As a crypto-currency researcher, I examine a large number of altcoins to understand what's happening on the blockchain. However, many of these coins have multiple client versions, or syncing take a long time, or the clients are unstable.

I know I can download the blockchain database dumps from http://cryptochainer.com/. It appears, however, that you would still need to install the original clients. Is there a way to directly parse the blockchains from  http://cryptochainer.com/ without using the original clients?

I'm a researcher on crypto-currencies. Lately, when I was examining the blockchain of Dogecoin, I found that a small number of blocks were not merged-mined, even though Dogecoin had already switched to merge-mining.

Here's one example: https://www.zpool.ca/explorer/DOGE?start=972420

You can see that Blocks #972415 and #972403 were not merge-mined (PoW). All other blocks were merge-mined (AuxPoW). This happened in November 2015, more than a year after Dogecoin had switched to merge-mining.

I would expect all blocks to be merge-mined at this point, since a miner would be generating dogecoins for free while mining another Scrypt coin like Litecoin. In other words, it seemed irrational to be mining just Dogecoin, given that you could also have mined Litecoin.

So how would you explain my observation? Were a small number of miners behaving irrationally?

Thanks!

We are a group of crypto-currency researchers from the University of California, San Diego, USA. We are writing an academic paper on the socioeconomic behaviors in the altcoin community.

To send us your response, please visit https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1016846.0

Your response will be kept strictly confidential. We will anonymize it and incorporate into a scientific publication. Thank you!

Based on feedback from past survey respondents, I have updated the survey above. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1016846.0 -- thanks!

We are a group of crypto-currency researchers from the University of California, San Diego, USA. We are writing an academic paper on the socioeconomic behaviors in the altcoin community. In particular, we are interested in the profitability of mining: What is the revenue? What is the cost? What is your motivation for mining?

To send us your response, please visit https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1016846.0

Your response will be kept strictly confidential. It will be anonymized and become a part of a scientific publication. Thank you!

Thank you!

To clarify, we are aware that there are more than 500 altcoins in the past three or four years. Some try to reinvent the financial market. Some try to generate profit. Some try to do both. Some have other goals.

We are trying to understand the profitability model in an objective and purely academic way. It is not our intent to speculate or judge anyone. Through this survey, we are hoping to gather anecdotal evidence on the mining and creation of altcoins. At the same time, we are conducting analyses on blockchains and exchanges. In a few months, we hope to publish a report, using data from both our analyses and the surveys, and to help the community understand the altcoin scene a little better.

As an academic, we are interested in understanding the profitability of altcoins. How much money are you talking about? Revenue? Costs? Feel free to respond via the Google Forms in the first post of the thread. Thanks!

You may have raised an interesting point. To avoid any misunderstanding, however, could you clarify your question first? In particular, what did you mean by "possession"? How can a cryptocurrency "disenfranchise" something?

Thanks for the feedback, Graham! We will iterate and improve the survey.

And yes, the result of the survey will be a part of a scientific publication, in which features that identify specific individuals or altcoins will be removed. In the past few years, we have published papers such as http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~snoeren/papers/botcoin-ndss14.pdf and http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/IMC13.pdf.

Many of the popular altcoins that we have observed are hosted on websites that clearly reflect a high level of professionalism. We thus make the assumption that a nontrivial amount of effort was spent on marketing, with the goal of attracting more followers and standing out from the other coins.

You all have raised a good point. The cost of developing a new altcoin may be low, yet to make sure that others would start using it (e.g. mining and trading the coin), the marketing cost can be significant. Our research group is trying to quantify such costs. How much does marketing cost? How many man-hours does it involve?

I'm surprised that most respondents so far say that the revenue from creating altcoins is close to zero. If indeed it costs effort to create and market a new altcoin, a rational altcoin creator would expect to receive some form of revenue in return (in addition to feeling good).

What would be the revenue? And how to generate this revenue? (You can respond to the thread or on the anonymous survey above. Thanks!)


Nxt may be a good choice moving forward. Rather, we are interested in a retrospective analysis. For the past two years, there has been a surge in new altcoins that are directly derived from bitcoin or litecoin. While some coins are created to make a better world, others may have a more rational motive. What's their business model? What are their costs and revenues? How do they maximize returns?

All questions are optional. We're mainly interested in the cost and revenue of creating a new altcoin, and of mining altcoins.

Please help out. Thanks!

We are a group of crypto-currency researchers from the University of California, San Diego, USA. We are writing an academic paper on the socioeconomic behaviors in the altcoin community.

We would like to invite everyone to participate in a short survey.

• For altcoin developers
• For altcoin miners

(Feel free to fill in both surveys if you are a developer and a miner.)

Your experience with altcoin will be useful toward our research and the community. All responses will be kept confidential and used only for research purposes. The result of the survey will be a part of a scientific publication, in which features that identify specific individuals or altcoins will be removed. It is not our intent to speculate or judge anyone. Our goal is to understand the community in an objective, data-driven way.

In the past few years, we have published papers such as this one on de-anonymizing Bitcoin and another one on bitcoin-mining botnets. Both papers were published at prestigious academic conferences such as IMC and NDSS.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the lead researcher, Danny Y. Huang.

Thank you!

(Edited this post based on feedback from past survey respondents.)

Yes, that would be one solution.

The multifaucet.tk wallet search would redirect you to a third-party ad network. Subsequently, the ad network would redirect you to the destination page -- which, in this case, is the result of the wallet search. I'm in California; the ad network being shown is adf.ly. Depending on your geographic location, you may get a different ad network. These third-party sites generate revenue for multifaucet upon every ad view. This is paid for by the ad publisher. However, multifaucet has no control of what ads are being shown. To maximize their profits, ad publishers may show ads that may lead to malware, which promises higher margins than conventional ads.

In my case, I encountered the following page:

http://i.imgur.com/xzj6fWl.png

Update: It turns out that the sudden increase in block reward is due to transaction fees. For example, for TTC block 2372, the block reward is 8008 TTC. However, one transaction pays a transaction fee of more than 58% of the transferred value. This results in a transaction fee of 10000 TTC, which goes to the lucky miner of this block.

See details below:

http://blockexperts.com/ttc/tx/93841752430473b1aec3965de8642f2fbc7edddb043464c4013636010f28f643

Update: It turns out that the sudden increase in block reward is due to transaction fees. For example, for TTC block 2372, the block reward is 8008 TTC. However, one transaction pays a transaction fee of more than 58% of the transferred value. This results in a transaction fee of 10000 TTC, which goes to the lucky miner of this block.

See details below:

http://blockexperts.com/ttc/tx/93841752430473b1aec3965de8642f2fbc7edddb043464c4013636010f28f643

I verified the blockchain as shown BlockExperts against the official TTC client. There is no error. If you don't believe BlockExperts, open up the TTC client, and manually examine the coinbase transactions for the suspicious blocks (e.g. 1779, 1819, 1949, 2372, 66574, and 66696). None of these blocks have the typical 8008 + fee reward --- they are much higher.


The premining only occurs at block 2, as indicated in the source code: https://github.com/tittiecoin/tittiecoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L830-L841

Such sporadic increases in block reward, as shown above, are highly suspicious. Please forward this issue to the development team. Thanks!

I'm adding this to the list of possible scams:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=951827.0