Topic: Altcoins and Scamcoins - Know the difference. - page 2. (Read 6418 times)

Some additional innovations that FRC has

* Smoothly declining block rewards that eliminate the disruptive volatility inducing reward-halving events of all other coins
* Optimized difficulty adjustment parameters, adjusts every 9 blocks up or down 5% based on 144 block rolling window (will go live in a day or two through hard fork).  These parameters were identified through an exhaustive simulation process to be ideal for FRC and similar coins with 10 minute block intervals like BTC and TRC.

Also I don't think your characterization of '80% for developers' is correctly describing FRC, developers have pledged to give away all these coins through a non-profit foundation not keep them for themselves.

True and false religion: how to tell the difference

True religion: the one I believe in
False religion: all others
True prophet: The guy I listen to
False prophet: all the guys who say they are true prophets but are lying, except for the one I believe in
God: the guy who started my religion and talks to my prophet
Satan: the guy who tries to get people to leave my religion and join others
Good: doing whatever my religion says to do
Evil: doing whatever my religion says not to do, including believing in other religions


Etc.

And so it follows:

Altcoin: the one I hold
Scamcoin: the ones I don't

+ 1  i will say i did look into NVC it has been quite innovative , but terribly marketed. but its also on BTC-e I think its a stay.

The majority of servers and supercomputers in existence run Free Open Source Software.

Open source software is more secure than closed source software

You were able to make an FPGA design for Scrypt(N=32,64)?  How did it work?

This part we don't know yet.  At least the developer of Reaper (mtrlt) reported decreases in GPU hash rate roughly proportional to decreases in everyone else's CPU hash rates as N started to increase.  It's a little too early to tell what the situation will be when N starts getting high and both GPU's and CPU's are increasingly falling back to external memory (since the TMTO related to lookup gap only improves things to a point, which is why everyone gets faster hash rates on Litecoin with a lookup gap of 2 rather than 4, for example).

Future prevalence of GPU mining of YAC is probably going to depend on what exchange rates do, and whether N rises enough to whack GPU hash rates (for anyone that actually did succeed in making a good implementation with decent hash rates) while it is still more profitable to mine other coins with GPU's.  Small arms race, perhaps.  Right now, I'd bet on buying YAC cheap on Bter if someone is betting YAC will rise significantly in price later on, rather than tying up GPU's that could be mining Litecoin instead.

I only implemented OpenCL for YAC at N=32, and haven't bothered trying for other N values.  So, unfortunately I don't have good benchmark data for falloff of GPU hash rates as N increases.

I've gone on record several times in saying that YAC's N started too low at launch though.  I would've started N significantly higher than 32.  As a result, I pulled off an FPGA implementation that performed rather well at N=32, but became iffy at N=64 and couldn't be placed'n'routed by the Xilinx tools at all for N=128.

Yes, that is possible.  And I was one of the first people weighing in on the likelihood that the original developer's claims that YAC was GPU-resistant were likely not correct, back on the first day of the coin's launch (along with TacoTime, who was saying the same thing).  Unfortunately, we're not going to know for sure, especially since the original developer pulled the usual Houdini disappearing act after the coin launched.

I've examined the first ~100 blocks in the YAC block explorer trying to determine any of the original developer's coinbase addresses to try to figure out a lower bound for how much he made.  I didn't find anything exciting in the first 100 blocks that indicated much more than just CPU mining (so I'll certainly say CPU instamining by the original developer was a possibility).  It's entirely possible the original developer did have a GPU implementation but waited before turning it up.  There's no way to tell at this point.

A lot of people were real quick to turn up massive numbers of Amazon AWS instances and mine with them.  It's difficult to distinguish between those people and any hypothetical GPU's or GPU farms while examining blocks with the YAC block exporer.  ~9 to 9.5 hours after the coin launched, I had tons of Amazon instances mining too.

You seem to completely disregard the likely possibility that the author had an optimized GPU miner before the launch.

I see

it's not the at launch/early hashrate i was concerned about, i am more thinking on the long term, gpu mining for many days, weeks, months while everyone else is on cpus.

but maybe it is still quite resistant to gpus being that great even if you can get them to work

Given that the exact hashing algorithm (substitution of chacha20/8 in place of scrypt20/8, and Kekkac512 in place of SHA256) was a surprise to everyone at the coin's launch, there was a period of time where CPU mining would have had to be dominant.  The lion's share of YAC was mined during the first day by CPU's.  The author of Reaper (whose OpenCL kernel for mining Litecoin was later lifted for cgminer, BTW, so cgminer wasn't the original), mtrlt, reports needing about 13.5 hours of work to get Reaper going with any sort of hash rate that had a noteworthy advantage, and he also reports having had a late start.  Probably few people would've been able to implement it faster than the person who wrote the OpenCL kernel just about everyone mining scrypt coins with GPU's is using.  So, it's probably reasonable to assume that GPU mining of YAC has a high probability of having been entirely CPU for the first 13.5 hours, with a fair probability it was around day 2 before anyone had a GPU implementation up and running (given that most other people attempting it likely would've taken longer than mtrlt).  I did it in 8 hours but ended up with hash rates on a 6950 not much above my dual Xeon E5450 servers, so I didn't bother pursuing GPU mining YAC further.  It appears low hash rate results were common among the people that did attempt OpenCL implementations, as most of us aren't as good at optimizing OpenCL in "thinking outside the box" ways like mtrlt.  So, just my humble guess is that GPU implementations probably started occurring around day 2, with many poorly optimized versions not giving much advantage over CPU's, so I'd consider those a wash.  Until people speak up with more data, we don't know for sure that anyone other than mtrlt managed to achieve significant hash rates for GPU mining of YAC.  There could be, and it's also possible there weren't.  Time will tell, probably.



My GPU's are happily mining LTC, if anyone is curious.  And I'm one of the few that have admitted to having a GPU implementation of scrypt+chacha20/8+Keccak512(N,1,1), albeit producing nowhere near the hash rates that mtrlt, the author of Reaper, reported.



+1, I've bought far more YAC than I mined.  And I seem to be someone people point at as having mined a lot of YAC (I'm not so sure, I've seen in the YAC block explorer what the people who were CPU mining right from the coin's launch raked in).

indeed, i found some more reading on github, updated the dates and order and added the link.

i also dropped the premined coin sections - frankly there's too many damn coins to list there.  the very few ones that were novel AND premined are listed in their novel section with a disclaimer they were premined and thus dead.


Scrypt and hybrid PoW/PoS were already implemented prior to Bitbar, i will look if there is a novel method in their diff/reward calc

BitBar - Scrypt - Hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake and a fast, continuous difficulty and reward calculation.

updated

By Inflationary reward i mean literally that the reward for blocks inflates, or goes up over the long term.

Not like the 2->4->10->15->20 or whatever progression used for the first few days to combat early / premining.

I meant like, if the bitcoin block reward doubled instead of halving.

It should either stay the same or decrease.

I don't have anything against centralized systems per say, of course most existing institutions and systems are such.  but discussion and creation of them is meant for another forum.  cyptocurrency as we use it inherently means that it is decentralized and open source.

It would be like writing some closed source Open Source Software.  contradiction in terms. 

I understand your point of view, but such philosophical arguments don't affect the success of a coin. It's like saying "don't write closed source software, it's bad", that's not going to change anything. Almost all the currencies currently in use are centralized, and before bitcoin there was some research on p2p currencies with limited degree of centralization, say just for registering new users and exchanging coins for other currency. This was all called "cryptocurrency" as well. I think you are biased by bitcoin here.

To the "inflationary reward" remark. I don't think it's easy to predict what kind of reward will lead to inflation, that's all.

Yes, but it's this behavior, this attitude which is at fault here. Of course, if the creators don't have any interest in the coin, it's doomed, independently of whether it hits the exchanges.

Centralized systems are anathema to the purpose of cryptocurrencies.  So is closed source software

Agreed, removed that from OP.  I could add something to the list of coins if there's a novel one that uses inflationary or infinite coins, but i don't know which came first for that.

What are you referring to here?  I don't think i said "any rewards are bad".  But early rewards are a serious problem for coin launches now.


Almost every time i have seen people wanting to get their coin onto an exchange ASAP so they can dump it.  They have no interest in using or holding the coin itself.  Almost always goes together with the above point for early miners / premining / etc.

I've heard it's possible and that at least one forum user had a working implementation after a couple weeks, but AFAIK all of the 23 days since the coin's creation, save for the first hours (and by several people's experiences CPU mining the first 8 hours, it didn't seem like there was anyone GPU mining at that point), it's been more profitable to GPU mine about any other GPU coin rather than YAC.

As I understand it, if YAC's price rises there may a window of GPU mining being profitable, till N increases so much it becomes too memory heavy for GPUs again. I don't have the theoretical knowledge to assess this, though.

Incidentally, exchange price has remained so low for the whole first month that anyone could buy easily as many as the top hasher can mine (dontmine.me's top hasher has been mining 1500 YAC a day, or 0.67 BTC a day). Renting servers was also profitable for a while. So, there's surely a lot of people with thousands of coins they got without using GPUs at all.

When PoS starts to kick in it will decrease GPU miners' share of the total minting too, but I don't know by how much.

Adding

Nothing is wrong with centralization. Centralized systems are much more secure in many ways.

Nothing is wrong with any reward whatsoever. Reward is just the payment for supporting the network. It may be that if the network grows its value also grows, and there will be no inflation. You're just assuming very simple models here by saying it's bad.

Nothing is wrong with unbounded number of coins. Indeed it's the bound which is arbitrary and requires justification.

What's wrong about deals with the exchanges? I really don't even understand your motivation for that one.

Testing is a good point.