Bitcoin Forum

In b4 BBQ Lighter is to BBQ as Feathercoin is to Litecoin! :)

No but seriously, it is all very well to flame Liquidcoin for demonstrating the utter stupidity of super-low-difficulty blocks but as we have seen lately super-low-difficulty blocks, with their awesome power to generate almost nothing but orphans, are super-popular.

So maybe Liquidcoin was on to something? Why all the imitators if it was not a coin well worth imitating?

The great innovation of Liquidcoin was to demonstrate the utter fail that so many recent launches have emulated: a difficulty so low that almost all blocks are almost instantly orphaned.

As we have seen, that utter fail is exactly what the customers want, it is the ultimate in fashionable paradox: utter fail is the path to success!

Accordingly, let us put lighter fluid aside for a moment and consider lighter liquid! Fluid is confusing anyway since not all fluids are liquids.

The question we should be asking is would liquidcoin be more successful if its spewing of orphans eventually slowed down?

Recent launches that emulated Liquidcoin's orphan-spewing strategy lacked one key feature of Liquidcoin's approach: they eventually stopped spewing as many orphans, due to their difficulty not being permanently fixed at one value forever.

Might Liquidcoin regain its former popularity if its difficulty eventually became adaptive?

This is a question that can be answered empirically! All that is required is a slight change to Liquidcoin's difficulty adjustment algorithm, changing it from never adjusting to actually adjusting in some way.

I fired up Liquidcoind just now and discovered that, lo and behold, Liquidcoin is still out there... I got two connections right away.

So this is not a dead coin we are talking about here, it is, like BBQcoin itself, an ancient long term survivor, a coin, in fact, that wise CPU miners carefully limiting their hashing power might not even have been experiencing many orphans with at all! Another CPU-miner haven that has been giving CPU miners a chance to mine coins to their hearts' content all these years while the GPU miners blew huge amounts of electricity wielding huge farms full of multi-GPU rigs to divvy up into ever smaller portions some pie that cannot really have been much larger, really, due to the "infinite" divisibility of coins in general, than the quiet backwater pool that Liquidcoin has become.

....................

Arg someone just brought up Liquidcoin, darn, I had hoped to rake in coins all night before posting this.

The TL;DR I was aiming at here is hey lets fix Liquidcoin's difficulty. Let it adjust, as we pretty much do know now that fixing the difficulty is a broken concept that just spams everyone with orphans.

-MarkM-

Sorry about that lol.  So what difficulty adjustment algorithm would be appropriate?  Are you thinking it should remain very low compared to the hashrate, but not so low, that all anyone gets is orphans?  

Also, I'm not getting any connections when I try to fire it up. 

Maybe LFNET IRC is acting flaky again, someone got on though as they are downloading the blockchain from the dvcstable02.devcoin.org server right now.

I guess normal difficulty adjustment algos are based on trying to hit a time-between-blocks target.

We already have GeistGeld showing us that 15 second blocks are so fast that most people cannot afford enough RAM to run it, so I think slower would be better for people who don't have extra-large servers to run all their coins on. GeistGeld likes to eat at least 4 gigs of RAM. (I0Coin does too, and how many people spare the RAM to run that one nowadays? Heck how many bother to run GeistGeld?)

-MarkM-

i like the way you think!!!!!!

sounds like a great idea! Lets do it :D

To do this, a hardfork of LQC wouldn't be required would it?  

Yes.

Well markm it looks like you just volunteered for a job lol

There is no need it seems, there are not enough people mining it for blocks to come super fast right now anyway so looks like it can just plod along as a slow-blocks coin for who knows how many more months or years before it will need any "fixing".

-MarkM-

Well if I could ever connect, I could help plod it along a little faster lol.  But if it would have to be hard forked, why wait until that point?  Because at that point it would be too late to fix it, would it not? 

I'm running it just now, though it has ancient wallet, doesn't have debug to run any commands and longpoll definitely doesn't find a block each few seconds, lol. Only one connection.

My cpu is crap so I don't find nothing too though.

It uses port 3737 to communicate right?   

8697 is one I use to mine.

I'm running it for lulz, would love to find my first block ever though it looks I missed the chance with YAC  ;D

What's the block reward with this?

I would like to find out who runs the two nodes that I connected to when I fired it up. Maybe they belong to the original lanuncher of the coin. Whoever they belong to if they just have those nodes running on auto month after month maybe almost forgotten about it would be a pity to orphan them by making a hard fork that they don't even realise is going on until their yearly review of background processes or something.

-MarkM-

At https://github.com/nicksasa/Liquidcoin

It says

-Fixed difficulty (0.05) -Block reward reduces 4% every 1000 blocks, it does not increase ever. Minimum block reward is 1LQC

-MarkM-

Pool or I'm out, this is boring  ;D

Yeah Fairbrix and Tenebrix are both much more exciting than this one. Kind of why I figured who-ever is running the two nodes I connected to when I fired up maybe set them up in cron to start at boot and has since totally forgotten they are even running it. :)

-MarkM-

Fairbrix has no connections for me and I couldn't find Tenebrix for Windows if I recall it good.