Vertcoin - First Scrypt N | First Stealth Address - Privacy without mixer

[ivanlabrie]

Now we're talking, radical thinking there...sounds good mate.

[styxical]

I like the idea of rewarding p2pool more. Right now the incentive for people to learn something new (new to most people) is just not there.

Having a primarily p2pool coin would distinguish us in a very good way from everyone else as well - good for security of the network.

[AlexGR]

I think it is feasible that a huge pool could mask itself as a p2pool or use its hashrate for a modified p2pool and then get paid for it with increased reward. The network protocol would not be able to tell.

[Zer0Sum]

But some PR is not bad thing. 

BBrisow - thanks.

iGoodw1n - yes, a big PR initiative is on the way shortly.

i am not complaining about your work, i honestly think you are the most reliable DEV out there... [/]But sometimes it seems to me that you are experts in your technology, but miss the important PR aspect.[/]

I am fine now, i will support VCT and hope that we will have a HOT summer.

Wow, I'm very impressed by the sophistication of the VTC community.

Monero = same story = Death Spiral = Devs no clue about PR = stupid pizza promotion

There needs to be a PR specialist (not an engineer)...
Maybe a journalist who produces and circulates a POSITIVE TECH news story every 2 weeks...
Only a tech advance moves the price like MYR... and tacking on anon is old news.

The P2P redistribution of block reward is a nice idea, very democratic.

[Kalizar]

a huge pool could mask itself as a p2pool or use its hashrate for a modified p2pool and then get paid for it with increased reward

This might pull some extra coin in a traditional pool operator's pocket under very circumstantial conditions with little benefit for the work that would need to be done.

After this change takes place, I expect 50% to pick up on the news within the first week. (similarly like merged mining). Everyone will do whatever it takes to mine on P2Pool if already mining VTC.


-Hypothetically, if someone were able to create a traditional pool proxied to P2Pool (keeping 10% of coins), this would ultimately no longer be effective after everyone is already making the switch to P2Pool. They also run the risk of being discovered and shamed out of the pool business. Using the block explorer, you can see where coins are going (from being mined to disbursed).

-If a pool were to somehow mask itself as a P2Pool node, but was actually not, it wouldn't be a big deal. There are literally hundreds-if not-thousands of VTC P2Pool nodes running. Most of them never reach rates that would be profitable enough to construct such a scheme (for 10% fee).

-Someone is currently beta testing a VTC GUI Miner that automatically connects to a P2Pool 1,2, or 3 node (by scanning P2Pool port) based on fee and merge mines MON and PLX. Once this is running stably, it would be so easy for VTC miners to make the switch.


I can't see any way, so far, why this would hurt VTC.

[xirou1992]

But some PR is not bad thing. 

BBrisow - thanks.

iGoodw1n - yes, a big PR initiative is on the way shortly.

what happened to the price? dumping?

[TheCoinFinder]

51% attacks are definately a buzz-word lately, what with the Coinotron issue with Litecoin, and the GHash.IO issue. So I thought I'd put some time into the various opinions around this situation. And what I have come up with, may seem counter to what most people believe, and infact, has actually changed my mind on a few things.

Firstly, yes, 51% are very real. They can ruin exchanges, and tarnish a coin's credibility. They can of course be repaired on the coin, but you can't give people back Bitcoin or other traded coins for the non-existant forked coins that they bought.

Now with that having been said, we really are Barking up the "wrong tree" when it comes to seeing this threat and looking at Traditional Pools.
Yes, I run two pools - Verters' Pool (since way back in February - the first (?) MPOS pool to support a custom Bootstrap skin before it became common-place :p). and HashHarder - which has the "less profitable every day" triple-merge mining option, so of course you can take my opinion as a biased one. Same as miners of a coin can be biased also. Back to my point.

To perform a 51% attack properly (ie to cause serious trouble), one needs to fork the blockchain privately, and mine with greater than 51% of the network hash for a day, week, month or whatever. Then after this time, reconnect to the main chains, and begin the reintegration of the bigger block-chain. I personally don't think that "nodes" have any programming whatsoever to stop this from happening - and blocking a single node would be pointless, as the attackers could make 2, 3, or 40 nodes.

Now this is my point: No current pool could perform/would perform this attack.

There are two types of situation that could occur - 1- Miners are kept unaware of this attack and their hashrate is used to 51% the coin, it would mean that all the miners on the pool would not receive any coins to their wallets (because its a private fork) for the entire time they are private mining. They would also see that the pool has not found any blocks at all, despite the hashrate being the same. Any coins they did try to "cash out" would magically not appear in their wallets.

The other situation is that the miners are all in on it. Now assuming this is just a standard pool (ie the ones we are discussing always on here - the SimpleVerts, the Coinotron's, the Ghash's) - then all the miners are hashing away in order to make some money from this all. There is no financial incentive for a miner who is not associated with the pool to be knowingly undermining the very coin that they are spending power and time on.
Therefore, I think, given the points above - it is very unlikely that given 51% (or more) that any of the existing or future vertcoin pools that we are aware of - or Litecoin or Bitcoin for that matter - would actually perform any such "attack".

The threat would exist from unknown parties, privately mining themselves with the intention to sell their mined coins via an exchange and then overwrite the transactions with their privately mined chain. This could not I believe, be done on a normal pool with Or even without the miners knowledge.

And thus, the threat from a "traditional pool" is illusory.

[Kalizar]

It seems a lot of the hypes are incentives offered for investors to rake in more coins. DRK offers masternode operators currently 10% of the block reward.

Although the whole concept of DRK has never sat well with me... perhaps we could use a similar tactic to redistribute miners.

If VTC could offer X% (ex: 10%) of the blockchain reward to P2Pool miners only, this could potentially crumble traditional pools relying on VTC.

Maybe this could be added along with the stealth update?

Kiefferbp over at www.vertcoin.com/r/vertcoin also offered another great idea:

I do like your idea, but I don't know how this can be enforced as it isn't trivial to, with 100% accuracy, determine who mined what block. I know a lot of pools put stuff in their coinbases that allow services like Blockchain.info for BTC to tell who mined what, but it can be easily faked.
To add on to your masternode point: maybe you can take X% of the block reward and give it to people running full nodes. Chances are, people running full nodes are doing it for P2Pool---at least that's what I think. Of course, there are some people running full nodes that aren't, but it's an idea.
I would think a lot more people would mine on P2Pool if the ramp-up period for payouts isn't as long as it is. Maybe someone could think of something to improve on this.

Link:
http://www.reddit.com/r/vertcoin/comments/27qmp0/an_idea_to_bring_more_miners_to_p2pool_do_you/ci3i22m

I think this is a great idea, as well. Probably within more reasonable bounds and encourages node creation, as well.

[TheCoinFinder]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

[styxical]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

I think you are downplaying the 51% threat huge in this post. I know as a miner I was not constantly monitoring my rigs. MAYBE daily I checked in on them. Think how much damage could be done in a few hours by a malicious actor? Especially given our block reward is relatively frequent. It's better try to solve this problem now before we have bitcoin's "too big to change" problems.

More decentralization is always better.

[TheCoinFinder]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

I think you are downplaying the 51% threat huge in this post. I know as a miner I was not constantly monitoring my rigs. MAYBE daily I checked in on them. Think how much damage could be done in a few hours by a malicious actor? Especially given our block reward is relatively frequent. It's better try to solve this problem now before we have bitcoin's "too big to change" problems.

More decentralization is always better.

A malicious actor wouldn't run a traditional pool, nor use traditional miners to perform such an attack. It would be too easy to identify and spot. Decentralisation is good - as it means you do not have a single point of failure.

Currently however: http://www.verters.com/block-history

Give Me Coins, SimpleVert, Coinotron - take up a big proportion of the blocks. For all the evangelising (and it has been evangelical somewhat) for P2pool, all it has done is put the smaller pools out of business, and sent the miners to these larger pools.

Now, promotion of and subsidising of smaller traditional pools is a far better way to take back these miners IMO. People will P2pool if they so choose, but more needs to be done to support the traditional pools which have been left to suffer at the hands of P2pool and the large pools.

[Kalizar]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

I think you are downplaying the 51% threat huge in this post. I know as a miner I was not constantly monitoring my rigs. MAYBE daily I checked in on them. Think how much damage could be done in a few hours by a malicious actor? Especially given our block reward is relatively frequent. It's better try to solve this problem now before we have bitcoin's "too big to change" problems.

More decentralization is always better.

+1

A lot of investors want reassurance that their coins are safe. A P2Pool network of 50% or more would sweeten the deal.

Pool operators sometimes get too big. Collecting even 1% of the 20%'s network daily block reward is insane. We need to spread this among pool operators. Give them a chance to charge fees, and make a 10% block bonus.

If 100% of the miners created a node to receive 10% of the block reward spread among them, then no harm done! Block reward distribution would go back to normal, and everything would be relatively the same... Except VTC would now be a 100% decentralized coin!


Say we promoted the hell out of a few pools, and further promoted P2Pool, and redistributed the network evenly... Who is to say it won't happen again?

If an incentive for P2Pool Node operators was hard coded into VTC, this would reassure miners+investors+anyone that network centralization is likely to never become an issue.

[ivanlabrie]

Again, this is a brilliant idea imho...descentralization in something like Bitcoin is 100% lacking, we're all slaves of the asic mining device manufacturer mafia.

[TheCoinFinder]

A lot of investors want reassurance that their coins are safe. A P2Pool network of 50% or more would sweeten the deal.

That is a lot of nodes potentially. We're talking thousands and thousands of miners - potentially a thousand or more nodes. Updating wallets a hard-fork would be complicated, and I'm not sure how many p2pool networks would need to be run to accomodate all of them.

If an incentive for P2Pool Node operators was hard coded into VTC, this would reassure miners+investors+anyone that network centralization is likely to never become an issue.

There is no way (IMO) that you can hard code this into VTC. As anything p2pool can do in a block, a normal pool can (and will) mimic to receive the reward.

Further, doing so will kill the coin as large pools would not accept the update, nor would miners who don't want to be forced to mine p2pool (which is what you are essentially doing) - far from being a decentralised currency then, it is a forced decision.

[Kalizar]

Again, this is a brilliant idea imho...descentralization in something like Bitcoin is 100% lacking, we're all slaves of the asic mining device manufacturer mafia.

+1

I couldn't see anyone else being against this unless they operate a traditional pool or maybe CPU mine. If P2Pools 1,2, and 3 consumed the network, it wouldn't really make a difference for low-end miners anymore.

A CPU miner will probably find more interest in a CPU algo. They would be better mining that and converting to VTC.

A miner with a GPU older than 5-6 years will probably not have much of an expectation with coin profit anyways.

[Kalizar]

A lot of investors want reassurance that their coins are safe. A P2Pool network of 50% or more would sweeten the deal.

That is a lot of nodes potentially. We're talking thousands and thousands of miners - potentially a thousand or more nodes. Updating wallets a hard-fork would be complicated, and I'm not sure how many p2pool networks would need to be run to accomodate all of them.

If an incentive for P2Pool Node operators was hard coded into VTC, this would reassure miners+investors+anyone that network centralization is likely to never become an issue.

There is no way (IMO) that you can hard code this into VTC. As anything p2pool can do in a block, a normal pool can (and will) mimic to receive the reward.

Further, doing so will kill the coin as large pools would not accept the update, nor would miners who don't want to be forced to mine p2pool (which is what you are essentially doing) - far from being a decentralised currency then, it is a forced decision.

If someone has no technological experience, they will simply miss out of 10% (or any set amount) profit. That might not be a big deal for average miners between 1-2 MH/s. The average miner who builds his own GPU rig can figure it out. Also, there are VM images you require almost zero setup and get you started with your own P2Pool node. This could easily allow someone with little knowledge to setup a node.

Every further fork could be prepared with an updated VM image to download. Even if things are shaky for a 1-2 weeks after every fork, it's only 10% that might be pulled by a few nodes who got their nodes running quickly.

After every fork, the reward could be dropped to 1% (instead of the 10% example) for a set amount of time, and gradually increase to it's original number. (ex: 10%)

[chengtangclnru4]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

glad to see the update.
move head.

[Kalizar]

P2pool is nice. Its a nice feature of VTC that its a big part of it. But it's not that important guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404364.msg7224536#msg7224536

glad to see the update.
move head.

Hi, I saw this is your first post. Welcome to Vertcoin!

[jacob019]

What happened to the stealth send feature?  Is it on hold?

[Kalizar]

What happened to the stealth send feature?  Is it on hold?

It's being tested on MON first. Hence why MON is the "test bed" for new features.

http://www.reddit.com/r/vertcoin/comments/27rfhk/stealth_address_alpha_testing_testnet/