Personal Intro

I thought I would post this here first. I was approached by a couple of dedicated members of UFO Coin to work on their coin. I genuinely like the community members and the coin as I am a fan of the sci-fi genre so I decided to go above and beyond and make the UFO Coin client into a much better, newer and more secure release. It was 0.6 but I have updated them to a 0.8 client with all the bells and whistles and we are hard forking in a couple of weeksâ€™ time to secure the blockchain against attacks. From there we plan to change the hashing algorithm to the newest version of Scrypt called NeoScrypt developed by the excellent Ghostlander. This will use the latest components available and will be a 2014 version of Scrypt, not the very old and broken one used currently. When I say broken I mean by differential analysis which is why we see cheap ASICs coming out without RAM, as it is broken the protection afforded by variable N coins is redundant.

The idea these guys have is to fund research like SETI with their UFO Coins. I am all for this sort of thing which is why I was drawn to this project. I have volunteered a fair bit of time to upgrade UFO Coin but do not take this as a sign that I am not committed to Feathercoin. First and foremost I am a Feathercoiner, but at the same time I do enjoy helping out other people with their own coins. I believe in the open source ethos which unfortunately is largely overlooked in crypto currency as other coins are seen as competition rather than other projects trying to progress the underlying software.

Below is a message that has been created by the whole UFO team and which I am posting here now to officially relaunch UFO Coin. There are ambitious plans for UFO Coin and I am happy to stand with this coin and help it reach its goals.

UFO Coin welcomes Peter Bushnell as lead developer

Weâ€™re excited to announce our new UFO coin team members. though grateful for our legacy contributors. The future is looking bright with the addition of Feathercoin creator Peter Bushnell (bushstar) as the new UFO Lead Developer. In just a few short weeks Peter has steered a technical course for UFO coin, securing it from vulnerabilities plaguing most alt coins. Not only are new wallets available, a new site and shortly weâ€™ll announce release of an innovative hash algo NeoScrypt developed by the Feathercoin development team.

Technical update

Peter Bushnell (Bushstar) has taken the UFO client which was based in 0.6 and upgraded it to the 0.8.7.0 codebase which is much more stable and feature rich. There are several changes coming that will help secure the blockchain but a hard fork is required to make these improvements.
Expect a Hard fork at height 160,997 / 2nd July 2014 with the following enhancements:

The retarget solution is going to change to a hardened version of Niteâ€™s Gravity Well, this allows for rapid response to hash rate changes and recovery from high difficulty.
Time warp manipulability will be reduced to the point where its effect is negligible.
Automatic checkpointing will be set to a low depth, this prevents transaction roll back via 51% attacks. This is vital for any coin that makes good progress as attacks against coins become common at that point.

New wallet information

The clients made available for PC and Mac have features expected in a new release like Coin Control and the ability to run the client without a wallet attached to reduce the memory requirement. There is the normal elements found in the better made wallets, QR code generation for addresses in the wallet, UPNP and IPv6. The expected network infrastructure is in place with dedicated DNS seeders for clients to use to find others on the network and nodes dedicated for network connectivity.

New available Downloads

Windows
Mac
GitHub Source

In the coming days weâ€™ll be announcing many key partners and features through our UFO Community forum. Again, sincere thanks to our members, miners, sponsors and anonymous contributors for their continued dedication to the project, we invite all others to participate your help is always welcome.

UFO Coin Mission statement and Roadmap
UFO Coin Team Members

The UFO Team.