The situation on the cryptocurrency market seemed to be rather stable during the past week. The main competitor, Bitcoin, has not suffered any severe attacks, and has avoided any major price fluctuations.
Newcomers to the virtual asset market enjoyed rapid growth with Isracoin adding 62% to its value during the last 24 hours, with a market capitalization equal to $20 million.
The developer of Zetacoin stimulated the growth of price of his creation by 6.5% during the past week with a loud, but unspecific promise to make an important announcement.
The prices of the Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin have not suffered from any shocks and no change of value exceeded 4%.
Lucky Combination
Despite the constant prices and stable conditions of the market, Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, offered to unite with the Dogecoin community for even more advantageous mining conditions.
Lee sees two main reasons behind his idea. According to him, the Litecoin system and the Dogecoin environment are still vulnerable to attacks. Such a disadvantage might harm the attractiveness of mining, reduce potential benefits, which will finally lead to loss of users. People might switch to other new alternative currencies.
To avoid such results the developer sees opportunities in merging and unifying the currencies:
“I won't lie. This move will help out Litecoin also. Given my limited resources, I wouldn't waste my time on this if it didn't help Litecoin. Right now, every miner mining Dogecoin (or any other Scrypt coin) is a miner that is not mining Litecoin. So Litecoin's security is a lot less than it could be. So merging mining with Dogecoin would make both Litecoin/Dogecoin almost impossible to 51%.”
The so-called “51% attack” is an important point to consider. Should someone acquire 51% of the hashrate, he might dominate the system and damage the principle of decentralization.
Lee believes the currencies can be merged by using a hard fork:
“This [merged mining] can be accomplished by a hard fork in either coin. You've likely seen my take on why hard forking Litecoin is too dangerous today. Not so for Dogecoin.”
Jackson Palmer, creator of Dogecoin, is resisting Lee’s suggestion:
“Essentially, I don't think merged mining is the answer for Dogecoin right now. It's less than five months old and to say that anything needs to be done right now comes down to pure speculation.”
Technicalities
The ongoing week can be considered as a week of improvements and technical issues. Apart from the merging proposal many important tasks have been solved.
The Heartbleed Bug, which was threatening more than two-thirds of the internet, has been removed. Temporary problems made the Canadian Vault of Satoshi close till the OpenSSL flaw was solved, as Cointelegraph reported on the occasion yesterday.
To fix two vulnerabilities Bitcoin Core received a new maintenance update version 9.0.1. This issue was also been covered in detail by the Cointelegraph yesterday.
KnCMiner from Sweden decided to make its contribution to the development of the mining process. Those who are not willing to wait for Neptune mining rig any more might change their order for free and receive the Jupiter rig. Being ready to be shipped, the alternative rig has to ensure the same 3TH/s of processing power to its owner.
The company provides only 400 for exchange, as the initial Neptune rigs are in the final stage of fabrication. The manufacturing site in Asia will soon complete the order and ship the equipment for further assembly in Sweden.