It is simple to prevent the coin from finding PoS blocks.

In your $HOME, open .cachecoin/cachecoin.conf in a text editor

Add a line to it and save it:

reservebalance=999999999

And then if cachecoind was running, restart it.

Reserve balance is amount of coin that are to be ready and will NOT take part of staking.
Setting it to anything larger than your balance will effectively turn off the staking.

Increasing output 10 times will also (more or less) drop the price 10 times, which might scare both possible future investors and current holders that might just panic sell, pushing the price down even more ...

Now the price is around 300 satoshi, but once (if) it gets to about 2-4 satoshi range or less, it becames a bit difficult to trade due to most markets not having prices with fractional satoshi cost. That might ultimately kill the coin.

With bitcoin, everybody was scared that Satoshi has 1000000 BTC and what effect on market that would have .... and in the end, it had no effect, except for "scared" people.

I guess most of these unaccounted CACH are already dead or forgotten and while some parts might resurrect if somebody founds a lost wallet, it will happen randomly and over time.

I think good idea would be just to keep current output, but in a similar way as bitcoin halves its rewards over a long time frame, use a similar scheme.
The mined amounts would (perhaps more gradually instead of halving at regular intervals) decrease. That might create a currency with slightly "deflationary" trend and make it more attractive for miners, holders, investors and merchants to accepts (as the price would not drop, but with well-estimated gradual decrease, the actual value of one CACH might be more or less stable in time)

I might also join the development. While I have relatively little extra time to spare, so I can't promise anything big (do not expect stuff like smart contract ala Ethereum - that would require more or less huge rewrite of the protocol and in the first place fixing all the problems Ethereum has - there are many ways how a smart contract user can "shoot itself in the foot" and lose coins and there are many challenges also from the programming perspective and it is very hard to do the contract so you get some compromise between how powerful the contracts will be and how long will it take to verify them, etc ...)

Good thing about CACHe is the durability of the coin - due to its variable PoW + PoS it survived very well both times when there was a lot of interest in the coin and also times with minimal interest in the coin.

When comparing with other coins, what is missing in CACHe is the 100% fungibility - while bitcoin is relatively anonymous, current governments tend to regulate the currencies and if they will start having "blacklisted" (i.e. those that were involved in some hack, or criminal activity or whatever, so coins that were touched by some criminal in the past may be "tainted" forever) and "whitelisted" coins, then this could be a major blow to usability, as coins from many BTC hacks are already dispersed in the blockchain, often they are partially in wallets of people not connected to any of the hack.
Having fully anonymous transaction will ensure 100% fungibility -- all coins are equal, there would be no "tainted" coins

In order to not reinvent the wheel, the code could be "borrowed" from other coins - there are several candidates, like ZCash (although it does have relatively complex setup), DASH (no complex setup, but you have to add the masternodes infrastructure, which is quite complex) and few other coins I have currently on my watchlist.

I may also create a mining pool if there would be interest

Probably not at current price, where the expected profit would be around $0.30/day per CPU involved. But currently the price is a bit fluctuating, so there actually may be some decent profit if you wait

There is not many CPU-only coins, I've mined recently for example Verium in idle cycles and while I made over $1/day per CPU involved, it was only thanks to a price raise, so I'd guess the cost is more or less the same across all coins - equilibrium based on demand and supply, but if you time selling/keeping the coins at the right moment, you could make a bigger profit .

I've uploaded a bootstrap for those interested:
http://cachecoin.catcoin.cz/bootstrap.tar.bz2 (212 MB)
Extract contents of the archive into ~/.cachecoin and then syncing should be fast.

I've checked the status and there is quite some heavy mining.

Due to high n-factor, Cachecoin is no longer very efficiently minable with GPU and with decent CPU you get roughly 40 hashes per second.

As the estimated network hashrate is quite high (20-40Kh/s, which is approximately 500 to 1000 of CPUs), mining on a single CPU would mean several days to find a block.

I may set up a mining pool if somebody would be interested.

If you have trouble connecting, add nodes to ~/.cachecoin/cachecoin.conf:

addnode=95.129.166.161
addnode=46.42.18.54
addnode=95.56.230.130
addnode=90.188.4.252
addnode=46.174.254.155
addnode=5.9.77.113
addnode=145.239.189.106
addnode=89.20.235.47
addnode=83.149.126.153
addnode=83.149.126.153
addnode=83.149.126.153
addnode=108.170.1.134
addnode=18.218.175.220
addnode=85.229.148.185
addnode=130.255.12.3
addnode=116.109.8.201
addnode=78.138.168.196
addnode=27.193.75.17
addnode=2001:14bb:170:5da4:4c7:68c9:42ba:2199
addnode=188.67.104.159
addnode=195.200.244.73
addnode=23.121.32.255
addnode=2001:0:9d38:90d7:7b:abc:a6eb:14d0
addnode=82.27.21.3
addnode=95.31.5.166
addnode=80.247.47.34
addnode=66.244.240.237
addnode=66.244.240.237
addnode=164.215.117.146
addnode=2001:0:9d38:6ab8:140e:338a:d1d5:edc9

1046.15% value rise within 24 hours? What is happening?

Same happened to me. If you are under NAT, you have to punch holes in your firewall and forward port 36988 to your PC

What I see is the market is now getting saturated. Back in 2013 you could get off with a rebranded LTC/DOGE clone (from coingen or similar service, although it is not very hard to create the clone manually) with little or no innovation and with a bit of luck and not much effort get it to an exchange and make some money.

Good promotion/branding was helping more than technical quality here.

Some coins have brought minor improvements (better difficulty retargeting, coin rewarding or PoW algorithm, marginal improvements to the wallet UI), major improvements or ideas were relatively rare (PoS, anonymous coin transfer, ...)

I am not sure how profitable would it be to release a new "copycat" coin today, I think some people will still hop in to mine some (what if this coin takes off? Risky, but possible profit may be large), but chance to make some reasonable profit here for the dev are IMHO quite small. ICOs are better from perspective of coin creator, as you collect some money first and then release the coin later, bur people are now aware that the ICO market is full of scams and are very cautious to invest into someone with no or bad reputation.

For innovative coin (if you are smart enough to invent a completely new feature/concept, then go for it, but I'd consider a coin that mixes features from several other coins as innovative - for example smart contracts from Ethereum with anonymous sending, master nodes and on-chain voting/funding from DASH, add in PoS, multiple PoW algos, proof-of-space/capacity from other coins ....) you could do a good start, but that is nothing you can create within a day, it will be more like months of work of small to medium team to get first version ready and then work on improvements and bugfixes once the coin is alive. Good testing is a must, as small technical error can kill the coin quite quickly and community is not very forgiving if you would do several successive hardforks to fix your glitches.

From purely technical point of view: Bitcoin is technically inferior to other coins, but it was first and has long tradition and wide acceptance.

My personal prediction is that there will be many active viable coins in the future (like we have many active FIAT currencies nowadays), but from smaller coins (lets say lower than 50th place on coinmarket cap) I think more than 90% of them will die off or stagnate (it could be profitable if you predict correctly the few of them that will survive and invest into them

Me neither, this one was the first. As soon as I opened the port, the wallet synced within a minute.
I don't have double NAT, the router at which I've opened the port has a public IPv4 address.

Well, that is not a best way to do a swap that runs for a very limited time - people who missed the tight window have now lost all their old Corgis.
Some other "reborn" coins that decided to start a new chain have put all the old balances in the genesis block, so while the coin has new features and rules, it would work with all the old wallets.

Well, perhaps it is better for this coin to get on LTC or even DOGE market, as due to high denomination, the current price is less than 1 satoshi and thus untradable on BTC market.

With DOGE the price could be perhaps around 0.01 - 0.1, so perfectly tradable with enough decimal places

Bitcoin had a hard fork in the past due to bug in core protocol (integer overflow allowed to create bitcoins out of thin air).
Is this a bug in core protocol, or just somebody badly programmed or secured a smart contract?

Where would you draw the line? $100K lost due to bad smart contract will not be hardforked, but $1M will?

Nope. Everybody should be responsible for their own mistakes and those could be costly sometimes. With FIAT one small programming mistake could also cost you or your company millions (like Knight capital lost $440M within few minutes due to "trading glitch"), so crypto is not different here. Deal with it. Real world does not have hardfork options to fix your mistakes

About 4 years ago I've mined about 80 new altcoins shortly after they were announced here.

I've gone through the wallets and the statistics of survivability are:
- Only one of them took up nicely (DASH) and is now valuable.
- About 8% of them sort of survived and gained some small value (not much though ...)
- about 40% of them are alive, but their value is dwindling. Probably they will die off sooner or later
- The rest (about 50%) are now dead.

Note that then and now is a bit different (there were no Scrypt ASICs, less miners in general, more traditional PoW coins and less premine/PoS/ICOs), so as the market is a bit saturated, I guess survivability of a coin born today would be probably worse than 4 years ago, unless the coin would now come with some killer feature or some form of mass advertising itself.

Revival could be nice, but at least replace Scrypt with some GPU-only (lyra2re/x11/..) or even CPU-only algorithm (Scrypt-N with N of 1024² seems to be GPU-resistant due to memory requirements).

Tying the coin with price of gold somehow as it was mentioned could be a nice addition, although I can't imagine how that would be implemented ....

So, making a hole in firewall for port 36988 (and forwarding it) did the trick, however as the program does not advertise that this is necessary and average user may not be tech-savyy enough to use netstat and figure out by itself ... then I see it as a quite an ugly flaw of the wallet.

Or, if they are behind NAT over they which has no control (ie. they can't set up any port forwarding) ... then they might be out of luck even if they know exactly what is the problem.

Most other coins can work quite well without the port forwarding (I can't remember of having to forward ports for any of the other coins actually ...), so this is what might be unexpected even to more advanced users.

Well, this coin does have some promising features, so I decided to try the Verium part - check the wallet and see if I can mine some coins.

The mining part was quite easy (generate address in wallet, set up pool account, set up and start miner), but then I found out that the wallet does not synchronize to the network. At first start it downloaded a bootstrap (presumably with part of the blockchain), but then it fails to synchronize the rest of the blocks (last block is 3 days old)

First I see "Synchronizing with network (99.3%)", then later it is replaced by "Waiting for a network connection ...." ... which stays there for hours ....

I cloned git repo https://github.com/VeriumReserve/verium and then compiled and run the walled ... I tried this both with master and 1.1. tag, but the results are the same.

Maybe I need to punch some holes in the firewall? Maybe I need some extra setup? (any ideas?)

I guess I'll play with netstat and firewall settings and I'll look into the source and maybe I'll find what is wrong, but the bad news is that the wallet does not work out of the box - at least not in all cases.

Stumbled upon the same error.

But I found a cause (the appropriate kernel module is not loaded by default by itself, Xserver by itself requires only the base "nvidia" module) and a solution.

To fix it, as a root, load the missing kernel module:


After that, the miner runs.

I looked at the file ... it is an encrypted .doc

I have not tried opening it, but this approach is not typical for phishing, but for malware infections.

Some macro in the .doc would run (sometimes user is tricked to enable macros, sometimes an exploit is used to run macros without further user's intervention) and then the computer would get infected by some malware. Could be some ransomware, botnet, scareware, password stealer, banker, adware, but surely it will be something evil.

I am not going to examine it further to find which one it is.

Well, if the PoW will return in some form again, I can reinstate the pool (now with 0 reward mining does not make really sense), so there will be a pool again - with the early payment option turned on again if it would make sense in the new setting.

There are currently two issues with the pool:

There is slight problem with the stratum, as it loses connection to the coin daemon from time to time. Not sure why exactly it is doing that (it has not done that before in the past year or so) - I have to dig in the source and investigate it further, but for now I have found out how to detect that and restart the stratum as necessary.

Second problem is payouts - due to the fork and storm of orphans near block 90566 (there is fork of two branches - on one the "emergency" difficulty dropdown has happened, in the second it has not) the pool slightly screwed up and the cronjob detected a double payout (I guess the payment went to both the "good" and the "bad" branch during the fork storm).

I will resume payouts once I check the database and correct it (should be in about hour or two), although I will turn off the 'early payment' feature for a day or two until the tail of the blockchain (the block where the payouts are done) stabilizes.

Good thing is the blocks are now appearing in the wallet, so once fixed, the payments will resume and coins will flow again.