mcxNOW will be going into a maintenance period beginning November 15 2014 and lasting at least some weeks to address some issues concerning wallet use and the number of system administrators able to resolve problems. We will also take this time to perform some feature requests from users.

All wallets here will be removed to make way for a new wallet system meaning you will need to withdraw all your cryptocurrency holdings prior to this cutoff point. Any coins left in mcxNOW at the cutoff point will be destroyed.

Existing wallets and all backups are going to be shredded to maintain privacy of users. Some coins currently on mcxNOW will not return. Thank you for your patience while we try to keep mcxNOW one of the best platforms for cryptocurrency.

Introduction This is a public service announcement to all members of the MaxCoin community. The MaxCoin Dev Team is implementing some important changes to the mining protocol which will take effect on Friday, 5th September 2014 from block 600,000 onwards. This announcement outlines the details of the protocol modifications and the rationale behind their implementation. Please be sure to read this entire announcement as you may need to take action in order to be prepared for the upcoming changes. Failure to follow these instructions could result in the loss of coins. Be sure to check news.maxcoin.co.uk and our twitter account @maxcoinproject for further information about the availability of the updated wallet software. Brief Explanation The MaxCoin protocol will be modified on Friday 5th September 2014 to address certain unanticipated inflation effects that have resulted from an earlier update to the protocol. This change will slow the rate of mining in the near term and spread it out over the long term. The total number of coins to be mined will remain unchanged at 100,000,000. A checkpointing protocol will be implemented in order to provide additional security to the blockchain. Detailed Explanation At block 140,000 it was decided to half the block reward from 96 coins/block to 48 coins/block and bring down the total coin limit from 250 million MaxCoin to approximately 100 million. This decision was taken as a result of calls from the community to address the issue of excessive coin inflation. The result of this action however has had a contradictory effect to the long term MaxCoin inflation curve. We have now reached 33 million MaxCoin mined, which represents about 31% of the total coins that will exist. In contrast, bitcoin is at 13 million coins of their 21 million total. That’s 60%. It took 6 years for the bitcoin inflation curve to create twice as much as MaxCoin has in 6 months. Compared to the 10 minute blocktime of Bitcoin, MaxCoin has a very short blocktime of only 30 seconds. It also has a shorter interval between block reward halvings, 4 years in the case of bitcoin vs 1 year in the case of maxcoin. The combination of fast blocktime and shorter block reward halving interval means the inflation curve is heavily left shifted with a very large slope at the start. This means coin inflation from block rewards is heavily frontloaded in the “early adopter” phase of the network.

I thought I would make a quick post here to collect together some information about a few of the various infrastructure projects completed and currently underway within the maxcoin ecosystem, along with details of some additional third-party service agreements that are helping to increase the utility and promote adoption of maxcoin in the medium-long term.  Bear in mind, this is an incomplete list of the work that is currently being undertaken by the community, but I have tried to cover as many of the most relevant developments of interest to the wider community. The bullet points below merely scratch the surface of the work currently taking place.  If you have any comments to add, or if I have left anything important out, please post and discuss!

1. BitXATM have announced that they will be launching 1,000 ATMs in the US, all of which will be capable of transacting in MaxCoin. They will also have PoS devices for point of sale purchases. Not many other altcoins can make that claim. This potentially will increase the real world utility of maxcoin in day-day use by making adoption by bricks and mortar businesses as easy as possible.

2. The MaxCoin Silver Cryptobullion project on StartJOIN raised over $100,000 in crowdfunding capital in under two weeks with the aim of manufacturing a physical silver MaxCoin. The demand seen for this was huge, demonstrating how much support there is from this community to fund worthwhile projects.

3. The MaxCoin Power Mining project is attempting to create an FPGA that supports keccak for the purposes of mining maxcoin. It has raised almost $20,000 in funding and is currently seeking qualified VHDL programmers to assist with creating a working SHA3 implementation interfaced with cgminer. 

4. A brand new MAX/BTC market was launched on Bittrex.com, the largest and most well known AltCoin exchange. In less than 24 hours after going live, the Bittrex market surged ahead of Cryptsy to become the 2nd largest maxcoin market by daily trade volume. 

5. Work is underway on a MaxCoin Android Wallet to enable MAX transactions on your Smartphone.

6. The TXTCoinsNow project on StartJOIN is aiming to enable payments in MaxCoin via SMS without the need for a computer, a smartphone or even an internet connection. This project aims to bring max to the unbanked people of the world who do not have the privilege of owning expensive computing hardware. All that is needed is any regular phone to send and receive payments in maxcoin.

7. StartJOIN have confirmed that MaxCOIN will be accepted on their platform in the coming weeks for the purpose of making pledges towards crowdfunding projects. StartJOIN is one of the few serious crowdfunding platforms embracing cryptocurrencies and is aiming to be a large player in the crowdfunding market in the coming months and years. This gives maxcoin a unique use case, as no other crowdfunding platform has yet embraced a cryptocurrency other than bitcoin.

8. MaxCoin is currently in the process of being integrated into the NXT multigateway decentralised exchange. Yes, that's right. A decentralised MaxCoin exchange! You can learn more about the NXT multigateway on their website.

9. After the launch of MaxCoin in February, a single mining pool controlled a dominant share of the network hashrate for a significant amount of time. However, during that period, no 51% attacks on the blockchain were attempted. The mining community have however finally addressed the issue, such that no single pool now controls >51% of the MaxCoin network.

10. A paper wallet generator has been created to enable secure, long-term cold storage of maxcoin.

11. A MaxCoin News site has been established at maxcoinnews.net.

12. MaxBay.eu is an auction site currently in development that allows you sell your old stuff for MaxCoin.

13. The core wallet software has been updated on GitHub with built-in QR code support.

14. A secure web-wallet implementation is approximately 80% complete.

15. A minikey format has been implemented to create compact maxcoin private keys - GUI under development.

16. Work has been completed on a MaxCoin brain-wallet generator - GUI under development.

17. MaxCoin compatible versions of BitcoinJS and Bitcoin-abe are being being ported and are nearing completion.

MaxCoin Racing project on StartJOIN

www.startjoin.com

MaxCoin Racing is a revolution in motorsports. Become a MaxCoin Racing sponsor and receive rewards such as racing t-shirts, racing hats, custom artwork, etc.

Stacy: Alex Daley seems not to realise that it is bitcoin that uses ECDSA, the crypto algorithm designed by the NSA. Maxcoin, by design does NOT use ECDSA, but, instead, uses Schnorr signatures over elliptic curves which is not only faster than ECDSA, but also has a security proof and, again, was decidedly not designed by the NSA (not that there is a ‘backdoor’ as this imbecile alleges in ECDSA, it’s just not as fast & secure as the algo we use). So you have to ask yourself, if Doug Casey can allow such embarrassingly misinformed writing to appear on his site . . . how much can you trust ANY of their research?

We can't wait around for all banksters to commit suicide (5 in 2 weeks; not fast enough) thank @bitchrist we have #maxcoin to f*** them up

— Max Keiser (@maxkeiser)

February 14, 2014