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

[april29]

Is this coin dead?

LOL... WHERE DEV THIS COIN? SCAM?   

[1714060100]

1714060100

[1714060100]

1714060100

[chanbtc]

Is this coin dead?

Not really. It's now active on reddit instead.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nyancoins

[CoinaDay]

We're not quite dead yet. In fact, I think we're getting better! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs)

I came to this coin as a challenge. I'd originally heard of it from americanpegasus (infamous Redditor in crypto circles) being mocked for having supported it. And when I did my coin-a-day article on it (/r/cryptocurrency series for which this handle was originally created; since removed but slowly being republished as "coin-a-week" once every month or so), I was expecting it to be a dead coin. Everyone was making comments like seen above in the subreddit and I thought they must know what they were talking about.

But when I went to go actually look into it, I found that there was the absolute bare minimum enough to survive: there was an exchange, Cryptsy (which certainly has its issues, but keeps running), and there was a pool, prohashing (which I have extraordinary respect for after working with them; very technically savvy and helpful; truly a wonderful member of the cryptocurrency community) [actually also xpool but they seemed to have very low and inconsistent hashing power], and there was a block explorer, nyancha.in, now-defunct.

Since then, there has been incredible growth, not merely in terms of price appreciation, but also, and more importantly, in terms of community and technical development.

It's true that we don't really have a core dev at this point, but we also don't really seem to need one at this moment. A more pressing concern was when the block explorer went down. This was a major crisis for us, yet the community stepped up and put up block explorers quite quickly (https://nyan.space/chain/Nyancoin and http://bitfarm.mooo.com/nyan/block_crawler.php). We also got another major hub site for Nyancoins (http://www.nyancoin.info/), which includes a helpful status page (we'd been getting some serious hit-and-run issues which this helped monitor; within the last few hours it's possible we've picked up a dedicated miner and I also learned to use transaction fees to get us unstuck after a difficulty spike).

It's true that in the long-run we'll need to be able to do core updates. I've started looking into this and it looks like it should be pretty simple to rebase onto the latest Litecoin. I'm not aware of any pressing need for a client update, but I think it's important precisely because otherwise people will question whether or not we can do it. I'm targeting the end of August as the deadline for having updated clients released, but I'm hoping it can be done in half that or a bit less.

After I do the core client update, I'll work on getting an Android wallet released based on the litecoin one. I don't know when that will be ready, but, like all of this project, it's going to be an awesome learning experience for me. I've never even owned a smartphone; a Nyancoins wallet is the killer app for me!

The community has gone from being as dead as this thread to being quite active and involved. One of the cool projects right now in the works by /u/KojoSlayer is to create a Nyancoins Minecraft server which will be like a badass faucet in that you get paid Nyancoins for playing there. I've been wanting to get a faucet for the community (and that's another task on my plate as well), and I wanted us to have something fun rather than the crappy ad-filled stuff like everyone else. This is looking incredible.

If anyone would like some free Nyancoins, I encourage them to checkout http://reddit.com/r/getfairshare, a universal basic income project based on cryptocurrency which I have stocked with Nyancoins as an early faucet. The total distribution tends to be around 300-500 bits in value per day.

I apologize for not being more active over here. There's just a lot of things to do with Nyancoins, and I've got a lot of things going on in my life too. But I'll try to stay more on top of this. The main hub is definitely the subreddit though, and there are a lot of users there who can help assist you if I'm not around right then.

This is absolutely still a reviving coin. We have our challenges and we're working on them. I've even got a thread dedicated to collecting the major risk factors: http://www.reddit.com/r/nyancoins/comments/36e7ed/overview_of_major_risks_of_buying_nyancoins/. I hadn't actually put the lack of a core dev on there; I still don't think that's a major issue at this point compared to the rest, but I'll add it in now. One of the major ones right now are about 6 million Nyancoins sitting as a ceiling at 40 satoshi; that ~2.5 BTC ask is far more than our typical daily volume. But we'll get through that like we've gotten through everything else.

For a dead coin, we're sure pretty alive and kicking. 

And updated holdings disclosure: I now hold about 60 million Nyancoins, which is about 25% of the currently available supply. I believe strongly in this coin and I've put my money, time, and reputation where my mouth is.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!

[Armando]

And is it now PoS or not? I remember there was such plans months ago, but not sure if this happened?

[CoinaDay]

And is it now PoS or not? I remember there was such plans months ago, but not sure if this happened?

Excellent question. No, it is not PoS now, nor do I expect it to become PoS. The basic reason for this is that maxvall_dev disappeared on us and never released any code publicly.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this. The biggest disadvantage, in my opinion, is that I can't mine, since I don't have the specialized hardware. The biggest advantage is that we aren't facing the risk of a hard-fork.

We had a few weeks where we were kept getting our difficulty spiked, and then crazy long (12-24 hours) between blocks, but now we have a dedicated miner and our rate is looking good again (checkout this awesome status page we have: http://www.nyancoin.info/status.nyan; we used to be in the red often times from very long gaps in our blocks; now we're green or sometimes briefly yellow, but we don't seem to be hitting multiple hour gaps anymore and hopefully that's behind us now). I also found a work-around for this at the time, using a "large" transaction fee (a few hundred to a few thousand NYAN, which is a reasonable price for me since I give away 10,000 NYAN as my minimum tip generally) to make it profitable to break the logjam.

Obviously we wouldn't have faced those difficulties with PoS. But I think PoW will work out fine for us now that we're over the hump, and this hardware is going to become more and more commonplace over time, so I think we'll keep up fine. It also means that I'm able to just pull in the latest Litecoin code pretty easily (I think, but I won't really believe it until the builds are done and it's been working for a while). Also, it means we don't lose Prohashing, which has been a very awesome pool for us (they're not the ones responsible for the hit-and-runs driving up the difficulty; instead, they got out of it. They also are very informative. I can't say enough good about them).

I spent my first few months with Nyancoins letting it play out however it would. If maxvall_dev had released the code, I would've supported the fork. But since he disappeared on us, as far as I'm concerned, it makes sense to stick to PoW and make use of what we've got. One of the major factors too is not wanting to try to deal with Cryptsy on a hard-fork. We need to get another exchange anyhow, but I don't think we can afford to lose our only current exchange, and given Cryptsy's history, I felt that was a significant danger.

[jwflame]

And is it now PoS or not? I remember there was such plans months ago, but not sure if this happened?

PoS is gone.

Although the original poll was in favour of it, it had a very small number of votes and therefore lacked in credibility.
Someone did apparently create a PoS version, but that was started well over a year ago, no code was ever published and nothing has been said or heard about it since 2014.
A poll elsewhere supported a change to X11 - again with very few votes and that never happened either.

Without the support of the majority (probably 90%+), any such change is doomed.   If some change and others do not, the result will be two separate chains, total confusion and the end of the world as we know it.

[wolverine5pl]

whats PoS?

[CoinaDay]

whats PoS?

PoS is "Proof of Stake", the other major transaction processing type compared to PoW (proof-of-work) like Bitcoin is. Proof-of-work depends upon lots of hashing power to operate (specialized hardware is needed and lots of power and all that). Proof-of-stake depends upon holding a sufficient amount of the coin itself instead. So the hardware costs are much lower, and a normal computer can do the transaction processing.

I think there's a good argument it's technically superior, but on the other hand, there's a lot of this specialized hardware around (called ASICs), and so I think the current system is fine too.

For an example of a PoS coin, Peercoin is one of the biggest. There are also variations on the theme, like Bitshares, which calls its system DPoS, delegated proof-of-stake, where they elect certain community members to do the transaction processing.

[placebo]

The next MEOW?

https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/NYAN_LTC

Why not?

[CoinaDay]

The next MEOW?

https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/NYAN_LTC

Why not?

MEOW was the next NYAN. ;-p We already got more than 10x from our floor (floor from crash last year to end of last year; I started buying around January 4th or so (when I did my Nyancoins article on Reddit and learned that the rumors of the coins' demise were greatly exaggerated)).

But yeah, they did get a very nice pump recently, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are fundamentals behind it (they've got a working block explorer and plans for development, nice looking official site, etc).

I definitely wish them well! But we're still up more so far this year. ;-p

With that said...we have been pretty horizontal or a bit down from our peak this year (I've bought as high as 65 satoshi). A lot of that has been the transition from me being the major buyer driving the market to being far more limited in my buying (although I still have a lot of below-market bids to catch dumps). I'm still holding part of the market, but there's way more external demand as well. So although we've been somewhat horizontal, I think this has been a good growth period in terms of demand-not-from-me as well as the various community activity.

Right now, I'm trying to help a bit with Litecoin development to learn more to be able to do the update to the Nyancoins client effectively. My personal 'deadline' for that is the end of August, which I think I should be able to hit (hopefully sooner, but I've got a job afk again which will be taking time and energy). On that, I'm currently stuck on trying to build the latest Litecoin (my first time trying to work with Gitian). I have a thread on litecointalk with my issues in case anyone is familiar with the gitian builds and can provide me advice: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=25819.0.

But yeah, absolutely, I would love it if we started getting some major buyers in. We've got a ceiling at 50 satoshi that I would like to see smashed. I would like to think that we 'deserve' a market cap of more than $20-30k at this point. But all in good time. :-)

Oooh, I see a new ~900k bid at 49 satoshi! Nice!

Also, my % of the Nyancoins market is likely to go down slowly over time: I'm giving away Nyancoins faster than I can afford to buy them back, and I expect that to continue to be the case over time. I expected this and am fine with it: I would much rather hold even 5% of a big, juicy pie rather than 25% of a coin that actually does end up dying. But at this point, I think we've got rough patches more than existential crises ahead of us: we've still got some inconsistency in the blocks from a somewhat weak baseline hashing power (although much better than we were quite recently, when we faced 12-24 hour gaps sometimes). And the market has improved enough that I think its security on Cryptsy, and the existence of the /BTC market there is assured.

I've got a thread of the major risk factors with Nyancoins, which I mentioned just a few posts back, but I'll mention again: http://www.reddit.com/r/nyancoins/comments/36e7ed/overview_of_major_risks_of_buying_nyancoins/ If anyone can think of anything I missed, please let me know.

I'm interested in building this for the long-term. And I hope to see the altcoin market in general recover too. But, of course, I hope that we grow the fastest.  

edit: I also wanted to mention, I actually made some profit off that MEOW bump. I sold about half of my holdings and bought some more NYAN with it. I still own about 20 million or so MEOW. :-)

[placebo]

old coins are back, and it is good too. Too much bad coins has been released. Listed on exchange and then being delisted and all money gone. Luckily Cryptsy is holding all their coins.

[CoinaDay]

Yeah, Cryptsy has gotten a lot of criticism, and I've certainly had my annoyances with them, but if it weren't for them, I don't think Nyancoins would've survived. With that said, I definitely would like to look into getting onto another exchange as well. For a while now, I've been holding off on that since I didn't feel we had enough volume yet to justify being taken on by another exchange. But we can sustain a ~1 BTC volume or so over time, I think that will be a reasonable option (just a complete guess as to what we'll need; I should look into this more and start a discussion with an exchange or two).

I definitely like the idea of the old coins coming back rather than launching new coins. To me, the long, extended floor made for an extremely fair distribution: anyone who wanted in cheaply could get in cheaply. And I still consider the price cheap, even though we're 10-20x up so far this year (depending on how exactly you define the starting value and where the market's gotten up to now; we had a really nice bump in the last 24 hours.). I think in terms of order of magnitude increases (base 10), that is, 10x increases. We've gone from a couple thousand market cap to $20k-$30k market cap, and I'm thinking about the future where we go into the $100-$300k range and break onto the front page of coinmarketcap. I think we'll attract significantly more attention once we're starting to approach 100x return, and presuming we can sustain that, I think the story of our recovery will become one of our unique selling points as well.

I've got a fair amount more work to do in order to prepare Nyancoins 2.0 (including a community discussion about what to do about the hard fork for v2 blocks in Litecoin v0.8 once I understand the implications myself and can present the options reasonably), but I'm not aware of any current major problems with our current client. The community seems to be doing quite well. The blockchain seems to be getting pretty consistent.

It's been a wild ride so far, and we've just begun as far as I'm concerned. 

[chanbtc]

old coins are back, and it is good too. Too much bad coins has been released. Listed on exchange and then being delisted and all money gone. Luckily Cryptsy is holding all their coins.

Yes, some people may not like Cryptsy... but they can't deny a Cryptsy listing does add a good value to this coin. Without Cryptsy, this coin should had died long ago.

I just want nyan to continue to stay on Cryptsy for long. Cryptsy should remain the main exchange for nyan even we may get into another exchange later. 

[placebo]

old coins are back, and it is good too. Too much bad coins has been released. Listed on exchange and then being delisted and all money gone. Luckily Cryptsy is holding all their coins.

Yes, some people may not like Cryptsy... but they can't deny a Cryptsy listing does add a good value to this coin. Without Cryptsy, this coin should had died long ago.

I just want nyan to continue to stay on Cryptsy for long. Cryptsy should remain the main exchange for nyan even we may get into another exchange later. 

Looks pretty cheap now...

[CoinaDay]

I'm done with Cryptsy and pulled my coins out. They had withdrawal issues, and then after a strongly-worded message to support where I finally got my withdrawal, they sent 6 million extra, which doesn't exactly build confidence. One of the top priorities for the community is to find another exchange.

In part as a result, and in part due to a loss of confidence from a personal breakdown (basically recovered, the Nyancoins community was incredibly supportive to me), the Cryptsy price went down to around 30. I haven't looked lately, taking a quick glance. Yeah, pretty much the same: a bid at 30 might get filled, although chasing the asks could push it easily to 40 satoshi or higher for any significant volume (multiple 100k).

I'm pretty busy with my job (just menial fast food right now; teaching me that there are worse things than life in a cubicle. Character building though...) and haven't had time to make progress on a lot of different aspects I'm trying to work on. There are some new faucets the community put up, which is pretty cool, as well as a themed-minecraft server project.

I'm hoping to get time to install Ubuntu locally (currently on CentOS which sucks for building because of old build system components; nice for stability though) so that I can try working through the Litecoin gitian build again. That process would hopefully allow me to commit signatures to them (I'm not even sure if they still need them; haven't had much time online lately), as well as teach me how to do the updated build process for Nyancoins 2.0, which is one of the main hurdles left for Nyancoins 2.0 in my opinion (although the fact that it will require a hard fork will be non-trivial and I don't know all the details of that yet (read: haven't determined it yet; this is based on a hard-fork in Litecoin 0.8, while Nyancoins were forked from a 0.6 or 0.7, I forget which off-hand, although I think it was the former; I made a post on Reddit with the details back when I was comparing the source)).

Also, we seem to have lost dedicated miners, which is definitely a problem.

So progress is slow right now, or arguably we've taken a few small steps backwards, but I continue to have high hopes for the future.

[CartmanSPC]

Hi Coinaday,

Glad to see you are back in good spirits. You should be able to update Nyancoin to the latest Litecoin codebase without doing a hardfork. I have seen you mention that signature thing before. You shouldn't have to do anything with that to use the code from Litecoin.

Also, although it would be nice to get Nyancoin updated to the latest Litecoin codebase I don't think there is any urgency to do so.

If you find it taking too much time and effort you might want to consider hiring it out to someone experienced with doing these things.

[BitcoinNational]

Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello Hello...

placeholder
ignore and move along

http://imgur.com/gallery/H9YEM

[CoinaDay]

Hi Coinaday,

Glad to see you are back in good spirits. You should be able to update Nyancoin to the latest Litecoin codebase without doing a hardfork. I have seen you mention that signature thing before. You shouldn't have to do anything with that to use the code from Litecoin.

Also, although it would be nice to get Nyancoin updated to the latest Litecoin codebase I don't think there is any urgency to do so.

If you find it taking too much time and effort you might want to consider hiring it out to someone experienced with doing these things.

Hi, thanks!

I don't think so: Litecoin v0.8 had a hardfork (something about switching block versions; I have spent more time talking about this than looking into the details of what was done and why). We are forked from an earlier version and going to a later version, thus we're crossing a hardfork. I'd be glad if we didn't need a hardfork, but I'm pretty confident we do.

Right, we wouldn't technically need to do the gitian build, but I think it's important for a number of reasons. It's now Litecoin's "official" build, basically, and we should be trying to follow them technically as much as possible, in my opinion. In addition, it allows for a deterministic build and thus a secure build process, which I think is important and valuable.

I agree that there's no particular urgency to updating. But I think one of the obvious criticisms of Nyancoins at this point is "you don't have a core developer!! you're obviously doomed!!", which, in the long-run would be a fair point.

I think hiring someone would defeat the purpose. Just like I wanted to encourage the community to build its own block explorers rather than pay for one to be put up for it (and this worked out), I want to see us develop the technical talent "in-house" to do client updates.

I certainly appreciate the input. I agree that there isn't a particular urgent need for the update, but I think it will be a significant positive milestone for us, showing a serious movement on the technical revival in the core tech. Also, if I understand the process of BCT, that would allow us to make a new thread, which I think would be a significant milestone for visibility as well.

[chanbtc]

Hi Coinaday,

Glad to see you are back in good spirits. You should be able to update Nyancoin to the latest Litecoin codebase without doing a hardfork. I have seen you mention that signature thing before. You shouldn't have to do anything with that to use the code from Litecoin.

Also, although it would be nice to get Nyancoin updated to the latest Litecoin codebase I don't think there is any urgency to do so.

If you find it taking too much time and effort you might want to consider hiring it out to someone experienced with doing these things.

Hi, thanks!

I don't think so: Litecoin v0.8 had a hardfork (something about switching block versions; I have spent more time talking about this than looking into the details of what was done and why). We are forked from an earlier version and going to a later version, thus we're crossing a hardfork. I'd be glad if we didn't need a hardfork, but I'm pretty confident we do.

Right, we wouldn't technically need to do the gitian build, but I think it's important for a number of reasons. It's now Litecoin's "official" build, basically, and we should be trying to follow them technically as much as possible, in my opinion. In addition, it allows for a deterministic build and thus a secure build process, which I think is important and valuable.

I agree that there's no particular urgency to updating. But I think one of the obvious criticisms of Nyancoins at this point is "you don't have a core developer!! you're obviously doomed!!", which, in the long-run would be a fair point.

I think hiring someone would defeat the purpose. Just like I wanted to encourage the community to build its own block explorers rather than pay for one to be put up for it (and this worked out), I want to see us develop the technical talent "in-house" to do client updates.

I certainly appreciate the input. I agree that there isn't a particular urgent need for the update, but I think it will be a significant positive milestone for us, showing a serious movement on the technical revival in the core tech. Also, if I understand the process of BCT, that would allow us to make a new thread, which I think would be a significant milestone for visibility as well.

Very well-said. Hope we can see a new wallet soon. 

Honestly speaking, I do suggest you can do it step-by-step. If I were you, I might update the block version and release the new wallet first, and then do gitian build later. Even Litecoin didn't implement all important changes in one single update.

[CoinaDay]

Very well-said. Hope we can see a new wallet soon. 

Honestly speaking, I do suggest you can do it step-by-step. If I were you, I might update the block version and release the new wallet first, and then do gitian build later. Even Litecoin didn't implement all important changes in one single update.

Thanks! My initially stated goal was to have the code available by the end of August, and I still hope to meet that (although the actual time of the hard-fork may still be a month or two after that).

I can totally understand that perspective. But I think of this as being a deliberately "LTS" (long-term support) type of release: we should err on the side of taking longer and making a version we'll be comfortable with people using for a year or more to come rather than just trying to get something out soon. This is both because we don't want to require people to update frequently, but also because it's a hard-fork, so I think we need to have a compelling level of quality to make sure we switch cleanly. [And on that subject, I'm not sure if I'll keep Litecoin's switch at a given block height, or whether I'll try to put in a consensus version-marking change akin to how the block size increase is proposed to happen in Bitcoin; I think the latter is a better, more robust method to make sure a switchover is clean, but it would require a significant functional change from the Litecoin code, which is risky.]

I think that doing the gitian build is reasonably central to the goals of the new release. It helps to improve security via the deterministic build, and it should be a cleaner build process once we have it working properly. We don't want to release without, at the least, a *nix and Windows build (our current Mac build may or not be working, so it might be less essential), and I think this is a reasonably good way to do it. Also, one of our goals it to release an up-to-date, streamlined set of instructions for the gitian build, aimed at someone starting out on a fresh system with reasonable technical knowledge. As far as we (myself and jwflame, a community member on /r/nyancoins who has also attempted this build), there seems to be something missing in the existing published steps, although I still need to reproduce it again (I'd tried on a VPS which didn't work; it was suggested to try on bare metal to make sure that wasn't the issue) (currently downloading Ubuntu 64bit; I accidentally installed 32bit locally instead which of course didn't work).

I think this is the last major hurdle: I've looked at the diffs before and at the new code, and I think it should be relatively straightforward to "reapply" the original changes, although, of course, until I actually have it running I won't truly believe it. So I think it's reasonable to be spending a fair amount of time on this step (although the actual time I've spent on it hasn't been huge; it's just that it's hard to carve out a lot of time and energy for it with my current work. I'm getting better about that I think though; I'm hoping to step up my progress).

If this works out as I hope, we will see a Nyancoins 2.0 which will be capable of carrying us for another year. I expect there will continue to be various vulnerabilities announced upstream, of course, and I hope to have minor releases incorporating the fixes, but I'm hoping and expecting not to need another hard-fork, and that we will have "good enough" security on this new client to not "require" people to upgrade (for instance, the current client is theoretically vulnerable to the heartbleed issues, but it didn't really seem relevant to us, because it attacked QR codes, which we don't have any known reader for currently, and some other aspect I don't recall which didn't seem relevant; similarly, the latest security issues announced were some sort of DoS attack: our biggest threat for DoS has been our own inconsistent hashing power).

Bottom line: I think we're in a reasonably good position on the technical front and will continue to a Nyancoins 2.0 in a timely fashion, and that it will be a security improvement capable of meeting our needs for a year or more to come after that.