[ANN] [QRK] Quark | Core 0.10 upgrade

[mcphervi]

Well guys, as an aside to the anonymity discussion here, I wanted to let everyone know that the new Quark - centric exchange, QEX is now online. I've been beta testing it over the last week, and the team has worked very hard to get everything finished up!

Check it out here:

https://qex.la/

http://www.qrk.cc/press/

Quark-centric should be:
-buy QRK with USD
-buy other coins using QRK


otherwise nothing new.

Price falls lower and lower.

I've had contact with them for the last several weeks, and this sort of setup is on its way for several more coins within the next couple of weeks.

Vic

[1714861045]

1714861045

[1714861045]

1714861045

[1714861045]

1714861045

[jonesT]

Quark needs:

- Anonimity, like darkcoin
- PoS
- Create its own exchange and pays interest. See in this exchange the intelligent relation between sharecoin and feeshare: https://sharexcoin.com/interests/about I think this system could rise quark prices again. Please, comment.

[tw007tw007]

quark needs more attention and advertising 

Yes.
Only more attention and advertising   will make it rapid price rises!
 

[tw007tw007]

QRK is good,but no characteristic

As long as it can bring us income, characteristic becomes less important!

[reRaise]

quark needs more attention and advertising  

It just needs to go pos

Give me any single reason why PoS is good, and I'll prove it's wrong.

Right now the main problem for Quark is completely hoppible situation in mining. Pool coinmine.pl generate from 60% to 70% of blocks and we have roughly 500 i7-class CPUs hashing ATM. So, we could experience a 51% attack virtually at any moment. And even assuming pool operator completely honest it’s very easy for someone to DDOS the location of major hashrate and attack Quark with no more than half a thousand CPUs. It’s a small botnet or a not very large corporate network -- e.g. Microsoft has 1200 000 server nodes, Google -- 800 000. The reason for such a pathetic situation is generally the initial coin distribution model, which generate very few Quarks, not enough to feed profit-seeking commercial miners. Just an other side of one of the greatest advantage of Quark.

Considering this we can conclude that right now Quark is unsecure at all and it would be highly unreasonable to use it for large transactions.

To fight this we of course could use new pools, donation mining, but these are half-measures. We can’t gather more computing power than a large corporate network on a donation basis.

The problem is fundamental and will stay long-term, so the solution must be fundamental. I think the only viable option is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), the form of mining when a probability of block generation increases dramatically with increase of coins in the wallet of miner. TO day this technology has already proven itself with a several years of operating in probably a hundred of coins. I know no serious issues reported or acknowledged security concerns.

Moreover, PoS is viable economically, as it reward long-term coin supportes and provide income on capital. Also PoS stimulate people to maintain full nodes which favorably affects network integrity and security.

Still, PoS is not ideal because it give a significant share of block and coin generation to coin bags with large wallets. But it could be adjusted to reduce such factor. For example the network could provide even tiny amount of coins generated this way and the process will be still continuing since the costs is almost zero. Or amount of PoS generated coins and/or probability of block finding may be depend nonlinear from wallet. Anyway we could find some intelligent and economically justified solution.

I believe the community must reach a consensus on this matter. We can’t build a succesful coin without an appropriate security basis. And we need to prove the world that we are able to handle such security problems.

As of now Quark gets more secure if more people mine, but there is almost nothing to mine with a 1 quark reward. It has a fundamental flaw. Quarks developer made a mistake to fasten the block halving to 1 per block in 6 months. Thats when the majority of the supporters left. Would those 6 months be 50-100 years then quark would have been top 3 in market cap.

You may not agree, but would be better if you would gave a suggestion also.

[cryptohunter]

Quark needs:

- Anonimity, like darkcoin
- PoS
- Create its own exchange and pays interest. See in this exchange the intelligent relation between sharecoin and feeshare: https://sharexcoin.com/interests/about I think this system could rise quark prices again. Please, comment.

this

i suggest fund set up held by escrow, investors in this project get the fee's from the exchange. Run by the qrk foundation.

The POS part i am not sure if it is even possible with qrk algo?

Also we need to think up other features/services we need for the coin, get a pot of QRK set up for it. Then again investors get % of service charges.

I would say we need to raise 100K qrk at least. How much you put in determines the % you get back.

We need more marketing too.

[ycagel]

Been a long term holder of Quark and I commend the community for all the fantastic accomplishments and projects. In the past, Quark's pricing has been tied to BTC as a lot of other alts. Currently, even with the rise in BTC, Quark continues to remain stagnant or fall in price. I am not a miner, but I assume the profitability to mine is not there and the increase in price is affected by that. Quark is attempting to get main stream consumers / investors, but it seems to be a larger path and technology is continuing to change and evolve. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks as always,
YC

[mcphervi]

This is cross-posted from reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkCoin/comments/26lj2g/hashrate_non_pos_supporting_measures/

Guys, I appreciate the discussion and voting on POS, but do realize that this is not the only way to do things, it does come with its own set of issues, and it is NOT a trivial undertaking. I have multiple times posted the list below with the intention of sparking discussion on alternative measures to implement to ensure blockchain security. Please join me in discussing these and other alternatives that you can think of as well.

1. Jackpot related mining rewards - if we can get the Grotto Lotto jackpots raised then we can produce mining incentive by paying people indirectly through grotto lotto. This is a stop gap solution until our valuation is high enough.
Proposed Goal - 20K starting point for jackpots each month going forward. We need help funding this.

2. Mining software that allows easy access to GPU mining on multipools that pay out in Quark and that also donate 10-20% of mining power to the Quark network. There is a practical means of implementation of this - I may have found someone to code this for us now.
We have a community member now actively looking at doing this for us

3. ? Merge mined coin. Lots of issues including constant dumping, the fact that its value is tied to investment,which would be hard to obtain if all it is is a mining token for Quark.
I don't think this option is likely viable currently but would appreciate suggestions on implementation

Vic

[dragonseer]

This is cross-posted from reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkCoin/comments/26lj2g/hashrate_non_pos_supporting_measures/

Guys, I appreciate the discussion and voting on POS, but do realize that this is not the only way to do things, it does come with its own set of issues, and it is NOT a trivial undertaking. I have multiple times posted the list below with the intention of sparking discussion on alternative measures to implement to ensure blockchain security. Please join me in discussing these and other alternatives that you can think of as well.

1. Jackpot related mining rewards - if we can get the Grotto Lotto jackpots raised then we can produce mining incentive by paying people indirectly through grotto lotto. This is a stop gap solution until our valuation is high enough.
Proposed Goal - 20K starting point for jackpots each month going forward. We need help funding this.

2. Mining software that allows easy access to GPU mining on multipools that pay out in Quark and that also donate 10-20% of mining power to the Quark network. There is a practical means of implementation of this - I may have found someone to code this for us now.
We have a community member now actively looking at doing this for us

3. ? Merge mined coin. Lots of issues including constant dumping, the fact that its value is tied to investment,which would be hard to obtain if all it is is a mining token for Quark.
I don't think this option is likely viable currently but would appreciate suggestions on implementation

Vic

Just want to add that I think no.2 is a great initiative. I have been multipool mining on hashco.ws and paying out in Quark but would prefer to support the network as well. The thing I like about the hashco.ws pool is the ability to keep certain coins, for example, I set it so I get payouts for Potcoin, Isracoin, Auroracoin and Dogecoin, while everything else is converted to Quark. So a multipool that gives me coin control AND donates mining power to the Quark network would be only pool I would ever need.

Regarding merge mining, it only makes sense to me if Quark becomes more established and another coin launches that merge mines with Quark. I thought coins could only be merge mined if they share the same algo? It would of made both Dogecoin and Litecoin stronger if they merged but evidently they didn't want to take the risk and now it looks a little uncertain for both. There doesn't appear to be a natural fit for Quark to merge with except maybe for Bitcoin (because Quark covers the biggest weakness of Bitcoin as far as I'm concerned, and this would be big news) or maybe Zetacoin (another quick confirming, fast mined coin) but again these are two SHA-256 coins and I don't know enough about the technical aspects of this.

[reRaise]

This is cross-posted from reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkCoin/comments/26lj2g/hashrate_non_pos_supporting_measures/

Guys, I appreciate the discussion and voting on POS, but do realize that this is not the only way to do things, it does come with its own set of issues, and it is NOT a trivial undertaking. I have multiple times posted the list below with the intention of sparking discussion on alternative measures to implement to ensure blockchain security. Please join me in discussing these and other alternatives that you can think of as well.

1. Jackpot related mining rewards - if we can get the Grotto Lotto jackpots raised then we can produce mining incentive by paying people indirectly through grotto lotto. This is a stop gap solution until our valuation is high enough.
Proposed Goal - 20K starting point for jackpots each month going forward. We need help funding this.

2. Mining software that allows easy access to GPU mining on multipools that pay out in Quark and that also donate 10-20% of mining power to the Quark network. There is a practical means of implementation of this - I may have found someone to code this for us now.
We have a community member now actively looking at doing this for us

3. ? Merge mined coin. Lots of issues including constant dumping, the fact that its value is tied to investment,which would be hard to obtain if all it is is a mining token for Quark.
I don't think this option is likely viable currently but would appreciate suggestions on implementation

Vic

Just want to add that I think no.2 is a great initiative. I have been multipool mining on hashco.ws and paying out in Quark but would prefer to support the network as well. The thing I like about the hashco.ws pool is the ability to keep certain coins, for example, I set it so I get payouts for Potcoin, Isracoin, Auroracoin and Dogecoin, while everything else is converted to Quark. So a multipool that gives me coin control AND donates mining power to the Quark network would be only pool I would ever need.

Regarding merge mining, it only makes sense to me if Quark becomes more established and another coin launches that merge mines with Quark. I thought coins could only be merge mined if they share the same algo? It would of made both Dogecoin and Litecoin stronger if they merged but evidently they didn't want to take the risk and now it looks a little uncertain for both. There doesn't appear to be a natural fit for Quark to merge with except maybe for Bitcoin (because Quark covers the biggest weakness of Bitcoin as far as I'm concerned, and this would be big news) or maybe Zetacoin (another quick confirming, fast mined coin) but again these are two SHA-256 coins and I don't know enough about the technical aspects of this.

Regarding merge mining with Bitcoin

I would say quark can't be EASILY merge mined with Bitcoin. But Quark can be changed to recognize SHA256 PoW from Bitcoin blockchain and Quark PoW from its own block chain. But of course that not an easy change.

[dragonseer]

Regarding merge mining with Bitcoin

I would say quark can't be EASILY merge mined with Bitcoin. But Quark can be changed to recognize SHA256 PoW from Bitcoin blockchain and Quark PoW from its own block chain. But of course that not an easy change.

As long as Quark remains Quark when you use it, this would be the best solution and it would make the combination of Bitcoin/Quark tough to beat... Bitcoin is the original innovator with the brand recognition and Quark is the new blood that actually makes Point of Sale transactions practical, quick and secure... This could change everything, if it can be done...  

[digitalindustry]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=627038.0

give feedback on the topic please-  Regards.

[coinnext]

Coinnext Exchange added Quarkcoin

Trade at https://coinnext.com/trade/QRK/BTC

On top, trading is completely free for 90 days.

[dzejmsdin]

thanks!

[jonesT]

I just added quark to this exchange voting list:

https://sharexcoin.com/votings?coin=QRK

Please, vote!  

[dE_logics]

quark needs more attention and advertising  

It just needs to go pos

Give me any single reason why PoS is good, and I'll prove it's wrong.

Right now the main problem for Quark is completely hoppible situation in mining. Pool coinmine.pl generate from 60% to 70% of blocks and we have roughly 500 i7-class CPUs hashing ATM. So, we could experience a 51% attack virtually at any moment. And even assuming pool operator completely honest it’s very easy for someone to DDOS the location of major hashrate and attack Quark with no more than half a thousand CPUs. It’s a small botnet or a not very large corporate network -- e.g. Microsoft has 1200 000 server nodes, Google -- 800 000. The reason for such a pathetic situation is generally the initial coin distribution model, which generate very few Quarks, not enough to feed profit-seeking commercial miners. Just an other side of one of the greatest advantage of Quark.

Considering this we can conclude that right now Quark is unsecure at all and it would be highly unreasonable to use it for large transactions.

To fight this we of course could use new pools, donation mining, but these are half-measures. We can’t gather more computing power than a large corporate network on a donation basis.

The problem is fundamental and will stay long-term, so the solution must be fundamental. I think the only viable option is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), the form of mining when a probability of block generation increases dramatically with increase of coins in the wallet of miner. TO day this technology has already proven itself with a several years of operating in probably a hundred of coins. I know no serious issues reported or acknowledged security concerns.

Moreover, PoS is viable economically, as it reward long-term coin supportes and provide income on capital. Also PoS stimulate people to maintain full nodes which favorably affects network integrity and security.

Still, PoS is not ideal because it give a significant share of block and coin generation to coin bags with large wallets. But it could be adjusted to reduce such factor. For example the network could provide even tiny amount of coins generated this way and the process will be still continuing since the costs is almost zero. Or amount of PoS generated coins and/or probability of block finding may be depend nonlinear from wallet. Anyway we could find some intelligent and economically justified solution.

I believe the community must reach a consensus on this matter. We can’t build a succesful coin without an appropriate security basis. And we need to prove the world that we are able to handle such security problems.

As of now Quark gets more secure if more people mine, but there is almost nothing to mine with a 1 quark reward. It has a fundamental flaw. Quarks developer made a mistake to fasten the block halving to 1 per block in 6 months. Thats when the majority of the supporters left. Would those 6 months be 50-100 years then quark would have been top 3 in market cap.

You may not agree, but would be better if you would gave a suggestion also.

As you've stated, large block rewards increases inflation. What you see right now is the future of Bitcoin. This's what happens when you rely on TX fee.

It encourages holding the coins as investment, avoiding it's circulation, i.e. true use as a cryptocurrency. Then worst -- PoS looks at the coin age; the longer you're holding a large amount of cryptocurrency, the higher the chance of mining a block, which further reduces chance of circulation. However if the profits proof of stake is giving you is negligible, then we may nullify this disadvantage.

PoS is more vulnerable to 51%

Following this article --
         
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=604716
         
A higher degree of PoS means more vulnerabilities. PoS coins will not get any score in 51% protection.
         
Apart from this, you need to run a full node in order for the wallet to mine blocks based on PoS and it should be up always; how many people will do that? (especially when the interest rate is low)? When these coins will be made popular, 90% people will run light weight wallets giving power to the hands of these 10% (PoS difficulty will be low in this case cause the no. of people mining is less). Yes it is true, like with PoW the distribution of mining power will shift towards more professional miners who'll hold large amount of coins, but if the interest rate is low, they rather sell their coins to invest in real world schemes which provides more profits than this crypto, as an advantage they'll have lower risk cause the crypto market is very volatile.
         
In case of PoW, power will may be in the hands of 5% (lower no. of people than PoW) but they'll have a lot of hashing power which if compared to the amount of coins held by these 10% is a much higher value increasing the difficulty in comparison to PoS, which results in higher comparative difficulty for PoW.  As compared to PoW, acquiring enough coins to do a 51% is easier (at these low difficulty and especially when interest rate is low.).

Even without the stated vulnerability.

The cost of an attack is lower.

Maybe the quark foundation can do something about it distributing the hashing power across pools.

Another solution is enforcing TX fee. That way Quarks will be the 1st currency to rely that much on TX fee.

Yet another one is a better difficulty retarget algo --

If a crypto has fast difficulty re-targets, it's difficulty to do a 51% attack, cause in the forked chain the difficulty will increase rapidly and will soon reach the target block times, the block time of the main chain will be the same, making a 51% attack impossible.
            
If the main chain's difficulty was high cause of the attacker's majority hashing power, it'll drop to sustain a block interval equal to the attacker's fork chain.

[reRaise]

Is there any plan on adding anonymity features to QuarkCoin ?

Or even upgrade the coin algo. to something new, e.g. X13!

Quarks algo is imo superior to x11, dark coins x11 is somehow a copy of quarks multiple hashing, but x11 or x13 doesn't have random hashing. You can see quark as x6 with random hashing which is harder to attack than x11 so it should stay as it is.

Regarding PoS there are some talks see here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=627038.msg6994063#msg6994063

But there are also some other measures being taken, if you follow r/Quarkcoin on Reddit you can stay updated

[mcphervi]

The ShaqFu guys have been busy with coordinating the ~1000 perks for the last little while so haven't wanted to bother them too much. Just sent a quick email to inquire and will update everyone soon as I have a response.

re: QEX - the exchange is real, and I've used it a bunch. Some bugs that they're working out right now but I'm optimistic.

I received this a few days ago from ShaqFu - sounds like another little bit before the perks kick in:

"Hello all,

I am aware of how long it has been since the campaign ended. I know that there are lots of you who are still awaiting delivery of your perks. I would like to ask once again that you remain patient while we get through the immense number of items that we are having to produce and deliver to people. There are only so many of us who can focus on this task and it is simply going to take time.

Due to the current basketball playoffs we have very little of Shaq's time to work on the perks that he himself must be involved in. This is due to change in a couple of weeks.

I understand that some people may be frustrated but I can only assure you that I am doing my absolute best here. We have always said that we will deliver the perks as soon as we possibly can. Everyone will get everything they purchased. It just takes time.

Thank you to all of you that continue to wait patiently. I look forward to fulfilling everybody's orders.

Best wishes,

Oliver"

[mcphervi]

quark needs more attention and advertising  

It just needs to go pos

Give me any single reason why PoS is good, and I'll prove it's wrong.

Right now the main problem for Quark is completely hoppible situation in mining. Pool coinmine.pl generate from 60% to 70% of blocks and we have roughly 500 i7-class CPUs hashing ATM. So, we could experience a 51% attack virtually at any moment. And even assuming pool operator completely honest it’s very easy for someone to DDOS the location of major hashrate and attack Quark with no more than half a thousand CPUs. It’s a small botnet or a not very large corporate network -- e.g. Microsoft has 1200 000 server nodes, Google -- 800 000. The reason for such a pathetic situation is generally the initial coin distribution model, which generate very few Quarks, not enough to feed profit-seeking commercial miners. Just an other side of one of the greatest advantage of Quark.

Considering this we can conclude that right now Quark is unsecure at all and it would be highly unreasonable to use it for large transactions.

To fight this we of course could use new pools, donation mining, but these are half-measures. We can’t gather more computing power than a large corporate network on a donation basis.

The problem is fundamental and will stay long-term, so the solution must be fundamental. I think the only viable option is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), the form of mining when a probability of block generation increases dramatically with increase of coins in the wallet of miner. TO day this technology has already proven itself with a several years of operating in probably a hundred of coins. I know no serious issues reported or acknowledged security concerns.

Moreover, PoS is viable economically, as it reward long-term coin supportes and provide income on capital. Also PoS stimulate people to maintain full nodes which favorably affects network integrity and security.

Still, PoS is not ideal because it give a significant share of block and coin generation to coin bags with large wallets. But it could be adjusted to reduce such factor. For example the network could provide even tiny amount of coins generated this way and the process will be still continuing since the costs is almost zero. Or amount of PoS generated coins and/or probability of block finding may be depend nonlinear from wallet. Anyway we could find some intelligent and economically justified solution.

I believe the community must reach a consensus on this matter. We can’t build a succesful coin without an appropriate security basis. And we need to prove the world that we are able to handle such security problems.

As of now Quark gets more secure if more people mine, but there is almost nothing to mine with a 1 quark reward. It has a fundamental flaw. Quarks developer made a mistake to fasten the block halving to 1 per block in 6 months. Thats when the majority of the supporters left. Would those 6 months be 50-100 years then quark would have been top 3 in market cap.

You may not agree, but would be better if you would gave a suggestion also.

As you've stated, large block rewards increases inflation. What you see right now is the future of Bitcoin. This's what happens when you rely on TX fee.

It encourages holding the coins as investment, avoiding it's circulation, i.e. true use as a cryptocurrency. Then worst -- PoS looks at the coin age; the longer you're holding a large amount of cryptocurrency, the higher the chance of mining a block, which further reduces chance of circulation. However if the profits proof of stake is giving you is negligible, then we may nullify this disadvantage.

PoS is more vulnerable to 51%

Following this article --
         
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=604716
         
A higher degree of PoS means more vulnerabilities. PoS coins will not get any score in 51% protection.
         
Apart from this, you need to run a full node in order for the wallet to mine blocks based on PoS and it should be up always; how many people will do that? (especially when the interest rate is low)? When these coins will be made popular, 90% people will run light weight wallets giving power to the hands of these 10% (PoS difficulty will be low in this case cause the no. of people mining is less). Yes it is true, like with PoW the distribution of mining power will shift towards more professional miners who'll hold large amount of coins, but if the interest rate is low, they rather sell their coins to invest in real world schemes which provides more profits than this crypto, as an advantage they'll have lower risk cause the crypto market is very volatile.
         
In case of PoW, power will may be in the hands of 5% (lower no. of people than PoW) but they'll have a lot of hashing power which if compared to the amount of coins held by these 10% is a much higher value increasing the difficulty in comparison to PoS, which results in higher comparative difficulty for PoW.  As compared to PoW, acquiring enough coins to do a 51% is easier (at these low difficulty and especially when interest rate is low.).

Even without the stated vulnerability.

The cost of an attack is lower.

Maybe the quark foundation can do something about it distributing the hashing power across pools.

Another solution is enforcing TX fee. That way Quarks will be the 1st currency to rely that much on TX fee.

Yet another one is a better difficulty retarget algo --

If a crypto has fast difficulty re-targets, it's difficulty to do a 51% attack, cause in the forked chain the difficulty will increase rapidly and will soon reach the target block times, the block time of the main chain will be the same, making a 51% attack impossible.
            
If the main chain's difficulty was high cause of the attacker's majority hashing power, it'll drop to sustain a block interval equal to the attacker's fork chain.

Thanks a lot for this post - interesting to read, and we are looking at how best to tackle this issue. I will have to look further into the difficulty re-targeting - it sounds like this wouldn't be too technically challenging to implement potentially, would not alter the fundamentals, and along with checkpointing might make things pretty hard on an attacker.

[Netnox]

Make a Quark T-shirt design and win 1000 QRK

Let's have some fun. I want you to make a design for a T-shirt that involves Quark in some way, it could be a guy playing shaq-fu on an old arcade game and paying with physical quarks, this is just an example you decide if you want to use it or make your own. If only one person enters that person will get 1000 quarks. The winner will be decided 1 week from today, but we can make it 2 weeks if someone needs more time, just let me know in the comments before the 1 week is up. I will pick a winner among the top 5 most liked designs so i'm counting on the community to help me out in choosing the right winner. (I will not be selling your designs, but I might order a T-shirt with the winning design and post it on the subreddit) please tell the quark forums and your friends about this, so that we can get as many entries as possible. I'm looking forward to seeing your designs.

To enter just upload your design and put the link in the comments http://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkCoin/comments/26rypz/make_a_quark_tshirt_design_and_win_1000_qrk/