Bitcoin Forum

Many recent PoW/PoS coins have had very fast PoW periods.  This could mean that there is not enough time for word to spread about the coin in time for more casual miners to have a chance at mining the coin themselves.  This poll is to gauge the community consensus on how long a PoW period needs to be in order for a coin launch to be deemed adequately fair to everyone.

Why even bother? Look at how lottoshares was distributed. They used other blockchains to reward holders of those chains with coins. The PoW was already done so no need to do it again. Save the planet man! Go green, etc.. blah blah..

I actually wonder if this strategy is kind of the opposite of what should happen...  In the end, you've created a new cryptocurrency that had a "green" launch, sure.  But only if you think of it in a narrow-minded sense.  Consider:

• 100 people are mining.
• EcoFriendlyCoin launches that lets you claim coins using other coin.
• No one mines this coin, so it is "green", but the 100 people are still mining - just mining something else.
• The same amount of CO2 enters atmosphere as would have otherwise.
• Result: You've watered down the market by introducing another coin on top of whatever coin you used to claim your lottery ticket.  Now 1 Doge = 1 Doge + XX EcoFriendlyCoins.  Alternatively, you could have the person send Doge for EcoFriendlyCoins and promise to send the doge to a random wallet address that doesn't actually exist, effectively "destroying" the Doge and not watering down the altcoin market, but now you've introduced trust into the system that the developer actually destroyed the coins.

At least with a new PoW coin, you are not watering down the market in the sense that the hashing power has to come from somewhere.  (You still are adding $$ where $$ didn't exist previously, obviously, so you are sitll watering down the market in that sense.)

Be careful going down the 'fair route' i.e. a long PoW phase unless you have a seriously good retargeting system. The native Peercoin and Novacoin retargeting on every block doesn't work anywhere near as well as KGW, DGW, Digishield etc.

A short PoW stage may help to get and keep miners interested long enough to sustain high hash rates and add some resistance to attackers using pool-hopping tactics. These attackers love to drive the difficulty through the roof, stop mining suddenly, leaving the blockchain stuck. It happens a lot with new coins and it causes a lot of problem when legitimate people struggle to find blocks; they will just give up very quickly.

Also, a lot of miners seem to like to mine a coin for a while and move on to something else fairly soon.

131 years.

Around 10 years for the prime real estate mining period.  Bitcoin doesn't really have hundreds of years mining period since people are getting chicken scraps for most of it.

well played.

True, but it's relative as well.  If bitcoin doubles in value in 2 years (not going to speculate on how likely this is), then 12.5 BTC blocks will be worth the same as 25 BTC blocks are now.