Advanced Checkpointing released
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Good morning. Sorry I was out of the loop yesterday, my youngest son had climbed into my eldest son’s bed during the night which is six foot off the ground and then fell out during the night crashing into and smashing a rigid plastic bin. He was cut up and very shaken and I spent yesterday nursing him.
Smoothie, this is pretty much the same system that PPCoin had in place. It is basically centralised security for the blockchain. After getting feedback from several technical users it would seem sensible to leave the depth at five to allow natural reorgs. The depth is how far back the node will checkpoint blocks. If the checkpointing node goes down then the network works as normal. To perform a 51% attack the attacker first has to take down the checkpointing node.
There were discussions started in the community about how to handle 51% attacks, I found an early version of this solution from Sunny King and put it forward on the forum discussions. I do not think anyone was uber happy with the idea but this was considered the lesser of two evils and would have to do until we found a decentralised solution. The attacks we suffered were very impressive and shows the need to evolve, in my mind it was either find protection for 51% attacks or give up and I am not leaving Feathercoin. My sole purpose is to see Feathercoin survive.
By the way we should all be nice to Sunny King, he implemented Proof-of-Stake and has now created a coin for finding Prime numbers. My money is on Sunny for being the real Satoshi :)
As for Bitcoin and Litecoin. I sent a message to Coblee about making a large contribution to his Litecoin development fund raiser. I got an upsetting and surprising response from him saying that Litecoin should be the only Scrypt coin and that Feathercoin is a scam, I find this surprising coming from the chap who sold his coins to Koolio when I gave all my coins away in a bounties and bought back in. I am now glad that I did not make a large donation as I have it from several sources that the Litecoin upgrade to 0.8 was to appease Gox. I guess when Gox let the news out that they almost listed Litecoin when the massive drop happened that some people started making trouble for them. You may have noticed that NMC came to life at the same time as Litecoin. Bitcoin developers are not going to be interested in us and generally see alts in a dim light even though alts are where the innovation can happen now. If I was a Bitcoin dev I would have got board and started working with alts by now. When I started Feathercoin Coblee was nowhere to be found and Bitcoin was untouchable, that is the reason that I started Feathercoin. I want to have an active alt with an approachable dev and community.
Back to ACP, when there is an algorithmic solution to 51% attacks in the protocol then we will jump at it and leave ACP behind.
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26709” timestamp=“1377856508”]
I am now glad that I did not make a large donation as I have it from several sources that the Litecoin upgrade to 0.8 was to appease Gox. I guess when Gox let the news out that they almost listed Litecoin when the massive drop happened that some people started making trouble for them. You may have noticed that NMC came to life at the same time as Litecoin.
[/quote]Interesting. Can you expand on it a bit? I know, I know, its going off topic.
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26709” timestamp=“1377856508”]
By the way we should all be nice to Sunny King, he implemented Proof-of-Stake and has now created a coin for finding Prime numbers. My money is on Sunny for being the real Satoshi :)
[/quote]Agreed! ;)
[quote author=Bushstar link=topic=3438.msg26709#msg26709 date=1377856508]
As for Bitcoin and Litecoin. I sent a message to Coblee about making a large contribution to his Litecoin development fund raiser. I got an upsetting and surprising response from him saying that Litecoin should be the only Scrypt coin and that Feathercoin is a scam
[/quote]Wow. Coblee always reminded me of this character from Role Models …
[img]http://iratedb.com/images/items/2011/9/f13518c3-fd1b-404f-a58d-21d1721928b1.jpg[/img]
… apparently that assessment was correct.
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[quote name=“Magic8Ball” post=“26711” timestamp=“1377857890”]
Interesting. Can you expand on it a bit? I know, I know, its going off topic.
[/quote]It is off topic but I am finding it impossible not to respond, I got into crypto because it is a revolution and the biggest thing since the Internet, but also because of the constant drama :)
I got this news from two different sources and it made some sense to me. I figured after Mark Karpeles let slip about their intention to add Litecoin the week Bitcoin crashed, that MtGox would get some serious resistance to Litecoin support at that point. Especially as people were blaming MtGox for the huge Bitcoin crash due to the extreme lag in trading on Gox, some one and a half hours to process a transaction. If that is what lag does imagine what Litecoin could do. I imagined that Mark was going to experience some serious pressure not to support Litecoin for all the wrong reasons. So when I heard that Litecoin was asked to upgrade to 0.8 by Gox it made a lot of sense to me. This would be one way to get some of the people resisting Litecoin on Gox to be quiet perhaps by invalidating their arguments.
As I have nothing to back this up with and I am not going to drop names then we have to consider this gossip.
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[quote name=“wesphily” post=“26718” timestamp=“1377869210”]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26697#msg26697 date=1377839165]
[quote author=wesphily link=topic=3438.msg26670#msg26670 date=1377824479]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26608#msg26608 date=1377789408]
To be completely fair I suggest that Peter have the new portion of the code reviewed by other coin developers just to get input from a technical perspective.Perhaps Peter already did this as I have not been watching this that closely.
[/quote][size=12pt][b]Everybody[/b][/size] that has the knowledge required and is willing to put in the time required has already reviewed the code. What I mean by this statement is that most people who have the experience do not have the time or refuse to put in the time required. Most people who have the time and/or willing to put in the time don’t have the experience required. Hard to meet both requirements without $$ involved.
[/quote]This is a very absolute statement you made there. I honestly doubt that to be the case but that is just my opinion.
[/quote]Absolutes can be right until proven wrong. Prove it wrong.
[/quote]Two things, Wes, do not use words like everybody and nobody as you will irk those who like to be literal. Smoothie, do not get caught up arguing over small details of loosely spoken words, stay focused on the issues at hand :)
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26709” timestamp=“1377856508”]
Good morning. Sorry I was out of the loop yesterday, my youngest son had climbed into my eldest son’s bed during the night which is six foot off the ground and then fell out during the night crashing into and smashing a rigid plastic bin. He was cut up and very shaken and I spent yesterday nursing him.
[/quote]This is why my wife dont want doubledecker bed. You just went all through her nightmare…
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[quote name=“wesphily” post=“26718” timestamp=“1377869210”]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26697#msg26697 date=1377839165]
[quote author=wesphily link=topic=3438.msg26670#msg26670 date=1377824479]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26608#msg26608 date=1377789408]
To be completely fair I suggest that Peter have the new portion of the code reviewed by other coin developers just to get input from a technical perspective.Perhaps Peter already did this as I have not been watching this that closely.
[/quote][size=12pt][b]Everybody[/b][/size] that has the knowledge required and is willing to put in the time required has already reviewed the code. What I mean by this statement is that most people who have the experience do not have the time or refuse to put in the time required. Most people who have the time and/or willing to put in the time don’t have the experience required. Hard to meet both requirements without $$ involved.
[/quote]This is a very absolute statement you made there. I honestly doubt that to be the case but that is just my opinion.
[/quote]Absolutes can be right until proven wrong. Prove it wrong.
[/quote]I don’t have the burden of proof as I did not make the statement. Nice try. ;D
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26725” timestamp=“1377872857”]
[quote author=wesphily link=topic=3438.msg26718#msg26718 date=1377869210]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26697#msg26697 date=1377839165]
[quote author=wesphily link=topic=3438.msg26670#msg26670 date=1377824479]
[quote author=Smoothie link=topic=3438.msg26608#msg26608 date=1377789408]
To be completely fair I suggest that Peter have the new portion of the code reviewed by other coin developers just to get input from a technical perspective.Perhaps Peter already did this as I have not been watching this that closely.
[/quote][size=12pt][b]Everybody[/b][/size] that has the knowledge required and is willing to put in the time required has already reviewed the code. What I mean by this statement is that most people who have the experience do not have the time or refuse to put in the time required. Most people who have the time and/or willing to put in the time don’t have the experience required. Hard to meet both requirements without $$ involved.
[/quote]This is a very absolute statement you made there. I honestly doubt that to be the case but that is just my opinion.
[/quote]Absolutes can be right until proven wrong. Prove it wrong.
[/quote]Two things, Wes, do not use words like everybody and nobody as you will irk those who like to be literal. Smoothie, do not get caught up arguing over small details of loosely spoken words, stay focused on the issues at hand :)
[/quote]Well then again it is the small details that make up the bigger ones right?
I’ve voiced my opinion and views. Obviously most appear to disagree. That is okay with me.
To be honest I could be completely wrong, but I would not be honest with myself if I did not voice what I thought was the best course of action.
Even when Sunny King used his centralized checkpointing much of the community was opposed to it. The reason he had the checkpointing (if you read into the history) was because there existed an exploit he did not tell anyone about until Jutarul exposed it.
Price plumetted, and community support for PPC fell quite quickly.
I wouldn’t call a 51% attack an “exploit” but rather a feature that exists in a non-perfect system that Satoshi built.
I’m not exactly sure what your take is on changing the difficulty adjustment algorithm, but I sure hope it doesn’t change soon. Current events form future trends. Likely changing the diff algo twice can turn into more than that.
In any case. I’ve said my peace.
Aloha
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That’s pretty much it. You told me that Feathercoin was a pump and dump scam coin and that I should shut up shop.
I am not sure how I was supposed to interrupt that in a positive way or how you thought that was helpful. I used to think that Litecoin was a champion of alternative crypto currencies so I was surprised by your response.
All the same I wish you all the best with Litecoin.
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This is Great!
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Many thanks for dropping in Coblee. No doubt you have made this an interesting day for many :)
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to anyone looking in from the outside, this seems as if coblee/lirecoin is somewhat hostile… and does state to close up shop… seems bush just stated what was in the correspondence. becoming defensive just gives a few of us a laugh to read
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Nice read. Must say all merge mined coins are dying slowly. If Feathercoin becomes merge mined with Litecoin, it’s game over. I’m afraid that’s unacceptable.
We’ve had a discussion here on switching to scrypt-jane or some kind of it. Some community members supported this idea, some not. I never mind competition and voted contra.
Coblee, your invitation for Peter to join the Litecoin development and shut down Feathercoin wasn’t very kind. Feathercoin isn’t a one man project. There are many people contributing as much as they can and want.
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Hate seeing devs on different coins argue.
Kiss and make up guys ;Don a more seriouse note.
I do see bushstars interpetation of the conversation, and how the correspondance might have felt hurtful.
Especially when users request that we should ask Coblee it gets extra frustrating for bushstar to defend not wanting to involve a person he feels is negative to the coin.I guess theres a lot of talk on higher level regarding all kind of subjects (merge mining, partnership) etc that
is not revelead to public. Fully understandable since it might create panic or pump/dump scenario. -
[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26709” timestamp=“1377856508”]
Good morning. Sorry I was out of the loop yesterday, my youngest son had climbed into my eldest son’s bed during the night which is six foot off the ground and then fell out during the night crashing into and smashing a rigid plastic bin. He was cut up and very shaken and I spent yesterday nursing him.Smoothie, this is pretty much the same system that PPCoin had in place. It is basically centralised security for the blockchain. After getting feedback from several technical users it would seem sensible to leave the depth at five to allow natural reorgs. The depth is how far back the node will checkpoint blocks. If the checkpointing node goes down then the network works as normal. To perform a 51% attack the attacker first has to take down the checkpointing node.
There were discussions started in the community about how to handle 51% attacks, I found an early version of this solution from Sunny King and put it forward on the forum discussions. I do not think anyone was uber happy with the idea but this was considered the lesser of two evils and would have to do until we found a decentralised solution. The attacks we suffered were very impressive and shows the need to evolve, in my mind it was either find protection for 51% attacks or give up and I am not leaving Feathercoin. My sole purpose is to see Feathercoin survive.
By the way we should all be nice to Sunny King, he implemented Proof-of-Stake and has now created a coin for finding Prime numbers. My money is on Sunny for being the real Satoshi :)
As for Bitcoin and Litecoin. I sent a message to Coblee about making a large contribution to his Litecoin development fund raiser. got an upsetting and surprising response from him saying that Litecoin should be the only Scrypt coin [size=12pt][b]and that Feathercoin is a scam[/b],[/size] I find this surprising coming from the chap who sold his coins to Koolio when I gave all my coins away in a bounties and bought back in. I am now glad that I did not make a large donation as I have it from several sources that the Litecoin upgrade to 0.8 was to appease Gox. I guess when Gox let the news out that they almost listed Litecoin when the massive drop happened that some people started making trouble for them. You may have noticed that NMC came to life at the same time as Litecoin. Bitcoin developers are not going to be interested in us and generally see alts in a dim light even though alts are where the innovation can happen now. If I was a Bitcoin dev I would have got board and started working with alts by now. When I started Feathercoin Coblee was nowhere to be found and Bitcoin was untouchable, that is the reason that I started Feathercoin. I want to have an active alt with an approachable dev and community.
Back to ACP, when there is an algorithmic solution to 51% attacks in the protocol then we will jump at it and leave ACP behind.
[/quote]It appears your bolded claim above was not true based on the messages between the both of you.
[quote author=coblee link=topic=3438.msg26838#msg26838 date=1377975469]
[quote]
Hi Coblee,I recently launched Feathercoin as a homage to Litecoin, by creating a coin with four times the number of coins, which now has a four times more frequent difficulty adjust at 41.4% a time. This gives it the same overall difficulty change as Litecoin. I have always been a supporter of Litecoin and wanted to recreate the enthusiasm and fun that I remember in Litecoin when it was younger. I enjoy the challenge more than anything else.
I would like to make a large contribution to the continued development of Litecoin and would hope that I will be able to patch and test Feathercoin at the same time. I am happy to enter into a NDA and would never do anything to jeopardise Litecoin. We are working on features that could be of interest to you, like the ability for the client to properly handle LTC URL links with address and amount.
Please let me know if I could contribute to development and donate to the costs, if it is possible let me know how much funding you require to make this happen.
For more information on Feathercoin you can head over to our website. http://www.feathercoin.com/
Regards,
Peter Bushnell
Feathercoin Dev[/quote][quote]
Hey Peter,Thanks for your email and sorry for the late response. As you can imagine, I’m quite busy currently working on the client and also trying to get more merchants and services to accept Litecoin.
It actually took me a few reading of your PM to understand what you were saying. So you wanted to donate to us in exchange for early access to our work in progress code. Is that right? I don’t think that we would be interested in doing that for a few reasons:
- Our donation request is so that people can donate to us if they feel like they want to contribute to the improvement of Litecoin. We don’t want it to be some sort of bounty thing or some kind of bribe.
- Our work in progress code is doing something dangerous because it can fork our chain. We want to be extremely careful with it so that there’s no accidental release. Unfortunately, I don’t know you well enough to trust you and your team with that.
- Our current work is just a rebase of Bitcoin 0.8.2. This is something that your team can easily add to Feathercoin separately from us. It might even be a good thing for your coin to do this separately.
That said, if you think that our work in Litecoin is going to help Feathercoin in the future, we welcome any donation that you feel is appropriate. And if you tells us that’s you, we will call it out in the donation spreadsheet.
Lastly, I wanted to give you some advice for your coin. Given that you are using the same PoW as Litecoin, I think you are running into the same problem Namecoin had, which is the rollercoaster difficulty due to miners jumping in and out of your coin between difficulty changes. I think the best move for your coin is to merge mine it with Litecoin. This way, hashes aren’t wasted going between the 2 chains, feathercoin will be better protected against 51% attackes, and there won’t be a rollercoaster difficulty problem anymore. Think about it. Our team can help you with implementing that if you want. Just let us know.
Thanks,
Charlie Lee
[/quote][quote]
Hi Coblee,Thanks for your response. I guess it was a bit cheeky of me to offer a large donation for early access to your project, I would have loved the chance to patch and test simultaneously. As you say it is probably safer to do this after Litecoin has made the change and everything is running smoothly. Thank you for your kind offer of some support for merge mining. This is something we may well consider when we have established ourselves more.
Litecoin has been very kind to me over time and I am happy to make a smaller donation of 100 Litecoin. I have included the transaction details below to get my name on to the donors list.
Status: 0/unconfirmed, has not been successfully broadcast yet
Date: 04/06/2013 09:26
To: LRNYxwQsHpm2A1VhawrJQti3nUkPN7vtq3
Debit: -100.00 LTC
Net amount: -100.00 LTC
Transaction ID: 2c37762f5b8d112d853a750b9eb0a26521fd8f04f45bab89fbedef2e006e0a7aWe are currently working on Feathercoin merchants services but will soon start work on additional client features. I hope that some of them will be of value to you.
Regards,
Peter
[/quote][quote]
Peter, thanks for your donation. If you need any help with merged mining, let me know.
[/quote][quote]
I’m not sure if you saw but there was some impressive 51% attacks on Feathercoin. This makes the idea of merge mining all the more appealing.I’m wondering what you think the long term effects will be. For sure that we will initially be a very appealing combination to mine pretty much doubling profitability. It is unlikely that this is sustainable and I am not sure what the effect will be.
Could you please let me know your thoughts on this?
I would like to make a move that is not damaging to Litecoin or Feathercoin.
Regards,
Peter
[/quote][quote]
Peter, first of all, let me be honest. I don’t think there’s a need for Feathercoin as you don’t do anything much differently than Litecoin. Your efforts (which are commendable by the way) would be much better served if you focused on Litecoin. I’d welcome any help you can give to our team. We could definitely use some of the marketing skills you (and justabitoftime) have shown with your efforts on Feathercoin. So if you have any interest in shutting down Feathercoin and joining the Litecoin team, let me know. :)Feathercoin, from my view, is a pump and dump coin, like most of the other recent copycats. It is not your intention when you released it, but people who are mining it right now (or attacking it right now) are just pumping the price up so that they can make a killing. It’s unfortunate for the people left holding the bag.
That said, I will try to help you as best as I can…
I think an alt coin must use a different hashing algorithm in order to survive as a separate entity. And ideally, it would rely on a different set of machines, like ASIC versus GPU versus CPU. That is why Litecoin became successful. It didn’t (for the most part) have to fight Bitcoin for miners. I’ve learned this early on before I created Litecoin. Because unless the coin is the dominant coin, miners will always jump between your coin and the more stable and dominant coin, which is Litecoin in this case. And they will sell your coin for that. So your difficulty will oscillate between profitable and unprofitable, and miners will jump in and out and cause even more drastic changes in difficulty. Namecoin went through the same fate 2 years ago, and they HAD to resort to merged mining to save themselves. I see this fate for all scrypt clones, unless they manage to somehow become the dominant scrypt coin, which is a very hard thing to do given the networking effects of a crypto coin.
The upside of merged mining is obviously you won’t need to worry about being 51% attacked. The downside is that your coin then becomes kind of a by product of mining Litecoin, so people will always perceive the coin to be worth very little. You can see how much Namecoin is worth compared to Bitcoin to have a idea what it would be like for a Litecoin merged mined coin. If you don’t merge mine, your end result will likely be worse. I think the coin will just die a very slow death as the initial people supporting the coin will leave and you are left with pretty much nothing. See tenebrix as an example. It didn’t merge mine with Litecoin and it’s now dead. Whereas, Namecoin and Ixcoin merged mine with Bitcoin, and they are at least still around.
Your other option is to switch your hashing algorithm to a CPU only algorithm. Why not explore that? Switch it to scrypt with more memory-hard parameters. Maybe use what Colin originally suggest for scrypt. See yacoin for an example. Though their solution with PoW/PoS and dynamic params is kind of a mess. If you are a CPU-mined coin, then miners will mine your coins only on a CPU and they won’t easily switch between you and other scrypt coins. They might switch between you and yacoin, but having 2 coins competing for miners is much better than 20 coins competing for miner. Plus, yacoin does not have the network effect to necessarily be the dominant CPU coin. Maybe feathercoin can be that.
So 3 options:
- Merge mine with Litecoin
- Switch to a new CPU-only hashing algorithm
- Abandon Feathercoin and put your efforts into Litecoin
By the way, are you propping the feathercoin price up or is someone else doing it? Given the attacks, I just don’t see why anyone would be a buyer of feathercoin right now.
- Charlie
[/quote]
[quote]
Hi Coblee,We are keen to develop Feathercoin, it will not always so closely resemble Litecoin so do not worry about that.
Just to let you know that when I started this coin I mined 150,000FTC which I then gave away in bounties the last of which went towards the block 33,000 hard fork coding and mining. It has never been my intention to mislead people for my own financial gain. If Feathercoin succeeds it is because of our genuine efforts to make this coin work. As to your last question I do not have the coins or knowledge to manipulate markets. When I trade I generally lose money :)
What is happening to the Feathercoin market is not unique and has been seen in other markets including Litecoin.
We have three options ourselves but leaving the coins is not one of them nor is it something that is possible to do. Feathercoin or Litecoin would continue with or without us. No one is irreplaceable in open source projects like this.
Thanks for your information on this. I will talk to others about merge mining and get back to you.
Regards,
Peter
[/quote][quote]
Hi Coblee,I just wanted to let you know what our three options are. I forgot to include them earlier.
1. Merge mining
2. Use Scrypy-Jane like YAC coin. This was the solution I brought up with others and was interested to see you mention it. I like the idea of Feathercoin having a different hash from Litecoin and Bitcoin and we will not be in each others space as much.
3. I am not sure if this is possible but it is an idea that I do not think you will like, that is to implement PoS blocks. Those attackers blocks which made our difficulty drop would have been broken up by PoS blocks.Regards,
Peter Bushnell
[/quote][quote]
Hi,Thank you for your time Charlie. If you are interested I will let you know what we decide to go with. It sounds like moving further away from Litecoin would help some of the larger Litecoin community consider to work together with us on projects that could benefit all of us.
Regards,
Peter[/quote]Like I said, I regret wasting my time with you.
[/quote] -
I am sorry Smoothie but that is pretty much how I interpreted it, we can be literal but we can also read between the lines.
I can sympathise with Coblee, he couldn’t have stopped Litecoin like I am not able to stop Feathercoin.
This is very sad that this conversation has now happened and I apologies for talking publicly about my correspondence with Coblee. I should have kept my opinions of our conversation to myself.
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“26863” timestamp=“1377983508”]
I am sorry Smoothie but that is pretty much how I interpreted it, we can be literal but we can also read between the lines.I can sympathise with Coblee, he couldn’t have stopped Litecoin like I am not able to stop Feathercoin.
This is very sad that this conversation has now happened and I apologies for talking publicly about my correspondence with Coblee. I should have kept my opinions of our conversation to myself.
[/quote]It is pretty clear what you claimed was said. Nowhere was the word [b]scam[/b] used in addressing Feathercoin.
Perhaps sticking to the facts about what was said as opposed to reading between the lines would have been a better approach when bringing up such accusations. I would have responded similarly if the accusation was made towards me and the facts stated otherwise.
Maybe it would be a good lesson to keep to how software is coded. You can’t read between the lines of code, it is what is stated in plain text. No interpretations.
In anycase you probably are right. Keeping your correspondence between you and Coblee would have been better or at least posting the actual conversation as opposed to interpreting it then to have to backpedal on what was really said.
I’ll give you credit, at least you are able to apologize publicly.
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That was an interesting read… I hope Feathercoin becomes bigger than Litecoin!
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Funny really as a lot of BTC fan-boys say LTC is pump and dump.
That was a very hostile “You will be assimilated - resistance is futile” tone from Coblee which left me a bit surprised and disappointed. I thought open source was about sharing… ho-hum.
Still - this is crypto! ;D
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The biggest scam coin of them all is the Dollar. I understand the natural human tendency towards tribalism and when the blame shower hits there is always plenty to go around but I want to stay focussed on the task at hand and help people regain control of their financial wealth.
These days a successful tech company is defined by its ability to [i]bring technology to the people to create something very powerful[/i]. That is best achieved when the developers and the communications teams have a mutual respect for one another and work hand in hand and I think that’s what differentiates Feathercoin.
