[ANN] STRAKS - A POW/Masternode Cryptocurrency focused on e-commerce utility

[lupanar]

I want to congratulate the developers with a successful start, it was one of the best starts in recent times.
 Smooth transition to the mainnet and accessibility for all platforms.

LOL, in recent times?  Hardly.  This started out with devs saying it could only be mined using a built-in cpu miner with a confusing script that would launch multiple daemons.  I'm sure their plan all along was to mine with their GPUs while the idiots wasted cpu cycles.  They waxed poetic as to how different this coin was and how it was too advanced for pools or miners to implement.  Only when pools did actually implement it because its nothing more than a standard algo did they change their tune. Lets not forget that rewards started 2 days after the stated time.  If you ask me, this ranks as the 2nd worst start in recent times, ranking right after Bitcoin Gold.

This was a simple statement of facts, but it appears you have a certain narrative that you are content on aligning your re-wording towards. There are 1250 coins on the market today, if for some reason STRAKS is not a currency that you would like to be a part of, I am certain that there are other currencies out there that will resonate with you. Nobody is forced to trade nor direct mining power towards STRAKS if they do not want to. At no point did we "change our tune" as you state, it is simply just a fact that the protocol is newer than what there currently is on the market.

The protocol is too new for mining pools to be able to easily implement it without any updates implemented to pools. Our hopes were that CPU mining would have lasted longer, so that even the hobby miner would have had a chance to get on board (the farms today can make it difficult for the small hobby miner to get on board) but while monitoring hashrates it became evident that someone had managed to crack it a day before launch. All credit goes to Decker from Deckerpool (https://t.me/deckerpool) who managed to update yiimp to the new protocol. After we managed to locate him, we approached him and agreed to pay him a bounty in exchange for making the code open source to the public (https://github.com/DeckerSU/yiimp/tree/straks), so that pools could be set up, miners would have a leveled playing-field and lastly so that the hashing power could be decentralised across multiple pools. If we were, as you state, holding onto a GPU miner ourselves, I am not exactly sure why we would go to the effort to pay someone for their source code for GPU mining? I addressed this very concern several pages ago too (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2433318.msg24952030#msg24952030).

A core value to STRAKS is transparency. Under no circumstance will we ever compromise on that value. We know the cryptocurrency market is crowded with nefarious individuals, we seek to shake that up by doing our part to create an ethical corner in this crowded space of nefarious individuals.

Fair enough, but I am a proud owner of a few Straks currently, so in the spirit of this being community driven and transparent, I'm just throwing in my 2 cents.  And I don't want to argue semantics, but Decker really only updated the stratum code, and from what I can tell, it looks like the main sticking point was the 5% rake the devs take from the blocks.  Suprnova implemented this coin and they don't even use yiimp.  Strange that a russian pool that previously was solely dedicated to mining SIGT would come up with this update though.  Anyway, I just thought it seemed kind of shady to make it sound like there was some giant technical advancement preventing GPU mining, when the real problem was that no one had implemented it with the stratum protocol and ccminer doesn't support getworktemplate.  CPUMiner-opt does support getblocktemplate though, so if this really had started as a cpu only venture, anyone could have used that to mine to the daemon instead of a goofy hack to run multiple daemons.

What I think is a little alarming is this.

I have ~6800 sig that I got from 1 week mining sig fairly early on that I didn't bother doing anything with. This translates to approx 1700 STRAK. Based on current network hash rates, it would take me approximately 4 months  to mine this many STRAK. It seems to me that the sig holders will be the one to control this network, but how is that fair? Why can't this coin be a true fresh start, without giving all the power to the people who held some unrelated coin?

You forgot that there was a poll with 2 swap options - swap with rate 1:4 and 1:20, and as we see most people chose 1:4. It was a people choise, thats it.

From what I recall there was no option to not have a swap at all and create a new coin without the sig baggage.

This option is coming from default, to swap or not your Sigt is up only to you.

Again, this is not the case I am trying to make. Of course it is up to you whether you want to swap your sig or not, but the fact is plenty of people WILL swap their sig, and that is what hurts the network as a whole.

Ok, again, people made a choise to choose the option of 1:4 swaping rate, WE all decided it so no turning back now, of course people with Sigt at their hands have an advantage over those who havn't, but no one forbid to buy more Sigts to have some Straks bag after swap, and after the swap period will be over, after all those Sigt holders will dump their swaped Straks, price of Straks after month or two will find balance between rare mining coins and dumped Straks from Sigt swap. As for me , I believe its fair that Sigt holders have some advantage considering that they are loose damn bunch of $ investing into Sigt.

[1714141836]

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[1714141836]

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[Chromexnet]

The point you are missing is that Vertcoin (or any other coin for that matter) is not tied to the value of SIGT.  If the swap is 4 to 1, common sense dictates that it will be impossible for Straks to have more value than 4x the value of SIGT.  This isn't FUD, this is economics.

I would argue that currently Sigt will follow the value of Straks, not the other way around. The ratio between them stays 4x yes but that doesn't mean Straks' or Sigt's value can't go higher than it currently is. After the swap period is over Sigt will become worthless and the ratio of 4:1 no longer holds.

Approximately 13,680 Staks are mined a day.  Current value of SIGT is 342 sats, which is artificially inflated, but the current value none the less.  With that in mind, .046 BTC, or $375 total is mined per day.  I can't think of a scenario where this would be profitable, unless there were under 100 miners at work.

Care to clarify why you consider Sigt at 342 sats artificially inflated? Sure it looks that way if you look at the price a month ago. However, a month ago Sigt was a dead coin. So that's not a fair comparison. Back when Sigt project was doing well the value was hovering around 1000-1200 sats. I think currently Straks looks much better than Sigt ever did so in that sense Straks should be more valuable. I'd say the price of 6000 sats for Straks (i.e. 1500 sats for Sigt) seems reasonable. 6000 sats would mean 0.82 BTC are mined per day.

But lets put forget that detail for now and look at the amount of Straks set aside for this swap.  It would take 6.5 years of mining on this blockchain to equal the amount earmarked for swapping.  Actually it would take much longer than than that considering masternodes will take in anywhere from 30-60% of the block rewards, but I digress.  When masternodes are enabled, there will have been 383,040 Straks mined.  This is enough for 7 masternodes for the whole community.  Yet, the amount of Straks available to swappers will be enough for 685 masternodes.  Essentially the network will be run by people who have done nothing for this coin beyond owning some unrelated coin!

Still think this is all FUD?  It should also be noted that I had to get this information off of a fucking readme.md file on their github.    Their website, forum announcement,  facebook page, reddit sub, and twitter feed make no mention of this SIGT swap.  I'm sure this was done in the spirit of "transparency."  The same readme file also states that this swap was voted on overwelmingly by 319 "community members" between Oct 30 and Nov 4 on discord and bitcointalk.  Yet this announcement thread wasn't even created until November 20.  What were the choices in the poll?  Was voting down a swap an option?  Of course not, the vote was to determine whether it would take 4 or 20 SIGT to get 1 Strak.  Its not hard to see what the obvious choice was.  Also not hard to see that this poll was only announced to SIGT owners.  You are fooling yourself if you think this coin has been created for any reason beyond pumping up SIGT!

I don't pretend to know everything, so please, point it out if anything is incorrect.  This is quite possible considering I had to glean this information from different sources, as the developers seem to conveniently omit information from this announcement.

It's seems you're new to this community if you haven't heard about the swap before. The swap was discussed in length here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2303471.0 In short: The community wanted the swap to happen. Given that a lot of money was invested in Sigt it's fair that the existing Sigt coins can be converted to Straks. Now we could argue what's a fair ratio and how should be marked for the swap but that actually doesn't change anything. The reality is that existing market cap of Sigt will be converted to Straks' market cap. I can understand this might feel unfair for new miners but then again it's the same situation if you go mine any other old coin. The only thing that should matter to a new miner is how many coins you get and what's the coin value.

[Eulersheep]

I want to congratulate the developers with a successful start, it was one of the best starts in recent times.
 Smooth transition to the mainnet and accessibility for all platforms.

LOL, in recent times?  Hardly.  This started out with devs saying it could only be mined using a built-in cpu miner with a confusing script that would launch multiple daemons.  I'm sure their plan all along was to mine with their GPUs while the idiots wasted cpu cycles.  They waxed poetic as to how different this coin was and how it was too advanced for pools or miners to implement.  Only when pools did actually implement it because its nothing more than a standard algo did they change their tune. Lets not forget that rewards started 2 days after the stated time.  If you ask me, this ranks as the 2nd worst start in recent times, ranking right after Bitcoin Gold.

This was a simple statement of facts, but it appears you have a certain narrative that you are content on aligning your re-wording towards. There are 1250 coins on the market today, if for some reason STRAKS is not a currency that you would like to be a part of, I am certain that there are other currencies out there that will resonate with you. Nobody is forced to trade nor direct mining power towards STRAKS if they do not want to. At no point did we "change our tune" as you state, it is simply just a fact that the protocol is newer than what there currently is on the market.

The protocol is too new for mining pools to be able to easily implement it without any updates implemented to pools. Our hopes were that CPU mining would have lasted longer, so that even the hobby miner would have had a chance to get on board (the farms today can make it difficult for the small hobby miner to get on board) but while monitoring hashrates it became evident that someone had managed to crack it a day before launch. All credit goes to Decker from Deckerpool (https://t.me/deckerpool) who managed to update yiimp to the new protocol. After we managed to locate him, we approached him and agreed to pay him a bounty in exchange for making the code open source to the public (https://github.com/DeckerSU/yiimp/tree/straks), so that pools could be set up, miners would have a leveled playing-field and lastly so that the hashing power could be decentralised across multiple pools. If we were, as you state, holding onto a GPU miner ourselves, I am not exactly sure why we would go to the effort to pay someone for their source code for GPU mining? I addressed this very concern several pages ago too (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2433318.msg24952030#msg24952030).

A core value to STRAKS is transparency. Under no circumstance will we ever compromise on that value. We know the cryptocurrency market is crowded with nefarious individuals, we seek to shake that up by doing our part to create an ethical corner in this crowded space of nefarious individuals.

Fair enough, but I am a proud owner of a few Straks currently, so in the spirit of this being community driven and transparent, I'm just throwing in my 2 cents.  And I don't want to argue semantics, but Decker really only updated the stratum code, and from what I can tell, it looks like the main sticking point was the 5% rake the devs take from the blocks.  Suprnova implemented this coin and they don't even use yiimp.  Strange that a russian pool that previously was solely dedicated to mining SIGT would come up with this update though.  Anyway, I just thought it seemed kind of shady to make it sound like there was some giant technical advancement preventing GPU mining, when the real problem was that no one had implemented it with the stratum protocol and ccminer doesn't support getworktemplate.  CPUMiner-opt does support getblocktemplate though, so if this really had started as a cpu only venture, anyone could have used that to mine to the daemon instead of a goofy hack to run multiple daemons.

What I think is a little alarming is this.

I have ~6800 sig that I got from 1 week mining sig fairly early on that I didn't bother doing anything with. This translates to approx 1700 STRAK. Based on current network hash rates, it would take me approximately 4 months  to mine this many STRAK. It seems to me that the sig holders will be the one to control this network, but how is that fair? Why can't this coin be a true fresh start, without giving all the power to the people who held some unrelated coin?

You forgot that there was a poll with 2 swap options - swap with rate 1:4 and 1:20, and as we see most people chose 1:4. It was a people choise, thats it.

From what I recall there was no option to not have a swap at all and create a new coin without the sig baggage.

This option is coming from default, to swap or not your Sigt is up only to you.

Again, this is not the case I am trying to make. Of course it is up to you whether you want to swap your sig or not, but the fact is plenty of people WILL swap their sig, and that is what hurts the network as a whole.

Ok, again, people made a choise to choose the option of 1:4 swaping rate, WE all decided it so no turning back now, of course people with Sigt at their hands have an advantage over those who havn't, but no one forbid to buy more Sigts to have some Straks bag after swap, and after the swap period will be over, after all those Sigt holders will dump their swaped Straks, price of Straks after month or two will find balance between rare mining coins and dumped Straks from Sigt swap. As for me , I believe its fair that Sigt holders have some advantage considering that they are loose damn bunch of $ investing into Sigt.

There was no option to not vote for a swap mechanism at all. Why should it be another coins responsibility to bail out sig holders, everyone is aware of the risks when investing, don't invest what you are not prepared to lose. All it does is make this coin seem shady. I just think more thought should have been put into this. This coin will not have a great community without a great community of miners, and what is the incentive for mining?

[Chromexnet]

Btw, the details of the swap were communicated openly right from the start. The proper value for Sigt would be much higher if the project had not failed.   Anyway, the low value of Sigt gives you the opportunity to get Straks with a huge discount now.

Saying things like "this coin will never be more valuable than 4x the value of SIGT" is comical. It's like saying Bitcoin will never have a value of $1 in 2010. Of course the value will go higher as the project moves on. Give the coin some time to grow. The devs are doing a great job and so far have exceeded all expectations.

Could you tell me where they were communicated openly at?  As I mentioned before, its only mentioned at the very bottom of their readme on github.  And I'm sure the value of Sigt would be higher if it didn't fail.  The fact that the main avenue to acquire Straks is to buy another failed coin really says it all.  The value of bitcoin would never go higher than a dollar if the bitcoin developers held back enough bitcoin to match the amount of US dollars in circulation with the promise to swap 1 bitcoin for 4 quarters.

Multiple times here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2303471.0, http://signatum.news/, in the discord channel, etc. It's true the current Straks marketing material doesn't focus on the swap much but then again, focusing on a swap when announcing a new coin is not the best way to market it.

[TheHas]

While we can debate the merits of the sigt/straks swap 4:1, and how this relates to system integrity etc - at very least you could say it is a good sign that the price of sigt is going up, as it probably means people 'believe' in straks as a project, so are buying up sigt as a way to get onto straks?

If there are any budding economists out there that could explain if that logic makes works, happy to hear it.

[shibob]

You don't have to swap Sigt to Straks.... Anyway I'm sure the developers will have a reasonable time limit on the swap, so the price of sigt won't impact Straks after a set date. I think from that point onwards Straks can be priced based on its merits, and not clouded by whatever is happening with Sigt.

I'm happy with the swap. I mean, you don't have to swap so why should we be upset with the short term choice to do so? If you like Sigt, just keep it.

Mining Straks will find a balance point in difficulty as time goes, people will jump in and out based on profitability, as happens with all coins.

It's not about what coin I like or don't like, it's about the integrity of the network. What's the point in mining it when sig holders will just dump at below mining cost once they're able. It doesn't make any sense to tie the coins together this way, it only hurts STRAKS and makes it seem like a scam. 1 week of mining sig for me translates to 4 months worth of mined STRAKS coins...? There should have just been 0 coins outside mined coins.

I totally agreed with you. I mined Straks at very beginning and when I found out this, I think it's not worth to mine at all. Basically it (PoW coin) could not be stronger and better without strong mining community.
So if I'm wrong, please correct me!

[montagneg]

The protocol is too new for mining pools to be able to easily implement it without any updates implemented to pools. Our hopes were that CPU mining would have lasted longer, so that even the hobby miner would have had a chance to get on board (the farms today can make it difficult for the small hobby miner to get on board) but while monitoring hashrates it became evident that someone had managed to crack it a day before launch. All credit goes to Decker from Deckerpool (https://t.me/deckerpool) who managed to update yiimp to the new protocol. After we managed to locate him, we approached him and agreed to pay him a bounty in exchange for making the code open source to the public (https://github.com/DeckerSU/yiimp/tree/straks), so that pools could be set up, miners would have a leveled playing-field and lastly so that the hashing power could be decentralised across multiple pools. If we were, as you state, holding onto a GPU miner ourselves, I am not exactly sure why we would go to the effort to pay someone for their source code for GPU mining? I addressed this very concern several pages ago too (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2433318.msg24952030#msg24952030).

A core value to STRAKS is transparency. Under no circumstance will we ever compromise on that value. We know the cryptocurrency market is crowded with nefarious individuals, we seek to shake that up by doing our part to create an ethical corner in this crowded space of nefarious individuals.

Bounty Decker from Deckerpool has not been paid yet! When will the payment be made?

[Alexey Sukharev]

All credit goes to Decker from Deckerpool (https://t.me/deckerpool) who managed to update yiimp to the new protocol. After we managed to locate him, we approached him and agreed to pay him a bounty in exchange for making the code open source to the public (https://github.com/DeckerSU/yiimp/tree/straks), so that pools could be set up, miners would have a leveled playing-field and lastly so that the hashing power could be decentralised across multiple pools.

Bounty Decker from Deckerpool has not been paid yet! When will the payment be made?

Cmon man! I'm from that Deckerpool too. Didnt saw your name on that pool.
But yes, according to STRAKS Richlist, DeckerSU didnt got his bounty yet. Why so?

[cryptomen101]

While we can debate the merits of the sigt/straks swap 4:1, and how this relates to system integrity etc - at very least you could say it is a good sign that the price of sigt is going up, as it probably means people 'believe' in straks as a project, so are buying up sigt as a way to get onto straks?

If there are any budding economists out there that could explain if that logic makes works, happy to hear it.

yes ,now sigt is bumping up in yobit ,that means people are interested to buy (make swap to get more benefit out of stracks), since the INstamine protection helps investors make more belief that that the price would sustain reasonably ..lets loook forwards 

[Gunbit]

I dont understand this complains and FUD at all.

Compare to our experience with many alcoins and their price prediction + plus compare to the cost of nicehash cost  - 1 STRAKS should cost 0.0004 BTC or highter.

So, you will get atleast 100% profit if you will buy sigt now and swap it later. SO why you complain Devs give you a chance to make 100-300%  profit - ust buy sigt till it cost below 1000-1500 sat.

This is good oppotunity to gain profit - you just cant realise how to use it. Dont mine Straks, "mine" it by buying sigt.

[Eulersheep]

I dont understand this complains and FUD at all.

Compare to our experience with many alcoins and their price prediction + plus compare to the cost of nicehash cost  - 1 STRAKS should cost 0.0004 BTC or highter.

So, you will get atleast 100% profit if you will buy sigt now and swap it later. SO why you complain Devs give you a chance to make 100-300%  profit - ust buy sigt till it cost below 1000-1500 sat.

This is good oppotunity to gain profit - you just cant realise how to use it. Dont mine Straks, "mine" it by buying sigt.

Definitely not. Why? Because the market will be flooded with 30 million odd coins. Money doesn't just appear from nowhere... for you to make money someone else has to lose money, just the nature of the market.

Also the reason I'm complaining is because I'm not a greedy ignoramus looking for the next pump and dump. It sounds like you don't care about this coin at all, you're just looking to make a quick buck. It is NOT good for the long term sustainability/community of this coin to not have a strong mining community and to have most of the power in the hands of people who owned some complete unrelated coin.

[Gunbit]

I dont understand this complains and FUD at all.

Compare to our experience with many alcoins and their price prediction + plus compare to the cost of nicehash cost  - 1 STRAKS should cost 0.0004 BTC or highter.

So, you will get atleast 100% profit if you will buy sigt now and swap it later. SO why you complain Devs give you a chance to make 100-300%  profit - ust buy sigt till it cost below 1000-1500 sat.

This is good oppotunity to gain profit - you just cant realise how to use it. Dont mine Straks, "mine" it by buying sigt.

Definitely not. Why? Because the market will be flooded with 30 million odd coins. Money doesn't just appear from nowhere... for you to make money someone else has to lose money, just the nature of the market.

Also the reason I'm complaining is because I'm not a greedy ignoramus looking for the next pump and dump. It sounds like you don't care about this coin at all, you're just looking to make a quick buck. It is NOT good for the long term sustainability/community of this coin to not have a strong mining community and to have most of the power in the hands of people who owned some complete unrelated coin.

Ok.

First of all, STRAKS is created by Signatum members so its not brand new coin - its signatum 2.0 And the commuynity of signatum = community of straks. Okay, lets say 95% of STRAKS community knows this coin because they mined Signatum previously. And the devs made a very great job here - because now cs of swap 4:1 signatum price _must_ pump to 1000-1500, otherwise straks will be a dead coin from start.

How money will appear ? It is so simple. All the people in crypto world can buy signatum and hold till swap. The profit price to buy signatum is till 1500 satoshi - so there is no reason to not buy it. Look at diff of straks mining - coin should be atleast 2-4 dollars per straks or its not worth it.

[kingdeng]

It's definitely going to tumble in the short term

[tpd09]

these are exciting times no matter how you look at it...

I will sit back and enjoy the ride!  

@Devs - isnt Zcash 2mb blocks after the hardfork?

[easyrimka]

still no date for the swap ?? why do you ignore SIGT holders ?

[lentyna]

The last few pages people discussing the swap between SIGT and STRAKS but it's funny how developers don't want to associate this new coin with SIGT

It seems that they made this new coin in order for old SIGT holders to get rid of worthless coin. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Gunbit]

The last few pages people discussing the swap between SIGT and STRAKS but it's funny how developers don't want to associate this new coin with SIGT

It seems that they made this new coin in order for old SIGT holders to get rid of worthless coin. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You wrong in "worthless" conclusion of the coin.  Every coins with good ROI from masternodes make huge profit to investors = it's not worthless at all. All other stuff about technology innovation and other are not matter much. So, masternodes means that people will defenetly buy. And if people will buy it - we goes back to model, there price depends on diff vs. daily supply. And according to calculation - straks should cost atleast 1$

[lentyna]

The last few pages people discussing the swap between SIGT and STRAKS but it's funny how developers don't want to associate this new coin with SIGT

It seems that they made this new coin in order for old SIGT holders to get rid of worthless coin. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You wrong in "worthless" conclusion of the coin.  Every coins with good ROI from masternodes make huge profit to investors = it's not worthless at all. All other stuff about technology innovation and other are not matter much. So, masternodes means that people will defenetly buy. And if people will buy it - we goes back to model, there price depends on diff vs. daily supply. And according to calculation - straks should cost atleast 1$

I was talking about SIGT as being worthless. Think about what would be the price of SIGT right now if there was no swap offered.

[Gunbit]

The last few pages people discussing the swap between SIGT and STRAKS but it's funny how developers don't want to associate this new coin with SIGT

It seems that they made this new coin in order for old SIGT holders to get rid of worthless coin. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You wrong in "worthless" conclusion of the coin.  Every coins with good ROI from masternodes make huge profit to investors = it's not worthless at all. All other stuff about technology innovation and other are not matter much. So, masternodes means that people will defenetly buy. And if people will buy it - we goes back to model, there price depends on diff vs. daily supply. And according to calculation - straks should cost atleast 1$

I was talking about SIGT as being worthless. Think about what would be the price of SIGT right now if there was no swap offered.

Agreed, sigt is worthless. Still - who cares. It can hit 1-1,5k sat per sigt just because of swap fact and im happy to invest all my money from mining neoscrypt coins into sigt right now.

[GEFE5T]

Where is the exchange?