Some initial Q&Ayou will change the algo to have more decentralization in mining?
Yes, there is a new POW that should be both ASIC and GPU resistant. A modified version of scrypt was used to overcome the short comings in the Litecoin and others implementations, these modifications 1) greatly increased the memory size used and 2) added a long sequence of random memory accesses which eliminate the effectiveness of pipelining needed to make ASICs efficient.
The code for the new POW and an explanation is here
https://github.com/satoshisbitcoin/satoshisbitcoin/blob/0.11.2_PublicTest_At403562/src/crypto/modified_scrypt_smix.cpp#L193Not able to sync.
Anyone got some active nodes?
Yes you can see the nodes running on the main net here. The trial fork has not activated yet, after it does the nodes will slowly be rejected from the main P2P network and will partition into a new network.
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/?q=/SatoshisBitcoinFullFork_PublicTest_At403562:0.11.2/A new DSNSeeder is used in the modified client to help nodes fine other nodes participating in the fork. If you build the client from the satoshisbitcoin repo everything is automatically setup to use this new DNSSeed.
Wouldn't this give a massive advantage to exchanges? They will own a huge amount of coins on the new chain but will not be required to pay them out to anybody as they will of course not keep separate user balances.
This provides an alternate path for current Bitcoin users as well. All long-term Bitcoin holders start with their coins on the new branch, that is what makes this project / alt coin different from other alt coins. We have plenty of alt coins with different parameters. What we don't have is an alt coin that preservers the first 7 years of Bitcoin ownership. If you own Bitcoin's you will already own part of Satoshi's Bitcoin after it activates.
- The POW algorithm will changed to re-enable CPU mining
Hahaha, good luck with that.
1) This a modified version of scrypt was created by people with extensive experience porting software algorithms into both ASIC and FPGA implementations. Anything can be done in and ASIC, but the design used provides very little benefit over a light-weight CPU core, it is likely the most cost efficient implementation will be a very cheap ARM core connected to a stick of DRAM.
2) The algorithm will be modified if/when needed to keep CPU mining. This will be part of the code base on the official launch version of the client. By forcing changes into the POW algorithm if needed, this lowers the benefit of optimizing in the first place since the time frame to gain a benefit is low. Also we will continue to learn on each iteration and make more and more ASIC/FPGA/GPU-resistant designs. The goal of the project to keep Satoshi's "1 CPU 1 Vote" concept a reality.