[ANN][AIRDROP]NewEnglandcoin: A Coin 10x Faster than Bitcoin with Rich Culture

[rosso]

When NENG listed on the new exchange

What new exchange ?

[honglu69]

Mac Wallet for both GUI and command line are released in v1.1.2:
https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases

The MacOS wallet was compiled in OSX 10.11 machine with backward compatibility with OSX 10.7 or higher.  Only OSX 10.11 was tested, but other platform may work as well.

To compile your own MacOS wallet from source, check the doc guidelines  on how the current Mac wallets were compiled:
https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/blob/master/doc/build-osx.md

[honglu69]

Obviously current version of cheetah_cpuminer does not support Mac platform yet.  With the new release of Mac wallet,  cheetah support for  OSX will come soon. 

[honglu69]

Cheetah_cpuminer v1.1.2 is released at github.  This version added additional support for Mac platform.

https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/cheetah_cpuminer/releases

README Document:
https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/cheetah_cpuminer

What is Cheetah_Cpuminer?
NewEnglandcoin (NENG) blockchain has dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm which may trigger ASIC miners to get stuck on NENG blockchain finding no blocks from several minutes to several hours.

Cheetah_cpuminer will automatically start mining at local PC when ASIC miners get stuck. Cheeta_cpuminer will stop mining when ASIC miners are smoothly generating blocks

v1.1.2 is tested under  Windows 10, Mac OSX 10.11 and Ubuntu Linux 16.04

[honglu69]

NewEnglandCoin  v1.2.0

released at github:
https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.2.0

New Features:

• Blockchain hardfork at 273501 block
• Anti-51% attack feature enabled at fork
• Anti-instant mining enabled at fork

v1.2.0 implemented new dynamic hashing algorithm II as explained in technical whitepaper v1.0.  This new wallet upgrade is required for all users.

[honglu69]

NENG block chain has successfully forked off  at 273501 height with time stamp of Sun, 17 Feb 2019 16:56:44 GMT, below block.

Below is the first forked block link
http://nengexplorer.mooo.com:3001/block/c0c58a22ec247f47347b875592688eb0253b06bb8fcc89a7fa8c17e8d58ab583

Research on verifying the results of dynamic algorithm II  is ongoing.

[honglu69]

v1.2.0 Hard Fork has been major success!

Research on first forked 50 blocks confirmed that shortest block time was 4 seconds.  Essentially fast block time or instant mining has been stopped.  Historically, fast blocks would
be 1 in 20 blocks , some times 1 or 2 blocks in within 10 block stretch.  The dynamic diff algorithm implemented in v1.2.0 is working.

Of the first forked 50 blocks, 17 blocks were mined by CPU miners,  33 blocks were mined by ASIC or GPU miners.  In other word, the first 50 blocks under new algorithm, ASIC/GPU miners got 66% of total rewards, CPU miners obtained 34% of total rewards.  Ratio split on ASIC/GPU/CPU miners are not constant, could be subject to changes depending the difficulty and mining rigs distribution.  However, this 66/34 split of rewards is within expectation of our original plan for the v1.2.0.

[honglu69]

Found one issue after the hard fork,  the original plan was to raise the spike difficulty level within 3 seconds to the level of dogecoin.   The current dogecoin difficulty is about 2 million,
litecoin difficulty is about 7 million.

However,  the v1.2.0 math is off by 10x.  My mistake. The spike difficulty is only 1/10 of dogecoin level. Here is screenshot I obtained on the small ASIC rig that we ran.  Below screenshot is from  either Findblocks or Miners.rocks pool. We actually tested on both pools and got similar screenshot like below:

https://ibb.co/k0xYgGT


Note in the screenshot, the mining pool said "Network difficulty changed to 244k".    The desired result is 2440k. 
ASIC mining pool should set difficulty to the base level, which is 16 or 25 whatever, probably several orphaned blocks got ASIC pool confused and used the 3 seconds spike difficulty instead.
Whatever, this tells us that the spike difficulty is only at 0.2 million level,  one tenth of dogecoin, or 3% of litecoin difficulty level.

On the otherhand, NewYorkcoin  current mining difficulty is  928.  The NENG spike difficulty is 263x larger than that of NYC.  This issue is not so urgent to fix.  We will table it for now
and do a bundled security upgrade in 2019 Q2 together with other issues TBD. 

[honglu69]

It appears that now it is exclusive mining period for ASIC/GPU miners.  There are probably no rewards for CPU miners for now. Not sure why.  Still learning and studying the NENG blockchain.

The ASIC miners got stumbled into 244K zone, thinking the difficulty base level is 244,000.  Actually big pool ASIC miners are not doing so well, Blocks are mined by big ASIC for sure, but not that much rewards.

The big winner now is small solo ASIC/GPU miners.  I actually now am running a small ASIC USB stick at 3 Mh/s hash rate, getting blocks virtually very two minutes. Probably true if someone runs a GPU solo miners for similar results with big rewards.  For the v1.2.0 is encouraging small ASIC/GPU to go alone with solo mining setup.   

[honglu69]

Update on solo-mining small ASIC rigs:  gave up on solo-mining setup messing.   Only good for couple of hours and then were hit with "all pools are dead" error. 
Not worth the effort.     

Re-join the two pools here at NENG.

[honglu69]

One Major Issue found on v1.2.0 ,  for unknown reason,  as soon as ASIC miners stumbled into 244k difficulty zone,  NENG is no longer CPU minable.  virtually 100% of mining rewards go to ASIC or GPU miners,  pool or solo miners.

Because CPU mining feature of NENG is important coin feature. This is major issue.  We will give a day tomorrow to observe NENG blockchain movement and work on the solution.
Until further notice from here, it is not worth trying Cheetah CPU mining for now because pretty much 100% of rewards goes to ASIC or GPU miners.

[honglu69]

CPU mining were back just minutes ago.  This was likely to be difficulty reset period.  It used to be super fast movement, 1 second per block for ASIC miners for 1440 blocks.
Because v1.2.0 upgrade removed instant mining, the reset took much longer to the point of slow movement on very low diff. 

But now the base diff is up so that CPU mining is back into play.

[honglu69]

NewEnglandland v1.2.1 released at : https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases

This is security update to have checkpoints on block 278008 to secure the hard fork.  This is recommended for upgrade for all users.

[honglu69]

Dev Policy on Checkpoints on NewEnglandcoin

NewEnglandcoin v1.2.1 update is checkpoints security upgrade to secure the blockchain on hard fork.  Checkpoints technique is controversial method in blockchain world.
In fact, bitcoin itself has not performed checkpoints for a long long time.  The issue with checkpoints is that decentralization of  a coin means that nobody has central control on blockchain.
Certainly NENG dev does not intend to control NewEnglandcoin blockchain and merely view ourself as tech support.  However, frequent checkpoints on a coin means the coin is centrally controlled by dev team.

In order to fulfill decentralization goal of NewEnglandcoin, we as dev do not plan to frequently apply checkpoints technique.  We only intend to apply that on hard fork in the future.
Even for hard fork, we do not intend to impose our forking view by ourselves.  Any future hard fork will have several weeks to a month of pre-annoucement on hard fork in bitcointalk or discord for the intention.  We will also issue release of new software version one week in advance in order for members to prepare fork. The new release will have 1 week compatible blockchain with older version and will have fork a week later.   Therefore, 1 week to 1 month time will be available for NENG members to express any opposing opinions on fork, and there will be minimum of 1 week period to allow DEV to cancel or modify hard fork plans in the future.   We believe such procedure in place on NewEnglandcoin  from now on will surely confirm that
any future checkpoints on hard fork is not indication of any centralization.  NewEnglandcoin will continue to be a decentralized cryptocurrency and controlled by nobody just like bitcoin, litecoin or dogecoin.
 
The next hard fork or potentially a checkpoint on NewEnglandcoin will be Q3 of 2019, to be determined by our research on the results of v1.2.x release.

[honglu69]

NewEnglandcoin v1.2.1.1 released at: https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases

This release mainly add feature of supporting linux Ubuntu 18.04 amd64 platform.  For other OS, there is no change on code verses the v1.2.1