Bitcoin Forum

Just an idea...not sure if it is a good one or not.

Develop the wallet/coin to throttle new blocks found based on an average of blocks found over the previous "x" period of time. The idea is that if a pool wallet has not consistently been finding blocks at a certain rate any new flash mining would only continue to find blocks at their average rate. The block finding rate should slowly increase over time based on the continued hash rate being utilized.

Just wanted to throw it out there to the community.

How are you going to fight individual users who would only switch to the coin based on the profitability? You trying to treat the symptom instead of fixing the rules set by the coin itself.

Which rules?

Adjusting difficulty on every block for example

I see what your saying. It would only work against pool flash mining not a bunch of individuals deciding to solo mine. Also the parameters of what constitutes flash mining vs. normal mining would be hard to determine.

Not sure about the solution proposed, but there seem to be 2 camps in the alt-coin forums;

1) Those who have picked a coin (or two or three), they believe it has or will have value. They are betting on the long term, hoping for the next LTC.  They mine it, perhaps they support it in some way, with time/expertise ect.  They may mine other coins of course, but they are holding their chosen options for the long haul

2) Those who are in it to maximize as much profit as they can short term (hourly, maybe sometimes in terms of days).  They diff jump and they scramble via coinchoose for the most profitable coin of the moment and try and join the wave before its to late.

I believe the latter is pretty much destroying any chance of the former to actually ever reach its goals. Especially now that we see hundreds of Mh/s thrown at coins, just from one source, let alone the others doing it individually.  While group 2 will argue that if the coin is strong enough, it will survive, and that its just free markets at work, I question whether a coin like LTC would have ever made it as far as it has if it was launched in this kind of atmosphere.  

I guess my point is, are group 2 destroying the chances for any of us (ie: the entire alt community as a whole) from ever seeing another success as big as LTC (in terms of value)?  Are they trading potential long term gains like LTC (for the masses) for short term personal micro profits?

Perhaps they will finally force movement to totally new systems like eMunie and whatever else is out there (which may not be a bad thing).

Or, perhaps the sky isn't actually falling on alt-coins and I need to get outside a bit more :)

You bet your ass they are, this is the way of the "ghuman being"  :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I have noticed that it takes about 10-12 blocks of ARG when it hits high diff before multipool bounces to the next victim. This suggests a coin with a diff adjustment every 20blocks or less would be a viable easy solution. A better approach is to make the diff change after a set amount of time say every hour or even half hour. That's the solution I would like to see, this block counting method that everyone uses is just wrong. It's one of the legacy design faults from the original BTC.

Constant readjustment isn't good either.  The retarget time is fine if hashrate doesn't go up or down 4000% instantaneously.

Constant block count readjustment can work if you limit the effect to a certain percentage. eg. a 25% difficulty change every 30min.

Well, retarget could be smart: don't adjust it right away to the desired difficulty everyblock, instead make a 20% (it could be 5%) difficulty adjustment every block towards desired target difficulty.

Someone pointed out in another thread that these chain-hoppers screw themselves as well as everyone else, because if they were careful not to throw "too much" hashing power on a chain they could milk it of many more blocks than they can if they stick its difficulty as high as possible as fast as possible then leave.

I do not know though if the writer was correct. The idea was theh igh difficulty was lowering the total number of blocks per hour or day or whatever so much that there would have been many many more blocks to grab in that timeframe by carefully ensuring the difficulty did not rise, or only rose minimally or something like that.

Jump in fast, grab 100 blocks in ten minutes, no more blocks for a month, versus jump in less precipitously, get 100 blocks or more per day for a month, kind of concept.

Maybe they just didn't do the math and the total blocks the chainjumpers get is the same either way?

-MarkM-

The Coin should be designed in such away so it would withstand this: every individual miner suddenly switching to it. Forget about pools. More and more miners will redirect their miners based on profitability themselves.

Sure but the best profitabiity is obtained by mining coins no one thinks are worth anything / no one thinks are profitable, so that when eventually people do start to think they are profitable you already have them on hand to sell while everyone else is busy switching over to mining it. By the time they get a block, you've already driven the price back down by selling coins you already picked up back when it was "not profitable enough to mine".

-MarkM-

Yeah that was me in the ARG thread, the idea being that the pool would work our a desired difficulty in advance to keep the coin below based on the nethash of the pool added to the coins nethash. Then vary the mark/space ratio of when it mines to keep the profit as high as possible. eg.  mine the coin for a predefined number of blocks, mine another coin or two, until a predefined number of blocks have passed on the first coin then go back to it and mine it for a certain number of blocks again. Rinse and repeat, recalculating the optimum number of blocks to mine each time to maintain the desired difficulty.

I doubt if the pool operators would bother to do this, they seem arithmetically lazy to me, else they would have already worked out that they are forcing their users to spend most of the day mining inefficient high difficulty, high hash rate coins that are tolerant to the hopping effects of their net hash like LTC,FTC.

The claim that flash pools are "always mining the most profitable coin" is bogus, because to make it happen they destroy the profitability of other coins for extended periods of time, so the less profitable coins look better.

The best money to be made is mining the lowest diff coin you can get away with, not just for 20min then bouncing to a high diff coin where you have no impact or decent share, just because you have smashed down all the way more profitable coins.

Yes BBQcoin was really good profit, mine it with one CPU core for a year or so, people racked up a lot of coins and made fortunes when the GPU folk came back to it drove its difficulty high enough that exchanges were willing to list it, wow lots of well paid CPU miners... Hopefully Tenebrix and Fairbrix will do that too, and for single-GPU miners maybe GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin, I0Coin and GeistGeld will work similarly.

(Actually, some of the latter are still so low difficulty CPUs might well still be able to rack up lots of coins because so few GPU miners, even of the single-GPU scale, bother to merge all of the merge-able coins.)

-MarkM-

If the coin is already on the exchange, no need to mine it then - just buy it and wait for the price to go up, sell it and profit. This is pure arbitrage and has nothing to do with mining. Mining most profitable coin is mostly about difficulty and not about the price because people who switch between coins would usually sell coins right away.

Thus the best mining profit is those not on exchanges, since as you point out if its on an exchange and people think it worthless you can simply buy it. If its not on an exchange though, well hey that is where mining comes in, it lets you get hold of coins the people who can only buy not mine do not have access to until someone does mine them.

Perhaps best of all are coins that many many people already got a lot of (so lots of people want to see it make a comeback), but which are not on an exchange currently and have dropped in difficulty massively; especially if the reason they are not on an exchange is a simple bug that can easily be made to go away once you have enough of that coin yourself to make fixing the bug look worthwhile.

(e.g. I0Coin and GeistGeld, easy to fix by any cut and paste clonecoin maker since one could just cut and paste groupcoin to make new versions of i0coin and geistgeld, presto, the problems that got i0coin removed from bitparking's mmpool go away and for geistgeld we will be able to start seeing whether the sheer speed of the blocks really does cut significantly into the merged mining of other coins even when top notch servers are used for the merged mining...)

-MarkM-

A coin without mining is worthless, how do you think the transactions are achieved?
When a coin is locked at high diff because of a flash mining attack, the transaction time can be screwed for weeks on end as we have seen with CNC and FTC. This can lead to the coin being removed from the exchange.

Hence merged mining. The more blockchains you need to secure the more useful merged mining becomes.

-MarkM-

Think about real resource miners: gold, silver, copper, etc. Do they mine it and then wait for the price to go up? They in fact do the opposite: they short sell it before they even start to mine it, so they would know exactly how much their operation would cost and how much profit they will make. I think short selling (hedging) of digital currencies is coming as well, so be ready for it.

Mining and trading are two different things, which are very independent from each other.

I don't want or like merged mining, and it's not a solution to the flash mining pool problem, it just duck shoves the problem to some other coin dev.

Millenia after the "invention" of gold, silver, copper, sure.

But back in the day when someone proposed a newfangled shiny that they speculated might catch on?

Heck even just going out trying to short sell it likely would let competitors realise a new shiny was on the horizon, they might go out and mine it all while you are busy doing your market-research aka trying to sell it, short or otherwise...

New "fools gold" is being found every day around here, wanna pre-order some of the next one up in case it turns out not to be pyrites afterall but an actually new metal?

-MarkM-