Securing the Block Chain
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[quote] Would anyone be so kind as to give me an idea of what parameters the network can know about each node [IP, Hashrate, Blocks Found, Public Key Age e.t.c.]? [/quote]
If you compile the Debug version of the Feathecoin Wallet client from GitHub, there is a debug console. help, lists all the available functions in the client. You can run each one yourself - e.g. getpeerinfo, getdifficulty, gethashespersec etc…
The block chain explorer contains the raw data of blocks produced and difficulty.
At the moment, the human element and the effects of recent software changes need monitoring (before any further adjustments are made). Feathercoin is in a novel situation, which means we cannot rely on past experience. Also, solutions I would have argued as nonsense a couple of months ago might now be relevant.
My advice is monitor, identify problems, develop solution to problem, implement solution, monitor effect of solution, etc
Perhaps the question I would like to see answered, what security updates are available in 0.8.5 (of Litecoin / Bitcoin) and which are we going to implement / take advantage of, if any?
The main thing we could do to increase security is to encourage a significant number of miners, compared to the power of a potential attacker or pool.
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0% PoS is a very good idea in general. There are some issues though. While 0% PoS doesn’t produce any coins, these PoS blocks break PoW coin distribution as scheduled by design. For instance, Feathercoin block reward is halved every 840K blocks until ~336 million coin supply is reached. If zero reward PoS blocks are included in the calculation, the coin supply is lower than expected. If not included, the coin distribution takes more time than expected.
