[ANN][NYAN] NyanCoin - ★★★V1.2 Released! Now Listed on Cryptsy! ★★★

[CartmanSPC]

Just noticed... The difficulty algo needs to be looked at/fixed. We have some people playing with the blockchain. I feel this is more important than getting the client code updated to the latest LTC release. Fixing the algo will require a hardfork so it needs to be done carefully with plenty of time (perhaps months) for people to upgrade.

Look at blocks around 769152 to see what im talking about.

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[CoinaDay]

Just noticed... The difficulty algo needs to be looked at/fixed. We have some people playing with the blockchain. I feel this is more important than getting the client code updated to the latest LTC release. Fixing the algo will require a hardfork so it needs to be done carefully with plenty of time (perhaps months) for people to upgrade.

Look at blocks around 769152 to see what im talking about.

I appreciate you calling attention to this. We've faced problems with this before. I'll note that a handy workaround that I've used before is adding a high (100-300 NYAN) transaction fee to make it profitable for prohashing to solve the next block (the fundamental problem is external hit-and-run pools taking advantage of our low difficulty to get a lot of easy NYAN, then leaving once the difficulty is gone, and not having enough baseline hashing power to make that unprofitable to start and to solve it once it happens; prohashing is smart enough to consider pending transaction fees, and so since the block reward is 168.5, it can be pretty cheap to make the coin profitable enough to mine).

Copying my reply from Reddit before for laziness (for the rest reading this, the whole thread is at: https://www.reddit.com/r/nyancoins/comments/3dnjth/blockchain_being_toyed_with/) :

I appreciate the suggestion, but I am not yet convinced of the necessity.

I am extremely conservative about making hard fork changes. The switch to PoS would have been huge and I would have been willing to try the risks involved. But that developer disappeared, and I think at this point, we need to work with what we've got.

I don't think that our system is unworkable. We just need people, like yourself, who are willing and able to mine Nyancoins for the sake of Nyancoins rather than an immediate market sale (which is unworkable because it means we lose the miners with a difficulty spike).

The difficulty *should* spike when we get a lot of hashing power coming in.

I don't think the alternatives suggested are preferable. AuxPOW: this means that miners who don't have any inherent interest in Nyancoins get the mining rewards. I would much rather have people decide to dedicate hardware in order to mine. AuxPOW allows cost-free attacks: we could face exactly the same situation we're facing now (hit-and-run) and they wouldn't even lose the use of the hardware for mining other coins during the hit. This would allow them to drive up the difficulty far more at no cost. In addition, we lose the incentive to dedicated miners.

This is, to a large extent, a learning coin. We want to provide opportunities to newcomers in all areas. One of the ways to do this, in mining, is to keep what we have: we have a very low barrier to entry for people to be able to get a mining unit which will be able to make a significant impact on our reliability and allow them to earn a significant amount of Nyancoins. If we were on AuxPOW, the barrier to entry would be significantly higher.

I don't know the details of POSv, but as I recall, and from the name, it's a PoS variant. There are a number of issues with this. One of them is that it means abandoning our current major pool, prohashing. I don't want to do this. Although my current plan for Nyancoins 2.0 involves a hardfork, it's one that I believe they will follow (they need an exchange, and that's the more challenging part, but they won't inherently resist it). They are good enough that if we had consensus, they might agree to stop mining the old PoW if we went PoS, but they are a Scrypt PoW based pool and would not be able to help secure our network if we went to PoS.

I do think it's worth considering a PoS Nyancoins in the future. But I believe that Nyancoins PoW must and will continue no matter what. Further, I don't believe we're strong enough for two coins at the present time. What this means to me is: we work with what we've got and we consider fancy new stuff in the future (counting PoS here even though, yes, it's stable and established at this point; but it's shiny and new compared to Nyancoins tech).

I hope I can persuade you, as it sounds like you could be a major miner for us. I would much rather see us have a small, relatively centralized couple of Nekonauts mining rather than AuxPOW. And I don't want the risk (guarantee) of a community split that would come from PoS at this point. If PoS had come when it was first proposed, or even a few months ago, I think it might have had a chance. And, of course, as a major holder, I would have, at least on the surface, stood to benefit quite a bit from eliminating the dependence on mining hardware and changing the rewards to going to the large holders willing to maintain a server. I would have basically taken over the processing at that point.

But, again, with where we are now, I think we need to move forward as best we can. I don't think the difficulty algorithm is fundamentally flawed. Instead, we are simply seeing what happens when we depend on external-to-our-community power which dwarfs our own.

[CartmanSPC]

The problem is that the difficulty is not spiking fast enough. I would look at some other implementations of difficulty....not sure which coins have a good difficulty algo...perhaps Globalcoin? Also maybe the current algo from potcoin (they are forking to POSv...but not because of the diff algo).

....and I don't think moving away from mining equipment is a bad thing at all...it's actually preferred...and this is coming from someone with a lot invested in mining equipment!

[CoinaDay]

The problem is that the difficulty is not spiking fast enough. I would look at some other implementations of difficulty....not sure which coins have a good difficulty algo...perhaps Globalcoin? Also maybe the current algo from potcoin (they are forking to POSv...but not because of the diff algo).

....and I don't think moving away from mining equipment is a bad thing at all...it's actually preferred...and this is coming from someone with a lot invested in mining equipment!

Ah, I gotcha. Right, if the difficulty spiked faster, then there would be much less incentive for the hit-and-runs. On the other hand, the same thing could be done and we'd still need mining equipment to get it unstuck.

Yeah, in general I wouldn't be opposed to moving away from mining equipment; it's going away from the existing pool (prohashing) more disappointing. I haven't had a chance to be watching the Nyanchain lately; is it running a bit better? I do think "Nyancoins PoW" is going to keep going. Someday I think it would be cool to have a "Nyancoins PoS" forked from it, and perhaps we could even update the difficulty algorithm to work a bit better, but I do think we ultimately just need good baseline mining equipment support to get Nyancoins PoW to work well, no difficulty algorithm can compensate for that.

So I think we'll keep having use for some of that mining equipment if you can spare some. ;-)

[CoinaDay]

Apologies for not having updated here lately. I've been busy at work afk as well as some work on NYAN2.

I've been talking far more about this on /r/nyancoins.

NYAN2 will not fork against NYAN1.2. That is the fundamental point. There is a follow-up, NYAN3, which will be a hard-fork. We will be following a principle of near-unanimous consensus for that fork: we're expecting 99+% support. Any legitimate objection should stop it. It will be a proof-of-strength for our community.

But back to NYAN2. I'll have a github repo up by the end of the month (yes, within 36 hours) for my first-draft, 'pre-alpha', code release. I believe I've captured "most" of the necessary changes, but of course, the devil's in the details. I'm going to be relying upon the community for build and correction support. Yes, that's right, I haven't even tried building it as of yet. This is meant more to be a code release for discussion and review than a buildable release. Of course, I want to explicitly note that this version should not be trusted with any significant transactions or balances yet.

I hope to have at least a release candidate by the end of September out of this. I think that should be easily and safely attainable with due final touches and fixes and testing.

Notable things I need to do yet for NYAN2:

Add my alert key for NYAN3 or emergency notifications.

Get testnet working

Add more dnsseed nodes

Add ip seed nodes

Add nyan to documentation

[CoinaDay]

I've released the pre-alpha code for review and build testing.

https://github.com/mathwizard1232/nyancoins/tree/nyancoins2 - This is a fork from litecoin tag v0.10.2.2.

https://github.com/mathwizard1232/nyancoins/commit/e60459bea1ad9befd5c2ca7daa6523ac1a6a7ce8 - One-commit draft of Nyancoins2 on top of it.

Again, the bottom line is this is meant to be a backwards-compatible update replacing NYAN1.2. I will add an alert key and system that I control for making announcements about the NYAN3 upgrade. I expect to see full network adoption of NYAN2 before I would even contemplate releasing NYAN3, but the NYAN3 discussions can and should be active now (I'm going to work on building discussion on /r/nyancoins, current homebase of the Nekonaut 'renewal' (#definitelyacult).

In financial news, we've finally gotten back to a 40 satoshi floor, at least for now. I'd really like to see us holding 1bit by the end of the year, but 40's better than nothing, and better than where we started. :-) Haven't seen the million+ dumps that I saw in previous rises, but frankly, I haven't had the BTC to build the million+ floors either to attract those lightning strikes. So I can't consider this too clearly established on the market yet. I'm really hoping for outside money to move in; so far, I still am leading the market during the major rises.

Which brings up the question of whether my trading is ethically and morally legitimate: am I trading on what should be considered 'insider knowledge'? This is why I have tried to put my holdings up-front-and-center when I'm talking and why I've chosen to announce them. I want it clear my bias and stake and do not want to mislead anyone. On the other hand, of course I believe strongly in what I'm doing, which is why I'm doing it and why I've invested in it (and of course, now being committed, have a strong incentive to continue in any case). I've been buying based on my knowledge of my determination to make this succeed in the long-term, as well as seeing the many skilled and positive and simply superb Nekonauts who have come to /r/nyancoins and put up the block explorers and so much more. Yet I've announced my intentions for months and my holdings and the contributions of others are public knowledge because they have been done in public. So I believe that I have acted legitimately. Still, it's a concern I have, so I figure I'd mention it. Just as a reminder, I think I have about 20-25% of the currently available NYAN. This means about 50-60 million. I think that's about right, although I may have gone higher lately. To my recall, I think I have about 42M offline, about 15M in the tipbot (crazy high amount partially result of glitched Cryptsy overwithdraw at one point), and I have about 8M on Cryptsy at this point, as a result of strong buying this month as I finally started using Cryptsy again, after avoiding them after the whole negative NYAN balance quirk. That would make a claim for possibly 65M with the potential to buy to, say, 70M or more before the end of the year if I splurged or there were dumps. Which at 230M current supply, 25% would be 57.5M and thus exceeded.

Frankly, I would prefer to be holding a higher proportion of other assets in my portfolio. My life savings, such as it currently is, is basically in NYAN. But I continue to see it as having the highest growth potential against the market of anything I could put my money into, and as such, I keep gambling on it when I can, in terms of time and money. Eventually, I would be quite happy to own a smaller % of a far larger market. I've given away tens of millions of NYAN at this point I think; certainly I've given away more than 10M. I try to do so in ways that will benefit NYAN and further its principles: fun, self-improvement, and service to others.

I'm trying to build a financial community with a sense of ethics and innovation, who are interested in building from scratch the foundations for years and decades to come. NYAN2 is a small step along that journey. Its very development this next month will again strengthen the technical aspects of our community. I've said that NYAN should be a techie's DOGE: 'fun' should be considered to include well-written technical reports.

At this point, it's still far more visions than reality. There is a lot to build and write. Ultimately I want us clearly contributing upstream, first in terms of documentation. Outside contributions need not be limited to upstream, nor technical alone.

NYAN2 will probably have notable technical advantages. But I really want it for marketing purposes: it is a technical show of strength, or more modestly: proof of continued life. It gives us something to talk about. It gives us a reason for a new thread. And by doing the upgrade smoothly and professionally, as well as with the spirit of nyan, it should be a significant aid in growing the community.

[jwinterm]

Sounds like a plan. I'm thinking about switching my Scrypt miners over to Nyan soon, as Myriad scrypt is going auxpow soon, so that way I can solo mine Nyan and Myr at the same time 

[forzendiablo]

not sure if its worth to re-run nyan than to enter other coins...

[CartmanSPC]

Sounds like a plan. I'm thinking about switching my Scrypt miners over to Nyan soon, as Myriad scrypt is going auxpow soon, so that way I can solo mine Nyan and Myr at the same time  

Better yet...run a NYAN p2pool node and merge mine Myriad+doge+syscoin+viacoin+a few others at the same time.

Source code: https://github.com/CartmanSPC/p2pool

[chanbtc]

Sounds like a plan. I'm thinking about switching my Scrypt miners over to Nyan soon, as Myriad scrypt is going auxpow soon, so that way I can solo mine Nyan and Myr at the same time  

Better yet...run a NYAN p2pool node and merge mine Myriad+doge+syscoin+viacoin+a few others at the same time.

Source code: https://github.com/CartmanSPC/p2pool

Good piece of information. Thanks.

Will try it to see how good it works.

[CoinaDay]

o/ all!

Sorry about not updating more recently. I've been busy with a lot of things, NYAN and otherwise.

We got listed on Cryptopia!

https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange?market=NYAN_BTC
https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange?market=NYAN_UNO

These will be the main two I'll be bidding, although there's also

https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange?market=NYAN_DOGE
https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange?market=NYAN_LTC

which I might put bids on. /DOT, maybe. Feather and Popular I doubt I'll make any serious market in. :-)

Right now, Cryptopia is ahead of Cryptsy, significantly. I expect it to continue to lead, but I expect and hope that arbitrage with Cryptsy will also start. High enough spread to easily beat the 0.5% fee too.

Cryptsy has had withdraw issues, like only withdrawing half of what was requested, which is a PITA as it requires multiple withdraw attempts then to fully withdraw. So far, it still ends up working in the end. But we wanted to get off, so we're off now.

---

I'm going to do a NYAN2 ANN once I've got it building at least. I did a code draft, https://github.com/mathwizard1232/nyancoins/tree/nyancoins2, but haven't worked with it more yet, including not yet trying to build. I'm planning to do that this month and make enough progress to justify the 2.0 ANN this month. I think that'll give us some good visibility here. And the new exchange is a great step forward. I was amazed at how well that process went. One of our /r/nyancoins community members started and led it and I joined in, along with others, and we had a strong lead in both the user and DOT votes two days in when the admins just added us. :-) It was a great experience. We've got a lot more positive energy added to our community and momentum. New nekonauts and revived seeing NYAN alive and strong.

As always, lots more to do. One of the big things now has been to have more outside (not me) money come in and start making a strong drive too in order for us to reach and hold a bit by the end of the year. Cryptopia promises to be a major part of that.

I'm very excited. ^_^

[Hobbyist]

Pool added at https://hobbyistpool.ddns.net/nyan

Nothing too special,  NOMP/MPOS pool.

Site is behind a self-signed cert,  Your browser will complain.

[CoinaDay]

Thank you hobbyist! I've added it to the sidebar links for pools on /r/nyancoins. It's always great to see more long-term miners getting interested in NYAN!

https://www.nyancoin.info/status.nyan - the status page has been showing full green more and more often as this recovery goes on; I'm sure we'll get hit-and-runs again and especially during price spikes, but I think the worst might be past us now (we'd had times in previous months where 8-24 hour block gaps would happen with some regularity as a result of hit-and-run mining). These are just my impressions however; I haven't actually done statistical analysis of the Nyanchain as I should for this.

Just another random comment: I'd like to see a basic richlist for NYAN addresses running at some point. Shouldn't be hard, it just hadn't been a high enough priority to happen before. At this point I think it's starting to be its turn to be done next. And I'm curious to see how many of them are mine as well as to start seeing what other addresses hold lots of NYAN for long periods of time. :-)

[CartmanSPC]

I would recommend contracting cryptoid.info for the rich list. It is an excellent block explorer.

[alt19]

does NyanCoin have checkpoints? normal checkpoints or ACP?

estimated supply over the next 10 years?
the information is needed for http://alt19.com/19/cryptocurrency.php
thanks

price change in BTC is >+1,000% over the last year, why?

[chanbtc]

Yeah, in general I wouldn't be opposed to moving away from mining equipment; it's going away from the existing pool (prohashing) more disappointing. I haven't had a chance to be watching the Nyanchain lately; is it running a bit better? I do think "Nyancoins PoW" is going to keep going. Someday I think it would be cool to have a "Nyancoins PoS" forked from it, and perhaps we could even update the difficulty algorithm to work a bit better, but I do think we ultimately just need good baseline mining equipment support to get Nyancoins PoW to work well, no difficulty algorithm can compensate for that.

I re-read your post and start to believe that a PoW/PoS hybrid should now be suitable for Nyan. It won't disappoint the existing pool, while can keep the blockchain running by PoS after each PoW hit-and-run.

[Hobbyist]

I have a small, Nyan pool at https://hobbyistpool.ddns.net/nyan

Largely unused at the moment but available.

[CoinaDay]

does NyanCoin have checkpoints? normal checkpoints or ACP?

estimated supply over the next 10 years?
the information is needed for http://alt19.com/19/cryptocurrency.php
thanks

price change in BTC is >+1,000% over the last year, why?

NyanCoin does have a couple very old checkpoints. We'll probably add an updated one or two in NYAN2.1 (estimated 2016Q1). I don't know what ACP means; I think they're normal checkpoints.

The max supply is 337 million. With halvings every year, we should be quite close to that in 10 years.

Price change is because I started a revival for the coin. I'm working on community, technical and financial. This is just in my spare time, as I can't afford to go full-time on NYAN (yet), but we've made good progress. I've bought up about 25% of the current supply, net of tens of millions I've given away in promotions and rewards to various Nekonauts for supporting the cause.

My goal is to build a strong store of value for the long-term, meaning sustainable but strong growth for years to come as we build up from a financial crash last year. I came into the coin with the community comatose, the technical infrastructure mostly gone, and the price at around 1-3 satoshi. /r/nyancoins is now at least mildly active, we've got a decent basic infrastructure added (nyan.space, nyancoin.info (the status page is especially awesome), freenyancoins.uk (which also has dice. ), extra pools ; none of that I run, all different Nekonauts during the revival; I do run /u/tipnyan, badly (I need to do backups and work on security)), and the price is currently around 20 satoshi (that's where I'm currently building my bid floors on Cryptopia, which exchange we've had added about a month ago).

My biggest concern at the moment is getting the build for NYAN2 done (my laptops do not have the RAM to do it decently and I'm too strapped for cash at the moment to buy a new laptop; I should have it in a couple months) because of the fork vulnerability from the old, current NYAN1.2 client (more than a year old!), as demonstrated on Peercoin just recently. It worries me to talk about that, but I don't think it would be right to try to just ignore it either.

Once that's resolved, I'll feel a lot better about the technicals. I've been wanting to get NYAN2 out anyhow just as a proof-of-life for basic core work (rebasing onto recent (v0.10.2.2) LTC; nothing fancy).

And I still think we're massively undervalued on the finances, as I think I'm worth more alone and I have chosen it as my personal store of value, and the Nyancoin community as a whole is worth a lot more than I am alone. But we'll keep proving ourselves over time. I'm hoping for a decimal order of magnitude increase in price against the strongest competitor each year. Of course that's a rather optimistic target, and I won't complain about gaining less, but it's just an indication of the type of climb I intend to make.

This coin is my proof-of-concept of coin rehabbing principles; a living experiment. I intend to make it a textbook example of taking an almost-dead coin and building it into a powerhouse. For more information, see my many posts on reddit.com/r/nyancoins

Yeah, in general I wouldn't be opposed to moving away from mining equipment; it's going away from the existing pool (prohashing) more disappointing. I haven't had a chance to be watching the Nyanchain lately; is it running a bit better? I do think "Nyancoins PoW" is going to keep going. Someday I think it would be cool to have a "Nyancoins PoS" forked from it, and perhaps we could even update the difficulty algorithm to work a bit better, but I do think we ultimately just need good baseline mining equipment support to get Nyancoins PoW to work well, no difficulty algorithm can compensate for that.

I re-read your post and start to believe that a PoW/PoS hybrid should now be suitable for Nyan. It won't disappoint the existing pool, while can keep the blockchain running by PoS after each PoW hit-and-run.

The blockchain has been stable lately and has not had any hit-and-run attacks that I have noticed. I am still not interested in championing such a change and do not think it would be uncontroversial. In particular because PoS usually expects to get a reward as well, and I'm not going to fuck with the 337 million coin cap; that's a core feature. I am not planning any hard forks of any kind until NYAN3, which I expect no earlier than 2016Q4, and I don't plan anything controversial for that (any convenience changes we need, and hopefully something like a 2MB block size limit just to show we can, even though I've never seen a full block on the Nyanchain).

[CartmanSPC]

The blockchain has been stable lately and has not had any hit-and-run attacks that I have noticed.

I too haven't noticed any hit-and-runs lately. The blockchain has had a stable 400Mh/s+ for a while now. All seems fine there. Even though Nyan is vulnerable to an attack the likelihood is very low.

[chanbtc]

Yeah, in general I wouldn't be opposed to moving away from mining equipment; it's going away from the existing pool (prohashing) more disappointing. I haven't had a chance to be watching the Nyanchain lately; is it running a bit better? I do think "Nyancoins PoW" is going to keep going. Someday I think it would be cool to have a "Nyancoins PoS" forked from it, and perhaps we could even update the difficulty algorithm to work a bit better, but I do think we ultimately just need good baseline mining equipment support to get Nyancoins PoW to work well, no difficulty algorithm can compensate for that.

I re-read your post and start to believe that a PoW/PoS hybrid should now be suitable for Nyan. It won't disappoint the existing pool, while can keep the blockchain running by PoS after each PoW hit-and-run.

The blockchain has been stable lately and has not had any hit-and-run attacks that I have noticed. I am still not interested in championing such a change and do not think it would be uncontroversial. In particular because PoS usually expects to get a reward as well, and I'm not going to fuck with the 337 million coin cap; that's a core feature. I am not planning any hard forks of any kind until NYAN3, which I expect no earlier than 2016Q4, and I don't plan anything controversial for that (any convenience changes we need, and hopefully something like a 2MB block size limit just to show we can, even though I've never seen a full block on the Nyanchain).

I am not suggesting to change it now either. I just believe PoW/PoS hybrid should be a good choice when we need to change.

Perhaps we can reduce PoW reward and provide a relatively small PoS reward to keep the coin cap.

There is no hit-and-run lately because Nyan is not so hot right now. But it doesn't mean we should not prevent hit-and-run from happening in the future.