[ANN][VRC] VeriCoin Proof of Stake-Time Currency | New Roadmap Released

[erikbit]

My new wallet shows my coin balance and history but is not synching.. On mac I went to Library/Application Support - and there is no Vericoin folder in there where I can keep the necessary wallet file. Even the old wallet never made it into the application support folder. In Mac Finder - Vericoin Wallet was (and still is) just an item i could eject like a memory stick. So now it has been synching a good 12 hours and nothing. Again, coins are showing but they are not staking and wallet is not synching.

Please Help

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[GridWorker]

My new wallet shows my coin balance and history but is not synching.. On mac I went to Library/Application Support - and there is no Vericoin folder in there where I can keep the necessary wallet file. Even the old wallet never made it into the application support folder. In Mac Finder - Vericoin Wallet was (and still is) just an item i could eject like a memory stick. So now it has been synching a good 12 hours and nothing. Again, coins are showing but they are not staking and wallet is not synching.

Please Help

My windows wallet was stuck syncing when I woke up. I backed up wallet.dat (just in case) and restarted wallet. It synced fine when it started. Staking resumed.

[pingdigi]

To expand on a point I made earlier, I want to relay a story from history:

------
In World War II the allies relied heavily on bombing the enemy to try and turn the tide of the war. However they were losing a lot of planes from ground fire and air combat. When many of the planes returned, they were often shot up so badly it was a wonder they could fly at all.

"We need to reinforce these planes with armour" said the leaders in charge. But the engineers had a problem "If we put too much armour on them, then the planes will be either too heavy to fly or burn too much fuel to be able to make the trip".

A mathematician named Wald was asked to catalogue where all the bullet holes had torn through the plane. He produced a diagram that reflected something similar to this:

http://www.nww2m.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/plane-damage.jpg

The plane on the left represented the undamaged plane, and the plane on the right was where the damaged was being recorded. The superiors said "ah, we need to reinforce the wings, nose and tail because this is where the damage is occurring".

Wald said "I'd reinforce the areas where there are no bullet holes".

"What?" they said incredulously. "But that's where all the damage is!"

"But Sir" said Wald "these are the planes that made it back"

As the obviousness of Wald's observation sunk in, the engineers began the task of reinforcing the remaining planes
------

If cryptocoins are going to win the war and become a viable currency, we have to stop focussing on the holes and start seeing the areas that truly need to be reinforced.

[buy4crypto]

To expand on a point I made earlier, I want to relay a story from history:

------
In World War II the allies relied heavily on bombing the enemy to try and turn the tide of the war. However they were losing a lot of planes from ground fire and air combat. When many of the planes returned, they were often shot up so badly it was a wonder they could fly at all.

"We need to reinforce these planes with armour" said the leaders in charge. But the engineers had a problem "If we put too much armour on them, then the planes will be either too heavy to fly or burn too much fuel to be able to make the trip".

A mathematician named Wald was asked to catalogue where all the bullet holes had torn through the plane. He produced a diagram that reflected something similar to this:



The plane on the left represented the undamaged plane, and the plane on the right was where the damaged was being recorded. The superiors said "ah, we need to reinforce the wings, nose and tail because this is where the damage is occurring".

Wald said "I'd reinforce the areas where there are no bullet holes".

"What?" they said incredulously. "But that's where all the damage is!"

"But Sir" said Wald "these are the planes that made it back"

As the obviousness of Wald's observation sunk in, the engineers began the task of reinforcing the remaining planes
------

If cryptocoins are going to win the war and become a viable currency, we have to stop focussing on the holes and start seeing the areas that truly need to be reinforced.

Trully, another way of thinking could benefit the greater good for all of crypto.

Appreciate this post. Very good thought.

[barabbas]

I read in the "first press release from Voot coin" that IconicExpert -my supposed alter-ego for some nut cases- has issued and Yahoo financial published, that "VootCoin's NiteSend feature uses a multilayered protection process to help ensure untraceable, hidden, completely private transactions between parties who are not able to know each other's identities." And this brings to my memore the all kinds of vanilla-flavors anons that now plague every single crypto coin out there (including VRC, of course). But what makes me smile most is the part in which "...the parties (transacting) are not able to know each other's identities." This to me is like the gay (or not gay) baths on Melrose, in Hollywood, where people go, insert their dicks in a hole in a wall and someone on the other side sucks it until business is taken care of... Not a bad deal if you are into that kind of stuff but, for the life of me I cannot think of any transaction in which any normal person would want to be involved in which they would go to such extent to avoid knowing who are they buying from -and even selling to-. Not that I care much about who is selling what if the product or service is  known and highly regarded but, if they are, the people I have known all my life take great pains and considerable expense in making it known to everyone that those are indeed their products/services . Just the opposite seems to continue being all the rage in (some) cryptos.

Now I know that VRC, its community and its devs are not interested in transactions involving arms, terrorist services and slavery (sexual, organ or otherwise). So it would leave only porno stuff (and if you need crypto to pay for that you have problems that no amount of anon is going to solve) and drug cartel activities (where you may knot know the identity of the person you are buying the stuff from but you know its proceedings go ultimately to a cartel. I am quite sure that the devs pursuit of mainstream adoption would gladly leave both those sources of "interest" out too.

So quite glad that anon pursuit is NOT one of the priorities of VRC.

Sorry for the somewhat off-topic. Hopefully some would find it if not interesting, at least slightly humorous.

[Alphi]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

one needs to also consider that rolling the blockchain back isn't just invalidating 1 or two transactions.. it is invalidation every transaction across the entire system that happened after the roll back point.
when people are using the network to buy and sell goods you simply cannot do such a thing without causing major financial damage to the people using the system.

in the case of a small alt coin where the majority of trading is happening off the block chain at exchanges and being done by speculators then there isn't such a big issue with rolling back.

[pingdigi]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

[criptix]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

the best example are all the miners mining at ghash.io with 51+% am i right?
pos/pow have the same problems

[MAD945]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

Damn...you beat me to it lol

If a disastrous event happened that effected miners and holders of Bitcoin and the only way to fix the problem was the Devs to hard fork....what do think would happen?

[GridWorker]

You know what's funny, if the fud were invested enough they could have swung the wallet the other way.

[Alphi]

the best example are all the miners mining at ghash.io with 51+% am i right?
pos/pow have the same problems

no you are not right at all..

miners having 51% of the power to produce coins for very limited period of time is not the same thing as stake holders with 51% of the coins and the power to create 51% of all future coins for eternity.
this is why the vericoin devs had to take such drastic action when someone had a mere 30% of the coins.

also a pool having 51% of the hashing power is not the same thing as a single entity having that much power because miners would simply move if the power was being abused.

pos and pow have very different problems.

[FUD_master]

My  answer to LTC dev FUDDER : (http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2apsj7/litecoin_developers_will_never_fork_litecoin_to/ciycbhd ) , i know he will delete the answer , so i post it here for other stupid fudders) :

snip

The LTC dev's comment is the reason I dumped LTC this morning.  Felt great!  Try it, anyone else that has LTC.

[Alphi]

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

this simply is not true at all...

in a PoW coin you have to convince the miners to adopt the new fork.
If 51% of the miners do not agree then the fork simply does not happen.

due to its size and also its PoW implementation it would be virtually impossible for the bitcoin devs to do something like this with bitcoin without first gaining the consensus from mining community.

miners play a vital role in securing the network not only from outside attacks but from internal misuse of power. they are separate from stake holders with separate interests so they act as a counterbalance.

in a PoS coin there are no miners so there is no separation of powers.
in theory stake holders should play that vital role of making sure that power is not abused.
in practice however.. stake holders do what they are told or get locked out of the system.

this is not just a problem for PoS coins, it does affect all small growing coins, the PoS part merely amplifies problem because some crucial checks and balances are removed.

so I reiterate that it really isn't true at all so say that ANY coin can be rolled back. Some are many orders of magnitude more difficult to roll back than others.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

Damn...you beat me to it lol

If a disastrous event happened that effected miners and holders of Bitcoin and the only way to fix the problem was the Devs to hard fork....what do think would happen?

no doubt that when a coin is faced with a fundamental problem which could break it going forward the only option is to hard fork.
I think you are missing the point though..

because of the centralization of power it was all too easy to force this coin into a position where it was faced with such a dilema.
and it was all too easy for the devs to force change upon the community.

perhaps you are too busy arguing theoretical when you cannot even see the reality of the situation in front of you.

But they *CAN* be rolled back. That's the point.

humans have space flight they *CAN* fly the moon and they *CAN* fly to the next solar system.

your missing the point that one is possible.. and the other is currently practically impossible.

[smoothie]

....
Let's make some math:
- Mintpal's daily volume was around BTC 2.5K, some BTC 5 daily revenues or US$ 2500 (based on 0.2% transaction fee)
- VRC 8M were valued at some US$1.65M
- This means some 660 days of MintPal's revenues
- Let's assume some VRC 12K coins as an average position
- This means some 660 people were holding their coins at MP

Conclusions:
1) MP would never be able to pay and would go bankrupt
2) As an immediate consequence, all 660 VRC holders would loose their money
3) With 30% of VRC coins out there available for further attacks, VRC would crash and all people holding it would loose their money

So, please, let not fool ourselves: It was not about saving MintPal. It was about saving the coin and the investors' money.

Image damage was done on all POS coins from PPC Nova..BC...XC...to VRC will surfer
and with rollback you give all POW coins golden bullet to shot in POS...
Right direction would be improve POS security to 90% resistance like NXT - not magic rollbacks.

And whole black marketing has started like that one:
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2apsj7/litecoin_developers_will_never_fork_litecoin_to/ciycbhd

Coblee just shot himself in the foot potentially. Does he think saying he won't fork will seperate him from any of the other crypto that are in the game right now? Not even under circumstances that would benefit his community. I wonder how many people will sell out of LTC and move funds here after hearing that. I certainly don't want my money with a "idealist" instead of someone more practical. Not when crypto needs a team more practical to go mainstream.

You are telling me. If the developer is capable, and the whole community votes for it, he won't allow to stop the fraud??

WOW I WILL NEVER BUY LITECOIN!

Perhaps you should address Coblee's scenario of what could happen as opposed to dancing around the issue:

what's stopping MintPal or another exchange from pulling this move:

1) Create a SQL injection vulnerability on your exchange and leave it there
2) Attack yourself and steal your own VRC
3) Take the VRC and deposit it to other anonymous crypto/crypto exchanges and buy BTC with it and withdraw them
4) Cry foul to the VRC devs and show proof that you were hacked by a SQL injection
5) If the devs roll back, then you just effectively double spent all your VRC (or as much as you could given the liquidity of VRC). And the other exchanges lose
6) If the devs don't roll back, then you tell people that you've been hacked and X% of the coin now belongs to the thief and the thief can attack the network. Watch VRC/BTC drop like a rock. Then buy back the VRC with your BTC and return the VRC to your customers.

[Fippy]

Truth be told, I just wanna see some hacker steal 4+ million Bitcoins, just to see how Bitcoin would react.

Then we could end this silly "right or wrong" debate once and for all.

[criptix]

the best example are all the miners mining at ghash.io with 51+% am i right?
pos/pow have the same problems

no you are not right at all..

miners having 51% of the power to produce coins for very limited period of time is not the same thing as stake holders with 51% of the coins and the power to create 51% of all future coins for eternity.
this is why the vericoin devs had to take such drastic action when someone had a mere 30% of the coins.

also a pool having 51% of the hashing power is not the same thing as a single entity having that much power because miners would simply move if the power was being abused.

pos and pow have very different problems.

i dont understand your argument why miners have only a limited time? do you mean because the network hashrate can increase?
that argument doesn't revoke anything because the entity with over 51% can just buy/produce more hashpower.

even if i give you the point that a pool might not count as a single entity, because miners could leave if the pool acts in a malicious way -
bitcoin is facing the same problem when an entity decides to buy/produce more then 51% hashpower - tbh even 35% is enough, but u should know it if you read the thousands of articles about it.

[buy4crypto]

....
Let's make some math:
- Mintpal's daily volume was around BTC 2.5K, some BTC 5 daily revenues or US$ 2500 (based on 0.2% transaction fee)
- VRC 8M were valued at some US$1.65M
- This means some 660 days of MintPal's revenues
- Let's assume some VRC 12K coins as an average position
- This means some 660 people were holding their coins at MP

Conclusions:
1) MP would never be able to pay and would go bankrupt
2) As an immediate consequence, all 660 VRC holders would loose their money
3) With 30% of VRC coins out there available for further attacks, VRC would crash and all people holding it would loose their money

So, please, let not fool ourselves: It was not about saving MintPal. It was about saving the coin and the investors' money.

Image damage was done on all POS coins from PPC Nova..BC...XC...to VRC will surfer
and with rollback you give all POW coins golden bullet to shot in POS...
Right direction would be improve POS security to 90% resistance like NXT - not magic rollbacks.

And whole black marketing has started like that one:
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2apsj7/litecoin_developers_will_never_fork_litecoin_to/ciycbhd

Coblee just shot himself in the foot potentially. Does he think saying he won't fork will seperate him from any of the other crypto that are in the game right now? Not even under circumstances that would benefit his community. I wonder how many people will sell out of LTC and move funds here after hearing that. I certainly don't want my money with a "idealist" instead of someone more practical. Not when crypto needs a team more practical to go mainstream.

You are telling me. If the developer is capable, and the whole community votes for it, he won't allow to stop the fraud??

WOW I WILL NEVER BUY LITECOIN!

Perhaps you should address Coblee's scenario of what could happen as opposed to dancing around the issue:

what's stopping MintPal or another exchange from pulling this move:

1) Create a SQL injection vulnerability on your exchange and leave it there
2) Attack yourself and steal your own VRC
3) Take the VRC and deposit it to other anonymous crypto/crypto exchanges and buy BTC with it and withdraw them
4) Cry foul to the VRC devs and show proof that you were hacked by a SQL injection
5) If the devs roll back, then you just effectively double spent all your VRC (or as much as you could given the liquidity of VRC). And the other exchanges lose
6) If the devs don't roll back, then you tell people that you've been hacked and X% of the coin now belongs to the thief and the thief can attack the network. Watch VRC/BTC drop like a rock. Then buy back the VRC with your BTC and return the VRC to your customers.

What he said was, I value idealism, over practicality, I heard everything I needed to, Will never invest in litecoin again.

My money is not safe when someone refuses to help the community due to a certain "purist" view. Certainly allowing thievery? There is a better way. To say he would never fix the blockchain EVER to rollback transactions shows he has a lack of vision for how to ever fix the problem if it happened. So instead he points the finger.

[pnosker]

Please don't attack Charlie Lee (coblee). He owns VeriCoin and is family. His criticism is justified.

[megadestruct61]

Truth be told, I just wanna see some hacker steal 4+ million Bitcoins, just to see how Bitcoin would react.

Then we could end this silly "right or wrong" debate once and for all.

Since I'm sure there is no one place that 4 million Bitcoins are stored and I hope there never is that will not happen.

[Wulfcastle]

People are worried that this might set precedent for other coins to respond the same. An example would be if Bitcoin did this when Mt.Gox happened.

Bitcoin has forked two times, significantly. One was in 2010 when someone was able to mint billions of Bitcoins. They had to go back 100 transactions and reset the chain. Thankfully, the network was really small then, and all the developers had to do was get to the big pools and tell them to update their codes. Bitcoin was really small, and no one cared about it, so it didn’t get much attention.

The second event was where Bitcoin was updating from, I believe, 0.7 to 0.8. People didn’t like the 0.8 change, so some people didn’t move over. Basically, they were competing on two parallel chains for a long time. Eventually, the developers decided to revert back to 0.7.

When people say we’re abusing our power, that’s fine; they can say what they want to. I don’t think of it that way, because we were going out of our way to prevent the coin from dying off. Most of the people who are critical of this are people that don’t own it and are people that want another coin to succeed. They attack every coin and right now it’s a good opportunity to attack VeriCoin.

------

There is more, read the full article @ http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/vericoin-developer-speaks-ccn-mintpal-hardfork/2014/07/15

That is the mos important part.
The dev decided to make a change but the people didn't.
And in the end it was the users that decided the which chain was the right one.

Here there was decision taken by a few to protect a business , nothing more.

Until it's technically impossible to rollback the chain, this "problem" will continue. The argument of "I don't like what the VeriCoin devs did, I'm going to buy <such-n-such> coin instead" doesn't hold because all other cryptocoins can be rolled back as well. Just because the devs say they won't doesn't mean they can't!

So bravo VeriCoin devs! You did a good thing, and although people are upset you violated some sort of imaginary moral law, the problem that has always been there is now front and centre.

If you don't like it, show me the code to fix the problem.

Well you see Bitcoin had to fork there, as that hack exploited a flaw in the protocol. VeriCoin on the other hand had no need to fork as there was no flaw in the underlying protocol, this hack on MintPal was simply a theft.