Lottocoin, and weird stuff...

Alright, good to my word, on Saturday night I switched my mining operation over to LottoCoin.  It had a catchy gimmick (the coin that is also a game), so I thought I'd give it a go.  For the time being, its mostly a game for miners.  The payout for a block is quasi-randomized and the difficulty is non-linear - so anyone mining might get lucky and see a big payday.

No idea how that's going to pan out yet... but I'll keep you informed.

And now on to the weird stuff.

Its interesting, as I've gotten into mining and trading bitcoins, I am frequently witnessing real world applications of hacking that have some value beyond just attacking something.

For example - when Lottocoin first launched, it became clear that to insure a regular pay off, was to join a mining pool.  You can certainly mine solo, but since the payouts are all over the place its pure gamble as to the pay off.

With that said, there were some that wanted more time solo mining before the pools really started chewing away at both the profits and the difficulty.  So what did they do?  A massive DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.  Why would they do such a thing?  Because if the mining pool servers could be kept offline, they would have a much better shot at mining new blocks (before the pool beat them to it, and their block was orphaned).

Anyway, it seems like some new piece of news about applied hacking almost every day in the cryptoscene.  It sure makes for interesting reading....  and highly volatile markets.  LOL

That's it for now.