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It's time - we can get to this fork and have a coin that works or we can lose the blockchain to our attackers. It's up to us.
Looks like a cool coin and very active but obviously some drama. Can you or somebody briefly summarize the drama in one post? Thanks.
The main drama from launch is that the original dev team deployed a coin that wasn't capable of living in an environment with large amounts of hash and with profit-oriented switch pools (something nearly every coin launched since BTC has to solve). The battle since has been devising and deploying methods for adjusting the difficulty that work, while also building a dev team from scratch and rebuilding the coin's network infrastructure and a proper testnet. On the code side, we didn't want artificial block lengths (30 second or 3 minutes or any other combination) and didn't want to go to merged mining. We think we have a unique solution that will work regardless of the network hash rate.
The PID process deployed in V9.1.1 wasn't expected to be a 100% solution, but it has a fatal flaw that when the hash rate is too slow a large miner/pool can hit the network and cause the diff to climb too high too fast (that's the 'galloping' you can see on the network chart). While not a good situation, it's been better than any previous attempt, and it gave us the time to develop and fully test a solution which we think will become beautifully apparent when we hit block 46331.
During this 'interesting' ~18 month period, we also found that one gent on the dev team was more interested in his own profit than on the entire CAT community and after causing severe damage to the project multiple times (including multiple forks) he was ejected from the team and community. He's not happy about this, and has deployed his own sock-puppet FUD brigade and highly-modified coinds to harm CAT rather than take his mad coding skillz to make his own coin. We know him as 'hozer', 'catcoiner', 'Buy', 'tmagik', 'technomagik', 'Troy Benjegerdes', and quite probably 'vampirus'; and know his code (which caused a parallel (and incompatible) block chain well before we deployed V9.2.0) as 'catoshi' or 'catcoin' clients rather than our 'satoshi 9.2.0' clients.
In the process of building the V9.2.0 client and new difficulty system, we also removed all of hozer's code and also updated the code base with security fixes and developments in the parent LTC code that were fielded after CAT launched. All of our pools, all of our infrastructure, and more than 80% of the clients seen on the network are running the current V9.2.0 code and our network is rock-solid. We did, however, cause a condition that would have normally created a simple fork for those that continue to run the earlier 9.1.1 code (which had a kludge of a 30 second minimum block time) that would have disappeared as the rest of the community moved to the new code - but hozer was happy to continue to mine his own fork as part of his FUD campaign, and he merged his older fork with our new soft fork. That's the piece that 'vampirus' either doesn't yet understand or is trying to twist. It's really important to note that while the 9.1.1 client will 'technically' join the parallel fork, there is only one entity mining that (hozer) and there are zero CAT transactions there, and all of the nodes on that fork are firewalled into the obscurity they deserve. If you are interested in understanding this more fully, feel free to hit the earlier threads as this is fully documented.
Launch thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-catcoin-scrypt-meow-380130V9.1.1 thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-catcoin-0911-old-thread-locked-please-use-092-thread-441402The real important parts to hook onto aren't the past two years, but the next - we have a solid team working together for CAT and her community, we have a strong network infrastructure managed by experienced sysadmin/netadmin folks, we have ties and exchanges with multiple other coin projects, we're preparing the next release for testnet now, and we are really looking forward to the community response once we fork into the V9.2.0 code at block 46331...644 blocks to go.
Feel free to connect with us on Freenode #catcoin-dev or #catcoin or ##catcoin and we'll be happy to go into whatever detail you're interested in - we're pretty much there 24/7.
Andy
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