The NSA took down the #1 hidden service hoster 'Freedom hosting' and with that about half of all the established websites within the network. They also have exploided some JS to try to identify the visitors. They say it's about the child porn sites but we all know that is just an excuse. Enough is enough. We can't let them take away our freedom of speech further on. Join us at #OpNSA and give them what they fear: Resistance and the coming revolution.

Anonymous #OpNSA Public Service Announcement Regarding the Tor Exploit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUwxz8ALQM0

There is a lot of things wrong with NVC:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266618.0

It's far away from being a coin. Thanks for the link. It seems I have to take a deeper look at current radix sort calculations for GPUs. Reading about it seems to me that radix sort isn't the way to go here in the long run. Scrypt with fixed parameters isn't very wise too in the long run.

It's the first altcoin that is using the hashing power to calculate something useful. And it's still the only one that does this. Primes are (like already said) very important in cryptography and of course can be useful in other areas as-well. People like the idea of using the hashing power to create something useful. I'm not an expert on prime calculation but the used ways to calculate primes seems to be 3 of the few to go at least for now. There will likely be hard-forks necessary as soon as newer and better prime calculation methods come along and make the used obsolete. That isn't a big problem with an active community behind it and will not have to be done often if even once. Sooner or later the development of ASIC's will be worth it and calculating primes will get to the next level. I think XPM will stand around for a long time and will very likely increase in value over time (not necessarily according to BTC but for sure in relation to the USD).

My current full list of preferred cryptocoins: 1. BTC, 2. LTC, 3. XPM

I never had anything to do with NVC at all. For me it was a 'no no' from the start on.
I'm just trying to list the needed information for those who are not able/willing to do the research.

People who are aware of creations like the 'New World Order' and are able to see bigger pictures are probably already aware of what I'm going to tell you here. Everyone else should take the time to read this. This should be an easy to understand explanation for unaware people. If you have some corrections, just let me know about. Feel free to leave other thoughts in here too.

They have planned it through and through. NVC is the highest 'valued' altcoin for a long time now.

Novacoin is based on ppc. It uses proof of work and proof of stake instead of PoW only (initial thread 114712). There was a premine of 210,000+ coins (143828). 110'000 of that premined coins were 'destroyed' (sent to an address that can't be generated with any private key) by BTC-E (more details about that later). The other 100k+ coins that were premined are probably still in existence.

The premining shocked a lot of people away from it (what's a good sign) and created less competition to the people who where willing to mine it (probably the creator themselves, some insiders and a little bit of others who didn't/don't understand why premining is bad). This was the first 'bad-news' for NVC right after the release.

The NVC creators gave 110k of their premined coins to BTC-E to get listed there (probably for a lifetime). Of course you want your altcoin getting listed on the biggest altcoin exchange as soon as possible and as long as possible, especially if you have a lot of the already existing coins and will get more out of mining than others because of the PoS reward system that is included. People got informed about that and BTC-E decided to destroy all the received bribe money after a huge revolt from the community (144158), but never have removed the trading pair nvc/btc on their exchange. Nothing ever got public what has happen to the other 100k premined coins. So they were probably still in the hands of the creators. Smells wrong, right?

The BTC-E story was the second 'bad-news' for NVC and not a lot of the still miners were willing to support that scam further on. A lot of traders have sold their holded NVCs (to the 'still believers'). The above named mining'-insiders' were able to mine even more coins. At that point they have a very high percentage of all coins. It's very likely that it was above 90%. With that it's easy to drive the prize up slowly over time (by simple market manipulation through pumps/dumps, give-away's and so on) and not actually have to give away a high percentage of the holding coins. The slowly increasing prize became interesting for other miners who are looking to mine the coin that gives them the most rewards in a short-term. They mine it and probably sell the mined coins as soon as possible. And who is buying them? Right, the same gays again. These miners don't really care that they are helping securing a network of a coin no one really want to see 'succeed', they are just looking to make as much money as possible.

As already mentioned: The proof of stake implementation makes sure that the miners who have already mined more than others get higher rewards on their further generated blocks. I don't think I have to tell who is going to get the most coins out of mining in the case of nvc.. Of course it's about the same guys again and again.

As time goes by and bitcoin became more and more a topic for none-geeks through mainstream news and simply 'mouth-to-mouth propaganda', more and more people also got interested in altcoins. Most of them are not willing to do their research and simply buy what they think is 'hot'. NVC seems to be very hot then it's the most 'valued' and 'stable' altcoin of em all. The big holders can take most of the investment back if they do it 'right'.

So what we have now is an altcoin called novacoin that has the highest rate of all altcoins and has a very secure network (probably the most secure one of all the altcoins out there). But it's also a coin that is 'controlled' by a small amount of people. Newbies will fall for that coin and the process will start over and over again. The nvc powers in place will not give up their position without a fight. Sounds familiar? It is of course not driving satoshi's idea of decentralization further on. You can call NVC being the NWO of the cryptocoins. I also like to call it 'No Value Coin'.

So if that still isn't looking like a very well planned scam for you, then I really can't help you.

FreeTrade: Thanks for your input and it's nice to see other people working on that too. We may should exchange our results. I like to do the programming very low level for that purpose. While assembler is a little bit too freaky and time intense to code with, we are doing it on very low leveled c. P.e.: We don't use any strings at all yet and just std math operations besides the radix sort. Your mentioned SHA hashing doesn't make sense within the proof of work algorithm itself in my eyes. The created algo has to be as good as the well known hashing operations in terms of irreversibility and unique hashes anyway and then nothing else is needed around it. I think our current mechanism is already very good in terms of that.

Seems counterproductive in your explained view. Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of actually producing anything 'useful' with the hashing power like your mentioned primecoin is doing (i'm mining XPM btw). But besides that it's still about getting coins out of mining and we don't want certain people to have an advantage against others in that game. Therefore a CPU friendly (and of course 'botnet/server farm' resistant) coin may is the right way to go. We would love to include calculations in the proof of work algorithm that brings what you have called 'a social value' but we don't want to loose the mentioned focus in it. If it somehow can be combined, just let me know..

Right, the lcache is used in scrypt. Reading to and writing from the RAM would be too time intense. So forcing the process to use enough memory does it make harder for GPUs,FPGAs,ASICs to outperfom the lower processors. Anyway: I think you guys are missing the point here. For getting a pure proof of work mechanism done there is no need for an enc/dec function like scrypt. It can be done with simple hashing (what we are looking for). Of course it's interesting to see how scrypt makes the processing cache intense and it may be something we should include in our hashing function too. The GPU resistance should not only depend on simply high memory usage. We should have a hashing function that includes several different ways to make it CPU friendly. The question is still the same: Anything else than radix sort we should include?

Related to the botnet and co resistance I've already mentioned that this is a topic for later. Having a good enough hashing function has to be done first. It's about getting this done step by step. Don't expect another useless altcoin that just clones an existing one with little changes in it.

I'm not a scrypt expert. It's new to me that with the default values it's truly GPU resistant. As far as I understand, it's not that the operations aren't hard to be done by GPUs itself, it's just that enough memory is necessary for a certain scrypt hashing (depending on the used values of course). So with enough RAM a GPU should outperform CPUs like they do it on SHA256, no matter what variable values are used. Correct me if I'm wrong.

We are aware of that but it's difficult to truly achieve it. You can't just implement some IP restrictions and think it's done. There is much more about this to do. It's a point for later. First of all we want to get the hash function CPU 'friendly'. Any other 'restrictions' will be included after that.

Some of you like to see an altcoin that is truly GPU,FGPA,ASIC resistant. We would like to see such a coin too so we have started experimenting. We are working on the hashing function right now. It's radix sort based. We use 64 random numbers between 10000 and 75536 (16^4+10k). This 512 char long decimal number is the 'key'. (If we subtract the 10k on each number block and convert it to hex, it's a 256 long hex string in total [or in other words: 1024 bits].) We then change each number block with a specific simple math function and radix sort them by LSD. This gives us a 'hash' (same structure as 'key'). Using a difficulty is already in place. The above explained process for getting a hash out of a key is also depending on the difficulty. The higher the difficulty the more often the hashing has to be done before getting back a hash (simply said). Validating a hash is based on simple math functions depending on the difficulty. The higher the difficulty the less hashes are valid (simply speaking).

I just want to make sure we are on the right track with this.

Possible improvements: I would like to implement tacotime's mentioned tree search algorithm in topic 64239. But it has to be implemented in a way the search is mandatory and that's very hard to do. We may also should use radix sort MSD and LSD instead of LSD only. What do you think?

Do you have any idea what we should change/add to the hashing function?

Don't think the 'newer' generation isn't aware of all that. As far as I can tell there are much more younger people willing to accept such views than older ones. There are much more older people who took their past years to get at least some 'wealth' for themselves within the system and for them it's very hard to look at it that way. There are much less young people who are not in that wealthy position and for them it's much easier to see through. Another point is that younger people are much more motivated to at least try to change something. Satoshi is more likely about 20 years old than 70.

Of course do the brainwash instruments have it's effects especially to the new generation and there are a lot of zombies within it. As a kid I was very naive too but I've learned to use my own brain and feelings instead of keep being a clueless slave. And now I'm trying to support each movement that could take the power back to the people. There are not much external inputs needed to at least think about it and the amount of inputs are everywhere. I don't see the problem that people are not aware. I more see the problem that not enough well organized groups are willing to do anything against it.

It's obvious what Dr. Higgs thinks about BTC (if he takes the time to understand the design). BTC is the first real global initiation to take the financial powers from the central banks and give them back to the people. BTC is ahead everything else within the financial world and will (as long as we fight for it) more and more be a real thread for them.

You can't have a creation like BTC within a free market without expecting some guys creating similar alternatives to it. Right now it's hard to say how even bitcoin will establish. I think it's great to have something like litecoin. Alternatives are always a good thing. Of course they depend at some point of bitcoins success. LTC has a few advantages over BTC even if it's still very similar. We will see how these advantages will work out in the future. Of course people can make/loose huge short-term profit with it and so a lot of speculators will sooner or later jump on it too. Bitcoin is still in it's early days and litecoin even more. The fluctuation isn't a bad thing at all and may stabilize over time with market growth. Therefore is also a long-term success chance for litecoin. For me there is no reason why LTC shouldn't exist besides BTC. Does it take any potential value from BTC? According to the value in USD, yes. But that doesn't mean these two can't coexist without hurting each other. You don't blame silver that it makes your gold less valuable than it could be without. If people see reasons to convert some/all of their BTC into LTC then it shall be that way.

I'm looking forward to this and think both of em will have their usage(s).

That's all true if we are talking about money that is sooner or later needed to pay something with. Of course it's highly speculative to hold any BTC if it's about storing wealth because of the unknown future value compared to fiat. It's like with any other asset. There are no guarantees in any market. I don't get what you are trying to say here. You shouldn't focus on the 'problems' that are the same within each other asset. You should rather focus on it's specialties against everything else. Bitcoin has a huge potential (in several ways) and that's why people are willing to invest in it (speculate on it).

Haven't read all the replies. But here is where the idea of 'buying something nice instead' fails. We are still not at the point where a business can function without any fiat money at all. Imagine the business that is taking your Bitcoins needs to cover their costs with USD (or similar) and is likely forced to sell some or even all of the coins through exchanges. That leads to the same effect in having a prize drop. It might be worse because they don't care about the maybe already low prize, they just want to get their costs covered with almost no risk. This could lead to a much worse prize drop. I'm not saying all the business will do it, but I think most of 'em will.

I've no idea if that is true or not. But the point is it could be. Gox still has too much impact on the prize and so it's very easy for the authorities to prevent the creation from rising in value. And they sure do. We can't really know how much a Bitcoin is worth as long as we let the decision to centralized exchanges. A decentralized creation like bitcoin also needs decentralization when it comes to defining the prize. There is a lot of work to do before we are able to get there. Until then you can't expect any rise in value at all.

There will always be people mining just to help prevent the decentralization aspect of the network without the focus of making any profit with it directly. You can't stop the big players using their ASIC rigs. So ASICs (even if they are just small ones) for everyone is the way to go. Anyone who is actively into bitcoin and want to keep it alive will sooner or later do his part for it (doesn't necessarily need to be mining).

It will likely cost you too much for buying all the hardware necessary to get a decent amount of network shares to break even fast. My succession is to mine litecoin. At least you can mine something with ordinary GPUs while these efforts mostly do not lead to anything within bitcoin anymore because of ASICs.

BTC and LTC. It is risky according through prize volatility. Convert some/all of 'em in USD or similar using exchanges if you don't want to take the risk of loosing value (in fiat crap) on your coins.