PPC is not just a PoS currency, it's where PoS was invented in the first place. But it's always had PoW as well.

In a pure PoS currency, initial coin distribution is a problem, and generally it needs a centralized authority that decides how the initial coins are given out. For example, the authority can be a company that sells the coins, which goes against everything in the original ideas of cryptocurrencies. So PPC used PoW to ensure that anyone can mine the initial coins in the same way as in Bitcoin, but the PoW block reward was designed to get smaller so that PoS would dominate in the long run.

Anyone here? The Zarcanum update seems to have broken PoS mining for me, and I've filed a bug report. However, I wonder if it's a simple issue on my end, so I'd appreciate any ideas:

https://github.com/hyle-team/zano/issues/437

I might try this is I knew how to mint and spend on the command line. I found the listlelantusmints command, but I don't know how to proceed after the minting.

It would be great to have some centralized documentation for these things. For example, https://firo.org/guide/ has nothing on minting, which is supposed to be a defining feature of this coin.

It's easy if you already have an account at Stex. Otherwise, KYC can be a bitch. Are there other active exchanges for BBR that don't have KYC?

It's also weird to have KYC if you are exchanging from one anonymous coin to another, as is the case here. The exchange will know that this real verified person exchanged X BBR to Y ZANO, but they have no way of tracing either transaction very far.

I see a couple of problems with HDD mining. First of all, if the mining is profitable, some people will start building huge storage farms, just like is done with PoW mining hardware, and it will use a lot of energy and materials. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox.

Second, assuming that home farming with your existing general-purpose hardware remains feasible, it has a huge drawback compared to CPU or GPU mining. For example, I've bought GPUs for work but they can spend most of their time mining. In most cases the miner can stay running in the background all the time. In some cases I'll need the whole GPU to my work, but even then, I can easily resume mining after that.

This doesn't work with HDD farming. If I want to use that drive for something else, I first have to delete the plotfiles, and then later regenerate those plots with a lot of CPU time and energy. So you will need dedicated farming drives, or at least some dedicated drive space.

I've been testing out small-time Chia farming since just before the mainnet launch, and I even bought a new drive for it, knowing I can still use it for something else if this doesn't work out nicely. I like playing with new technologies in their early stages, and I guess I have a soft spot for Bram Cohen -- I remember when Bittorrent came out, and I like coding in Python myself. I'd like to be proved wrong about the above reservations

Chia mainnet has just launched. Am I seriously the only one on Bitcointalk doing Chia, or is there another thread?

I think the card itself should be fine for mining. At least the VRAM is not an issue, I mine Zano with cards as low as 2 GB. But something is wrong if the miner is picking up an Intel device. If you have both Intel and AMD OpenCL drivers installed, you might need the --cl-devices option with the correct device number. Try --list-devices to find those numbers.

That guide doesn't say anything about minimum VRAM, which I think is a pretty gross omission.

Anyway, 3 or 4 GB cards won't work. The MTP scratchpad itself needs 4 GB and then you needs some for the rest of the program, so the total is about 4.5 GB. If you can find a 5 GB card that should work. 6 GB is plenty.

I recommend the official https://github.com/firoorg/ccminer as it is open source with no hidden fees. I haven't found a closed miner whose speed increase is worth the fee (and the risk of running untrusted software).

Screen doesn't put the program in the background in the usual sense. It makes the program run in a virtual terminal, which you can still access normally. I use screen a lot so I can keep lots of terminal programs running, without being visible all at once. You can put screen itself in the background with all the programs running within, and open it later (perhaps when connecting from another machine).

I think this is its most essential feature. Many people learned to use screen around 2000 for using IRC; they could leave their IRC client running on some server, and return to their session the next day, without keeping their own computer on all the time.

For actually putting zanod in the background, I use the --no-console option. So
or to make it extra sure

Me neither. I'd really like to see an example of some other coin that has succesfully rebranded. Or any other product/project out there in the real world.

I notice that the new daemon update/rebase has lost the traditional getinfo RPC command. While it has its replacements, I cannot find the old "moneysupply" number anywhere. Is it still available somewhere via RPC?

Trading is now live at Stex. It was previously known as Stocks.exchange and I've used it since late 2017.

https://app.stex.com/en/basic-trade/pair/BTC/ZANO?ref=18645393

You do realize that mining profitability is relative to coin price and difficulty, not just absolute wattage? For example, on my GTX 1070, Wild Keccak uses 92 W while MTP (Zcoin) uses over 150 W. But I still mine the latter because it nets me much more, even after paying for electricity.

Absolute wattages can be a problem due to hardware health and noise, but you can usually limit those by other means. In fact, reducing total power will often increase efficiency (hash/J).

Finland's leading cryptocurrency company recently got a female CEO. I couldn't find an English announcement but here are some relevant links:

https://bittiraha.fi/muutoksia-prasos-oyn-johdossa/

https://prasos.fi/

I don't think a 750Ti has enough video memory. The miner needs at least 4.5 GB.

This. High hashrates mean fast and simple hash functions, which are very ASIC-friendly, and it's not what the community wanted. It's also a bit like the Megahertz Myth of CPUs: do you care about real-life performance or a meaningless number?

Still, the memory requirements of Zcoin's current MTP implementation are quite steep. A 4GB GPU is not enough, you need 6GB in practice (as there are no GPUs with 4.5 or 5GB). This means only newer GPUs. A lot of people have GPUs with 1..4 GB VRAM, and they are now useless for Zcoin. Hash is being concentrated to those with the latest GPUs.

If the MTP miner only required 1 or 2 GB, we could distribute the hash to a much wider community. And I guess it would still be ASIC resistant, because a factor of 2 is not a deal breaker.

https://github.com/zcoinofficial/ccminer says:

"mtp requires 4Gb of vram, hence cards with less than 4.5Gb of vram won't work. while running, ccminer will also use around 5.5Gb of ram."

I've tested the miner on a GTX 960 4GB, and it didn't work, as expected. GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1070 8GB were fine, though slower than expected, both around 100 kh/s.

I've also struggled with the recent build issue, which is obviously related to zlib/gzip. This commit seems to be to blame:

https://github.com/cryptozoidberg/boolberry/commit/d1be390e63147631fa2ca16a48f74b8333c86bfb

as it builds fine when checking out the preceding version. This one looks like it bundles a copy of zlib instead of using external libraries -- I wonder why?

Good point. Those who want masternodes should first explain

• what is the problem that masternodes are trying to solve, and
• how would masternodes actually solve the problem

instead of running around like Steve Ballmer shouting "masternodes" in place of "developers".

There's one thing I absolutely accept about masternodes. We should totally reward those who maintain stable nodes with good uptime and connectivity. But all the masternode schemes I've seen include a large deposit of money. That's the bit that goes completely against all logic and ideals I've known so far.

In general, I pay people for useful services. I don't pay people just because they already have money. In the real world, rich people don't get richer simply by having all that money, but because they use their money sensibly -- for example, on servers and Internet infrastructure.

Moreover, I don't want a world where you need a hefty deposit in order to be a service provider. I'll rather trust a distributed P2P network than an oligarchy of a few rich players. Isn't that why we have cryptocurrencies in the first place? If you want old-time big-money capitalism, you can already do that outside the crypto world.