Posts made by DemocraticRepublicOfDave

If they want any UK based exchange to require every user to provide with a copy of a government issued ID for activity monitoring, it isn’t going to work well.

Serious question.

Why won’t it work well?

Any current UK based exchange that allows fiat withdrawl/deposits currently has to follow the UK (anti) money laundering regulations, which requires identity checks already. As do other governments.

https://www.gov.uk/money-laundering-regulations-introduction

??? :o

ah - maybe I see. For a *global* exchange based in the UK this would be a problems - but then many governments also have AML regulations which would also have to be complied with.

I still don’t see the major objection, other than for people ideologically opposed to government intervention. But wouldn’t most people not have a problem with this (commonly referred to in bitcoin forums as “sheep”)?

Cheers

Dave

* edit *

OK - having re-read the article I would like to refine my post above so in brief… I both agree and disagree that what is proposed will work.

• Any exchange/business based in the UK would have to comply with the regulations (whatever they are). They already have to comply with AML if they handle fiat.

• Any “blockchain/cloud” based services linked to a UK business would have to comply with the regulations.

• Other “blockchain/cloud” based services not linked to any business (example : DAC, NXT Asset Exchange) would not be able to be regulated by the UK Government (nor would it currently be possible to do so).

Hmm.

Did I just rebutt my own question ???

Just my thoughts.

Cheers

Dave

Hi all,

Questions…

Aim

What is the aim of the coin? Is it a testbed for technolgy? is it to create value for the holders? something else? or a mixture?

Target audience.

Who is our target audience (customer)? other dev? someone wanting to transfer money across the world for low fees? real world usage? speculators?

Once identified - What is our unique selling point that distinguishes us from other coins (for the target customer)? for devs this could be attractive technological innovation - a good recruiting tool, for others - to be brutal I’m drawing a blank.

and once that is identified, how to we promote the coin to that target audience?

General points (from my humble view)

The world of crypto coins is evolving and fast changing. For me this focus on coins is missing the bigger picture. We are actually looking at the evolution of the blockchain as a technology, and coins are just the first higher layer app that runs on top of it.

You can still use the crypto coins as a pointer to how the blockchain may evolve in future however :

1. We had a proto-currency experiment, called bitcoin, which was a testbed which was never meant to go mainstream, which went mainstream (mainstream - my definition - when media and politicians start talking about it).

2. We had the first generation of alt-coins, trying to address some of the shortcomings of bitcoin, and yes, some to make a lot of money for the holders.

2a) We had FTC as one of these first gen alts, with good community support, which was attacked by other coin owners (51%, etc), which promoted innovation (however controversial) to combat these attacks.

3. We had the bitcoin price explosion, and suddenly everyone and his dog was launching coins, mainly to make money.

4. In amongst this explosion, we had second generation coins, like NXT (for example) launch, with both technical (PoS) and real-world selling points (arguable) building out the blockchain for new uses (like adding an asset exchange on top of the coin). We also had the coming of the dark coins (DRK, XMR) to address privacy concerns over the blockchains public ledger. For a while privacy was fashionable.

5. Currently I see coins-as-a-service. Stuff like VIOR (which looks like it may becoms abandonware), a possible alternative to skype, containing it’s own alt-currency to use for buying credits, etc. Eventually I see blockchain services launching where the currency angle is entirely dropped, and it is sold by business as a product.

Now the alt-coin shakeout has arrived, lots of coins will end up in the graveyard of abandonware. A few will survive and serve niches.

In my opinion FTC has a good, if small, community keeping this coin going. One of it’s selling points is that it of longevity. Focus on the technology and it has a chance to survive the crypto winter. Focus on real-world uses and I think (with our current design) we have already lost. Who knows maybe we will innovate ourselves back into that race - but that should not be the focus for now.

I suspect those who bought in to FTC for a real-world return on their investment will not agree with me at all.

Cheers

Dave

Voted for Core, as Lizhi has already done a lot of work on this already and has code in testing now. So wouldn’t it be best to finish this off, then move onto stealth?

Cheers

Dave

Hi,

Done - Issue #6 - cgminer does not work with catalyst 14.xx drivers (and 13.12 drivers broken for ubuntu 14.04)

Cheers

Dave

+1

Have Ubuntu 14, catalyst 14 and shitload of problems :(

Even thinking about reinstaling old ubuntu 12 and catalyst 13 from scratch.

m.

I thought of this too. Unfortunately my mining machine is also a bit of a testbed and I need 14.04 for it, so I can’t downgrade - (hmm - unless I boot off of USB I guess).

From what I understand it is cgminer that doesn’t play well with catalyst 14.

So would a solution be to port neoscypt to sgminer? I’m not sure what changes to the .cl code would be needed for this. I suspect everyone is busy at the moment with the changeover.

Cheers

Dave

Hi All,

Well I guess I will not be mining feathercoin when the switch-over occurs. :(

It seems my ubuntu 14.04 system will not run with catalyst 13.12. Even after patching (x3!) the 13.12 driver so that it built and installed, it was crashing my gpu cards on startup. Despite lots of playing I’m not able to resolve the issues (maybe later AMD cards are not compatible with 13.12?) so I’ve gone back to catalyst 14.

Are there any plans to make the miner compatible with catalyst 14? As time goes on I suspect this will become a problem for more and more miners.

Cheers

Dave

yyep…
when i tried to create bin file with tmuir12

4.xx drivers:
i got double hashrate(100khs/gpu) but only HW errors.
all other setting where just as using 13.xx drivers.
14.xx created bin used at 13.xx drivers gave same results:double hash rate but only HW errors.

could there be a change to get valid hashes at this double hashrate with 14.xx bin file tweaks or something?
i could take a look how much power usage is when using 14.xx bins… if its 210W… we maybe have something

I can’t get it working at all with 14.4 on ubuntu 14.04.

@tmuir12. Thanks for the catalyst info. I was unaware that cgminer has issues with catalyst 14.x. I will downgrade my rig to 13.12 and see what I get.

Cheers

Dave

Hi.

Can’t seem to get it working on my main linux mining machine (AMD processor, 1x Saphire 7970, 1xMSI R9 280, Ubuntu 14.04, Catalyst 14.4).

export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
./cgminer --neoscrypt -o http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554 -u  -p x --verbose -T

Output…

 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Started cgminer 3.7.5
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] CL Platform 0 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] CL Platform 0 name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] CL Platform 0 version: OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1445.5)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Platform 0 devices: 2
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Device no. | device name          | byte_addr. | atomic | OpenCL version
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19]      0     | Tahiti               |   yes      |   yes  | OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1445.5)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19]      1     | Tahiti               |   yes      |   yes  | OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1445.5)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Probing for an alive pool
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Testing pool http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] JSON-RPC call failed: {
   "data": null,
   "code": -32601,
   "message": "Method not found"
}
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Testing pool 0 stratum stratum+tcp://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] Switching pool 0 http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554 to stratum+tcp://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554
 [2014-09-25 11:17:19] JSON-RPC decode failed: (unknown reason)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Pool 0 difficulty changed to 0.515190
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Stratum authorisation success for pool 0
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Pool 0 http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:10554 alive
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Network diff set to 5.2K
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] New block: dfded30153c64217... diff 5.2K
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Stratum from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Init GPU thread 0 GPU 0 virtual GPU 0
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform version: OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1445.5)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] List of devices:
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20]  0       Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20]  1       Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Selected 0: Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Selecting neoscrypt kernel
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Initialising kernel neoscrypt140909.cl with bitalign, 1 vectors and worksize 64
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] initCl() finished. Found Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Init GPU thread 1 GPU 1 virtual GPU 1
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] CL Platform version: OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1445.5)
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] List of devices:
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20]  0       Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20]  1       Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Selected 1: Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Selecting neoscrypt kernel
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] Initialising kernel neoscrypt140909.cl with bitalign, 1 vectors and worksize 64
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] initCl() finished. Found Tahiti
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] 2 gpu miner threads started
 [2014-09-25 11:17:20] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:23] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:24] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:40] Pool 0 difficulty changed to 0.507378
 [2014-09-25 11:17:40] Stratum from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2014-09-25 11:17:46] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:47] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:49] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:53] GPU1: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:54] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:17:54] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:04] GPU1: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:04] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:12] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:12] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:19] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:28] GPU1: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:35] GPU0: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:18:58] GPU1: invalid nonce - HW error
 [2014-09-25 11:19:03] Pool 0 difficulty changed to 0.526939
 [2014-09-25 11:19:03] Stratum from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2014-09-25 11:19:10] Pool 0 difficulty changed to 0.511299
 [2014-09-25 11:19:10] New block: 61e0bbd6e5249b31... diff 5.2K
 [2014-09-25 11:19:10] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
 [2014-09-25 11:19:11] Stratum from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2014-09-25 11:19:23] GPU1: invalid nonce - HW error

I will try to play a bit more tomorrow, and also test out the Win build on my 750Ti.

Cheers

Dave

Howto

Getting started with gpuminer

3. Run cgminer

• run 'cgminer -o http://: -O :

Hi all.

The command line on the first post instructions is incorrect, at least for me on my linux setup. cgminer run command should be :

cgminer –neoscrypt -o http://: -O :

Otherwise the miner starts up in scrypt mode. I am running version 3.7.5 - cloned yesterday.

Cheers

Dave

Hi Calem, hi all,

Excuse me if this is a bit rambly. my post below turned into a bit of a brain-dump.

Flippant answer :

Regarding crypto-currencies and money. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

Longer answer :

Crypto’s are hard to define. When I initially was getting into it I had trouble explaining to other people what it exactly was.

• It sometimes behaves like money (you can get exchange it for goods/services/ and $$$s).
• It sometimes behaves as a comodity.
• It sometimes behaves as property (hoarding it in the expectation of another disfunctional bubble).

I am using bitcoin as money. My wife has a US student loan. Being the US they don’t accept international payment so each month I buy an amount of BTC on bittylicious, send this to coinbase, and withdraw to a US account, whereupon I can pay the monthly amount. Previously I was using paypal and paying the fees.

sidenote - If coinbase were to support FTC then I would consider using that for my UK --> US transfers.

The next steps to take are to lobby the student loan company to accept bitcoins directly, and then receive part of my wages in bitcoin (easy to convince the boss as I am self employed).

I am just one person, but a whole eco-system is now being built mainly around BTC, but also this is laying the groundwork for cryptos in general.

However - you have identified the elephant in the room WRT BTC. It does not scale well (I have myself wondered if there is another price bubble, whether the blockchain would cope).

I have always considered BTC and most of the 1.0 crypto-currencies to be prototype crypto-currencies. You are correct in that BTC is “stagnating” due to it’s success and it is much easier for smaller coins (like FTC) to innovate.

Now (what I term) v2.0 coins are appearing, and they are addressing the perceived and technical weaknesses seen in the v1.0 coins. An example Boolberry can expand the number of transactions stored in a block dynamically if demand requires, then reduce them afterwards (this actually was used against it in a recent unsuccessful “exit” attack). Privacy is an example of a perceived weakness, hence the popularity in coins that mix, encrypt transactions, etc.

Over the past year crypto-currencies have boomed, with hundreds being launched. Now (IMO) the shakeout is beginning, with each coin suffering an identity crisis. Most of these coins will die a slow death (Natural selection demonstrated). However some of these coins will survive, because they offer some sort of innovation (example NXT with it’s asset exchange) and/or serve a niche need.

BTC itself may be toppled in time and if that becomes the case it is going to be a very painful time for cryptos and those based around them, but blockchain technology - the real innovation - will remain, and the eco-system will not be destroyed but will be adopted for that which replaces it.

Back to FTC - I agree when you say FTC is a coin that is willing to grow, adapt, and evolve. I disagree when you say we should do this in every direction, rather than focusing on a niche.

Question I have been pondering for a while - what is FTC’s unique selling point?

Cheers

Dave

Just for the record - I currently hold BTC/FTC :D /NXT (v1.00), and BBR/XMR (v2.00).

Hi all.

I have generated doxygen documentation based off of the current master branch on github. It seems like bitcoin started to use doxygen but it was then discarded after a while.

If anyone is interested I have uploaded the generated documentation to an old unused website of mine:

http://www.bishop-morrison.com/feathercoin/index.html

The documentation includes class hierachy diagrams and also the source with hyper-text links.

http://www.bishop-morrison.com/feathercoin/inherits.html

http://www.bishop-morrison.com/feathercoin/files.html

As I will be going through the code anyway to understand it, I could document as I go (in a light way, not with heavy detail at this point).

Thoughts?

Cheers

Dave

Just cloned the feathercoin source - I see a doxygen config file in the /docs directory. Going to run doxygen on the source and see what I get.

Cheers

Dave

Hi all,

Well I’m a bit of a fan of doxygen - which with a few tweaks to the comments, you can use this to autogenerate html or even .pdf documentation on the code and hey presto, done (although you have to take the time to understand the code and add the comments to the classes/methods and variables).

The comment formats are pretty easy to follow - I have used it over the years to document as I go.

Cheers

Dave

Links - Doxygen main page http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

Example of doxygen comments : http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/docblocks.html

calem, what do you mean no harm? :D A CUDA miner is an absolute must!!! The Nvidia cards are much more versatile and can be used for much more applications than just mining. I am all for a cuda miner. Id be more than happy to throw the amd gpus and mine with an nvidia instead. Would pledge 2 mil UFO but wont be able to deliver then until late september… probably will be able to borrow tho

Hi all,

The new NVIDIA Maxwell chipset uses much much less power than the AMD equivalent. Also they have ironed out problems regarding slow computation that made the previous generation chipset so poor at mining.

In the UK you can buy a 750Ti for just over £100 that will give you around 265kHashes/s scrypt using 60 watts. It also will run much cooler so less power required for cooling also.

I believe the high-end maxwell GPU cards are scheduled to become available in September. So long as NVIDIA don’t set too high a price for the cards I would expect a lot of miners to switch, especially where electricity is expensive.

Regarding openCL compatibility, the CUDA SDK includes OpenCL (1.1?) support. I’ve just had a quick look at a sample of code and the C API looks similar (but not completely identical) to that implemented by AMD (small things like oclGetPlatformID rather than clGetPlatformID).

Regarding the actual .cl code I’m still not up on enough to fully comment, but I would expect identical or at worst minor changes for a non-optimised solution (for AMD and NVIDIA). However, when it comes to writing optimised openCL code then this could diverge. For example I think I read somewhere that with AMD 79** GPUs it’s best to use the int4 vector type to ensure maximum use of GPU resources. With other GPU architectures this might not be the case, hence we could end up with, once optimisation is performed, maybe opencl code for AMD, and a different one for NVIDIA.

Of course, first we have to get a first working version of a openCL based miner. Optimisations will come later I would guess.

Cheers

Dave

Ref: http://cryptomining-blog.com/922-the-new-nvidia-geforce-gtx-750-ti-scrypt-mining-performance/

Hi all,

OK - so I’ve just caught up on the conversation over the past few days. I’m a little bit confused so maybe I can recap and see if I have got what is being proposed?

Changes

1. The blockchain stays as is, a public ledger showing all transactions, values, etc - So no dark blockchain (encrypted, mixing, etc).

2. Add the ability to have a white address. A white address links to and identifies a “standard” address (Name, Address? facebook account? twitter?).

3. At the same time we reuse the tech for 2) to add the ability to have an encrypted “dark address”. This encrypted address would replace the “standard” address in any blockchain transactions. Only the address on the blockchain would be encrypted, so amount, txid would remain the same, hence no additional double spend issues.

3a) When dark addresses are created, an associated dark address “viewkey” (to borrow from Monero-speak) would be created. This viewkey could be sent to a third party for auditing purposes (e.g. accountant, government, etc).

Proposal

The proposal is to create (and publicly launch?) a new coin as a testbed for the above, and once properly tested and debugged, incorporate the features of the new coin back into feathercoin.

Is the above correct?

Initial thoughts/issues/questions (again I am still learning the specifics of exactly how blockchain transactions work).

• What would the white address consist of (actual realworld name/address, facebook account, or could be many different things)

• Would the new coin be launched publicly and traded? or be a private experiment. Risk for real world launch would be that it would take the place of FTC?

• Would we have one “dark address viewkey” per dark address created, or one for many dark addresses created?

• Handling of change addresses, for dark transactions, would the client automatically create dark change addresses when transactions are made?

• Ability to sign a message using a dark address?

Cheers

Dave

Hi,

Name suggestion - Batcoin - because they fly in the dark.

Hmm. maybe too close to Bitcoin.

Cheers

Dave

Hi panoramix,

But there *is* privacy. Feathercoin has as much privacy as bitcoin. There were notable cases where many members of general public had great interest in breaching privacy of another user, namely Sheep Marketplace thief, or Mt Gox thief. Did they succeed? No. So what problem, what hurdle are you talking about?

Actually I disagree here. The public blockchain is great for organisations that wish to be open and publicly accountable for what they spend, and how they spend it. But for businesses and individuals that are using it as a bank account it leaks information all over the place about what other BTC/FTC/etc addresses that user holds, and also what they are spending it on.

I can see a whole new field of crypto-forensics being developed specifically to tap the blockchain information leaks to allow specific address(es) to be linked to a person or organisation.

Just like Google uses our browsing history for targeted advertising, block-chain information too could ultimately be used to, say, identify high net worth individuals and target them (be it happy things like selling yachts, or nasty things like extortion). It would just be another tool in the box.

I have come to the opinion that BTC is likely to fill a niche roll in business (like accept bitcoin payments for customer convenience and immediately converting to fiat), and businesses are not likely to keep a substantial amount of crypto for security reasons (example: companies would be able to work out how much BTC their rivals have, another example: customer pays in BTC, company can then check the balance of the sending addresses used, work out a rough estimate of net BTC worth, and adjust prices (up?) for the next purchases accordingly, or even target ads at the customer to sell more expensive kit).

Privacy is not just something to protect the bad guys.

To flip this on it’s head - information is power, and just how much power do you wish to give away?

Cheers

Dave

Hi All,

Quick intro - Long-time lurker - I’m a Software engineer with about 18 yrs c/c++, assembler experience. I’m currently in the 3G telecoms field and have little experience with security/hashing algos (apart from the 3G ones), etc. However I currently have my head buried in mining software, trying to get up to speed with mining, hashing, OpenCL, etc in my spare time.

As a result some of my comments here maybe a bit simplistic / already discussed, or completely irrelevant.

However I too agree that this is a good idea. Especially with the rise of cryptonote based currencies like Monero/Boolberry which have the anonymity built in.

I can see a “shakeout” time coming where a lot of altcoins without anonymity option will go extinct as people switch, hence it probably is a matter of survival for FTC to adopt it. It would give FTC a distinct advantage over most of the alt-coins out there.

I also like the idea that anonymity is optional. This is currently the case with Monero, however the developers aim to remove this and go fully anonymous in the future.

I enclose a few links about cryptonote/monero below - as there may be concepts that could prove useful (perhaps?).

Cheers

Dave

(Disclosure - I own FTC, Monero, and Boolberry).

Links:

Cryptonote whitepaper - https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf

Monero main site - http://www.monero.cc/

Freelance software engineer on the south coast of the UK.

About 18 years C/C++ plus various assemblers experience, linux also. Been working in 3g field (RRC, UTRAN, RNC, etc) for past 10 years, but also have more general embedded systems experience to fall back on. Been looking into cryptos for the past 18 months with a keen interest.

Cheers

Dave

Hi.
Should be able to make it.

Any hashing algo experts going? Trying to get a good understanding of neoscrypt in particular and hashing algos in general. Talking it through with someone face to face would help.

Cheers

Dave