as compared to a a paltry 580 1 THs machines for the PPC network. 

To even claim that PoS compensates for this gross deficiency is like claiming that a Humvee is more secure than a M1-A1 Abrahms Battle tank because it is smaller.  Give me a break!!!

To me, Friction's arguments make much more sense but I too would like to hear a second opinion from an Experienced programmer like Mark.

This is really important as it is iXcoin's main supposed advantage.

Mark, if you could chime in we would all appreciate it.  Thanks!

[markm]

Vircurex: nice idea, but very poor development and assistance / maintenance

e.g. If you exchanged BTC for usd, you could not withdraw your money.
They send a message of confirmation of your trading activity once in a while (unreliable service)
They have a problem of visualization of sell/buy boxes, but nobody seeems aware of it.
Trading volume very low.

I think IXC really needs CEX.io exchange.

Dexter44 got a message from the CEX.IO folks that the IXC exchange is scheduled for February.

The trading at Cryptsty is more dynamic that Vircurex.  The only problem is, there aren't many IXC coins at Cryptsy.  You could by 10 BTC worth and it'll drive the price to go up 100%.

I wouldn't risk using Cryptsy at all, its entire purpose seems to be to enable as many scams as possible as quickly as possible so it is hard not to just throw their entire operation into the scam category itself.

So basically one has to figure it is not whether they will run with your money, it is when they will do so...

And maybe the answer to that is, when scamming people stops looking so profitable, as in, when enabling scammers to cash in on their scams ceases to be so lucrative it will be time to scam all the scammers by running with their money.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Why does the hashrate for iXcoin spike then drop massively then repeat every few days?

It was at 10 PH and now it's at 6.  I've seen it do this many times.  So who would start heir gear on merge mining then say:  oh, I don't want these coins for free and stop mining iXcoin?  That makes no sense.  Once you set your gear to merge mine you set it and forget it.

So is there a way to do stealth mining?   And are these peaks on hash rate more like blips on a radar, showing the real hash rate?  Kind of odd cause I don't see it on NameCoin nor as much on BTC.  Although DVC Seems to have the same thing going on.

These spikes are occuring for all the merge mined coins and BTC.   BTC hashrate is 11 peta hash rate, but it was like 19 the other day.  

My take is that the 28nm miner manufacturers are testing their equipment.  

I am actually a bit surprised that it is affecting hashrate for IXC.  Could it be another pool is testing merge mining?   Are they testing their hardware using merge mining?

Every time difficulty is adjusted it takes a lot of blocks before a new average time between blocks can be figured out and the random time it takes to find blocks can be averaged over enough blocks to make a reasonable guess at the current hash-rate.

So when the adjustment happens, if the next block happens to be lucky (fast) poof the average taken over just one block looks like huge hash rate. A few thousand blocks later, if difficulty has not already changed again already, you can make a better guestimate of hash rate because the average time between blocks might by then be statistically meaninful instead of being just a random number that is really measuring luck not hashrate.

So even with bitcoin itself, every time difficulty changes it takes a lot of blocks for the guesses / estimates of how much hash rate might be out there to start to stabilise at reasonable guesses instead of just being a measurement of how lucky people have been so far since the difficulty changed.

IXCoin probably changes difficulty sooner/faster than bitcoin does, as an attempted defense against fly by night miners stranding it at high difficulty. So chances are it does not even stay at any one difficulty long enough for the averae time per block to settle down to a reasonable average before poof the difficulty changes and the averaging has to start all over again. So chances are it is always as much a measure of luck as a measure of hashrate.

All you really know is the difficulty.

For coins that take many many blocks before changing difficulty, if you estimated the hashrate as of the last block before the difficulty changed, that would give you the best estimate but even then it would only be estimating the average hash-rate across that many blocks, not the hash rate at that moment.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Re proof of stake so far it seems to have been a man in the middle attack.

Sunny King can make any chain he chooses be the "main" chain, so basically the security comes down to how many bodyguards he has, how many armed guards his data centre has, and how trustwirthy all of those people are.

It is even more centralised than solidcoin was, as Solidcoin had 12 or more trusted servers supposedly or by design, whereas PPC has as far as I know only Mein Fuhrer Sunnyking holding and maybe possibly safeguarding the destruct/chainrobbery lever.

Supposedly some clones claim to be trying or pretending to ameliorate that central control guy problem but I dunno if any of them are anything other than scams.

Novacoin is maybe even worse because the one guy is the central bank who adjusts interest rates arbitrarily any time the whim to do so strikes him.

-MarkM-

[FrictionlessCoin]

Dexter44 got a message from the CEX.IO folks that the IXC exchange is scheduled for February.

The trading at Cryptsty is more dynamic that Vircurex.  The only problem is, there aren't many IXC coins at Cryptsy.  You could by 10 BTC worth and it'll drive the price to go up 100%.

I wouldn't risk using Cryptsy at all, its entire purpose seems to be to enable as many scams as possible as quickly as possible so it is hard not to just throw their entire operation into the scam category itself.

So basically one has to figure it is not whether they will run with your money, it is when they will do so...

And maybe the answer to that is, when scamming people stops looking so profitable, as in, when enabling scammers to cash in on their scams ceases to be so lucrative it will be time to scam all the scammers by running with their money.

-MarkM-

A rock and a hard place?   An honest but incompetent exchange like Vircurex  versus a dubious but more dynamic exchange like Cryptsy.

Cryptsy apparenly has a lot of trading volume lately from the likes of Mega, Quark and Doge.   Quark is definitely a scam.  Doge is definitely good marketing and gullible late buyers.  

[VERUMinNUMERIS]

Re proof of stake so far it seems to have been a man in the middle attack.

Sunny King can make any chain he chooses be the "main" chain, so basically the security comes down to how many bodyguards he has, how many armed guards his data centre has, and how trustwirthy all of those people are.

It is even more centralised than solidcoin was, as Solidcoin had 12 or more trusted servers supposedly or by design, whereas PPC has as far as I know only Mein Fuhrer Sunnyking holding and maybe possibly safeguarding the destruct/chainrobbery lever.

-MarkM-

What about the debate regarding PoS being so secure, especially against 10 Peta Hashes of ASICS for the likes of DevCoin and iXcoin?

Does PoS offer the same or higher levels of security as real POW hash power?  Or is PoS misunderstood and for real security you need massive hashes?  Thanks.

[markm]

DOGE got onto VIrcurex because Vircurex is starved for volume and DOGE had good volume.

I nearly dropped Vircurex at that point, and still consider it a very bad sign that they didn't replace some other crappy scrypt coin(s) when they put DOGE in, since DOGE has more difficulty/security than any of them but litecoin so if it is even reasonable at all to have more than one scrypt coin DOGE would be the logical choice as the runner-up / also-ran scrypt coin, the rest are just toys waiting to be looted.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Re proof of stake so far it seems to have been a man in the middle attack.

Sunny King can make any chain he chooses be the "main" chain, so basically the security comes down to how many bodyguards he has, how many armed guards his data centre has, and how trustwirthy all of those people are.

It is even more centralised than solidcoin was, as Solidcoin had 12 or more trusted servers supposedly or by design, whereas PPC has as far as I know only Mein Fuhrer Sunnyking holding and maybe possibly safeguarding the destruct/chainrobbery lever.

-MarkM-

What about the debate regarding PoS being so secure, especially against 10 Peta Hashes of ASICS for the likes of DevCoin and iXcoin?

Does PoS offer the same or higher levels of security as real POW hash power?  Or is PoS misunderstood and for real security you need massive hashes?  Thanks.

Research proof of stake. There are years of deep discussion of it. Then SunnyKing came out of the blue claiming not to have even read all that work with his broken "solution" then later claimed to have fixed the obvious broken-ness that was pointed out to him, but I don't think any of the serious people working on proof of stake concepts was convinced at all.

Though maybe Cunicula has been saying that PPC is not too bad if you assume an economist's threat model (is it profitable to attack) instead of the traditional computer-science threat model (is it feasible to attack aka could an attack be done even if doing it might not DIRECTLY yield profits).

Cunicila's answer to "surely one can profit simply by shorting the coin before attacking it" is basically "even if the market would be stupid enough to offer shorts, surely after one person has profited by short-then-attack the market would not be so stupid as to offer shorts again".

Which falls flat, in my eyes, given the observed insanely hideously massive stupidity of this market...

-MarkM-

[Vlad2Vlad]

My feeling regarding Cryptsy is that they're trying to maximize profits. Why let other exchanges monopolize profits off massive trades in CrapCoins when you can add those coins as well and let people decide.  If a coin is a scam then the buyers has the responsibility to do their research.

It's just like Nasdaq, they lost tons of crappy stocks and even penny stocks and it's up to the buyer to do their homework.  And Cryptsy regularly removes coins off their site so I'm not sure they're a scam.

Cryptsy' has a parent company with plenty to lose so that gives me some conifer that they won't bail with out money. At the same time, I wouldn't leave any large amount of coins on their exchange cause you never know.

[RoadTrain]

You need to rethink this thing.
Security doesn't mean anything on its own. It only means when there's an attack vector, in this case a hashrate attack.
But in PPC you can't attack the chain with pure PoW. Well, you can in theory, but it's highly unpredictable compared to this kind of attack on a pure PoW system.
So yes, PoS DOES secure the network. And that's plain fundamentals in PPC case.
I assume you didn't bother learning about PPC's approach to security in depth.
I can't blame you, but at least stop posting about something you don't know much about like you do.

You are simply trying to deflect the obvious argument that IXC with 5,800 terahash of network hash rate is an order of magnitude more secure than PPC with 580 terahash rate.

There are 5,800 1 THs class machines securing the IXC network as compared to a a paltry 580 1 THs machines for the PPC network. 

To even claim that PoS compensates for this gross deficiency is like claiming that a Humvee is more secure than a M1-A1 Abrahms Battle tank because it is smaller.  Give me a break!!!

I said no word about IXC, and its security is even more debatable than PPC's.
I mean it's totally incorrect to compare pure PoW systems and hybrid ones. Especially when PoS plays only marginal role in securing the network.

As of markm's comment about PPC's centralization, that may be true, I didn't follow closely its latest developments, but it was planned that checkpointing made optional.
Any PoS coin is vulnerable in its infancy, just like any PoW coin while difficulty is low.

PoW coins are secured by hashrate, while PoS ones are secured by stake weight. Either of those needs time to rise high enough.
I haven't seen any research comparing the security of pow and pos/hybrid systems. But it's clear that what really matters is the cost of an identical attack in both networks.
Until this research is conducted, please refrain from blindly comparing security of different systems.