Sending you a PM.

X11 is just as vulnerable to dumping from FPGAs and botnets. ASICs are also being embraced by the developer of X11, it was just meant to delay them until X11 is as old as Scrypt.

That being said, I need to give some information about what has been happening to us lately as it's come to light. I'm personally a little sick of the BS everywhere in this scene.

NOBL has had a hash of between 1-4GHs this past month, with difficulty between 10 & 40. For a Scrypt altcoin, we're relatively secure.

We have been consistently targeted for 51%/double-spends for a week or so it seems (the last being in the last 12 hours), to decrease confidence, to decrease price, to tempt exchanges to delist us. We have a few options, we can either go PoS (vulnerable to double-spends via stake among other unknowns/weaknesses), we can consider introducing centralized checkpointing similar to FTC (an idea a lot of people really don't like), which was also considered by others last year during constant 51% attacks on scrypt, we can and do continue to promote merge-mining, however larger operations aren't generally interested in a sub $200k marketcap coin, or we can constantly revert mining & transactions via hardforking (over and over and over again every time a 51% happens, adding more damage to us). Or we can keep growing and building the hashrate naturally without giving bad actors incentive to constantly try and abuse our chain.

This is great FUD, I admit that, it's perfect. What I can only do right now is ask people to consider mining and using NOBL rather than leaving buy orders. Leaving buy orders gives them more incentive to constantly 51% us and abuse exchanges for profit. We need to grow the hash/security of our network naturally without tempting people to abuse us for profit on exchanges.  

Ask yourself if you'd really like to work and try make NOBL a longer-term coin and don't care about price. If you don't feel that way sell now while we continue working. Otherwise we need people out there building, spreading the word, promoting, using, accepting NOBL and introducing it to their friends. The premine won't be moving because I already get enough accusations, but it will be going to some exchanges over time provided they can confirm the movement is legitimate.

In the meantime please post suggestions, advice, etc. while we consider what our next move is. I'm sorry, it would just be wrong to prattle on as if we were LTC 2.0 and didn't have our own vulnerabilities, growing pains and issues to deal with. We are in talks with multiple parties, as well as gearing up for a more secure chain that would make us less worthwhile to do what they have been doing to us.

Short-term what we need is a higher hashrate for security with less buywalls on the exchange so people stop trying to take advantage.

Right after I read this I saw a new buy wall on mintpal
0.00000016   61090136.44682990   9.77442183

Maybe someone is happy about this situation and wants the attackers to keep going so he can buy cheap coins?

I would consider asking all exchanges to use more confirmations for noble deposits, this should solve the problem at least until the network will get bigger.
Block time is 1 minutes so 12-15 confirmations are legit.

Mintpal already has a BIG number of confirms for depositing NOBL (after 139 last night, and still PENDING, I gave up counting).
Edit: OK, now I know.

Exchanges have varying measures of protection against them. And yes, they have to cover the losses generally as they're the service that's been 'abused' and left at a loss after an attacker withdraws his BTC. The amount they told me they have lost is staggering.. and they say we're the only coin consistently being targeted..

Not quite. Someone builds a separate private chain with enough hashpower to ensure it will ultimately be longer than our current public one. They send a transaction from our current chain to an exchange, dump it and withdraw the BTC. Once it's all said and done they unload their longer, private chain onto the network which doesn't have the original deposit so it's as if it never happened and they keep their NOBL. They've already received their BTC, so by that time it's too late to protect the exchange. All the orphans are a result of our current public chain being overwritten by the privately built one when it's unloaded on to the network.

Thanks, now I understand.

So, maybe some ppl will join the mining, if we tell everybody (twitter, etc...) that NOBL is the only coin beeing attacked so hard for so long? (edit: at least on MP it is a fact)
It just feels not fair to me.
Maybe there are others who feel and think the same?

Haha, are you saying that you attacked Noble?!!

As rofo may have mentioned and various people have pointed out, these new 'fads' are more hyped up than they really should be. They all have their vulnerabilities that makes them weak to certain types of attacks and methods of undermining the vaunted 'invincibility' of their algorithms. Changing to Pos for instance, is a very time consuming and delicate process that can actually result in more vulnerabilities for the coin. It would be akin to cutting off your arm to save yourself the pain of lacerated fingers. Pos with its already publicized weaknesses can overshadow the threats we now face.

As I said, these attacks are persistent but defensible against with methods we know of now. The question is, are you and the community willing to spend time, effort and some money to support a crypto currency that has a dedicated, willing and honest dev and will sooner or later catch the eyes of those who are even bigger players (those who are eyeing the coin and crypto currency from the outside at the moment)?

What we have now is both a tech race, and individual know-how race against those who will either hype up a 'new' tech to profit greatly, vs.  those who really want to create an innovative, solid crypto currency.

The bottom line for coins in this constantly changing world, where legitimate technical advancements such as merged mining are often overshadowed by latest profit drawing 'fads', is that a coin needs a strong dev and community that are willing to work actively to solve technical problems and fight against those who seek to destroy a coin.

We know what we need to do: Increased, secure hash rates in one form or another, and community willing to either help the dev themselves with technical assistance, or reach out to those who are capable of performing such tasks.

Let's make it happen