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

[BorisTheSpider]

ZeroCoin/ZeroCash - an on-blockchain mixing and anonymization service.

Is this for real? A lot of coins has promised this over the past year, and we have yet to see anything concrete. I know Zerocoin was discussed heavily at Feathercoin, but it was deemed to be too complicated and unwieldy.

If you can show some proof that it is viable I will invest big. I want to know if you have actually looked into it or somebody just told you he will implement it.

All I can say at this stage is, we have looked at the protocol - we agree that there are some challenges, but if Zerocoin doesn't work out for us, we will look at other solutions. We have discussed various options regarding the implementation, and working around some of the difficulties, and we will be looking at code and trying stuff out on the testnet in the next weeks. I won't go any make any commitments that I can't keep, but what I can say is if anyone is going to have this soon, it will be Vertcoin - we're making it a top priority.

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[1715338715]

1715338715

[dedicatedpoolcom]

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[mv1986]

Boris,

could you provide a statement that summarizes in a nutshell what the advantages of vertcoin are? I mean, it should be a statement well balanced between amateur and expert, maybe a little bit closer to amateur. I am talking about the coin to some people, but am not really able to explain in a convincing way that this coin is THE coin.
Also, is this core feature really unique in the crypto-currency-industry?

[gonzzo]

Boris,

could you provide a statement that summarizes in a nutshell what the advantages of vertcoin are? I mean, it should be a statement well balanced between amateur and expert, maybe a little bit closer to amateur. I am talking about the coin to some people, but am not really able to explain in a convincing way that this coin is THE coin.
Also, is this core feature really unique in the crypto-currency-industry?

I would appreciate that too (collecting infos for a newsletter)!

[dsergeevich]

BoristheSpider=Boris blade? from the movie "Snatch"?  

[gonzzo]

BoristheSpider=Boris Razer? from the movie "Snatch"?  

you mean boris the blade aka boris the bullet dodger  
(like the movie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuciVppucTI

[Basnoff]

mv1986 and gonzzo,

This might come across as rude, but please don't see it that way,
I'm guessing Boris will be pretty busy with the technical side of things.
You might be able to save him some time if you could specify what isn't clear in the following quotes:

From the first page of this thread:

What is Vertcoin?

Vertcoin is a cryptographic currency, similar to Bitcoin and Litecoin, with one major difference.  As the forerunner of the digital currency movement, the original Bitcoin developers were unable to perceive all potential threats that would arise to challenge it's mission as a decentralized currency.  

Millions of dollars were spent by various companies to build application specific integrated circuit (ASIC)  computers in an attempt to monopolize mining.  These devices made it so GPUs and CPUs were no longer useful in the mining process.  As a result, the vast majority of Bitcoin mining and transactions would now be processed by large data centers that required hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in investment.

Now that Bitcoin computational power is handled almost entirely by large data centers, the currency has rapidly changed from a distributed, decentralized currency, to one that is much more centralized and vulnerable.  Companies such as Cex.io are routinely hitting 40% PoW computational power on a daily basis, and will soon be able to perform 51% attacks at will, if they so choose.

Due to the problems ASIC chips brought on the digital currency platform, a new currency, Litecoin was created.  Litecoin attempted to utilize the Scrypt hashing algorithm, which is more memory intensive than SHA256, to deter ASIC use.  As of January 2014, there are now Scrypt ASIC chips being deployed by the Chinese for mining.  So far, around 1000 Mhash of Gridseed ASIC chips have been brought online and used on the litecoin and middlecoin.com network.

The Chinese chips have not been released on the greater market at large, but eventually they will, and the same problems that SHA256 currency faces will come to the Litecoin and other Scrypt currency networks next.

Where does Vertcoin fit into this?

Scrypt was utilized by Litecoin to try and deter ASIC use because large memory requirements are the best way to try and make ASIC financially unfeasible.  Litecoin held out for a while, but the original memory requirements in the barebone litecoin distribution were just not high enough to lock out ASIC completely.  

Vertcoin has now been released as the logical evolution of Litecoin and introduces what's known as "Adaptive N-Factor".  The N-factor component of Scrypt determines how much memory is required to compute the hashing functions.  Vertcoin N-factor increases with time to stay one step ahead of any possible ASIC development.

For the long, foreseeable future, GPU computing will be the fastest method of computation for Vertcoin, but CPU computation will eventually make gains as N-factor increases.

And from vertcoin.org:

As digital currencies mature, mining power is being concentrated due to ASIC farms and huge multipools.
This weakens security for us all.

Vertcoins algorithm has been designed to resist the development of custom mining hardware, and multipool mining ensuring that transactions are validated by a widely distributed network and avoiding the selling pressure when large mining pools indiscriminately flood the market with freshly mined coins.

Now you specifically mentioned that it is intended for amateurs mostly, and that it has to be in a nutshell.
I'm guessing most people don't know what an ASIC is. This will be fairly hard to explain in a few lines.

[wintersondante]

I would also encourage information seekers to consider these two sources as well:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/vertcoin-soaring-cryptocurrency-set-surpass-bitcoin-1435261

and the interview with the creator of Vertcoin:

http://www.followthecoin.com/interview-creator-vertcoin/

Bit but by all means, if you need more clarification, or a statement those don't offer, help us to figure out what you need more than those.

[BorisTheSpider]

Boris,

could you provide a statement that summarizes in a nutshell what the advantages of vertcoin are? I mean, it should be a statement well balanced between amateur and expert, maybe a little bit closer to amateur. I am talking about the coin to some people, but am not really able to explain in a convincing way that this coin is THE coin.

Also, is this core feature really unique in the crypto-currency-industry?

In a nutshell, there are a combination of factors that make Vertcoin better than any other cryptocurrency. Uniquely, we have an adaptive N-factor schedule that is chosen carefully to keep GPUs in the game over time, whilst frustrating ASIC development - the main reason this is important is that ASICs have been seen to lead to centralisation of mining power, and centralisation is bad for security - on the flipside, keeping GPUs in the game is important as otherwise a chain is vulnerable to botnets. Apart from this, we have some other excellent fundamentals - we have a very active, experienced and commited dev team and the founder Vertcoin as well as the rest of us in the dev group are commited to the project for the long term - I think that's pretty important. We meet every day in IRC or Skype and there is constant activity. This coin also has a fair distribution and wasn't premined, it's not just another scam coin, its primary motivator is not someones personal profit but rather to build a better mousetrap.

I also think we have some really good things going on that are not quite there yet, but which are in the works and coming very soon indeed, in particular, we will soon have a solid, concrete roadmap for where we want to take this project next, and how we intend to stay ahead of the curve, with milestones and specific target timescales for implementation. As part of this drive to kick the organizational side of the project up a notch, we will also shortly have much more clarity of leadership, a defined structure for who is responsible for what, a public face of Vertcoin - accountable people, and a proper business plan.

[gonzzo]

mv1986 and gonzzo,

This might come across as rude, but please don't see it that way,
I'm guessing Boris will be pretty busy with the technical side of things.
You might be able to save him some time if you could specify what isn't clear in the following quotes:

From the first page of this thread:

What is Vertcoin?

Vertcoin is a cryptographic currency, similar to Bitcoin and Litecoin, with one major difference.  As the forerunner of the digital currency movement, the original Bitcoin developers were unable to perceive all potential threats that would arise to challenge it's mission as a decentralized currency. 

Millions of dollars were spent by various companies to build application specific integrated circuit (ASIC)  computers in an attempt to monopolize mining.  These devices made it so GPUs and CPUs were no longer useful in the mining process.  As a result, the vast majority of Bitcoin mining and transactions would now be processed by large data centers that required hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in investment.

Now that Bitcoin computational power is handled almost entirely by large data centers, the currency has rapidly changed from a distributed, decentralized currency, to one that is much more centralized and vulnerable.  Companies such as Cex.io are routinely hitting 40% PoW computational power on a daily basis, and will soon be able to perform 51% attacks at will, if they so choose.

Due to the problems ASIC chips brought on the digital currency platform, a new currency, Litecoin was created.  Litecoin attempted to utilize the Scrypt hashing algorithm, which is more memory intensive than SHA256, to deter ASIC use.  As of January 2014, there are now Scrypt ASIC chips being deployed by the Chinese for mining.  So far, around 1000 Mhash of Gridseed ASIC chips have been brought online and used on the litecoin and middlecoin.com network.

The Chinese chips have not been released on the greater market at large, but eventually they will, and the same problems that SHA256 currency faces will come to the Litecoin and other Scrypt currency networks next.

Where does Vertcoin fit into this?

Scrypt was utilized by Litecoin to try and deter ASIC use because large memory requirements are the best way to try and make ASIC financially unfeasible.  Litecoin held out for a while, but the original memory requirements in the barebone litecoin distribution were just not high enough to lock out ASIC completely. 

Vertcoin has now been released as the logical evolution of Litecoin and introduces what's known as "Adaptive N-Factor".  The N-factor component of Scrypt determines how much memory is required to compute the hashing functions.  Vertcoin N-factor increases with time to stay one step ahead of any possible ASIC development.

For the long, foreseeable future, GPU computing will be the fastest method of computation for Vertcoin, but CPU computation will eventually make gains as N-factor increases.

And from vertcoin.org:

As digital currencies mature, mining power is being concentrated due to ASIC farms and huge multipools.
This weakens security for us all.

Vertcoins algorithm has been designed to resist the development of custom mining hardware, and multipool mining ensuring that transactions are validated by a widely distributed network and avoiding the selling pressure when large mining pools indiscriminately flood the market with freshly mined coins.

Now you specifically mentioned that it is intended for amateurs mostly, and that it has to be in a nutshell.
I'm guessing most people don't know what an ASIC is. This will be fairly hard to explain in a few lines.

we will promote vertcoin with our next newsletter (planned end of febraury/beginning of march). the newsletter is going to about 130 adresses.
some of our clients are asset manager and consultants for investors (some have already a lot of money in btc, ltc, ppc and nmc).

we have to tell them why vtc is different or better with the KISS rule.
we can not use words like "Adaptive N-Factor", "GPU" and such and need to translate to a non geek language they can understand or nobody will read or understand the information.

Well it seems we'll have to help ourselves here ...

[mv1986]

Thank you very much for the info!

There is sth I'd like to know: once the adaptive N-factor turns out to be the killer feature, can other coins fastly adjust for that feature? Or is this a fundamental that cannot be fastly implemented within the architecture of other coins?
DOGE-coin: quite successful. For what reason? I read an interview and the dev team says it has nice plans for the future. Could they plan to add a feature that guarantees democratic mining or is this sth that puts vertcoin really ahead of it all?

[gonzzo]

Boris,

could you provide a statement that summarizes in a nutshell what the advantages of vertcoin are? I mean, it should be a statement well balanced between amateur and expert, maybe a little bit closer to amateur. I am talking about the coin to some people, but am not really able to explain in a convincing way that this coin is THE coin.

Also, is this core feature really unique in the crypto-currency-industry?

In a nutshell, there are a combination of factors that make Vertcoin better than any other cryptocurrency. Uniquely, we have an adaptive N-factor schedule that is chosen carefully to keep GPUs in the game over time, whilst frustrating ASIC development - the main reason this is important is that ASICs have been seen to lead to centralisation of mining power, and centralisation is bad for security - on the flipside, keeping GPUs in the game is important as otherwise a chain is vulnerable to botnets. Apart from this, we have some other excellent fundamentals - we have a very active, experienced and commited dev team and the founder Vertcoin as well as the rest of us in the dev group are commited to the project for the long term - I think that's pretty important. We meet every day in IRC or Skype and there is constant activity. This coin also has a fair distribution and wasn't premined, it's not just another scam coin, its primary motivator is not someones personal profit but rather to build a better mousetrap.

I also think we have some really good things going on that are not quite there yet, but which are in the works and coming very soon indeed, in particular, we will soon have a solid, concrete roadmap for where we want to take this project next, and how we intend to stay ahead of the curve, with milestones and specific target timescales for implementation. As part of this drive to kick the organizational side of the project up a notch, we will also shortly have much more clarity of leadership, a defined structure for who is responsible for what, a public face of Vertcoin - accountable people, and a proper business plan.

ok thanks some information we can use and possibly simplify further ...

[Basnoff]

Gonzo,

Well that was exactly what I was afraid of since I run into this problem as well... Trying to summarize a fairly complex idea when the receiving end doesn't know the terminology is very difficult.

Fortunately the people you mention already know something of cryptocoins, it shouldn't be hard for them to see what the release of ASICs did with the difficulty if you show them the difficulty graph.

So showing them that this was caused by the few companies that can make ASICs should help to explain why this causes centralisation.

I'll google with you to see if someone has already put something up somewhere.

[BorisTheSpider]

we will promote vertcoin with our next newsletter (planned end of febraury/beginning of march). the newsletter is going to about 130 adresses.
some of our clients are asset manager and consultants for investors (some have already a lot of money in btc, ltc, ppc and nmc).

we have to tell them why vtc is different or better with the KISS rule.
we can not use words like "Adaptive N-Factor", "GPU" and such and nee to translate to a non geek language they can understand or nobody will read or understand the information.

Well it seems we'll have to help ourselves here ...

OK I see where you're coming from. Let me try to put it terms more appropriate for that medium/context:

1. We have a roadmap, leadership team and defined responsibilities. We will have public faces to the Vertcoin project who are accountable for specific areas of responsibility. By the time you write your newletter this will be in place, and you can come back here over the next days and weeks and see that taking shape. I think this is probably factor number 1 for your purposes - it's a big differentiator. Open source and community involvement is great, mix it with a bit of top-down direction and leadership and you have a recipe for massive success.

2. We have technical differentiators like our resistance to multipool mining. In price terms, resistance to multipools is important because it frustrates automatic arbitrage - it is not technically trivial for multipools to mine VTC then automatically sell it for BTC when it is the most profitable coin to mine. Multipools doing this tends to arb the price of other big coins down to the mean profitability, that isn't happening with Vertcoin because hashcows/middlecoin/multipool don't mine VTC.

3. The community is strongly behind this coin because it's not another scam and not another clone. That is important - it means people can clearly understand what differentiates us, and they are willing to put their money behind it as a result. We're seeing all sorts of signs that key players understand VTC is different like us getting code merged into mainline repos for things like p2pool and stratum. That hasn't happened to any other coins than BTC and LTC until VTC - it shows the confidence that other big projects have in this project, and that they understand it is different.

[BorisTheSpider]

Thank you very much for the info!

There is sth I'd like to know: once the adaptive N-factor turns out to be the killer feature, can other coins fastly adjust for that feature? Or is this a fundamental that cannot be fastly implemented within the architecture of other coins?
DOGE-coin: quite successful. For what reason? I read an interview and the dev team says it has nice plans for the future. Could they plan to add a feature that guarantees democratic mining or is this sth that puts vertcoin really ahead of it all?

Well, we've discussed this before. In a nutshell there is not much of a technical barrier to other coins using these things (that's what open source is all about - we'd be very flattered if other big coins like Doge wanted to borrow from us), but there are other big motivators for other coins _not_ to implement stuff that requires a hardfork once they are already well established. It's the main reason I pushed for our own hardfork to happen so soon - we needed to address some weaknesses in VTC as it was originally conceived, and we did it soon so as to minimise the disruption. Hardforking a coin that already has $50M of other peoples money invested in it is not a trivial matter.

[yannis7777]

My deposit made yesterday is still not on cryptsy, do you guys have some deposits processed or is cryptsy not working with vtc?

It took several hours for deposits to clear yesterday. Got mine in 12 hours or so. Wallet was down or something.

[gonzzo]

we will promote vertcoin with our next newsletter (planned end of febraury/beginning of march). the newsletter is going to about 130 adresses.
some of our clients are asset manager and consultants for investors (some have already a lot of money in btc, ltc, ppc and nmc).

we have to tell them why vtc is different or better with the KISS rule.
we can not use words like "Adaptive N-Factor", "GPU" and such and nee to translate to a non geek language they can understand or nobody will read or understand the information.

Well it seems we'll have to help ourselves here ...

OK I see where you're coming from. Let me try to put it terms more appropriate for that medium/context:

1. We have a roadmap, leadership team and defined responsibilities. We will have public faces to the Vertcoin project who are accountable for specific areas of responsibility. By the time you write your newletter this will be in place, and you can come back here over the next days and weeks and see that taking shape. I think this is probably factor number 1 for your purposes - it's a big differentiator. Open source and community involvement is great, mix it with a bit of top-down direction and leadership and you have a recipe for massive success.

2. We have technical differentiators like our resistance to multipool mining. In price terms, resistance to multipools is important because it frustrates automatic arbitrage - it is not technically trivial for multipools to mine VTC then automatically sell it for BTC when it is the most profitable coin to mine. Multipools doing this tends to arb the price of other big coins down to the mean profitability, that isn't happening with Vertcoin because hashcows/middlecoin/multipool don't mine VTC.

3. The community is strongly behind this coin because it's not another scam and not another clone. That is important - it means people can clearly understand what differentiates us, and they are willing to put their money behind it as a result. We're seeing all sorts of signs that key players understand VTC is different like us getting code merged into mainline repos for things like p2pool and stratum. That hasn't happened to any other coins than BTC and LTC until VTC - it shows the confidence that other big projects have in this project, and that they understand it is different.

it is always a difficult process to formulate the newsletter for our customers.
this time it will be a little more complicated and we will do some additional brainstorming. but we can work with the information we have now.

Thanks Boris and Basnoff!

btw:
we will maybe accept vtc as payment method soon, at least for some services in the next months.
depends on vtc/btc price & volatility in the next days and months. we will see ...

edit: for the meantime we use the "We support vertcoin" image (thanks again luke & may to force be with you ) on all pages of our website (http://www.ilgit.ch).
We have an active google adwords campaign for data rescue and general it services and i think we can help to spread the word quite well with our website.

[Shuxy]

I'm probably going to get bashed for this, but if anyone is willing to sell their VTC for cash/USD please let me know. I've tried searching and can't find a place to buy VTC without first buying BTC .

I can hook you up probably. Having getvertcoins.com built as I type, that will serve the purpose in a few days. Meanwhile I will do small transactions but no paypal.

Hey jballs, unfortunately I'm not based in the US, how do we go about this?

On the flip side, I managed to get some BTC and just exchanged them for 100 VTC !

[jballs]

Ok I just hatcheted this together for a reference point.

30VTC For best #betterthanbitcoin meme. Will put it to a vote.

This is not a winner!  

But you get the idea, and if someone want to make this concept prettier I kinda like the reference...bought a lot of platinum futures last week when I wasn't busy flippin' bits for verts.




PS- For the FB posts from yesterday, whilst you didn't follow directions exactly I have the list and will send out in the next couple hours, my social media people explained that I would be better off buying some good crack to smoke with the money than the rent a page scheme so I bowed to their wisdom. I do appreciate your enthusiasm though and it was helpful to see the idea implemented for perspective.

I like this idea

Any takers?
I bumped to 30VTC first place
20VTC second place
10VTC third place.


You can post them here and the vertcoin facebook page if mods are cool with it.  

https://facebook.com/vertcoin

[SnakeEater]

http://vtc.kilovolt.co.uk/index.php seems compromised again.  No transactions update and no payout and zero unconfirmed.