And some of us don't think it's had a decent chance to prove its merit.

I see altcoin space as feature-oriented. To take a deliberately jaundiced perspective: it's all just a pile of whistles and bells decorating classic bitcoin - the basic feature set is fixed by the fork parent. In that context, PoB is a potential genuine extension of that feature set and has some claimed merit - this we are checking out because if it can be made to work, it gives the coin a valuable USP.

The idea does seem to make sense, at least at a surface level and I guess we're big enough and ugly enough to want to persist in finding out whether it is actually capable of delivering. Maybe the dev didn't get the initial implementation quite right. It's not as if it's the first time that's happened.


I agree with the dev's assessment, a revised implementation based on the Peerunity fork holds some promise. The current slimcoin implementation is based on the Bitcoin 0.7.3 codebase (from which Peercoin was originally forked) and that's possibly a bit of an unsteady reed, still using BerkeleyDB and missing a raft of subsequent bugfixes, tweaks, etc.

Ironically, the collective task of getting this particular p2p engine firing smoothly is helping to establish a stronger sense of community ownership. Whilst it's not a strategy one would necessarily choose if given the option, there's little sense in throwing away all the progress to date in an impatient hissy-fit. I prefer to provide support where I think it'll be most effective, even if it's merely contributing a reliable node, as in this instance. I'm not at all sure that the effect of the last round of fixes wasn't banjaxed by the seed nodes going down while the dev was on holiday. We're still regaining network stability and that seems to be a problem in principle for any relatively low-hashrate coin.

We shouldn't underestimate the amount of work involved here. A browse through the repos commit history will inform you that “John Smith” has been consistently and persistently working on the code since December last year. The kids have only just gone back to school and his last post was about three weeks ago. I'm not anticipating full-time commitment from a man with a family, that would be unreasonable and, by my lights, undesirable.

However, I do think that the basic initial promise has been kept - mining on a Raspberry Pi and I prefer not to lose sight of this original goal because I can see a nice little brand story (“marketing strategy”, if you like) that would position this coin rather prettily in the spectrum of altcoin offerings and while it wouldn't necessarily demand involvement from the community of Slimcoin miners/owners, I believe it would definitely invite it. If-and-when the boat stops rocking, I'll start developing the idea further.

Cheers

Graham