thanks for the rewelcomes! its feeling to good to get my fingers back into SOIL, and am hoping to put as many hours as possible into it, in between tattoo clients.


ive been reading up on this, and one might even think that the massive mining attacks that hit us (and lead to ridiculously long block times) during the past winter, may have been a precursor to these sorts of DDOS and double spend attacks. i like the idea of locked checkpoints, but i do also dislike the idea that it could lead to more centralization (a few individuals having control of when and where hardcoded checkpoints are set and handled.. which in malicious hands can lead to more double-spend attacks).

and perhaps this is the sand in the Vaseline; especially for smaller blockchains such as SOIL, or Krypton or Shift. (or whatever the newest ETH fork is); is that to provide stronger blockchain security, one must centralize more - which goes against the IDEALS behind cryptocurrency. ROCK -> x <- HARD PLACE. take the split in the ETH community, where now we have ETH, ETC, and EthRegenesis. This all led out of a centralized (Ethereum Foundation) decision to roll back the block chain.

Krypton seems to be moving onto a separate PoS chain until they solve the issue, moving away from the EVM. they purchased hash power and distributed it to try to regain control...  Shift is migrating to LISK, which I think has even MORE opportunity to be maliciously used do their their PoS delegates protocols as well as how the LISK sidechains are governed in relation to consensus and minting. Neither of those options seem very good, nor does the idea of sheltering as an Expanse-based asset, which makes no sense at all to me. `

we will be updating the core SOILcoin protocols with a fork, updating our system to Homestead compliancy. we will, i think, stick with following the protocol advances of the ETH-Core group, regardless of how i might feel personally about the recent fork and how it affects a radical shift away from decentralization. this will also be an opportunity to revisit the block reward issues, to increase supply and foundation reserves.

ill be watching VERY CLOSELY regarding the fixes that are discovered to prevent these attacks against small-hashrate currencies. setting out hard benchmarks on the blockchain, which is slightly decentralizing, seems to be the best answer right now, and perhaps a smart contract can be constructed to allow this to be done autonomously, controlled by a contract rather than an individual or even a 2-of-3 multisig wallet signature reliance to make those changes to benchmarks.

so, for the next week, ill be getting the hard nodes reset on servers. this will be an out of pocket expense, but if anyone knows of NEARLY FREE cloud servers that i can run the nodes on, vultr costs about $10 a month US per node. i will be updating the OP with up-to-date links and will get our website back up, hopefully with the soilcoin.com domain. ill get to work on the protocol upgrades, and update our mist-based wallet to the newest iteration.