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Bitcoin Gold, the Latest Bitcoin Fork, Explained (arstechnica.com)
Timothy B. Lee via Ars Technica explains Bitcoin Gold: A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold -- like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August -- is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins. While Bitcoin Cash was designed to resolve Bitcoin's capacity crunch with larger blocks, Bitcoin Gold aims to tackle another of Bitcoin's perceived flaws: the increasing centralization of the mining industry that verifies and secures Bitcoin transactions.
The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin.
The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin.
About.com and wikihow called. They want their non-news content back.
lucm, indeed.
Bitcoin Gold is a shady operation. Here are their developers being called out for implementing a hidden fee in the software.
Of not enough bitcoins in the founders pockets!
I'm launching my own crypto currency which gives me more coins up front. You peansants can mine what's left.
I'm holding out for the Bitcoin Ultimate GOTY Edition with all the DLC.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So I was reading up on Bitcoin gold the other day. I'm not familiar with how the previous forks like bitcoin cash worked, but for BC gold I read that after the fork, the first 80000 coins are going to be pre-mined by the developers. Seems like a pretty big reward for a rather small change.
if(options.testnet == false){
options.rewardRecipients['GPY1LMyM8kaysLEB4a4nUCJ23Y6Wgd5zTC'] = 0.5;
} else {
options.rewardRecipients['mto9JE7y5ZPLEmUwH495u4F3fKMdpNWTAi'] = 0.5;
}
https://github.com/StarbuckBG/...
If they control the algorithms, they can decentralize mining more directly by giving preference to solvers who haven't been awarded recently. There is a problem with "solving farms" generating large numbers of identities, but that can be at least partly addressed by geographic distribution. If a solving farm entity is determined enough to get itself located at many diverse points around the globe, that's at least one component of diversity.
"Virtual location" can be in-part determined by ping-time triangulation. Servers attempting to game their location reporting can be downgraded based on abnormally high ping times. Servers with fast ping times are rewarded proportionally higher. So, a little guy running a single rig with good ping in a low-density of solvers location might get rewarded at "full rate" for his solves, while a bigger house running 100 rigs might get rewarded only 10% of full rate for each of their solves, making it more attractive for little guys to participate, particularly in locations without a lot of little solvers.
I laughed and laughed and laughed.
From the paper (PDF):
Hmm... Needs less than 1 gigabyte. For external chips, that costs, let me see, $16 in modest quantities. Want it cheaper? Here is a magazine article from 4 years ago about people embedding memory in ASIC dies. In a modern chip process, 700 MB fits into what, a 5mm square?
They wave their hand over it in the paper, so it isn't like they ignored the cheapness-of-memory problem entirely. What if we assume that they are right and they have indeed found a problem with a critical dependency on memory throughput. Is there an obvious solution to that problem? What is the fastest memory in the world? (What word is entirely missing from their paper?) SRAM. In-die SRAM can be absurdly fast, like full core speed for arbitrary values of "core speed" and no wait cycles. It makes no sense to load a CPU up with piles of the stuff because caching has diminishing returns. But, what if your goal was to use ~6 billion cells of SRAM not as a cache, but as your main memory... How much faster would that ASIC be than a general purpose CPU?
Bottom line, if you imagine that you have a computation problem that can't be solved by building a single-purpose chip, you are almost certainly wrong. Either you don't understand your problem, or you don't understand the array of solutions available to solvers.
See that "Preview" button?
You carry more than $1280 in your wallet ( https://goldprice.org/gold-pri... ) ? Man I hope you don't drop it...
So long as you can buy drugs with it safely, it's a real asset with real value to real people.
Dont miss out, everyone is doing it. If you dont buy now you will miss the boat.
Looks like a ponzi scheme, smells like a pyramid scheme. The technology is interesting but its surrounded by what seems to be an endless amount of negative stories of stolen lost or destroyed 'things'. Valuations all over the map, all seemingly based on nothing but speculation.
Even if some individual 'currency' is limited by some arbitrary design, there is an infinite number of 'currencies' that can be created with other limits or even no limits. So it appears on a macro scale there are actually no limits, and in fact no limiting factors at all.
Back when internet hit mainstream, we had a Dot-Com boom. Anyone could start a website in their basement, grab a cleaver domain name, raise money, spend it like it's raining cash, go IPO and collect money from naive buyers who invested purely because they wanted to get on the bandwagon. Not everyone succeeded in the end, but a large number of people did burn through a ton of cash, and some people did make millions before the bubble burst in 2001, when the world ran out of suckers to offload the dot-com stocks to at an even more inflated price.
So is this a new cryptocurrency bubble in progress now? Anyone can fork existing cryptocurrencies, or create new ones (harder to do but not impossible), call it something that inspires trust in unsuspecting buyers who feel like they want to get a piece of the action, take the money and run? How long before that bursts and there are hundreds if not thousands worthless crypto-currencies, like dot-coms after 2001?
Bitcoin has become a ponzi scheme but this is even worse. From the official thread:
@agarin55 commented 19 hours ago :+1: 18 :heart: 2
All pools based on this open source software are mining hidden fee. This PR removes unnecessary recipients. Correct me if I'm wrong.
@gagarin55
Hidden fee removed
12b669a
@StarbuckBG :-1: 13 :thinking_face: 2
Owner
StarbuckBG commented 19 hours ago
Thanks for sharing this!
I will not merge this PR, but will leave it here, so it is visible for everyone.
@Bourne-ID Bourne-ID referenced this pull request in BTCGPU/BTCGPU 17 hours ago
Closed
Beware of hidden fee hard-coded into z-nomp fork advertised by the devs #180
@oliverw
oliverw commented 17 hours ago
@StarbuckBG You're so full of shit it's not even funny anymore.
https://github.com/StarbuckBG/node-stratum-pool/pull/1
It's a scam, a fad or both. Done. You can all get back to work now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not commenting on Bitcoin gold, but this line in the summary is incorrect:
It's true that: BC mining has become a highly concentrated industry, but this was always bound to happen. The way BC is setup and the way the algorithm is build is such that the complexity of calculation and thus the resources needed to perform it are increasing as time goes by. It was predictable from day 1 that as the complexity grows, home PCs (and even custom home built clusters using stuff like playstations that people were for a moment rigging and using for mining) were going to become unprofitable, as the electricity consumption and hence the operating cost would soar past the yielded profit. It's not about efficiency, it's about profitability. People would still be running mining software on their home machines if it was profitable even if the profit made was small compared to large scale dedicated operations, but right now anyone using anything other than a custom mining machine will actually be losing money.
BC is this way by design (and if you ask me, that's one of the major problems of its design), so claiming that the original plan was to keep users running mining software on their own computers is to be ignorant.
This is something that in the long term endangers the whole of BC infrastructure: right now the large scale miners in Asia (mostly China) have kept on doing what they do because the price of the coin has kept going up, meaning that even though electricity and hardware costs have kept increasing, the increasing costs have been offset by the increasing price of the coin. However the fundamental issue is that the market price of BC fluctuates heavily, whereas the complexity only goes one way and that's up. If the market price of BC crashes, the mining will stop being profitable even for the dedicated operators, which will destroy the mining industry and essentially render BC unusable (and hence, worthless).
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The way BC is setup and the way the algorithm is build is such that the complexity of calculation and thus the resources needed to perform it are increasing as time goes by.
That's incorrect. Bitcoin mining difficulty is dynamic and adjusts to the total hashing speed of the network. It does this by requiring a certain number of zeros in the SHA256 hash. As more miners join the network with custom ASICs that only perform this calculation, difficulty goes up, but if they leave to join another network (like Bitcoin Cash), difficulty goes down. It's got nothing to do with the complexity of the calculations are increasing.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Having both held physical gold and traded ETS gold (and silver), I think that FX traded XAU and XAG are attractive options by virtue of 24hr markets and high liquidity. Holding physical metals "in your purse or pocket" (or vault) is actually great fun (everyone should have 1 ozt of physical gold at home!), but does not give you a speedy way to liquidate.
Holding physical also subjects you to assay costs when you buy it and sell it.
Isn't that what you rather mean?
It's just like Bitcoin except with all these additional features:
- No traction
- No recognition in the industry
- Large pre-mined scam from the inventors
and it addressed one of the biggest shortcomings of bitcoin: Power usage ... by making it unoptimisable and worse,
Some lady may decide to fork you and make a derivative work, yet hold you financially responsible.
I think Reddcoin was created exactly for that purpose. Adding Dogecoin wouldn't be a bad idea either. They're both coins that have more or less held their value over multiple years, unlike others which crashed and burned (i.e. mooncoin, flappycoin).
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