Topic: bitcoin vs solidcoin - page 8. (Read 19413 times)

I think that they mean that if a coin hasn't been spent or moved by the time it hits the 100K block, it's probably a lost coin and is given to the miner of the next block as that one is destroyed. 

How do you detect if a coin has been pruned?

I went to the solidcoin website and this is what I found as the logic for this fork...

"As Bitcoin itself and other similar chains have seen, there are numerous vulnerabilities and issues in the protocol, including :-

    * Slow transaction speeds, often making waiting for confirmations unbearable
    * Near complete shutdown of network due to pump-n-dumps by large operators
    * Transaction fee nightmares, no way of knowing what a fee will be until you've tried to send funds
    * Concentration of Bitcoins into elitist early adopters that have no interest or desire to help Bitcoins be used by "normal" people"


Really?  That's it?  This is the complaint?

1) Slow transaction confirms?  (not transaction speeds, as noted by the faq later, actual transactions take seconds)
2) Pump'N'Dump
3) Unknown transaction fees
4) Elitist attitudes


1)  So to solve the problem of 'instant' transfer confirmations, they reduce the target time from 10 minutes to three minutes.  Okay, but it's still three minutes.  How does that help?  If you are standing in a checkout line trying to buy a hamburger, fries and a coke you aren't going to be waiting for a confirmation in either case.  If you are sitting in the new car dealership then you are going to be waiting for several confirmations in any case.  This doesn't solve anything, and is just as arbitrary of an interval than Bitcoin's 10 minutes.  By what logic is three minutes better?  And why not two minutes?  And what is the expected network latency going to be if Solidcoin is running transaction volumes near to that of Visa?

2)  Is this a problem with Bitcoin, and if so, how?  This kind of thing (sort of) happened last summer, when the difficulty was way lower than now and almost no one was mining with their GPU's.  But rules now exist to limit such events, even though they are astronomicly less likely since that was most likely done by someone with a GPU mining prototype and there just aren't any new jumps in tech on the horizon.  Bear in mind that we knew that GPU mining was coming at the time.  And ASICs represent a leap in power efficiency not hashing power per se.

3)  They aren't unknown.  All one has to do is take a look at the range of fees in the last couple of blocks.  If you want to be 99% certain that your transaction will be included in the very next block, choose the high end of that range.  If you just want to have a pretty good odds of getting it in within the next couple of blocks, choose the low end of that range.  If you don't need it to be included anytime soon, choose zero. 

4)  Really?  You don't like how others play the game, so you are going to go home and make a whole new ball game?  Is this Baseketball?  Is this a logical reason to choose a currency fork over the original?  Because you don't care for the attitude?  Do you really think that others who come after you are going to prefer your attitude enough to overlook the advantages of the original?

I'll admit up front that I don't know anything about what Solidcoin is trying to accomplish, but it's obvious to myself that neither of you have any deep understanding of what Bitcoin is really designed to accomplish, nor how it works to that end.

Evolution is taking place before our very eyes. These forks called solidcoin/namecoin/etc are the 'random' mutations, and ultimately 'natural' selection will determine the most fit coin.

I am honestly currently down with Solidcoin.  The only alternative currency to Bitcoin I like. No namecoin, ixcoin, etccoin.  Not giving up on Bitcoin, but that is only because I have more invested monetarily, but I am considering changing.

that's it I'm out, somebody else tell him

And it's short-sighted. Taking the Bitcoin code, changing a couple things, and then telling every one to abandon Bitcoin for the fork, just attacks at the credibility of the currency's function as a store of value, and therefore the value of p2p currency in general.

FPGAs are about 5 times as costly as GPUs. That's a long way from affordable.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/custom-fpga-board-for-sale-37904
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btcminer-open-source-bitcoin-miner-for-ztex-fpga-boards-215-mhs-on-lx150-40047 <-read 'higher volumes'

Your dreaming if you think affordable fpga boards are "just around the corner"

The forks are just an act of desperation because gpu mining has become unprofitable and speculators know that fpga & co are just around the corner.
Price is down, people are delirious and think they can flee to the forks, but they'll sit on their gpu rigs nevertheless... well it's gonna happen  

Double-spend detection is the only real answer to speeding up trust in Bitcoin transactions, not decreasing block time like Solidcoin has.  There are at least two ways that it could be implemented:

1) Listening nodes (http://bitcointalk.org/?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819)
2) Querying mining pools (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.494150). A less rigorous version of option 1 that focuses on tracking estimated total hashing power working on a given unconfirmed transaction

The methods could be combined. Of course there's also the option of building true instant transaction layers on top of bitcoin like MtGox and Open Transactions servers.  Double-spend detection, as originally envisioned by Satoshi, would also largely neutralize any problems arising out of sudden drops in Bitcoin hashing power.

Like the video format wars, this may well get decided by which format sees widespread adoption by the porn industry first. People by and large are not looking looking for an alternative to the better known payment options for ordinary purchases, especially not a slower alternative that subjects users to volatile exchange rates. On the other hand, users looking for a degree of privacy may be willing to overlook those shortcomings. Silk Road is the best known example of that type of thing, but a pseudo-anonymous currency can only do so much to keep you out of jail so the appeal is limited.

Since Bitcoin hasn't really transformed its lead into a thriving 'real' economy so far, it's still anyone's game. Faster (ok, less slow) confirmations, a reasonably easy to pronounce name and minimal early adopter/political wacko baggage may be all it takes to attract significant amounts of real business and become the new de facto standard. After that, the features may not make as much of a difference. Beta didn't make a comeback once it caught up in recording time, even though picture quality was always better than VHS.

Solidcoin/"shitcoins" = infiltration and division of bitcoin network. If you are indifferent about this, you never understood bitcoin.

It appears to me that investing in a 60GH/s farm makes you heavily invested in *coins success. So I'd say you care. A lot.

There are plenty of technical ways to get around instant transfers (which are being worked on), so that argument doesn't really hold.
Also, only a fraction of transactions need to be realtime. A 10 minutes to 1 hour or more delay is acceptable for many ecommerce purposes for example.

I love your honesty, it was quite refreshing

Hey, I'm new, and I'm here because I heard about Solidcoin.  I'm not sure if I'm "worth having" but for what it's worth I don't agree with the negative postings about BTC made by one of the SC organizers.  I told them that.

As you pointed out, there's limited interest in BTC right now, but don't think keeping things the same is going to lead to rampant, wide acceptence.  Both chains could be improved and probably replaced by something faster and more user friendly.  I'm currently trying to promote both BTC and SC as I belong to some communities where I think people would find them ideal for their transactions.

technically, you could have like 2,100,000,000,000,000 "coins", right now i think there is only $56T cash i believe, thats BTC2.1Q, a quadrillion is a 1 and 15 0's

I like some of your ideas. We need more coins over all. 21,000,000 just isn't "enough" to go around lol