Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN][YAC] YACoin ongoing development
by
sairon
on 18/01/2014, 16:33:36 UTC
Created pull requests for the PoS fix for both master and testing branch. Changed the block number for switch to be #420000 as to give users more time to inspect code and start using new version - this should occur around Feb 11. I've disabled the clock drift change for now as it's not quite needed (that reverting commit could be reverted to enable it). Lemme know what you think.

In other news, old c coder has been able to compile a native MSVC++ version of yacoind (https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/pull/17) and I will merge that to testing (or maybe YAC-MSVC++) once the outstanding issues are resolved. Anyone that is able to test it out, please do so. This (I believe) makes YAC the first coin that can be compiled in MSVC++ since the early days of Bitcoin. I'm not a fan of windows and neither is sairon, but there are a lot of extremely talented people out there (like Ron and Satoshi  Wink ) who are masters on that platform, and I believe it will bring YAC to a whole new group of people.
Wow, seems like it's been quite a lot of work. The #ifdef's don't look nice, but dunno if it can be done any other way. Thumbs up!

Our block target for YAC is one minute.  This would imply that there would be a maximum of 720 POS blocks per day.  As YAC continues to grow, this may not offer many opportunities for people to mint their transactions.  Therefore, is it possible to....

1) Mint more than one transaction at once/per block? (i.e. Five transactions of 10 YAC w/ one coin-year each, in an unlocked wallet would mint in the same block, and be returned a single transaction (50.50 YAC)
2) Increase/remove the 'coin-age' cap? (I believe transactions stop gaining 'coin-age' after 90 days)  

This would help reduce the number of PoS blocks generated by a single user and ensure they wouldn't loose any coin-age / 'interest' on their unspent transactions.  

PoS target interval is 10 minutes. Setting it too low, however, would somewhat reduce the security of the network (lowering the active stake volume 10 times faster and we don't yet have enough PoS minters to negate this effect).

Problem with #1 is that it would kinda defeat the PoS minting pseudonymity if you would merge multiple addresses into one PoS block.

#2 would IMO also be bad as it would allow someone to absolutely dominate PoS minting for quite some time (as his coins would have a huge chance to be selected for PoS). You too late, you lose. 90 days is a plenty of time.

Is the N change enforced by timestamps? If so, would it open a path for some kind of fake timestamps attack? (Like faking older timestamps -> smaller N allowed -> same hardware get much higher hashrate, difficulty and trust score in blocks.)
Yes, Nfactor changes are based on timestamps. However, it's not much of an issue as timestamp of a block can't be earlier than that of the previous block (simplified - it's calculated from median time and clock drift, etc).