I would like to bring everyone's attention here. We have suffered two large fork recently, and now it's really time to bring the topic here and would like get everyone's opinion. So we can move forward, because this can happened again.
Here are the opinions that we can work on.
1. Keep current algorithm, increase security, adding more nodes and checkpoints.
2. Use POW+POS
3. Merged mining
4. Update algorithm, like Scrypt-N, X15, etc.
Worst case hard fork may needed.
Please contribute your opinions. Or if you have better opinions, bring it. So we can make a better FedoraCoin together.
I apologize if this post manifests my complete ignorance, but feeling still being a n00b in cryptocurrencies I have a few question regarding the proposed measures above and I hope to receive answers that allow me to improve my knowledge:
Re: 1.
Checkpoints are fine, but they always reference a point in the past before or at best when the wallet/src was released. Given the fork doesn't go back further than the checkpoint it is my understanding that a checkpoint helps nothing to prevent a fork from happening (except speeding up synching from scratch), is this assumption completely off? Though TIPS needs newer checkpoints for the getchainvalue function to work halfway performant, I don't believe it helps protecting from forks like the ones we saw.
I estimate the current TIPS network to something around 60-80 nodes. How many nodes more would you think would be needed and how do you think this can keep a fork like the one we experienced from happening?
Re: 2.
A POS/POW hybrid certainly serves as good protection against a 51% POW attack, however if you look at the richlist you will see that the top 2 wallets have >40% of the total supply. Assuming that never all supply will be staking and assuming those two wallets will stake, they can easily outgrow a majority of staking weight. I really have no clue if my suspicion here holds any ground, but I hope an experienced person with better skills can enlighten us.
Re: 3.
That seems to me like the best option to avoid a fork when enough pools join and merge mine TIPS. If I look at DOGE right now, it has ~900Gh - I guess that's much harder to attack than the current ~40Gh that TIPS has (or much less when it forked). However I am pretty sure it would move price of TIPS downwards when there is no more hard cost associated with mining TIPS.
Re: 4.
Could you explain how changing the mining algo would protect TIPS from an attack/fork? What exactly are you trying to achieve with an algo swap? You realize that you sound here like the takeover dev that also appeared out of nowhere suddenly and wanted to change the algo? May I ask if you are in any way affiliated with the SHA256 takeover-dev ?
I agree though that the coin needs an update, my opinion from digging through code is that it will get problematic to use - to say the least - once # 1,664,000 is reached.
I will highly appreciate if you can take the time to address my naive questions and help me toward a better understanding of how cryptocurrencies work.