[ANNOUNCE] Ixcoin - a new Bitcoin fork

[AtlasONo]

The creator of bitcoin really is some sleezebag, he also wants to rely on everybody else to do the dirty work, ie. create software, like a bitcoin <> fiat exchange for instance, and how does he want to pay for this work? Drumroll... with bitcoins that he mined himself for virtually no cost.

[Yuusha]

Everyone will just keep mining until the difficulty skyrockets, after which everyone will stop mining Ixcoins and no one will be able to even transfer them... not that you'd need to transfer them, since no one will want to buy them, as they provide nothing the bitcoins do not. It doesn't matter if you mine thousands of Ixcoins, you won't be able to use them for anything.

[RandyFolds]

Ouch!!!!

But it's not ripoff when the source is free

Sex is free too, but rapists still exist.

C'mon, son, gimme a Baaaaaaaaaaam! Green eggs and haaaaaaaaaaaam!

Edit: Oh, and since such forks tend to be lower difficulty (even lower than namecoin usually) they also make mining more accessible. BTC and NMC both have difficulties so high that CPU mining is more than unprofitable, it's flat out impossible. Let the casuals mine the forks and those of us with dedicated rigs will still mine BTC. There's nothing wrong with forks, we just need a good exchange to support them all.

This has already been addressed in this thread...like GPU miners aren't just going to roll in, rape the difficulty, and leave four months of slogging along for the chumps who stick with it. Taking a page from Phinnaeus Gage's book; Namecoin: It sort of sucks for those who really believe in it.

[OgNasty]

Seriously?  You think a fork with no added features is going to divert more than a trivial amount of resources from Bitcoin?  Getting mad over this is just silly.

I'm not mad.      This is an internet forum...  It takes a lot more than text on a screen typed by a stranger to anger me.

Somebody just needs to tell it how it is.  These people making bitcoin clones trying to get rich are at best, lazy.

[ohforf]

I wonder how bitcoins begun to be worth something.
Someone must have been willing to sell something for the first time... how did that happen ?
The same must happen with Ixcoin, or it will be just numbers.

[ctoon6]

ill give you guys a hint...the chain with the highest difficulty is the most secure. why would you use ixcoin when you could probably do a 51% attack with like 50 ghash/s for real.

[Rodyland]

ill give you guys a hint...the chain with the highest difficulty is the most secure. why would you use ixcoin when you could probably do a 51% attack with like 50 ghash/s for real.

That's a great point.... except for the fact that there is nothing you can use ixcoin for....  So what, exactly, would you be double-spending on?

Same argument could have been made against bitcoin in its early early days.  Still, this strikes me as a fairly transparent "boo hoo I missed out so I'm gonna make my own" get-rich-quick attempt.

If he'd made some attempt at creating a novel fork of bitcoin I'd have a different opinion.  If he'd not mined over 500k coins himself before going public I'd have a different opinion.

For the next "me too"er, I suggest the following:
- Pre-announce your project with a set "go-live" date
- Make a meaningful change to existing bitcoin (and it wouldn't hurt to put some thought and explanation into _why_ your change is worth our time)

[smoothie]

how fast does the difficulty change in terms of blocks? 2016?

[hashcoin]

DO NOT USE THIS
There is a more serious issue than that he already mined some blocks.  There is no way of knowing he hasn't mined EVEN MORE and is holding them to himself.

The genesis block is NOT properly timestamped.  The bitcoin genesis block contains the following quote:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

The reason for this is so you can be sure Satoshi hadn't been mining a chain for the past 10 years.  That quote PROVES that noone started mining before Jan 03 2009.

In IXcoin the genesis block has the quote:
"To see the farm is to leave it"
https://github.com/ixcoin/ixcoin/blob/Branch_v0.3.24/src/main.cpp

That is totally meaningless and proves nothing.

Either the dude who made this didn't understand the reason for timestamping the genesis block, or deliberately left it out.  Either way, there is no way you can know that he or someone else hasn't been mining an alternate chain for the past 2 years being kept hidden and that will be released eventually later..

Either way, this is not worth using.  Epic fail...

[Rodyland]

DO NOT USE THIS
There is a more serious issue than that he already mined some blocks.  There is no way of knowing he hasn't mined EVEN MORE and is holding them to himself.

Woah, so there's your double spend....  You're saying this guy could have been mining for the last 6 months, be up to block 50000.  Then he "releases" block 6000 (or whatever it was), and people start mining, trading etc.  Then one day in the future he drops block 50000 into the wild and all of a sudden everyone's coins go to him.

Interesting idea.  And while it may work, it would kill ixcoin dead.  Nobody would ever use it again.  So that eliminates the "get rich quick" aspect and turns it into a "sew mayhem and disaster" type scenario.

[ohforf]

OK, you win.

* ohforf shuts down the mining and ixcoin client.

Thanks for the Lesson.
Too bad there is nothing profitable left to mine for me. 

[ctoon6]

i dont fully understand how some text in the genesis block proves a date. but i do see your point.

[smoothie]

DO NOT USE THIS
There is a more serious issue than that he already mined some blocks.  There is no way of knowing he hasn't mined EVEN MORE and is holding them to himself.

Woah, so there's your double spend....  You're saying this guy could have been mining for the last 6 months, be up to block 50000.  Then he "releases" block 6000 (or whatever it was), and people start mining, trading etc.  Then one day in the future he drops block 50000 into the wild and all of a sudden everyone's coins go to him.

Interesting idea.  And while it may work, it would kill ixcoin dead.  Nobody would ever use it again.  So that eliminates the "get rich quick" aspect and turns it into a "sew mayhem and disaster" type scenario.

Agreed. What would that accomplish if no one uses ixcoin because of such an act? He would be destroying his own network he created.

[markm]

The Bitcoin code seems to ignore the timestamp of the genesis block anyway.

You can create a genesis block, leave it lying around un-mined a few days or weeks, maybe even years or decades, and when you do finally fire up the code and start mining you don't get a complaint that the genesis block is too old nor that the first block you create following the genesis block is too far into the future as compared to the date of the genesis block.

As soon as a new checkpoint comes out in a new version of the client, you will be able to see whether that checkpoint affirms the blocks mined since the publication of the current version or, if your held back chain theory is the case, instead is a checkpoint invalidating everything mined since publication and instead affirming some held back secret ten year old chain.(*)

-MarkM-

(*) Because he is actually Satoshi, and didn't even publish the whitepaper until long after starting that secret hidden held back chain...

EDIT: Actually, Satoshi's REAL held back chain PAID the newspaper to publish a specific future headline, they get a big chunk of the coins in the held back secret double-spend chain!

[Rodyland]

What would that accomplish if no one uses ixcoin because of such an act? He would be destroying his own network he created.

If his purpose was to piss people off, cause chaos and mayhem, and generally distract people from bitcoin, then that would work nicely.  There seem to be no shortage of people that are bitcoin perma-bears, and it's not that much of a stretch for someone to go from "I think bitcoin will fail" to "I hope bitcoin fails" to "I will help bitcoin fail"....

[Littleshop]

If he'd made some attempt at creating a novel fork of bitcoin I'd have a different opinion.  If he'd not mined over 500k coins himself before going public I'd have a different opinion.

I agree.  The only change he/they made was to make it EASIER to mine coins so they could get more in the beginning.  A better change would have been to make the mining reward smaller but then it would have taken twice as long to mine the same amount of coins they kept for themselves.  

[shotgun]

this whole thing is like one big WASTE OF TIME. Go mine BTC or NMC. WE DON'T NEED MORE CHAINS.

[N12]

this whole thing is like one big WASTE OF TIME. Go mine BTC or NMC. WE DON'T NEED MORE CHAINS.

Why leave it at two? Either one or infinite chains.

Also, why all the hostility? It’s Free Market!

[Nasakioto]

DO NOT USE THIS
There is a more serious issue than that he already mined some blocks.  There is no way of knowing he hasn't mined EVEN MORE and is holding them to himself.

The genesis block is NOT properly timestamped.  The bitcoin genesis block contains the following quote:
"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

The reason for this is so you can be sure Satoshi hadn't been mining a chain for the past 10 years.  That quote PROVES that noone started mining before Jan 03 2009.

In IXcoin the genesis block has the quote:
"To see the farm is to leave it"
https://github.com/ixcoin/ixcoin/blob/Branch_v0.3.24/src/main.cpp

That is totally meaningless and proves nothing.

Either the dude who made this didn't understand the reason for timestamping the genesis block, or deliberately left it out.  Either way, there is no way you can know that he or someone else hasn't been mining an alternate chain for the past 2 years being kept hidden and that will be released eventually later..

There are blockchain checkpoints within the code which prevent this from happening.

[Rodyland]

this whole thing is like one big WASTE OF TIME.

agreed

Go mine BTC or NMC.

Agreed

WE DON'T NEED MORE CHAINS.

Not sure.  I can imagine other rulesets that could prove interesting.  However I agree that it seems a waste of time to create a bitcoin clone when bitcoin's future isn't assured - especially since the reason for the lack of certainty regarding bitcoin's future is NOT the particular ruleset in place.  Let's get bitcoin stable, secure, and out of the bleeding edge and into merely the cutting edge.  Then we can start looking at how things could be done differently, better, in terms of the blockchain rules.

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