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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [TLS] Tlascoin | CPU| POW / NEW Twister algo | NO PREMINE
by
dga
on 05/05/2014, 16:16:31 UTC
That is, no pool can only solo mining?

You are strong, you will come up is not it? All the miners will thank you. Grin
hmm, from what I read, it says anyone mining this coin at the moment is getting screwed by dev  Grin
(miner or not not a good coin to mine)

Or the dev is not sufficiently careful to be trusted with your money, either way.

The quote from ypool is correct.  The hash function throws away half of the intermediate state generated by the first sha256:

   sha256(block stuff) --> hash1
   twister(half of hash1) --> hash2
   sha256(hash2) --> hash3

Thus, it's really only a 128 bit hash, not a 256 bit hash -- there are only 2^128 possible inputs to the second sha256, and thus, only 2^128 possible outputs.  Numerically, this is probably not a critical weakness, but it's incredibly uncareful design.  It also means that there are all sorts of ways to optimize the hash function well beyond what's in the built-in miner.

If you go beyond that, Twister was rejected from the sha3 competition for having substantial flaws.  That doesn't outright make it inappropriate in a PoW function, but it should raise substantial questions -- all other features being equal, I would consider a coin that did sha256(), x(), sha256() slightly better if it used a stronger hash function for 'x' than one that seemed like it was already going down the path of having some cryptographic weaknesses.  There's no reason to think that Twister makes this weaker than just dual sha256, but it should raise serious questions about the purpose for the coin's existence.

This is a technically poor coin / PoW design.