Quote from: cryptomommy on July 03, 2015, 01:58:07 PM

Quote from: dragonseer on July 03, 2015, 04:29:04 AM

Before selling all my Mintcoin before they go on to reach 200 Sat or whatever I did think that someone should demonstrate this attack before hard forking and changing the fast confirming parameters of Mintcoin. But regardless let's look at strategy first in terms of how Mintcoin co-exists with other cryptos. Let's say Bitcoin is your 'Reserve Crypto' which is a standard bearer for cryptos as a usable and practical currency alternative in a 21st century environment. The scheme I proposed for http://poisonedchalice.io for instance, supposes that a stable currency with a 4 billion dollar market cap is mature enough to leverage for some fixed term investment over a four year period. You want Bitcoin to be relatively stable as the lynchpin to this kind of financial product (stable after a 2015 Q4 correction, that is).

Mintcoin on the other hand, can adopt a slower confirmation time, IF it is leaning more towards the investment side of things, and less towards the Point of Sale transactions/merchant space. This space is better filled by something like Zetacoin or Quark, which are superior alternatives to Bitcoin in this instance, held back only by a lack of productive community output and shallow trading volumes at this stage. But these are not POS coins, maybe you want to stick a percentage of savings into a POS coin and security becomes much more important. So if an answer to timedrift is to increase the confirmation time, that means you are making a trade off where Mintcoin becomes more secure at the loss of 30, 60, 90 seconds on average (or whatever it is) each time you shift it around. I think that's a trade off most community members would be happy to make. Personally I have just got 4 BTC out of Mintcoin, but, that's after buying and holding over the space of a year or so (I'll buy back under 29 Sat and before another rate drop) so as you can see fast confirmation times haven't really been all that important so far.

I agree on that note - one thing we should not alter is the speed of Mintcoin - Its flipping amazing and extremely helpful whether sending / receiving to exchanges or a friend. We need the speed.

Have you or any of the community ever put any though into reducing the target block time? Current looks like 30 seconds. My concern would be long term syncability of the chain. It isn't too easy to sync it at the current 1.5 million blocks, and a few years from now it will be even harder. Raising the block time could be a beneficial long term change to throw in while a hard fork occurs.
This sounds very sensible to me with the understanding that our block chain is going to continue to grow - questions?

is it any less secure and why / why not?
will this affect the speed of the coin in transactions (including confirmations)
Does it require a hard fork

I would say that mints biggest security risk is the 2 hour time drift allowance. Read about the vulnerability here http://bitcoinist.net/interview-presstab-pos-vulnerabilities/
The goal is to have as little vulnerability to timedrift as possible, while not compromising the ability to stake. Blackcoin and all of its derivatives are using 16 second timedrift now. I am using 60 second for HyperStake. But would think something along the lines of 3 minutes would work well for MINT.
PressTab - Can you give us three recommended timedrift parameters from high to low and explain how the timedrift will affect the coins speed / confirmation time on the exchanges / security benefits

I would like to have these decisions finalized by the end of the day so PressTab can begin phase 1 of the wallet.

30 block time translates to 30 second confirmations. As far as I know, we are all in consensus we are not going to change that.
What we were talking about earlier is increasing how many confirmations are required as the network standard. 4 which mintcoin currently us at is very low (low security). An attacker, would only need to control the network for 2 minutes in order to 51% attack it. Increasing the # of confirmations to 40 would be exponentially more secure.