Bitcoin Forum

Is there a site like www.allchains.info for TRC difficulty??

http://dustcoin.com/mining

I know about dustcoin, but it doesn't show when the difficulty changes, date/time, or the next expected difficulty level. That's what I'm looking for.

I generally follow Coinotron and Vircurex as they have little boxes that show the current difficulty. Perhaps we could ask allchains to add TRC however.

http://trc.vpool.us/stats

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

Someone please make a chart to trace back when this all started

I'm affraid the total network hashrate is too low now, so this is still possible :(

Once over 700 - 800 Ghashes/s this "game" will probably be more difficult (requiring bigger hashrate to be significant enough)..

It looks like people are jumping from one currency to another, according to each chain difficulty / profitability.

I really think this - on the long-term - is not profitable for anyone, not the miner himself, nor the involved blockchains ...

Oh I forgot was it coinotron that implemented the auto mine most profitable altcoin or something? Is that the reason terracoin now behaves like this?

I read this coinotron feature was disabled a year ago.

New sites (dustcoin/...) pointing out the coins profitability probably helped increasing this behaviour, dunno

Yeah unfortunately it looks like a failure of Terracoin that is being exploited.

Terracoin or 'Terriblecoin'...  :D

This is a positive feature that responds quickly and accurately to market forces. What sense does being stuck with some other miners difficulty make after they have left the chain? The real abuse of difficulty comes when someone with large hash power jumps on a chain like LTC or BTC where the retarget is measured in many days. For the first number of days their immense hash power gets to abuse the low difficulty and mine an extraordinary amount of coins. When the difficulty FINALLY gets around to adjusting, they jump off, leaving everyone else to suffer the higher difficulty for a long period of time while they wait around for it to retarget, when the larger miner jumps back on and abuses it for another stretch of time.

With TRC large miners get only a short window of opportunity to abuse low difficulty, and small miners only have to suffer a brief period of time after large miners jump off the chain.

It's more fair, more responsive and more egalitarian. Free market in action.

Wow okay rabbit I guess you are really a die-hard fan that has to defend every bug of terracoin as a feature. It's a short windows yeah but it comes every hour so if you add them up suddenly it's not so short any more. I am sure large miners can afford to tweak their programs to only mine terracoin every other 30 blocks, while the smaller miners suffer.

Maybe someone can start a pool to take advantage of this, just to show how ridiculous it is to claim this as a feature.

Actually it's one of the things that really did attract me about TRC, no kidding. I'm a small miner myself and I was frustrated from the previous LTC rise when the difficulty went up significantly from some exceptionally large miners that came on board, but whom left as soon as the difficulty went up leaving us with a few days of frustratingly high Difficulty. I know I'm not alone in this, the BTC-E chat box had lots of small miners grumbling and watching litecoinpools retarget estimator, just waiting for it to go down again.

I'm not saying that you couldn't be right regarding having this exploited by a miner or pool that regularly jumped back and forth, although I think the effect is much more pronounced right now because the hash rate is relatively so low so relatively few large miners jumping on really makes big waves. When the rate is (hopefully) might higher and the number of miners much larger, I'm would hope that this effect won't be so pronounced.

That said, many of the big miners seem to be jumping on when the diff is low and profitability high. They in general seem to dump their coins pretty quickly, which adds more coins into circulation, which i also think is a good thing. It's more important to get coins into as many hands as possible at this stage of the game. Small miners are more likely to hoard (in my opinion) given the small number of coins we make. Large miners, even if only mining monetarily for the profit, are a helpful part of the economy. 

When the hash rate was low hundreds I didn't notice this. Look rabbit, I think it is already being exploited by some big miners, that's why it's jumping 3x back and forth consistently. And there would be more of them joining the force. I highly doubt this problem is now going to go away by itself as there can only be more and more people catching onto this, including the medium and small miners, as the profit motivation is quite large.

Both ppcoin and devcoin adjust faster and smoother than litecoin, the extreme and naive approach of terracoin is not a better solution.

Was kind of waiting for this, I published that python exploit script (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146855.0) a while ago and I figured someone would jump on it...

It's good to see that someone's put one hour of my hard work into use I guess.

Lets assume that your right- that bigger miners are going to catch on to this and en mass start jumping on and off, and for theory sake, lets assume the difficulty jumps by 100X each time.

The worst that happens is that we would need to start taking into account the "average" difficulty when making mining decisions which would show a much higher rate. We could also add a few metrics to our understanding of coins- oscillation rate of difficulty and price, the relationship between the two.

It's not like TRC would stop working because the difficulty would be so variable. Maybe it might be frustrating for miners or pools, but like you said- someone is probably going to develop a script that allows you to automatically switch. Indeed for CGminer I keep a number of different Sha-256 coins as alternative pools and CGminer switches between then if one pool becomes inaccesible. Would be cool to build a plugin that would automatically switch between coins based on Profitability.

That said, how long does it take for PPC to mature when you mine them? I'm speaking off the top of my head here, but I think TRC coins mature much faster- which is a plus. If your mining TRC only for BTC, your coins should be available faster for you to sell at the price you thought you were mining at. I'm not convinced that price needs to follow difficulty- and especially if the rate oscillates to dramatically, miners will have to make their value assessments based on other factors.

The problem is mainly in transaction times... as this gets worse it could slow to one block an hour and take forever to confirm.  This would effectively halt the chain if it became severe enough, as no one can transfer their coins to anyone else in a reasonable amount of time.

You need to hard code a fix for the difficulty algorithm if you want to correct this.

It's not that bad as the jump is capped at 4x I think.

And that "problem" will disappear once the network gets a higher constant hashrate, it's currently under 200GH/s on average, any other chain with relatively short difficulty adjust delay and such a low overall hashrate would have the same 'problem' with current hardware.

Bitcoin did not ran into this because dedicated hardware and farms came while the overall network hashrate was already big enough to be hard to overtake.

Personally I would welcome someone implementing some sort of auto-hopping based on difficulty. If the possibility exists to profit by taking advantage of the retargeting of TRC, then everyone should have the advantage equally. Perhaps even more intricate mining strategies would develop over time, taking into account coin maturity, profitability, even other factors like electricity or heat generation.

I thought about this when I saw the TRC profitability on dustcoin steadily bouncing between 60% and 140%now even more than 300%, propably somebody is jumping on and off with an ASIC. But as far as i can see this does not cause any major problems, only slightly above average profitability for the jumper and sometimes delayed transactions.

It looks like the difficulty retargetting algorithm will be updated at block 99988 in order to address the resonant difficulty changing we've been observing. This will be a mandatory update.  I think that the block will be reached in about 4 days so I'm not sure how this change will be rolled out so quickly. Obviously, a few more eyes on this update would be a good thing.

https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin/commit/300d6ac14fd5aaa6a71e14090fa72b1b1d029488

So what exactly is the difference between Terracoin and Bitcoin now? The only unique thing it had going for it I can see is a faster difficulty adjustment, which turned out to be a bad idea.

I don't think it was such a bad idea, just that is depend on a big enough network hashrate not to be abused :(

What is see now looks more like a 51% hashrate abuse, seeing 3 people mining only at low diff, and leaving when it rise again, holding ~ 100GH/s (more than the current network)

As i said earlier in another post, recently started chains have to immediately deal with huge-hashrate devices, which bitcoin didn't have to, as total network grew fast enough before such devices came into existence...


The three dudes that are jumping in at low diff, and out when it grows again at coinotron won't get any benefit at all, they'll just lower the trc price...
(test0024, gr0bi42 and wwwish or something ; don't understand why they join a pool though ... funding coinotron ?? :p )

It's unfortunate and I think Terracoin will struggle to grow and probably shrink in the long run.

If the difficulty of Terracoin is made more like Bitcoin I just can't see it being viable long term now because even a coin like Litecoin gets questioned what's different about it when there are obvious benefits to Scrypt and faster confirmations, so how Terracoin will stand up to such criticism I don't know.

In my opinion PPCoin is the only legit alt coin left alongside Litecoin. But time will tel...

Confirmation time is still lower than bitcoin and is different than the difficulty adjustment time. Bitcoin has many good things about it.  Confirmation time is shorter with TRC.. Fast difficulty adjustment isn't bad and Terracoin will still be faster.. The implementation probably was a bit ill conceived and prone to some abuse.  I think it will be corrected ahortly.

I see the future as a mix of alt coins.  There is no fixed pie where in order to have a winner, there must be losers.  Litecoin got an early start.  Terracoin benefits from ASICs. Some people see this as a problem but I see it as a benefit as long as the number of users is sufficiently high and the hash rate isnt too imbalanced.  Any coin that doesnt require specialized hardware in the future may be at risk to attack from botnets. I suppose the challenge for small altcoins will be to become big enough fast enough.  I think the prevalence of ASICs will do that for Terracoin and other Bitcoin clones based on the same algorithm.

It may still be a bit early to say, but it looks like the significant resonant difficulty changes have stopped.  This and the upcoming patch should smooth things out.

uh.  so to send terracoins it takes 6 confirms lasting 6 hours a piece, 36 hours?  URG!  for some stupid reason I took my TRc off btc-e and now its going to take 72 hours to get them back on?  what a load of crap man.  luckily I only had $200 in TRC trasferring so its like whatever.  but what a total shit coin man.  I can't believe I got suckered into even considering using it.  if the price completely crashes in the next 72 hours I'm going to throw a BFL asic at whoever invented this stupid coin.

I get soothing words, "no its gonna be alright, this is just a bump in the road.  its healing." 

do you realize how much damage you do to suckers like me by promoting SHITCOINS?  because I actually listen.  and this is the second time my terracoins have been stuck in transit for more than a day.  you can't even begin to think that terracoins will ever be adopted by anyone if transfers take over 1 day.  bullshit

"do you realize how much damage you do to suckers like me by promoting SHITCOINS?"

Seriously? So you're blaming people like me for participating in an open source software project that is a fork of bitcoin, and being excited enough about it that you decide to get involved as well?

If you are so a)impatient b)gullible c)rude you should think twice about whether or not the crypto community is the place for you. No one forced you to mine those $200 worth of coins, and certainly no one force you to BUY them either.

If you're just in it to "get rich quick" then the community doesn't need you- and I'm putting that honestly, and fairly. We need people who will develop projects, understand the system. We need people who actually UNDERSTAND how these things work.

We don't need angry rude people who are going to be unpleasant and actively discourage volunteers with vitriol because a piece of software didn't work 1000% fantastic right out of the bag. All these cryptocoins have their software flaws- they are just all waiting to be found. It took bitcoin 4 years to fork on an error, but it still forked: and they have a whole foundation of braniacs testing this stuff.

Alt coins don't get the benefit of being able to do 100% complete testing of their software before releasing it. That's what the community does. Thats what WE DO by using it. WE are the debugging process. Not even bitcoin is Version 1.0 yet- it's version 0.8 BETA software. While some Altcoins have programmers perhaps more genius then others, they too must stay up awake wondering if there is some program detail they missed. They can only hope that their fan base, the community, will be helpful in finding, discovering and communicating problems that arise.

So, once again- the community is happy to have anyone who wants to help out, and we are certainly happy to have you. I think most will agree with me that at this point in this grand crypto-experiment what is not helpful is people who are just here for illusionary money and have no intention of helping to make things grow and flourish in a productive way.

If you do "get rich quick": fabulous. We are all for it, but don't complain if it doesn't happen, and if you do end up with buckets of bitcoin, try to think of a productive way to reinvest in the community- build things, support people.

And when something breaks- help to fix it. Don't shit on the volunteers who are here because they believe in what they are doing, who reinvest what they make- both in time and money. If you want to gamble- play the lottery. If you want your $200 in terracoin to be worth something- download the latest client, get your GPU hashing no matter few coins it may make, and be positive. Don't discourage the very people on whom the future of your "investment" depends.

sorry.  i just feel like I'm getting the runaround.  I ask a question I'm affirmed A when really it is B.  its just frusterating.  I really hope for the best, if I can help in any way I will.  but I have a tiny laptop so I can't mine.  sorry for the explosion rabbit, I just don't have patience I guess when it comes to losing control.  namashka.  p.s.  am I getting this right, its about 40 hours to send or receive trc now?  for some odd reason I sent it to my own wallet and didn't realize it would be lost in limbo for a week from that click.  and of course there's no way to reverse it.  hoy.  does anybody have an asic to point at the network for a little while? 

yeah I'm new to all this and I apologize, and I am understating my investment.  so it was just me being stupid.

No worries. There is a temporary fix coming that should speed everything up again while a better solution is found. It's taking awhile to get to the point when the fix takes effect though. When de do get there though, it will speed up again.

k thanks rabbit, I never meant to infer that i didn't appreciate your positive attitude bud

over reaction, let's see if we can get an asic to speed us right along to that magic block shall we?