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I would like to gather community opinion regarding a possible change to freicoin's mining algorithm. Right now we use the same proof of work algorithm as bitcoin, non-merged mined double-SHA256. I have for some time been an advocate of switching to a newer proof of work algorithm that has better protections against mining industry centralization, and which avoids price- and difficulty-based swings in hash rate between bitcoin and freicoin. However it has until now been thought that changing the proof of work for a chain is necessarily a hard-fork change, which I would be hesitant to suppo

@ fedde thank you for your hard work with freicoin over the years.

@ Mark Friedenbach Thank you for your hard work and time spent on Freicoin

Sidechains and merge mining have their own intractable problems, and in particular they do not mix together very well (merge mining makes the sidechain problems worse, and vice versa). If freicoin were to be sidechain to another chain, it would have to either (1) be a separate proof of work, or (2) have all full nodes of both chains validate each other, an idea more commonly known as extension blocks. Setting freicoin up as a separately mined chain with a different proof of work (and therefore different hardware distribution) prepares for the first possibility while not excluding the second. B

Regarding ASIC reistance, it's a goal that in its strongest form is impossible. You cannot have an ASIC-reistant proof of work, and if someone is trying to tell you otherwise that's a good indicator you're dealing with a crank (or they're trying to sell you something). Anything you can do with a general application-agnostic circuit you can do more efficiently in a specialized circuit. This follows straight from information theory. HOWEVER, there is a weak form of ASIC-resistance which is interesting to note. With double-SHA256, GPUs are 100-1,000x more efficient than CPUs, FPGAs are 100-1

having an own mining alg sounds good, because in the long run if there are Freicoin specific asics, they would have an incentive to stay helpful to the coin. It could be even a good idea to have both algs running on the same time, therefore we should think about never fully abandon SHA256. Having it asics resistant is no need, i think its good to have ascis mining the coin, otherwise again lot of general purpose mining power can switch to mine the coin and also botnets can mine the coin.... To miner centralisation, i think a mining alg change will not solve that long. Centraliza

Sounds good to me. It similar I have seen on some coins that use Sha and scrypt to solve blocks. Will have pool ready for second also.

That's correct. There would be different sets of miners for the two algorithms. Pool services would run different pools for each. The length of the transition period and the allocation of subsidy between the old miners and the new miners is arbitrary in a sense. There's no technical reason for the choice, just soft factors like making sure that nobody is wronged by the transition and the community split as a result. A straightforward choice is to have a linear transition so that the subsidy given to sha256d miners is slowly stepped down and given to cuckoo cycle miners, over the course of

Ok, the dnsseed.sicanet.net has been running the past years, still working good ?