Defer to bluedragon747
He knows a lot more about writing custom code than i do and is by far a more experienced c++ coder
I know a few things, and am learning quickly, my advantage is a strong understanding of cryptography and mathematics.
I did not think of the attack method he brought up, there are so many ways to attack or disrupt a coin network that most people do not really know about, and Blue brings up a good point, it takes literally a few seconds to change the magic numbers as you put your source code together, begore you build your testnet clients ect......
Since it is easy to do why not take that step, excellent point that it is easier than adding a checkpoint to an updated client.
Not directly unrelated to this but on the topic of new clones coming out.........
I have to wonder what the hell some pepole are thinking when I see so many new coins launched every day most scrypt 1024 based ?
Even more amazing is some of them get hundreds of megahash thrown at them and are abandoned or dead within a few days , no connections,
no working blockchain ect......??
I think some people have just gone mad or crazy or don't know 'what to mine'.
I guess about a year ago when there were still only a few litecoin style clones some people would clone a coin hoping to get it listed at cryptsy as a way to make a few btc.
Those days are gone forever.....people who are 'mining for profit' as they say are complaining now that their big rigs are getting them .02 btc a day on middlecoin or similar switching pools
See for yourself and look at the payouts here on middlecoin they are all public since users use your btc address
http://www.middlecoin.com/allusers.htmlnote the paid out btc amount is the amount that person has had paid to them 'lifetime' from middlecoin, It is currently running at7.6 gigahash scrypt 1024 mining is pretty dam fast , a lot of people sloshing it up for less than the cost of electricity to run their equipment which may or may not be paid for.
Photon (and the other projectrs I am involved in) were started by me with the intention of long term support.
I have never designed anything that was aimed at giving either myself or anyone else an opportunity to cash in big just because they started early.
Also I will state that for me the reason my projects like Photon were 'Ninja' launched (without pre ANN and wallets in zip files ect.... ahead of time ) is because it is just not necessary. Yes it is true some people got some 'easy' mining of Photon in the initial hours it was launched however when you look at the total money supply even now, never mind what it will be a few years from now this little advantage is really none at all.
The only other step one can take to fairly launch a coin is to make a certain number of initial blocks have a zero or 1 coin block award until everyone hears about it and has a chance to get in and join the party.
I did not see that necessary here.
I got a little off topic for Blake Coin here , so my apology to everyone.........
I saw Blake Coin as a standout early on after it's release, you can see my old posts here and at cryptocoin talk.
When gpu mining first came out I worked many hours tweaking different settings for my gpu on both reaper then the cg miner build.
I do not think bitcoin needs to be replaced but there is no harm in a competitive market.
I am honored that BlueDragon gave me his permission to make Photon as a child of Blake Coin and provided his guiding hand.
As the network continues to run and build a following I have many ideas to make Photon (and Blake Coin) more than just 'other coins' on the lists.
the shorter chain will receive a block and reads the block header to check for magic value if the check is passed then it will try to add it to its own chain by checking the merkle which it will fail, end result if it keeps getting blocks from another chain is that the wallet locks up randomly doing these merkle calculations checks, also the pool uses the headers especially in a merge mine setup where you are stuffing multiple headers in the work
these are the things that get checked
1. height
2. magic value
3. merkle
4. time of block
just using the ports to define a broadcast is asking for someone to use an exploit to freeze the block processing or crash a pool wallet just by using a long chain with same magic value but a different merkle, I will continue to avoid coins that use same magic value and keep recommending to any dev to change it if they use the same as Blakecoin or another known value, if a dev can add a checkpoint they can change the magic value it does add as much security as a checkpoint and avoids random crashes and lock ups of wallet.
in my opinion a good dev is one that supports the coin over a period of time and tries to improve it, a bad dev is one that is around for a few days does not make any improvements then is non contactable and gone
