User:Clarifyinglight/sandbox

Hello,

This is my sandbox.

Video games economies such as Voidspace have mentioned plans to implement the use and exchange of cryptocurrencies including Mintcoin in online multiplayer games.

Mintcoin utilizes a 20 day minimum and 40 day maximum minting period; the minimum is considered the earliest age or time required for holding coins without spending them before the coins become eligible to begin the minting process.

=History= Mintcoin was launched on February 6th, 2014. Mintcoin was released immediately as fully open source on launch day and the code was quickly cloned, altered and re-released as new coins by other developers. Mintcoin was the first cryptocoin to attempt the implementation of a faster proof-of-work (PoW) initial distribution, followed by a conversion to a hybrid between PoW and proof-of-stake (PoS). The reasoning in support of the initial release as a PoW coin, was in attempt to release the coin with a fair distribution. Mintcoin was coded to have about a 4-5 week initial distribution based on PoW. The reasoning in support of the 4-5 week initial PoW distribution was to release and convert to PoS before the Scrypt ASICs were invented thereby causing a more lopsided and unfair distribution. Thus, the careful timing and implementation by the Mintcoin developers allowed for Mintcoin's initial distribution to be over just days before Scrypt ASICs began to hit the market.

Premine
Mintcoin was released with a premine of 700,000,000 coins to the original developer. The community started investing despite the pre-mine with the understanding that the pre-mine would be used to grow the community. Several million coins were actually legitimately used for bounties, giveaways, development, support and maintenance, new features, etc. However, within a few months of Mintcoin's release, the original developer became disheartened and decided to abandon the project. The original developer turned the rights of the coin over to the community but kept back the remainder of the premine, and gradually liquidated it on the open market by dumping the coins on exchanges over several months. As a result, the premine was completely purged but during this time the value per coin plummeted to as low as 0.00000001 BTC within the first year of the coin's existence.

Notable Patches

 * Mintcoin's release was innovative and highly experimental, attempting to achieve something never before seen in the cryptocurrency world; the PoW/PoS implementation originally attempted by Mintcoin had never been tried before. The original idea was that after the initial distribution phase, the PoW block reward would drop to just 1 coin per PoW block. However, the incentive to mine was almost entirely eliminated as the incentive to mine only 1 coin was not worth the effort, time, cost, and energy of running the mining equipment. As a result the PoW difficulty dropped to critically low levels, such that it was discovered to be insecure and a gaping security vulnerability. The flaw was that with the low PoW difficulty, a malicious miner with sufficient hash power could overwhelm and control the network, including possible double-spends; however, no double-spend attack was actually ever made on the Mintcoin network. Interestingly, the initial discovery of the flaw was not made by the Mintcoin developers, but by the developers of one of its early clones. The clone coin in particular was called Blackcoin which had released after Mintcoin, but with a faster 7 day initial PoW distribution, thereby enabling the discovery of the flaw more quickly. The flaw, a vital security vulnerability, was first fixed by Blackcoin which then notified the Mintcoin developers and the fix was implemented in Mintcoin. The fix involved converting Mintcoin to rely only on 100% full PoS instead of being a hybrid PoW/PoS coin. The fix involved a hard fork, but was implemented without any issues and Mintcoin continued to run as envisioned.


 * In December 2014, when Mintcoin was going from 20% APR to 15% APR, the blockchain froze and became stuck. The Mintcoin developer at the time (Roboguy) patched the code and the blockchain resumed as normal without indecent or security compromise.


 * In July 2015, another flaw was discovered by a cryptocoin developer (presstab). The flaw, named the timewarp attack, had to do with falsifying the Mintcoin's timestamping. The flaw involved tricking the coin based on it's timestamp to perpetually reduce the PoS difficulty. The flaw was patched without issue before any such attack was made on August 1, 2015.