Saturday 21 April 2012

Ixcoin

Ixcoin was announced by Thomas Nasakioto on August 10, 2011, 05:41:29 PM as a Bitcoin fork.   Each block consists of 96 coins with twice the inflation rate as Bitcoin with 21 million coins as limit - same as Bitcoin.   There was a premine of about 580 000 coins.   This eventually leads to some argument which caused the formation of i0coin, "0" supposedly to mean that there is no premine.   I guess it is some friendly competition despite the postings on the forums.  It has the features below:

  1. Shorter maturity period
  2. New blockchain
  3. New key format
Ixcoin project is here at Ixcoin Sources.   But the prices are too low and with merged mining causing the difficulty to increase too much to be profitable mining it, it is more of a byproduct of Bitcoin mining which is a pity as I find the coin very innovative.   Hopefully someone can resurrect the coins maybe make it part of the virtual currency of a popular online game for example.

Thursday 19 April 2012

Ixcoin I0coin

Bitcoin has been popular, but Namecoin isn't too popular even though there are diehard advocates.   But because of the Bitcoin increased in popularity and also in value, there are some forks of Bitcoin starting to appear, ixcoin and the i0coin.   Both was popular for a while before fading off.   They were being revitalized because of merged mining, something that had also happened to Namecoin.   But the value was far too low to be considered Bitcoin competitor at all.   Miners mine them because the mining pools had merged mining for these. 

Why has Bitcoin miners turn to mining pools?   Simple reason was it was taking far too long to solo mine due to the difficulty.  Mining pool allows for the pooling of hashing power so that you can some Bitcoins regularly rather than to wait months for a Bitcoin block.   I will be discussing about Mining Pools in the subsequent Blog Posts.

With regards to ixcoin and i0coin, there is some interest in the naming.   It seems that ixcoin was premined and there was some objection that the creator can profit from the premining.   i0coin as in "0" was to say that there is no premining and to act as a competitor to ixcoin and serve as an objection to the premining.   Though I would say some premining may be needed as you really do need bounties to start the ball rolling for the coins you are developing.   You may need an Exchange, you may need mining pools.  By providing bounties for such development, it hasten the progress of the coin development.

Sunday 15 April 2012

Namecoin Client

Namecoin GUI is not as friendly as that of Bitcoin and the rest.   It is more of command line.  There are attempts to make the GUI more friendly but the adaptation rate aren't as good.  Most are still using command lines.  To get your address for information you will need to key in as below.


The rest all needs command lines to set.   One lucky thing is that those using Namecoin are normally experts themselves supporting the Dot Bit domain and hence a lot do have the technical knowledge to use the command lines instead.

Namecoin Usage

Given the more specialized nature of Namecoin, NMC, I would like to give more information on its usage.  I think this video is very useful.


Namecoin Mining

Namecoin used to be a much smaller niche than Bitcoin, the prices of Namecoin is extremely low compared to that of Bitcoin.   One Namecoin is only about 0.006 Bitcoin and the difficulty to mine the Namecoin is tremendous due to the new merged mining.   The difficulty of mining Namecoin at this moment is 639,363 as compared to Bitcoin 1,577,913 and it is just worth 0.06 of Bitcoin.  It is more cost effective to buy Namecoin from the market if you need it for the Dot Bit registrations and functions.   Reason being merged mining allow Bitcoin and Namecoin and other coins to be mined together hence increasing the hashes and the difficulties and driving down the prices of the other coins tremendously till they are nearly worthless.

The chart at Vircurex.com shows how bad the prices of the other alternative coins, Namecoins included as compared to Bitcoin, BTC.   It is basically far more effective to buy the other coins than to mine it if you are not using merged mining.  For merged mining, such coins are now byproducts of mining Bitcoins.

NameCoin Video Introduction

I think this will help us understand NameCoin or NMC better given that it is radically different from Bitcoin which is far more easier to understand as it is only about money.  NMC is a special purpose cryptographic coin.


NameCoins Introduction

NameCoins is one of the earliest alternative cryptographic coins after the Bitcoins.   It is not purely for monetary purposes.  It has one very unique use which is that of providing for p2p domain name registrations.   NameCoins or NMC for short is actually promoting the Dot Bit domain name extensions.   It's purpose is to grow this decentralized Dot Bit domain name extension.   Due to its specialized nature, it has its own die hard advocates and even though it is under a lot of competition from Bitcoins and that its value had fallen a lot, there are still die hard supporters wanting to see the project through.  

Friday 13 April 2012

Bitcoin is one of the cryptocurrencies in that they uses computing powers to generate out the virtual coins.   But there are however, a lot of interesting ideas being spawned out either for fun, to try to replace Bitcoin or try to complement Bitcoin.   Till now we have not seen any serious challengers to Bitcoin yet.   But it is fun to track those alternate cryptocurrencies, how their ideas come about and how they flourish or sank.   I setup this blog to document these interesting development of the past as well as the future as I am sure more alternate cryptocurrencies will come into play as the geniuses behind them push out their inventions and innovations.