What do you mean by "shady"?  I use poloniex and it seems to be ok for Level 1 accounts since they do not ask for any private information other than an email address.  But yes I would not use them for their higher level accounts because I think they do require a lot of personal information.

So much anger.  I have read previous posts debating this topic.  One thing that comes up is POS needs checkpoints but POW doesn't.  I believe POW and POS needs to have checkpoints. Here are my thoughts.  Actually these ideas are not mine just what I have read previously on the same topic.  But for new users this might help.

There is a perception that a long POW chain has a lot computation work behind it.  This is not always true.  POW difficulty changes to meet the target block generation period.  There is no guarantee that a longer block chain has more work than a shorter chain.

On POW chain it is implied that work is being done and a longer POW chain has more work on it.  This is because on honest chains which have equal difficulty targets are for most part true.  But on this topic we are not worried about honest nodes trying to reach consensus with long running nodes which already have the honest chains.

In this case we are talking "checkpoint POS vs POW". Or as I like to say, "what happens when a new node comes online in a hostile hacker zone- how does a client trust one long chain vs another."

A hacker / attacker could basically fake blocks /w fake creation times for POS and POW chains.  For POW, the attacker would generate chains with lowest allowed difficulty level and then keep it this way while generating a longer block chain.  In this way an attacker can create a valid long POW block chain with low work / energy while following all the rules. This is sometimes overlooked because people look at bitcoin chain and see tons of energy expended in the mining races. The difficulty target in POW is to maintain block generation time not to insure there is a provable amount of work being done on the chain.

Enter the trusty checkpoint.  Without the checkpoints a POS or POW would fail in this scenario. A checkpoint hash however cements the block chain up to a given date.  With checkpoints an attacker has to mount the attack after this point which is more difficult to do with both POW or POS coins.  For POW, the attacker has to reduce the difficulty target using energy.  For POS, he would have to purchase a stake to reduce difficulty to generate a new fake chain.  

So I accept checkpoints.  They are cheap and make it highly difficult for attackers to workaround it.  

>stake took 4s ... stake took 2s ...stake took 3s

Interesting that the stake times can vary this much.  I would assume on a fast PC this would be more consistent. 

Maybe consolidating the outputs to reduce hashing would help.

 

>I'm not sure what happens if one of your peers sends you a block while you are working through your outputs. Maybe you stop working and use the peer's block, or maybe you keep working hoping to find an output of your own which can compete with the peer's block.

This to me is the difference.  A single user may finish hashing their wallet in under a millisecond vs JD jumbo wallet which takes 3-4 secs.  A 4 second head start would allow a valid stake to completely update the entire network me thinks.  It might make sense for client continues to look for valid stakes for a few 100 milliseconds because the time to propagating a valid stake is kind of variable, but after that it seems like it would be a wasted effort.  I do not have the knowledge to read code to know how clam works.

>The JD staking wallet does often have two outputs which are able to stake at the same time, and so only the first of them gets to stake.

It may be so, but I was more curious about the the actual hashing events being serialized.  Lets say a a wallet had 1 million inputs, then how long would it take hash all 1 million inputs? My guess is the first 1/2 million would have a greater probability to stake and not orphaned then then last 1/2 million just due to the time it takes to do hashing. 

Doesn't the 1st person who has a valid stake and propagates over the network win? 

I wonder if the size of the staking wallet affects the probability of staking.  Although POS doesn't require as much work as POW, there is still hashing going on for each input.  For smaller wallets this time is small . However for a large wallet or wallets with lots of tiny inputs, then I assume clam client does the hashes in a serial fashion which cause the 1st inputs to have a higher probability to stake vs ones which happen later in time.

My router has upnp setup does work with the clam coin client.   I saw same thing in the bitcoin core client but then it was fixed at some point.  Anyhow, what are the correct udp or tcp ports that need to be opened for home router to accept inbound traffic.

Thanks.

Does clam have any bounty rewards system? Me thinks clams need to kick start some projects to get some positive acceleration.  I would be willing to donate some of my clams towards clam based projects if a trusted person would organize it.

I do not view the whale digger to be a problem- its supply and demand.

The rise in clams initial value was probably due to early adopters not wanting to sell any coins.  To me, it would be better for a coin to not rise or fall too much because both causes problems.  When I see rise in price of clams without any new uses for clams, I usually think the problem is there is not enough coin supply to meet new user demand. So it encourages a hoarding feedback loop with no actual value behind it.  Falling has an opposite feedback loop.  The whale digger can be viewed as both helping to distribute clam supply cheaply to new users, and a destroyer of the coin value to older users.

I bought clams for many reasons- mostly to support the idea of POWS. I probably will hold and buy some more on the way down as long as I view coin as secure and following its original goals.  As long as the whale follows the rules they should be allowed to do anything they want. Nothing is wrong with this. Since there is not a lot of uses for clams atm, it makes sense to me why the whale digger would want to sell.  The short term view would be to sell your clams into btc or fiat and wait for prices to stablize.  If you do not like the Whale digger, the best attack on the whalers would be to provide new uses for clams.  A light weight android client for example would be great way to make clams more usable/  tradable.

Negative statements like this is like saying since were going to die someday the future looks bleak.

As long as nobody has mounted a successful attack clam's POWS implementation, I would say the future looks bright.
The longer clam simply runs as it is doing makes me think POWS has a future and POW mining is a waste of energy.

I had an idea about tx fees.  I would to see the clam client allow people who stake their clams have some control over the transaction fees they will accept.  Also the ability client to publish their fee requirements into the block chain.  This way poeple making transactions could dynamically see what the required tx fee will be needed to get their transactions approved.  If the client scans last X number of blocks for example, it could calculate the probability or time it would take to get the transaction approved. 

This would provide a self adjusting fee system.  The way bitcoin seem to work to me, is the client sw is manually tweaked with new tx fees structure depending on the price of the currency relative to USD and potential threat of spam.  So I thinking this would be better way to handle this.

Move your mouse over the ticket icon on the bottom left corner of the clam client.  It will pop up a message on the expected stake time. 

Hi, 

I'm a newbie to clams.  Is there a possibility to have a SPV wallet for clams?  Is there a white paper for clams like bitcoin?
I went to the two clam websites - both are high on graphics and low on detailed information.
I waded through hundreds of posts on this forum to figure stuff out, but alot of it sounds like its wrong and from what I read in later posts.
For example, is it still possible to randomly get 1000 clam bonus when staking?  It sounds like that doesn't happen anymore? 
Asking new users to read 200 pages of old stuff is not good for clam adoption...  But still I like the clam.