On merged mining:
Yes, AuxPoW is removed. The v2 fork switches from SHA-256d to BLAKE3 for all hashing (PoW, Merkle trees, addresses, sighash), which makes merged mining with Bitcoin/Litecoin technically impossible.
The security concern is valid, but merged mining was always a double-edged sword. It gave us hashrate we did not earn, from miners who did not care about the chain. A single pool deciding to drop i0coin from their merge-mine list could wipe out most of our hashrate overnight. That already happened several times on the i0coin life. That is basically fake hashrate.
Post-fork security comes from: ASERT difficulty adjustment (reacts to hashrate changes in hours, not weeks), 90-second blocks (faster confirmation, as always), and perpetual tail emission (5 I0C/block forever, miners always have incentive to mine, no relying on fees alone that today are essentially 0).
On quantum:
Merged mining does not protect against quantum attacks. Quantum resistance is about signature schemes and hash functions, not where the hashrate comes from. BLAKE3 is not quantum-proof either, but neither is SHA-256d. When quantum becomes a real threat, the answer is post-quantum signatures. That is a future fork for every chain, not just us. We are just not there yet.
On name and logo:
Staying the same. i0coin is i0coin: same chain since 2011, same identity, same ticker
The fork modernizes the internals, it does not change who we are. Rebranding would erase 15 years of history and confuse everyone who already knows the coin.
The zero-vs-O thing is part of the identity at this point. Anyone who found us has figured it out. We are not optimizing for exchange search UX at the cost of losing what makes i0coin recognizable.
