[ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin"

To the CLAMS community:

Yesterday, it came to the attention of the CLAMS development team that there is an exploit in the CLAM lottery system. Thankfully, due to some phenomenal detective work and a watchful eye by tryphe and dooglus, we caught the exploit extremely quickly. Additional investigation conducted by dooglus, revealed that the exploit was being undertaken by a well known developer in the community that goes by the name 'rat4'. rat4 is the chief developer of the crypto-currency Blackcoin.

The team immediately contacted rat4 via IRC. rat4 acknowledged discovering CLAMS recently and the use of the exploit. Though after-the-fact, rat4 agreed to speak with the development team and provided additional insight and information concerning the exploit. Despite being a bit bitter, the additional insight was greatly appreciated and helpful in considering the alternatives moving forward.

In short, the exploit was executed via withholding/solving/staking sets of blocks and involved brute forcing the block which decides the block reward prior to submission. To our great disappointment, no purely reliable, readily available and tested solution to the exploit existed that satisfied our requirements of security and fairness. After reviewing the options available for the CLAMS network, it was decided by the development team to conduct a near immediate hard-fork of the CLAMS block chain to remove the threat.

The Hard-Fork:

Starting at block 170,000 of the CLAMS block chain, the CLAMS network will be moving away from the variable lottery based block reward and transitioning to a standard 1 CLAM per block reward. This 1 CLAM block reward maintains a projected inflation target extremely close to the original target of the lottery update; the primary difference being that the reward is balanced between blocks instead of accrued into larger "lucky" blocks. The CLAM lottery has been greatly enjoyed by users and if a strong solution to the exploit presents itself in the coming days, there is intention to re-instate the lottery. Unfortunately, such a solution is not readily available at the moment and in a prudent time-frame.

At the time of this posting the CLAMS network is at block #168853. That places the hard-fork and block 170,000 at roughly 1,150 blocks from now: a bit under a day. Poloniex has been contacted and is prepared and ready to update the exchange client(s) in preparation for the fork. The new source has also already been pulled into the master repository. It is anticipated that the hard-fork will proceed with little disruption as it is quite simple in scope.

ALL USERS SHOULD UPDATE THEIR CLIENT IMMEDIATELY.

Updated Windows Client: https://mega.co.nz/#!0U0GTADT!80mk1ETxo_2JwcfsSVHnkyqu4H_9s8KM9Ril-MaPey4

Updated Linux Client: https://mega.co.nz/#!MEkiVKID!bmjd8FQkDoHh2LeT6jg138lLLupZgZ3fuwP271gYRYM

Updated Source: https://github.com/nochowderforyou/clams

	Author	Topic: [ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin" (Read 1153932 times)
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