[ANN] [MINT] Mintcoin (POS / 5%) [NO ICO] [Fair distro, community maintained]

[MarSas]

What would prevent such an attack?

[1714174196]

1714174196

[1714174196]

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[kiklo]

What would prevent such an attack?

Your Programmer may see some other options that the community is more agreeable too.
But my best guess would be dropping to your final 5% rate 2 years early.
Your 20 days min POS is stronger than apexcoin 24hr min POS, but your interest rate is 15% which is higher than apex's 10% .


 

[Derek492]

What would prevent such an attack?

Your Programmer may see some other options that the community is more agreeable too.
But my best guess would be dropping to your final 5% rate 2 years early.
Your 20 days min POS is stronger than apexcoin 24hr min POS, but your interest rate is 15% which is higher than apex's 10% .


 

Interest rate has nothing to do with its security. Mintcoin is more secure than most pos coins in that it takes 20 days to mint and 50 confirmations for minted blocks. We could increase the confirmations if needed. I'm not worried. As long as people keep their wallets online it improves the network and security. I keep my wallet online at all times because I want to help the network. 20 days is a good amount of time considering mintcoins block speed. It means its even better than peercoin in a relativistic stand point. That's why I think if people just understood pos better they would be buying mintcoin rather than all these other shitcoins. People think of MINT like its just some arbitrary random shitcoin when its not. It actually has innovative properties.

[kiklo]

What would prevent such an attack?

Your Programmer may see some other options that the community is more agreeable too.
But my best guess would be dropping to your final 5% rate 2 years early.
Your 20 days min POS is stronger than apexcoin 24hr min POS, but your interest rate is 15% which is higher than apex's 10% .


 

Interest rate has nothing to do with its security. Mintcoin is more secure than most pos coins in that it takes 20 days to mint and 50 confirmations for minted blocks. We could increase the confirmations if needed. I'm not worried. As long as people keep their wallets online it improves the network and security. I keep my wallet online at all times because I want to help the network. 20 days is a good amount of time considering mintcoins block speed. It means its even better than peercoin in a relativistic stand point. That's why I think if people just understood pos better they would be buying mintcoin rather than all these other shitcoins. People think of MINT like its just some arbitrary random shitcoin when its not. It actually has innovative properties.

The interest rate does affect security in the type of attack that guy used against apexcoin, a lower rate would mean he would need more of your coins to make the attempt. Also as your coin price drops , it would be easier for him to get the number of coins needed for the attempt.
I gave my best guess for a quick fix , but your programmer may have a solution the community is more likely to agree too.
Or you can just ignore it, if you are 100% sure mint is bulletproof.


 

[MarSas]

So, all minters, run wallets 24/7

[coolbeans94]

What would prevent such an attack?

Your Programmer may see some other options that the community is more agreeable too.
But my best guess would be dropping to your final 5% rate 2 years early.
Your 20 days min POS is stronger than apexcoin 24hr min POS, but your interest rate is 15% which is higher than apex's 10% .


 

Interest rate has nothing to do with its security. Mintcoin is more secure than most pos coins in that it takes 20 days to mint and 50 confirmations for minted blocks. We could increase the confirmations if needed. I'm not worried. As long as people keep their wallets online it improves the network and security. I keep my wallet online at all times because I want to help the network. 20 days is a good amount of time considering mintcoins block speed. It means its even better than peercoin in a relativistic stand point. That's why I think if people just understood pos better they would be buying mintcoin rather than all these other shitcoins. People think of MINT like its just some arbitrary random shitcoin when its not. It actually has innovative properties.

The interest rate does affect security in the type of attack that guy used against apexcoin, a lower rate would mean he would need more of your coins to make the attempt. Also as your coin price drops , it would be easier for him to get the number of coins needed for the attempt.
I gave my best guess for a quick fix , but your programmer may have a solution the community is more likely to agree too.
Or you can just ignore it, if you are 100% sure mint is bulletproof.


 

That doesn't make sense to me. How does a higher interest rate (higher reward for staking) mean he would need less coins? What affects the security of POS is not the interest rate of the reward, but the % of the coins held for minting and staking vs the rest of the network. So, if he was like the only person staking and nobody on the network was trying to stake. Mintcoin has a maximum coin weight buildup of 40 days to help prevent against this. This is why PoS coins that do not have a limit on coin age/weight are not secure, because an attacker can just wait until enough time has passed for their coins to overpower the entire network completely, basically indefinitely. This cannot happen with Mintcoin because of the 40 day limit. Because Mintcoin has a higher interest rate, means it is actually probably MORE SECURE because it motivates more people to hold their coins in their wallet for staking, thus increasing the staking participation rate. Security all has to do with the number of people on the network with their wallets online and attempting to stake. This is why Mintcoin has chosen a higher interest rate in these early years, as it is an additional boost to motivation to help keep more people minting and active on the network; and this increases the security of the coin. So I would argue that a higher block reward rate actually can help to increase security. For example: take Blackcoin for example...it already has 0 reward...so there is absolutely no motivation for you to try to stake your coins on that network, except to help secure the network. Mintcoin gives you a 15% annual reward right now to help secure its network. So I bet Mintcoin actually has a better staking participation rate than Blackcoin (thus Mintcoin more secure than Blackcoin, even though Blackcoin has lower interest rate). Since the 15% rate is equal for everyone, any increase in coin accumulation due to that, is equal for everyone on a % basis so that arguement is really all awash anyway..

[coolbeans94]

So, all minters, run wallets 24/7

Yes. This is where the protection and the security of the coin comes from. A higher participation rate the better. I have been tracking the participation rate since March 2014, and the percentage of total coins in existence that are staking is pretty high... about 50-70%. So theoretically, an attacker would need to obtain at least 26%-36% of the entire Mintcoin money supply in order to attack it. That is quite a large investment in the coin. If the participation rate was only like 10%, then an attacker would only need just over 5% to attack on the coin. So the security comes from everyone getting on and minting. And so that would require an attacker to hold a higher % of coins in order to attack it. More likely than not, if someone actually were able to obtain like 25-35% of the total coin supply, they would probably rather choose to pump it up and make a profit on the coin, rather than attack it, destroy/dump it and make it all worthless. So it is more secure if it requires more coins to attack it, and this comes from the participation rate of all coin holders. Even if you are not successfully making a minting every-day keeping your wallet online for minting, helps secure the network. It's coins that do not have a higher PoS participation rate that are easy to pick off and attack.

[MarSas]

FLT has an interesting incentive along the POS staking, a daily drip of coins for keeping the wallet open.

[fonzerrellie]

thanks for the insight coolbeans, not many coins have 20 days to wait before minting with a max stake age. AC has 14 days to wait but there is no max stake age... I'm just sync'n my ac wallet after 189 days so it should be interesting to see if I get any back to back even tho I don't hold more than 5k of them.

I don't quite get how getting pos blocks back to back could bring a coin down or is something else involved?

[kiklo]

That doesn't make sense to me. How does a higher interest rate (higher reward for staking) mean he would need less coins? What affects the security of POS is not the interest rate of the reward, but the % of the coins held for minting and staking vs the rest of the network. So, if he was like the only person staking and nobody on the network was trying to stake. Mintcoin has a maximum coin weight buildup of 40 days to help prevent against this. This is why PoS coins that do not have a limit on coin age/weight are not secure, because an attacker can just wait until enough time has passed for their coins to overpower the entire network completely, basically indefinitely. This cannot happen with Mintcoin because of the 40 day limit. Because Mintcoin has a higher interest rate, means it is actually probably MORE SECURE because it motivates more people to hold their coins in their wallet for staking, thus increasing the staking participation rate. Security all has to do with the number of people on the network with their wallets online and attempting to stake. This is why Mintcoin has chosen a higher interest rate in these early years, as it is an additional boost to motivation to help keep more people minting and active on the network; and this increases the security of the coin. So I would argue that a higher block reward rate actually can help to increase security. For example: take Blackcoin for example...it already has 0 reward...so there is absolutely no motivation for you to try to stake your coins on that network, except to help secure the network. Mintcoin gives you a 15% annual reward right now to help secure its network. So I bet Mintcoin actually has a better staking participation rate than Blackcoin (thus Mintcoin more secure than Blackcoin, even though Blackcoin has lower interest rate). Since the 15% rate is equal for everyone, any increase in coin accumulation due to that, is equal for everyone on a % basis so that arguement is really all awash anyway..

I will admit , I don't have all of the answers, but from what I pieced together it has something to do with the difficulty to stake blocks. In their forum , I received the impression that lower the % rate the harder it is to make the attack attempt.
The higher the difficulty the more secure your coin.
Since you mentioned black coin here is the comparison.

Crypto-currency    Block Height    Difficulty    
BlackCoin             535507              740.5 k
Mintcoin             1141336            0.32305372

Sources:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/blk/
http://www.multifaucet.tk/index.php?blockexplorer=MINT

Just thought you guys would like to be made aware of this.
If you believe it won't be an issue for you , ignore it.

 

[fonzerrellie]

That doesn't make sense to me. How does a higher interest rate (higher reward for staking) mean he would need less coins? What affects the security of POS is not the interest rate of the reward, but the % of the coins held for minting and staking vs the rest of the network. So, if he was like the only person staking and nobody on the network was trying to stake. Mintcoin has a maximum coin weight buildup of 40 days to help prevent against this. This is why PoS coins that do not have a limit on coin age/weight are not secure, because an attacker can just wait until enough time has passed for their coins to overpower the entire network completely, basically indefinitely. This cannot happen with Mintcoin because of the 40 day limit. Because Mintcoin has a higher interest rate, means it is actually probably MORE SECURE because it motivates more people to hold their coins in their wallet for staking, thus increasing the staking participation rate. Security all has to do with the number of people on the network with their wallets online and attempting to stake. This is why Mintcoin has chosen a higher interest rate in these early years, as it is an additional boost to motivation to help keep more people minting and active on the network; and this increases the security of the coin. So I would argue that a higher block reward rate actually can help to increase security. For example: take Blackcoin for example...it already has 0 reward...so there is absolutely no motivation for you to try to stake your coins on that network, except to help secure the network. Mintcoin gives you a 15% annual reward right now to help secure its network. So I bet Mintcoin actually has a better staking participation rate than Blackcoin (thus Mintcoin more secure than Blackcoin, even though Blackcoin has lower interest rate). Since the 15% rate is equal for everyone, any increase in coin accumulation due to that, is equal for everyone on a % basis so that arguement is really all awash anyway..

I will admit , I don't have all of the answers, but from what I pieced together it has something to do with the difficulty to stake blocks. In their forum , I received the impression that lower the % rate the harder it is to make the attack attempt.
The higher the difficulty the more secure your coin.
Since you mentioned black coin here is the comparison.

Crypto-currency    Block Height    Difficulty    
BlackCoin             535507              740.5 k
Mintcoin             1141336            0.32305372

Sources:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/blk/
http://www.multifaucet.tk/index.php?blockexplorer=MINT

Just thought you guys would like to be made aware of this.
If you believe it won't be an issue for you , ignore it.

 

I don't think the % interest rate has anything to do with it just network weight, how many coins are in wallets trying to stake, difficulty, and coin age for staking/minting prob has a bunch to do with it, the % pos seems to be arbitrary to me... I could be wrong tho

[Rent_a_Ray]

First thing you should do:
lower the nMaxClockDrift to 10 or 5 minutes.

It's not the final solution, but it's a beginning.

If anyone is in touch with roboguy: zeit@zeit-coin.net
Together we will find a solution - I'm sure.

Cheers,
Ray

Edit: kiklo wants to help you. What's the problem?

[ronald98]

FLT has an interesting incentive along the POS staking, a daily drip of coins for keeping the wallet open.

That's a great idea, there are too many POS coins whose networks freeze because nobody is staking.

[cryptomommy]

I will loop roboguy in on this conversation during Monday's hangout.

First thing you should do:
lower the nMaxClockDrift to 10 or 5 minutes.

It's not the final solution, but it's a beginning.

If anyone is in touch with roboguy: zeit@zeit-coin.net
Together we will find a solution - I'm sure.

Cheers,
Ray

Edit: kiklo wants to help you. What's the problem?

[Flyskyhigh]

How is getting an android wallet for Mintcoin coming along? It would be nice to move some coin around this way, and make it a lot easier to share with people.

[coolbeans94]

That doesn't make sense to me. How does a higher interest rate (higher reward for staking) mean he would need less coins? What affects the security of POS is not the interest rate of the reward, but the % of the coins held for minting and staking vs the rest of the network. So, if he was like the only person staking and nobody on the network was trying to stake. Mintcoin has a maximum coin weight buildup of 40 days to help prevent against this. This is why PoS coins that do not have a limit on coin age/weight are not secure, because an attacker can just wait until enough time has passed for their coins to overpower the entire network completely, basically indefinitely. This cannot happen with Mintcoin because of the 40 day limit. Because Mintcoin has a higher interest rate, means it is actually probably MORE SECURE because it motivates more people to hold their coins in their wallet for staking, thus increasing the staking participation rate. Security all has to do with the number of people on the network with their wallets online and attempting to stake. This is why Mintcoin has chosen a higher interest rate in these early years, as it is an additional boost to motivation to help keep more people minting and active on the network; and this increases the security of the coin. So I would argue that a higher block reward rate actually can help to increase security. For example: take Blackcoin for example...it already has 0 reward...so there is absolutely no motivation for you to try to stake your coins on that network, except to help secure the network. Mintcoin gives you a 15% annual reward right now to help secure its network. So I bet Mintcoin actually has a better staking participation rate than Blackcoin (thus Mintcoin more secure than Blackcoin, even though Blackcoin has lower interest rate). Since the 15% rate is equal for everyone, any increase in coin accumulation due to that, is equal for everyone on a % basis so that arguement is really all awash anyway..

I will admit , I don't have all of the answers, but from what I pieced together it has something to do with the difficulty to stake blocks. In their forum , I received the impression that lower the % rate the harder it is to make the attack attempt.
The higher the difficulty the more secure your coin.
Since you mentioned black coin here is the comparison.

Crypto-currency    Block Height    Difficulty    
BlackCoin             535507              740.5 k
Mintcoin             1141336            0.32305372

Sources:
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/blk/
http://www.multifaucet.tk/index.php?blockexplorer=MINT

Just thought you guys would like to be made aware of this.
If you believe it won't be an issue for you , ignore it.

 

I don't think the % interest rate has anything to do with it just network weight, how many coins are in wallets trying to stake, difficulty, and coin age for staking/minting prob has a bunch to do with it, the % pos seems to be arbitrary to me... I could be wrong tho

Correct. The interest rate does not affect difficulty, so that does not matter, what does matter is the participation rate of the majority. The security is reliant upon the difficulty, which increases as more people are trying to mint, but are not minting right away. The more difficulty the better for security. But on the flip side of that, the more difficulty, the harder it is to successfully stake a block. A high difficulty means there are a lot of people with coins that are mature, but a higher % of people are still not minting yet; waiting in a long line to get a block. The time it takes from when your coins become mature, to when they actually mint is what I'm talking about. If it is too difficult, then the only ones that will ever mint any coins ever would be only the super rich: (for example, changing parameters of Mintcoin to make it more difficult right now, might possibly create a situation that makes it so you would need over a million coins in order to successfully make a minting; anything below that amount of coins would not ever have enough weight to achieve staking a block). So there is a fine line between making a PoS coin "fair" for as many people as possible to be able to mint, or making it more "unfair" so that only the top holders mint and the rest never will. As for Blackcoin, I'm not sure their difficulty number is calculated the same way, so it is hard to look at them side by side like this and really compare them. I believe Mintcoin's difficulty is calculation in a similar way to the way Peercoin's difficulty is calculated. Blackcoin's difficulty just seems absurdly high to me, especially since the only motivation to stake with Blackcoin is to secure the network. With Mintcoin, we currently have a reward as a bonus to encourage network connectivity, so I would assume Mintcoin's "real" difficulty to be higher.

Anyway, here are the two most viable options I suggest of what we could do to increase the security of the coin: It all has to do with speed decrease in exchange for security increase.
1.  Increase the # of normal confirmations needed from 4 to say 24. (This would make it much harder to attack as it is much harder to plan to gain consecutive 24 mintings in a row. (However, this would give Mintcoin 12 minute fully confirmed transaction times rather than 2 mintues. (24 times 30 seconds).
2. Increase the # of confirmations needed from the time when you stake a block to when those coins are ready to be used in your wallet. Increasing it to say 300. (This give the network more time to make it harder to attack as well, but would make it take longer to initially use minted coins after staking them from 25 minutes currently to 2.5 hours).

So this would depend on what the community finds as an acceptable transaction time. Right now we are at about 2 minutes for fully confirmed transactions. We could make Mintcoin "orders of magnitude" more secure by increasing the confirmations required to say... 24.

Another thing we should also consider doing is removing the coin cap, and replacing it with a fixed amount of say 1 million coins per year indefinitely, this would prevent the coin from getting stale and always provide an incentive to stay connected to the network. Adding 1 million coins per year after 70 billion already exist will not be inflationary in anyway to worry about, because if it gets to a point where there are no more coins being added, eventually, coins are lost etc,  it could reach a situation where it becomes too expensive and nobody will be able to use them for transactions, and then the value could suddenly drop out from the bottom of it and plummet, as a coin is only valuable as long as it is useful. (Obviously this is a long way down the road, but it is good to think ahead, and if we do decide to change anything, get everything in the coin just right, just the way we want it so that it will be established for the long-term.)

Honestly, I'm all for adopting these parameters to make the coin more secure and lasting, because it is better safe than sorry, and will greatly decrease any risk. It would make Mintcoin a slightly slower but greatly more secure and long-term viable coin. A safe coin that can be depended upon long-term is going to be valuable.

[kiklo]

Correct. The interest rate does not affect difficulty, so that does not matter, what does matter is the participation rate of the majority. The security is reliant upon the difficulty, which increases as more people are trying to mint, but are not minting right away. The more difficulty the better for security.

The more difficulty the better for security. Agreed

As far as the interest rate goes, this was said in the other forum
the authors found "it's nearly impossible to attack a proof-of-stake currency with '1% stake even' as stated by Buterin".
To me this implies the lower the interest rate the more secure a coin from this type of attack.
Maybe others see it differently. But that's why I suggested the early change to 5%.
It will be interesting to see what other options come up.

 

[coolbeans94]

Correct. The interest rate does not affect difficulty, so that does not matter, what does matter is the participation rate of the majority. The security is reliant upon the difficulty, which increases as more people are trying to mint, but are not minting right away. The more difficulty the better for security.

The more difficulty the better for security. Agreed

As far as the interest rate goes, this was said in the other forum
the authors found "it's nearly impossible to attack a proof-of-stake currency with '1% stake even' as stated by Buterin".
To me this implies the lower the interest rate the more secure a coin from this type of attack.
Maybe others see it differently. But that's why I suggested the early change to 5%.
It will be interesting to see what other options come up.

 

Couldn't he be just be referring to a 1% total stake in the coin, meaning controlling 1% of the entire money supply? That's what it means to me when I read it. I think he is saying it's nearly impossible to attack a PoS coin by owning only 1% of it. You need to own much more than that.

[BobTheVeg]

Couldn't he be just be referring to a 1% total stake in the coin, meaning controlling 1% of the entire money supply? That's what it means to me when I read it. I think he is saying it's nearly impossible to attack a PoS coin by owning only 1% of it. You need to own much more than that.

Hi,

From what I understand an attack is about single individual controlling the block chain for a period of time. The goal is to control the block chain for a little more than the confirmation time of 4 blocks.

By controlling, I mean that according to the logic of the application, the attacker`s block will be chosen because his block waited more days and has more coins, etc.

When looking at the % of coins needed, you need to see the total amount of coins which spread over the 2 weeks because you can only use the coins for minting once per 2 weeks. If you have a single transaction of 1B coins which has minted 1 minute ago, it will not help to secure the network for the next 2 weeks.  Also, using 51% or 1% of coins is not the correct measurement, you need to use transactions.  You are minting transactions which has an age and coins to compute its weight. I feel that overweight transactions should be divided more than by half.

An attacker just need to look in the blockchain for the weakest moment withing 2 weeks and prepare his transaction to mint at that time (plus 2 weeks). By weakest moment, I mean consecutive minting blocks using low age and low coins. In fact, it appears that much less than 1% of coins would be needed because of overweight transactions, unevenly speared(over 2 weeks) transaction weight and because the attacker's target is only a few consecutive blocks ( out of the 40320 blocks - 2 weeks ).

P.S. This is my first post.

Regards,
Veg

[kiklo]

Couldn't he be just be referring to a 1% total stake in the coin, meaning controlling 1% of the entire money supply? That's what it means to me when I read it. I think he is saying it's nearly impossible to attack a PoS coin by owning only 1% of it. You need to own much more than that.

I wish that was what he was saying, but he meant staking percent , like Mint is currently 15% ,
basically the higher the staking % the less coins needed to make the attack, (if the difficulty is the same.)
Higher the difficulty the more coins that are needed, but if the difficulty was the same number, he would need 3 times as many mintcoins at 5% as what he would need at 15%.

Sad part the guy only used .07% to break apexcoin not even a ½ of 1%.
 Quote from other forum (the point is that I only use 0.07% of the available supply...)