I0Coin is a SCAM

[twobits]

There is a lot of fishy stuff about this launch. It came out 75 minutes later than expected and its possible that others were mining on the new block chain before it was posted to the forum. It also came with missing DLLs files
for the Windows install and it didn't run in server mode by default meaning that many solo miners may have lost a lot of blocks. Of course there was a lot of rush to mine this new block chain but many people not realising they required to server switch and still seeing zero balance took to the mining pools despite the very low difficulty. The mining pools really made the situation much worse as all the hashing power was now centralized mainly at BTCguild.

Anyone with a direct low latency connection to BTCGuild would have easily mined a lot blocks and causing other miners blocks to be rejected or marked as stales. Many miners big and small alike found that they efforts to mine this new blockchain were futile. I call for a royal commission and thorough investigation into the I0Coin fiasco. We need to look at the block chain data and see compare time stamps. We also need to investigate the many lost blocks and coins and enumerate exactly who most of the winning blocks went to.

The pools unfortunately have to much power and are defeating the purpose of p2p currency.

That is just they way the bitcoin make files are set up, and what they build right now.  Part of the issue of releasing a zero day mining block is you can't then do complete pretesting.

However, if nothing else,  this has been a good demonstration of the badness of pools.  In this case the pool operator launched a 51% attack, and even put about 'when you leave the i0coin ponzi scheme' .  Seems a bit anti-social of them to do this to a competing blockchain,  especially since they do not even believe in them.   I know I for one will recommend people not to use this pool.

[caston]

Is there currently a block explorer for people to examine  when mining began compared to when the first link was posted on the forum?

http://devcoinblockexplorer.dyndns.info/chain/I0coin

Thank you. We will try to work out from this if someone began hashing prior to the link being announced on the forums.

[twobits]

its possible that others were mining on the new block chain before it was posted to the forum.

You can see this isn't true in the block chain

Of course there was a lot of rush to mine this new block chain but many people not realising they required to server switch and still seeing zero balance took to the mining pools despite the very low difficulty.

lack of knowledge != SCAM

With the difficulty starting at 1, and the amount of attention this fork garnered, is what caused the start to be so chaotic, but you should have known this....

I know, I know everyone thought they would fire up their solo miners and mine a quick 500,000 i0coins and then by Saturday they would be rich....please

So those that were mining solo without the server mode switch would have lost any blocks they mined?


Is there currently a block explorer for people to examine  when mining began compared to when the first link was posted on the forum?

Yes I may be a "cry baby" and a "bad loser" but I think the credibility of p2p currency was twisted for financial gain here. A lot of people have lost faith not just in spin off projects but in bitcoin itself.  I urge people that feel they may have been cheated here to speak up and let their voice be heard. Do not suffer in silence. Let us know how you feel and tell us your story and post your observations.

A full investigation is warranted here and the members of the community have every right to bring this into the open.

You can't mine solo without a server running. So you can't mine any block in that case, so how could you lose blocks you could not have mined?  I did see a link to a blockexplorer posted somewhere, did not save it though.

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

[twobits]

I know Satoshi didn't like when people started GPU mining, so he would like even less the power of the pools.
It's a terrible waste of electricity to say the least.

This was something I wondered about.  Any links to anything I can read on this.  It almost seems to me he left a bit after gpu mining and pools started to really kick in?   Did he ever state why he was leaving?

[Xephan]

Well from reading the "I0coin - HOW MANY BLOCKS U GOT?" thread it does look like a couple of big players got over 90% of the blocks. Didn't it seem a little strange that blocks were going so fast yet everyone was getting stales? The excuse was that that everyone was getting stales because blocks were going so fast. So if blocks we're going so fast who was getting all the blocks and leaving everyone with the stales?

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37608.0

First thing, the ones not getting stales won't be complaining.

If you look at the btcguild block stats, practically the first few thousand blocks went to 1 miner (different ones but 1 miner per block). It's just a matter whose block made it to the server before the rest, a network latency race.

If you're right next to the server, connectivity wise, say with a 10ms ping, you'll have a 20ms headstart over everybody else. For somebody on the other side of the Pacific with say 200ms ping, he's going to get the work piece 190ms later and even if he got lucky and found the winning share on the first hash, that's another 190ms window for the guy next to the server to grab the block.

Now since the pool owner is likely going to be running miners ON the same physical network as the server, those miners probably going to win that race most of the time.

[twobits]

A full investigation is warranted here and the members of the community have every right to bring this into the open.

I can't think of anything that is unknown here, or even that was unpredicted.

[Xephan]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

[pbj sammich]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

Add to that the fact that the owner/creator of i0coin didn't personally mine out the first few difficulties himself

[twobits]

Well from reading the "I0coin - HOW MANY BLOCKS U GOT?" thread it does look like a couple of big players got over 90% of the blocks. Didn't it seem a little strange that blocks were going so fast yet everyone was getting stales? The excuse was that that everyone was getting stales because blocks were going so fast. So if blocks we're going so fast who was getting all the blocks and leaving everyone with the stales?

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37608.0

Um, no, since stales are work on the old block, it seems that is exactly the effect you would expect when the block are going quickly.  Also since the faster nodes are working on their longer block chain faster already, it all again makes sense it played out as it did.

[twobits]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

Right, so are you agreeing or disagreeing with the quoted statement somehow?  Or did you just quote it and add other thoughts?

[pbj sammich]

I don't think anyone anticipated this kind of leap to it personally...

Digbtc i0 pool = 174 GH/s
i0Guild = 444 GH/s
Coinotron 45 GH/s
Bitparking 37 GH/s

i think the target was around 50 GH/s ...

[twobits]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

Add to that the fact that the owner/creator of i0coin didn't personally mine out the first few difficulties himself

 In fact i0coin rode on ixcoin's coatails here, much like ixcoin is riding on bitcoin's.  It would not have gotten so far along if people had not just been through this exercise  with ixcoin.

[Xephan]

Add to that the fact that the owner/creator of i0coin didn't personally mine out the first few difficulties himself

I don't think he made a difference to the difficulty either. I remember when I saw it late and gave it a try for the fun of it, it was only at difficulty 2 or 4? Keep in mind the difficulty doesn't go up if he doesn't have the hash power to generate more than 1 block per 10 minutes on the average.

Since he took about 2 months to generate about 580K coins, we're looking at around 6042 blocks over almost 1500 hours, or just over 4 blocks an hour. At that rate, difficulty won't go up. So if 0.5TH/s jumped onto ixcoin at the start, we would had seen the same thing.

Fortunately for ixcoin, there was supposedly only 100~200+ GH/s for several hours to drive up the difficulty without causing too much problem.

This also reminds me of another factor, i0coin is targeting 5 minutes per block, so the block generation speed effectively doubles for the same hash power.

[caston]

Well from reading the "I0coin - HOW MANY BLOCKS U GOT?" thread it does look like a couple of big players got over 90% of the blocks. Didn't it seem a little strange that blocks were going so fast yet everyone was getting stales? The excuse was that that everyone was getting stales because blocks were going so fast. So if blocks we're going so fast who was getting all the blocks and leaving everyone with the stales?

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37608.0

First thing, the ones not getting stales won't be complaining.

If you look at the btcguild block stats, practically the first few thousand blocks went to 1 miner (different ones but 1 miner per block). It's just a matter whose block made it to the server before the rest, a network latency race.

If you're right next to the server, connectivity wise, say with a 10ms ping, you'll have a 20ms headstart over everybody else. For somebody on the other side of the Pacific with say 200ms ping, he's going to get the work piece 190ms later and even if he got lucky and found the winning share on the first hash, that's another 190ms window for the guy next to the server to grab the block.

Now since the pool owner is likely going to be running miners ON the same physical network as the server, those miners probably going to win that race most of the time.

Which is what I believe happened. The largest proportion of blocks went to miners on the same physical network as the server. Those of us in other continents didn't even get a look in. By the time we submitted our work it was stale.

[Xephan]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

Right, so are you agreeing or disagreeing with the quoted statement somehow?  Or did you just quote it and add other thoughts?

Agreeing somewhat on the first part but not on the second. i.e. I think having 580K worth of coins in reserve is not really reasonable, but not pre-announcing the launch was probably a good idea.

[Xephan]

Which is what I believe happened. The largest proportion of blocks went to miners on the same physical network as the server. Those of us in other continents didn't even get a look in. By the time we submitted out work it was stale.

It also depends on some sheer dumb luck I think? I've got more than 200ms to the io.btcguild server and less hashrate pointed at it than you did... but based on what you had posted, I think I got a few times more i0coins than you before the stales started going down from the new difficulties

[twobits]

I think it shows that the way ixcoin launched , with coins in reserve for bounties and infrastructure may not have been as bad as people thought after all.

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

Right, so are you agreeing or disagreeing with the quoted statement somehow?  Or did you just quote it and add other thoughts?

Agreeing somewhat on the first part but not on the second. i.e. I think having 580K worth of coins in reserve is not really reasonable, but not pre-announcing the launch was probably a good idea.

Fair enough.   I do think that without the bounties, the services made for ixcoin and also  i0coin would not have been made so quickly though.  

It will be interesting to see how much interest either of these chains has in  another month or two.

[caston]

Which is what I believe happened. The largest proportion of blocks went to miners on the same physical network as the server. Those of us in other continents didn't even get a look in. By the time we submitted out work it was stale.

It also depends on some sheer dumb luck I think? I've got more than 200ms to the io.btcguild server and less hashrate pointed at it than you did... but based on what you had posted, I think I got a few times more i0coins than you before the stales started going down from the new difficulties

yes I got about 9 coins from btc guild.. it didn't seem right at all which is why I changed to http://i0.digbtc.net/
but their page seems down now for some reason

[dayfall]

Ok, good.  So we now know the approximate starting difficulty, how to create a genesis block, how to build Linux executable, etc..

So when is the real start date?     (Oh yeah, and how to convert from GMT.)

[Xephan]

Fair enough.   I do think that without the bounties, the services made for ixcoin and also  i0coin would not have been made so quickly though.  

It will be interesting to see how much interest either of these chains has in  another month or two.

The bounties do help of course. The problem, which many of us pointed out, was the sheer amount. The pre-existing coins will have an effect on the valuation of the forked coin. So having 5800 would had probably been as good as 580K simply because each would be valued more anyway. If I'm not wrong, due to this i0coin is trading for twice or thrice the ixcoin value?