Well there we go,
Thanks FrictionlessCoin for the updates, your offer of returning the counterparty advance, honesty and hard efforts to-date. Figured BCF was slime on the wall, from what I can tell your 8.6 client is working well, I'm not sure who is using it yet, but it appears to me to be a big step forward from the previous release.
FrictionlessCoin, for those developers in the community that want to take things to the next level, was there a(some) particular issues you felt concerned about with the release? Areas in the code or considerations you didn't get a chance to work on to your satisfaction? Putting that 'extreme warning' on the ixcoin.co website download link turned most of us end users off from ever trying it.
Perhaps the best thing to do @ this point....is we have someone take over the .co website and/or go another route. Seems the foundation should make having a coherent and up-to-date coin website portal the highest priority, highlighting the 8.6 client as the next evolutionary step. Does anyone know if CEX/ghash.io is already using the 8.6 code? Sounds like ahmed_bodi has already tested & confirmed the merged mining capabilities of that client fork. Others?
What I see as the way to advance IXCoin now is to get the client up to the latest version of bitcoin (9.2). The merged mining part could take some time to get tested and operational, & as FrictionlessCoin points out, needs to be done first, before counterparty or other features are considered.
On that point....it just occurred to me, perhaps there is a way we could short circuit it's development time. Very soon now we'll not care about mining coins, what we'll care about most is flexible transaction fee management and the super secured hash rate, merged mining offers. Unfortunately, I'm to much of a noob on cryptocoin coding to be able to answer this question. It is interesting that we can soon gut any code required to mine coins, other than the parts required to insert blocks & secure the network hash rate.
It sure does seem like it's time we move on.. stop depending on the other (IOC, NMC or DVC) development communities/people to publish their latest code, so we can copy it. We should leap frog to the front of the pack, or at least co-develop the technology with knowledgeable developers, such as I see posting here & I'm confident we can get any code developed fully tested before releasing the binaries to general use...
GR
Even if the miner subsidy rates go to zero, you will still need to merge mine. Once you stop mining, the coin goes dead and is unable to process new transactions.
It's all nice to want to have your own development and be able to move forward in development, unfortunately all this takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot more than just upgrading the code base. The 0.8.6 has been sitting in the repository for months now, yet it takes effort to get the miners to adopt it. With a new 0.9.2 client, we'll have to go through the entire cycle again. It isn't easy.
The only way I see of getting things moving is to fork out some IXC in terms of bounty.
Reality check for all alt-investors.... look at most alt-coins.... they've crashed big time. The only ones that are maintaining a decent market cap are the ones that are providing technological innovation.
Out of the top 20 virtual currencies:
Bitcoin*
Litecoin*
Ripple
Nxt
Darkcoin*
Peercoin*
BitSharesX
Dogecoin*
Namecoin*
MaidSafeCoin
Mastercoin
Counterparty
Monero
BlackCoin*
BitShares PTS*
Bytecoin
XCurrency*
ReddCoin*
CloakCoin*
Quark*
Only 11 are derived from Bitcoin code base. The other half are entirely new implementations.