Quote from: MaD!CaT on July 04, 2014, 12:08:44 AM

Is it true Q2C is a dead coin now?

That would be an ecumenical matter.

Qubitcoin is listed on Poloniex, blocks are being chained, the network's seeing the same modest but persistent hashrate as is typical with mature altcoins, there's a handful of persistent nodes. To my untutored eye, the depth chart on Poloniex suggests that the price could be quite labile at this level.

I'd say Qubitcoin is as well as can be expected for an altcoin thats deep into the halving sequence, has an absent dev and isn't operating to any particular plan.

There appears to be a hard core of persistent residual belief in the validity of the notion of a technical altcoin, even if no-ones quite sure what that actually is, just that Qubitcoin is one.

It's not that Qubitcoin is especially neglected as an altcoin, there're loads of others just bumbling along with a community that is basically not overly dissatisfied with the situation and not seeming to experience any pressing urge to change things in case it upsets the applecart mainly because no-one's quite sure why the situation pertains as it does so no-one's quite sure how to proceed and doing nothing seems to be a course that puts assets at least immediate risk.

But then someone comes along and asks Is this coin dead? My response is Define dead and maybe I can give you an answer. But thats a bit of a cheat, I know you cant provide a definition of dead (its ostensive), so I cant give you the answer you seek, other than to point to a collection of instances and suggest you develop your own notion, then come back and ask a more focussed version of the question.

Qubitcoin hodlers might recognise my userid from earlier posts and recall that I've been maintaining a plan B repository; part backup, part sandpit.

It's what I use to try out experiments, such as using a chain of the 256bit versions of the hash functions --- instead of a chain of 512bit versions of those hash functions and then throwing away half of the hash before returning.

The Merckle tree implementation in the Bitcoin reference client is coded to use uint256 so the uint512 returned by a SHA3-512 hashfn has to be trimmed to fit -- in effect throwing away some (but, importantly, not all) of the advantages accruing from the use of NIST candidates. Some of the NIST candidate hash functions are faster in 512 than in 256, nearly all candidate SHA3-512s are faster than SHA2-256, so most of the speed advantage is retained, almost no matter which NIST candidates are chosen.

I idly questioned: is there a more felicitous selection of 5 NIST hashfns that brings maximum speed for a pure 256 solution and how does that compare with a truncated 512 solution?

A visit to the SHA-3 Zoo and a tour of the pertinent NIST candidates brings up the documentation that accompanies the reference implementation, optimisations, etc. that each candidate is obliged to make available in an associated submission zipfile, e.g. http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/sha-3/Round1/documents/Lesamnta.zip. I happily collected the lot. (Sorry but this is whats typically entailed if were to treat the term technical with any degree of seriousness).

The other piece of Qubitcoin work I'm pursuing is a re-release of the original codebase as a full fork of the bitcoin codebase that was used for the original history-less commit.

This technique re-inserts the particular altcoin codebase back into the commit history as branch of the official repos so it can assume the full benefits of its heritage. I've done this for Mooncoin, paving the way for a simple iterated merge of the developments of the upstream version tree, right up to the latest master.

To keep you all in the loop, Zeljko and I are carrying on a what do we do now to secure the immediate future of the coin discussion which involves ugly topics such as Q2C2fiat points - DNSSeed nodes must be hosted: hosting == fiat, Q2C won't cut it.

Just so's that visitors dont get the wrong impression about Qubitcoin's vitality, I'll set up an alternate github org project, qubitcoin-project (same as I've done for Mooncoin) which you're all welcome to sign up to. I'll ensure that everyone knows where the spare keys are kept and we'll work out some arrangement for community ownership of the IP of the various properties involved (official web site, block explorer, DNSSeed nodes, official p2pool, whatever).

Cheers

Graham