But that contradicts his belief that it helps smooth out the original distribution

And while it might sound fair that more hash power = more coins, the way bitcoin works, at low difficulties it means just significantly more hash power = most if not all the coins. Not exactly fair

io.digbtc.net comes up almost instantly for me, despite close to 300ms ping. On the other hand www.digbtc.net takes a while to respond despite the server pinging under 200ms.

You might want to traceroute the pools and see which is actually better for you. It might be how your ISP routes to the pool that's causing your mining efficiency to drop even further.

Still up for me. When did you switch to i0.digbtc.net? If 9 coins were all you got from BTCG, then I would assume the rest of your 81 coins at the time you posted about having 90 coints, were all from i0digbtc?

I think that maybe if you had stuck to btcg, you would had came out ahead. I had pretty much zero coin for the first few difficulties but that was pretty much expected. Once it took more than 2~3 shares per block, my coin rate went up tremendously. Due to the sheer amount of hashing power BTCG have, it would also had been able to void/orphan blocks from other pools as well simply by racing ahead with a longer blockchain.

The bounties do help of course. The problem, which many of us pointed out, was the sheer amount. The pre-existing coins will have an effect on the valuation of the forked coin. So having 5800 would had probably been as good as 580K simply because each would be valued more anyway. If I'm not wrong, due to this i0coin is trading for twice or thrice the ixcoin value?

It does the opposite actually. By counting down, it enabled those with massive hashrate to take advantage of their hashing power to grab majority of those coins without leaving a small window for the smaller players to get some and therefore spread it out.

It also depends on some sheer dumb luck I think? I've got more than 200ms to the io.btcguild server and less hashrate pointed at it than you did... but based on what you had posted, I think I got a few times more i0coins than you before the stales started going down from the new difficulties

Agreeing somewhat on the first part but not on the second. i.e. I think having 580K worth of coins in reserve is not really reasonable, but not pre-announcing the launch was probably a good idea.

I don't think he made a difference to the difficulty either. I remember when I saw it late and gave it a try for the fun of it, it was only at difficulty 2 or 4? Keep in mind the difficulty doesn't go up if he doesn't have the hash power to generate more than 1 block per 10 minutes on the average.

Since he took about 2 months to generate about 580K coins, we're looking at around 6042 blocks over almost 1500 hours, or just over 4 blocks an hour. At that rate, difficulty won't go up. So if 0.5TH/s jumped onto ixcoin at the start, we would had seen the same thing.

Fortunately for ixcoin, there was supposedly only 100~200+ GH/s for several hours to drive up the difficulty without causing too much problem.

This also reminds me of another factor, i0coin is targeting 5 minutes per block, so the block generation speed effectively doubles for the same hash power.

The bitcoin client needs a way to find other peers on the network. So it connects to freenode IRC and uses it as the broadcast network, which essentially looks like a botnet crashing into it when we get a massively anticipated new fork starting up

The only reason ixcoin didn't suffer from the same problem is because it wasn't announced in advance, and secondly the experience caused certain actions to be taken in anticipation for i0coin.

If i0coin had gone first, we wouldn't likely see a major pool readying up to unleash more than 400GH/s worth of hashrate onto it at diff 1. So the crazy block grab wouldn't had been this crazy

First thing, the ones not getting stales won't be complaining.

If you look at the btcguild block stats, practically the first few thousand blocks went to 1 miner (different ones but 1 miner per block). It's just a matter whose block made it to the server before the rest, a network latency race.

If you're right next to the server, connectivity wise, say with a 10ms ping, you'll have a 20ms headstart over everybody else. For somebody on the other side of the Pacific with say 200ms ping, he's going to get the work piece 190ms later and even if he got lucky and found the winning share on the first hash, that's another 190ms window for the guy next to the server to grab the block.

Now since the pool owner is likely going to be running miners ON the same physical network as the server, those miners probably going to win that race most of the time.

The issue is that your complaint is only applicable to a subset. There's no data to prove that removing text porn links will lead to increased female participation in Bitcoin. If anything, early adopters regardless of gender, tend to be more adventurous and less likely to be bothered by something like a text link. Now if there was some animated porn gif which a person cannot help seeing once a page loads that you are objecting to, I would and I believe others too, would support your push to get those disallowed.

I've not done solo mining on Bitcoin since I'm late to the party. But for the rest, I always had to start xxxcoind with the -server flag for solo mining. No difference with i0coin except there is too much hash power going into it from the start. Especially with a single pool having what appears to be way more than 50% of the hashrate, it makes absolutely no point to mine solo. Any blocks you get in, will most likely be erased when the pool solve that block before your block reaches their daemon. With multiple blocks per seconds in the beginning, it is almost guaranteed to do so.

+1 for this post.

There are still too many Bitcoiners who don't realize that in order for Bitcoin to succeed, it MUST be accessible to the general public whose experience with new software is simply download and click-click-click.

The root problem is always the size of the economy. There's nothing much to use Bitcoin for, so most miners will just keep it.

This is interesting, I was under the impression that anybody who intend to do solo mining should know they need to set the client into server mode manually?



I don't think there was any doubt what was going to happen. i0coin is only relatively more moral than ixcoin only because of the transparency and the fact the founder bothered to try something different which serves as good test data. But both are just going to attract people who are hoping to gain financially from being an "early adopter".

If anything, this experience should highlight how an established crypto-currency with high difficulty and a sufficiently diverse hashing population is more reliable and stable than a largely similar fork. Hopefully this will bring an end to pointless forks and anybody coming up with a new one will take note of the lessons here. So it is a good thing IMO if people lost faith in spin off forks, and will therefore think more carefully before doing so.

the i0coin launch may be had been poorly planned but I wouldn't call it a scam just because of that. Nothing that happen wasn't technically unexpected.

Disclaimer: I don't hold thousands of i0coins

Does it? Last I read it retargets every 2 weeks or 2016 blocks, whichever is sooner.

I'd say probably at least 100K. That would take an average of about 7 minutes or so for 1TH to generate each block.

The original bitcoin client code uses the freenode network to find peers to connect to so...

It is a good experiment and fun to watch it unfold.  Part of the question about having a target block generation period of less than 10 min is a bad idea was the amount of forking that would take place. With such low difficulties, the effect is probably multiplied and would serve as data for anybody else planning to change the target interval.