bitcoin vs solidcoin

[MoonShadow]

i believe in bitcoin, and i also agree we need to revamp the system. i like how it is for the most part, the only things i would change if i could would be

make gpu mining impossible (in reality, it centralizes bitcoin because a gpu can be easily scaled, id propose a proof of work system that is more serial than it is parallel. because bitcoin is sopose to be a medium of exchange, not a hoarding system or make money from simply using electricity.)
give 1000 coins per 5 minutes, until 500m exist, pruned coins will be added as a reward, so 500m will always exist
keep only 100k blocks, prune blocks, once you reach 100k, for every block that is made, one is destroyed. this also means you must trust somebody inside the network to give you a block to start with.
5 minute targets (some people fail to realize that once your transaction is in a block, rules for accepting coins in "limbo" no longer apply. if you want the same security then wait the 10 minutes and stop complaining, if you want me to write up a full description, just say and ill explain my reasoning)

I like some of your ideas. We need more coins over all. 21,000,000 just isn't "enough" to go around lol

I'll admit up front that I don't know anything about what Solidcoin is trying to accomplish, but it's obvious to myself that neither of you have any deep understanding of what Bitcoin is really designed to accomplish, nor how it works to that end.

[1714048755]

1714048755

[1714048755]

1714048755

[1714048755]

1714048755

[1714048755]

1714048755

[1714048755]

1714048755

[1714048755]

1714048755

[MoonShadow]

I went to the solidcoin website and this is what I found as the logic for this fork...

"As Bitcoin itself and other similar chains have seen, there are numerous vulnerabilities and issues in the protocol, including :-

    * Slow transaction speeds, often making waiting for confirmations unbearable
    * Near complete shutdown of network due to pump-n-dumps by large operators
    * Transaction fee nightmares, no way of knowing what a fee will be until you've tried to send funds
    * Concentration of Bitcoins into elitist early adopters that have no interest or desire to help Bitcoins be used by "normal" people"


Really?  That's it?  This is the complaint?

1) Slow transaction confirms?  (not transaction speeds, as noted by the faq later, actual transactions take seconds)
2) Pump'N'Dump
3) Unknown transaction fees
4) Elitist attitudes


1)  So to solve the problem of 'instant' transfer confirmations, they reduce the target time from 10 minutes to three minutes.  Okay, but it's still three minutes.  How does that help?  If you are standing in a checkout line trying to buy a hamburger, fries and a coke you aren't going to be waiting for a confirmation in either case.  If you are sitting in the new car dealership then you are going to be waiting for several confirmations in any case.  This doesn't solve anything, and is just as arbitrary of an interval than Bitcoin's 10 minutes.  By what logic is three minutes better?  And why not two minutes?  And what is the expected network latency going to be if Solidcoin is running transaction volumes near to that of Visa?

2)  Is this a problem with Bitcoin, and if so, how?  This kind of thing (sort of) happened last summer, when the difficulty was way lower than now and almost no one was mining with their GPU's.  But rules now exist to limit such events, even though they are astronomicly less likely since that was most likely done by someone with a GPU mining prototype and there just aren't any new jumps in tech on the horizon.  Bear in mind that we knew that GPU mining was coming at the time.  And ASICs represent a leap in power efficiency not hashing power per se.

3)  They aren't unknown.  All one has to do is take a look at the range of fees in the last couple of blocks.  If you want to be 99% certain that your transaction will be included in the very next block, choose the high end of that range.  If you just want to have a pretty good odds of getting it in within the next couple of blocks, choose the low end of that range.  If you don't need it to be included anytime soon, choose zero. 

4)  Really?  You don't like how others play the game, so you are going to go home and make a whole new ball game?  Is this Baseketball?  Is this a logical reason to choose a currency fork over the original?  Because you don't care for the attitude?  Do you really think that others who come after you are going to prefer your attitude enough to overlook the advantages of the original?

[RSantana]

pruned coins will be added as a reward, so 500m will always exist

How do you detect if a coin has been pruned?

[MoonShadow]

pruned coins will be added as a reward, so 500m will always exist

How do you detect if a coin has been pruned?

I think that they mean that if a coin hasn't been spent or moved by the time it hits the 100K block, it's probably a lost coin and is given to the miner of the next block as that one is destroyed. 

[wolftaur]

I think that they mean that if a coin hasn't been spent or moved by the time it hits the 100K block, it's probably a lost coin and is given to the miner of the next block as that one is destroyed. 

Which is an incredibly stupid idea. If I want to set aside some money for a few years they'd be "pruned" right out as "lost" coins and someone gets my money for no legitimate reason.

Plus the fact that I found almost thirty dollars in change and two USB drives when I cleaned my mother's couch the last time I visited her.

[defxor]

FPGAs are about 5 times as costly as GPUs. That's a long way from affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

[julz]

I think that they mean that if a coin hasn't been spent or moved by the time it hits the 100K block, it's probably a lost coin and is given to the miner of the next block as that one is destroyed. 

Which is an incredibly stupid idea. If I want to set aside some money for a few years they'd be "pruned" right out as "lost" coins and someone gets my money for no legitimate reason.

Plus the fact that I found almost thirty dollars in change and two USB drives when I cleaned my mother's couch the last time I visited her.

And incredibly - this idea or something very like it keeps popping up. e.g recycle coins after they don't move for 5 or 10 years.  I can only guess that the people suggesting it are very young.. and for them a 'decade' seems unimaginably long.
It's an awful idea. 

[Spacy]

FPGAs are about 5 times as costly as GPUs. That's a long way from affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

If the ROI after 5 Years is positive, then you can get 10x faster GPUs... for a even cheaper price...

[defxor]

FPGAs are about 5 times as costly as GPUs. That's a long way from affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

If the ROI after 5 Years is positive, then you can get 10x faster GPUs... for a even cheaper price...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg498479#msg498479

[wolftaur]

And incredibly - this idea or something very like it keeps popping up. e.g recycle coins after they don't move for 5 or 10 years.  I can only guess that the people suggesting it are very young.. and for them a 'decade' seems unimaginably long.
It's an awful idea. 

I think it's more "Fucking early adopters and rich speculators holding onto coins I WANT THOSE COINS ME ME ME ME ME ME ME" to be perfectly honest.

[Spacy]

FPGAs are about 5 times as costly as GPUs. That's a long way from affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

If the ROI after 5 Years is positive, then you can get 10x faster GPUs... for a even cheaper price...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg498479#msg498479

If the break even with GPU is much earlier, you can invest the profit you gather until the FPGA break even into FPGAs...

[defxor]

If the break even with GPU is much earlier, you can invest the profit you gather until the FPGA break even into FPGAs...

Please use math. I'll help: How much sooner do you need to break even with a GPU to be able to take advantage of the Moore's law equivalent to offset the higher electricity cost?

[Spacy]

If the break even with GPU is much earlier, you can invest the profit you gather until the FPGA break even into FPGAs...

Please use math. I'll help: How much sooner do you need to break even with a GPU to be able to take advantage of the Moore's law equivalent to offset the higher electricity cost?

Let's take some numbers:
6990 800MH/sec $800 350W
FGPA 200 MH/sec $600 0W

Difficulty 1777774
Exchangerate 8
Electricity $0.15 USD

FPGA: $0.91 a day => break even after 660 days

6990 power costs: $1.26 a day
6990: $3.62 a day - $1.26 = $2.36 profit a day => break even after 340 days...

660 days - 340 days = 320 days
6690 profit between 6990breakeven and fpgabreakeven: 320 * 3.26 = $755.2

=> After 660 days you could either have 1 FPGA and 0 profit, or 1 6990 + $755.2 which equals 1.25 FPGAs (or even more more powerful FPGAs which are available 660 days later)

Simple math...

[defxor]

=> After 660 days you could either have 1 FPGA and 0 profit, or 1 6990 + $755.2 which equals 1.25 FPGAs (or even more more powerful FPGAs which are available 660 days later)

Simple math...

Slightly too simple, not factoring in difficulty and/or price changes including the move from GPU to FPGA and ASICs. It's similar to claiming that people wouldn't invest in GPU farms, it being much cheaper (quicker ROI) continuing to mine using CPUs.

The result of your calculation was that with absolutely no changes you'd earn 25% of an FPGA in 2 years time. That's a risky proposal. If you move from GPU to FPGA already now you've offset a lot of that risk.

(FPGA miners can extend their ROI and sell BTC cheaper when a GPU miner has to stop running his rig altogether)

[Spacy]

=> After 660 days you could either have 1 FPGA and 0 profit, or 1 6990 + $755.2 which equals 1.25 FPGAs (or even more more powerful FPGAs which are available 660 days later)

Simple math...

Slightly too simple, not factoring in difficulty and/or price changes including the move from GPU to FPGA and ASICs. It's similar to claiming that people wouldn't invest in GPU farms, it being much cheaper (quicker ROI) continuing to mine using CPUs.

The result of your calculation was that with absolutely no changes you'd earn 25% of an FPGA in 2 years time. That's a risky proposal. If you move from GPU to FPGA already now you've offset a lot of that risk.

(FPGA miners can extend their ROI and sell BTC cheaper when a GPU miner has to stop running his rig altogether)

Correct, the difficulty/price over time ratio will adjust this calculation up or down.

[Technomage]

First of all, the profit issue. It's obvious that a large majority of miners are in it for the profit. That's clear. My rigs have been on Solidcoin for a while now because it has better profits, it has been especially nice now that BTC mining isn't that profitable to begin with and I still haven't payed for my hardware.

However, a lot of people in the Bitcoin world are doing other things than mining and then it gets interesting. Personally I don't care for people who are just mining and doing profit, those people are irrelevant. The people who matter are those that like Bitcoin itself and are talking about it, building services and commerce, programming all kinds of useful tools for Bitcoin etc.

I'm basically doing everything. The mining is mostly a hobby with some profit in it which is nice, but it's just one part of it. I'm also a long-term investor and a small-time trader. I happen to talk about Bitcoin a lot to get people to understand how big of a deal it is from a technical and social perspective. It truly has the potential to change the market system to work more like Smith originally intended and undermine the power of the global corporate system which is ruining us.

I'm looking at possibilities of offering Bitcoin-related services here in Finland and will probably start on that project in the very near future. This is what people need to do now, mining has been a core infrastructure component of Bitcoin and it is finally in a stable state. Mining or talking about mining isn't the answer to Bitcoin's success, building more infrastructure now that the core infrastructure is stable, is the answer.

As for Solidcoin, I have it as a very low probability event that Solidcoin will somehow rival Bitcoin. The "improvements" that Solidcoin has are actually minor and Bitcoin compared to Solidcoin is very well known already. Also, Solidcoin has at least one horrible feature change which is the fixed fee system. The variable fees in Bitcoin work exactly as they should. I've still saved a few SC just in case, but it's highly unlikely to succeed over Bitcoin.

A higher probability event is that Solidcoin will "succeed" as a little brother of Bitcoin and there are actually multiple cryptocurrencies on use just like there are multiple fiat currencies. I don't think this is very probable either but it's definitely possible. And I don't see that as a bad thing, the more people we get to use cryptocurrencies in general the better. If some people think Solidcoin is the answer and want to build infrastructure to support it, that's fine.

Personally I think Bitcoin is still very much the answer and there's nothing revolutionary in it's competitors, yet.

[ctoon6]

its a problem, when the only reason people use bitcoin, is to make money. bitcoin is a medium of exchange, not stocks.

[phelix]

any of the larger pools could easily run a double spending attack on solidcoin / on a sc exchange. hopefully somebody will attempt it soon. I sure would offer my humble hashing power for a short time. how much profit could there be in this? someone start the killerpool please!

I am looking forward to see the next fork implementing merged mining. and to see it go down.

every dead fork makes bitcoin stronger. 

[Spacy]

any of the larger pools could easily run a double spending attack on solidcoin / on a sc exchange. hopefully somebody will attempt it soon. I sure would offer my humble hashing power for a short time. how much profit could there be in this? someone start the killerpool please!

The funny thing is: you can just spend on a double spending attack what you HAVE. So if someone uses SO MUCH ressources for just spending some hundret IXCs, who cars? And if you have some thousand IXCs, why would you want to destroy their value? ^^ So either your balance is small enough to have no impact, or you have no intensions to destroy your wallets value.

[wumpus]

ok so there is a mini war going on.....

This is not a war - this is pest control