Topic: Vertcoin - First Scrypt N | First Stealth Address - Privacy without mixer - page 240. (Read 1232727 times)

WTF man? A hard fork or 2 a year means updating the wallets and whatever systems merchants use two times a year. Do you have any idea how often windows / linux or whatever OS updates? As long as the economics of the coin remain unchanged and the security of the blockchain is maintained i say fork away!

A repeatedly hard-forking coin is not suitable for real-world use or merchant adoption. Right now VTC is yet another low-market-cap trader's coin with a small user base so you can get away with this "mindset". Hopefully your eventual ambitions are grander than that.

Removing funds is neither possible nor desirable, but a centralised checkpointing system does ensure an attacker can only cause a re-org back to the last checkpoint that was widely accepted by the network.


I agree that no sort of centralised checkpointing is really acceptable, but I understand why PPC did it, and I certainly wouldn't go around using the word "insecure" about their network.


I just did! BC removed the stake modifier that the PoS/PoW hybrids like PPC/NVC use - without that, there's no protection whatsoever against an attacker who stockpiles stake blocks.

I just did! BC removed the stake modifier that the PoS/PoW hybrids like PPC/NVC use - without that, there's no protection whatsoever against an attacker who stockpiles stake blocks.

I noticed Blackcoin enthusiasts bringing up a check-pointing system to keep the network safe. I guess if anyone tries playing "funny games" by trying to 51% stake, this system would remove their funds.

Isn't this the same thing as having the central authority we deal with now?

Also, I've seen you mention there is another attack that is easier to perform on PoS. Are you ever going to unveil this security flaw?

Yes this, plus another attack where you stockpile stake blocks and release a re-org at your leisure. This is why PPC uses centralised checkpointing, and also why they use a stake modifier which depends on some subset of the last N PoW blocks, wheras the recent rash of pure PoS coins has simply removed this entirely, hoping no-one would notice.

A PoS coin is also susceptible to an attack, just like PoW. However, the means of performing the attack would be much simpler. The main weakness comes from most coin holders do not (and will probably never) stake their coins in the long run.

If there are 100 coins in circulation(for example) and only 4 coins staked, that would only require 5 staked coins to perform an attack. That is how a PoS attack would be performed, having over 51% of the staked coins.

Meanwhile, PoW requires 51% of the network hash. This makes it much more impractical to destroy a coin. Neither attacks have been successfully performed to destroy a coin, but PoS attacks would be much easier.

Mon said they will launch before summer. When PLX made launch date MON picked earlier date of 2 days. That's why i'm curious about this whole thing

Mon said they will launch before summer.

Could be waiting until MON's source is released. The he will edit it for 2 days, and release a copy called parallaxcoin.

fair enough. I don't feel like a scammer would try anything more than a copycat coin though. To be fair I have spoken to the devs and they've said they only changed OP's due to the negative criticisms and wanted a successful coin, so in their defense, they reposted and took away things that the community wasn't liking (like IPO and undisclosed premine). Sounds like they're learning to adapt if anything.

regardless. I hope time will tell! Too many scammers around, but I like to think I have an eye for them    

This coin seems pretty scammy. The guy has created like 3-4 new threads when people pointed out that he was paying people to say good things about the coin, IPO in the original thread, and pre-mine in general. His original thread was under the name agent something but now he's using a parallaxcoin account. I'm only putting him down because his behavior is that of a scammer.

I have been thinking about it, I don't know if my line of thinking is right or not, but I just want to throw it out for your guys to critique and correct me where I'm wrong.

Here we go: These are built for Scrypt mining first right? So in order to maximize efficiency for Scrypt mining, there must be a balance between hashing cores and the amount of memory. Too many cores and not enough memory, you are not utilizing your cores to their potential. Too much memory and too little cores, die space is wasted.

So in the case of Scrypt mining (n=10), one would assume that the amount of memory available to the cores are exactly how much the cores need in order to maximize die space efficiency. You wouldn't want more memory than needed because that takes up precious die space, so we can assume the memory shipped is fixed exactly at how much n=10 mining needs.

Let's assume then that core:memory ratio is 1:1 to maximize die efficiency. When we look at n=11, the amount of memory needed per core is doubled. However, because fixed memory was specifically allocated for cores running at n=10, you now find yourself with "half" the usable memory since each core uses up double the memory. Now at n=11, your core:memory requirement is 1:2, and with a fixed amount of memory it means only half your total number of cores are utilized.

Looking at GPUs we have today, switching to n=11 immediately halves the hashrate and that is considering we have an abundance of memory. That means in the case of these "ASICs", mining at n=11 is probably going to cut the hash rate by 1/4, and another 1/4 for each increase in N Value.

One workaround is of course to provide more memory as overhead, but memory is expensive and die space is limited. As primarily Scrypt ASICs, it wouldn't make sense to increase production costs or by crippling Scrypt hashrates since that's what they are meant to do in the first place.

Of course all this is assuming reprogramming for Scrypt-N ASICs is even possible.

Again, this is what I think. It may or may not be wrong. Criticism is welcomed and I would gladly learn from others who have input on this matter.

Edit: Shitty drawing I made in paint to help visualize.
https://i.imgur.com/EWhWDMI.png[1]  

how do you guys feel about this?

http://www.coinssource.com/vertcoins-successor-arrives-parallaxcoin/

That's very interesting, but Vertcoin will lance merge mining possibilities the may 2nd instead of parallaxcoin's may 4th, so I think that Vertcoin will take the credit

i looked back a number of pages, all i saw him say was "PoS in not secure" with no further details. Need to back that up if going to make such a claim.