I've been working on a new cryptocurrency.  I call it Crypto-Credits, or 'Cryddits'  -- That's why I decided to use this name on the forum.  It is my goal to completely avoid the pump'n'dump that most get involved in, avoid becoming (much of) a speculative vehicle, and skip straight to the phase of actually being useful as a digital currency that people can use without kicking themselves later due to enormous changes in price.

Right now the CLI client and the daemon are ready.  The release will happen sometime after I figure out QT enough to get the wallet working.   Personally I don't give a crap about graphic user interfaces, and will probably just use the CLI client.  But I'm learning QT because normal people want GUI applications and will not use a digital currency that requires hard skills like literacy and typing.  In terms of graphics I have the graphic design sense of a blind person, and will most likely make a GUI that most people find ugly or boring. It could be a week, it could be three.  I hope it won't be a couple of months, but that's a possibility because as yet I don't even know how "deep" QT is.  

I'm willing to take instruction and help, and expend personal effort, in making the client prettier or easier to use.  Aside from having the design sense of a blind person I *know* that I have the design sense of a blind person, and will cheerfully assume that virtually every normal human being has a better sense of graphics and GUI usability than I do.  So I'm very receptive to any usability or graphics problems that people bring up.  

Once I have a working QT wallet, I'd like someone to test it on Windows and help me work out the inevitable kinks before I go to actual release.  I personally do not own any Windows machines and therefore have no means to test it.

I will neither pump nor dump.  Ever.  I don't use social media, because I'm barely social in the first place.  So it will be very easy for me to completely avoid Tweeting about it, put up a Reddit page, mention it on Facebook, etc.  I don't use any of those sites in the first place.  So, as developer, I'm making a perfectly serious promise never to "pump" the coin or whore for publicity.  I also will never 'dump' the coin in the sense of selling more than about five percent of any I come to own in any single month.  And I'm going to include features actively repulsive to those whose main interest is in doing exactly that.

Here are some interesting features:  

1)  There will be an initial giveaway because it is mainly a proof-of-stake coin and you have to have an initial giveaway to get one going.  The giveaway will be exactly one million cryddits, divided in equal tranches among at least tens of thousands of public keys.  Most of you reading in this forum will discover that you already own at least one of the corresponding private keys because I'm going to blatantly steal the public keys from existing blockchains, including but not limited to the Bitcoin blockchain.  A viable currency needs an initial wide distribution.  Having an early giveaway exclusively going to people who respond to an initial thread is not nearly wide enough a distribution, and could be interpreted as a "pump" which, if you remember, I promised to not do. So I'm going for a distribution much wider than any initial thread could muster.  

2)  Because a lot of these addresses represent lost private keys or will wind up in the hands of nonparticipants, each of the initial tranches will become spendable by one of the other keys at random intervals about four weeks to four months apart, until either someone claims them, or until they have become spendable by any of seven addresses and still have not been claimed.  Each key, therefore, has a potential claim on seven different tranches of coins - but only if none of the other qualified keys takes them first.  The last (eighth) address is mine.  

That means that, If we assume that 40% of the addresses in the distribution are "dead", then eventually -- over an interval starting about seven months after initial distribution and ending twenty-eight months after distributon, about 2.8 percent of the initial million coins will be claimed by me.  This is completely probabilistic, and represents the only special treatment I'm giving myself in terms of the initial distribution.  This is effectively my "premine."

As someone who promises never to pump the coin, nor spend large amounts of it in a given month, I will flatly refuse to spend that 2.8% (or whatever it actually turns out to be) on giveaways, prizes, or promotions.   I will use at least half of it for bounties, available for someone who contributes code enabling new features or otherwise facilitates the use of the coin as a currency.  There will be absolutely no bounties for anyone who facilitates the use of cryddits as a vehicle for currency speculation or anyone who organizes a mining pool.  In other words, I'd cheerfully pay bounties to someone who developed a nice web interface allowing merchants to easily take cryddits as payment and in turn spend them on things that the merchants actually need.   But anyone who puts it on an exchange where it can be used to buy and sell other cryptocurrencies will not be rewarded for doing so.  Like mining pools, It's inevitable.  But neither has anything to do with this coin's real purpose - to be a *useful and usable* currency as opposed to being a speculative vehicle.

3) In order to make it repugnant to mine-n-dump operations, we will start out with about 3% inflation, and only about 10% of that available for proof-of-work.  In concrete terms, it's seven blocks per hour, one half-coin per block, or 84 coins per day.  Only one block out of ten will be awarded for mining as opposed to proof-of-stake, so miners are looking at block times of about 1.43 hours, for half a coin each, totaling about 8.4 coins a day.  It is my sincere hope that by making the creation of new coins slow relative to the number of existing coins, and making it flatly impossible for miners to control the majority of coins created simply by proof-of-work mining, we can skip appealing to the "mine-n-dump" crowd altogether.  Hopefully they can be encouraged to hold in order to take advantage of proof-of-stake mining.  And if they don't, their antics will barely affect the rest of us except insofar as we have opportunities to buy coins from them.  

Tranches of cryddits to take advantage of proof-of-stake mining will most likely be cheaper than mining rigs anyway, so if they whine, screw 'em. (they probably need to be screwed, and often, by someone who knows how).  

4) We're going to do a radical thing -- we're going to *STICK* with 3 percent inflation.  Each successive year will see 3 percent more cryddits created than the previous year.  This completely avoids the early hyperinflation of the money supply characteristic of most cryptocoins, and fails to reward any attempt at pump-n-dump as much as it fails to reward any attempt at mine-n-dump.  It is my fervent wish that by failing to reward currency speculation, cryddits can instead be used simply as a medium of exchange.  

5)  I expect to start with an abysmally low valuation, due to a large initial dump of cryddits by those who decline to participate and due to lack of support by speculators and miners who just want to dump.  That's okay.  After that initial dump, there should be no motivation for another dump to happen.  As for the speculators and the mine-n-dump crowd, we're better off without that "support" anyway.

6)  It may not be operating in the first version, but the infrastructure to support a "tumbler" is already in place.  There are actually two types of "coins" in the system, although the tumbler coins are usually invisible.  "Tumbling" your cryddits means your client will spend them to buy tumbler coins, then spend the tumbler coins in a subsequent block to buy back cryddits.  This is an effort to preserve some financial privacy even though the block chain is a public record.

This works because the transaction where cryddits are exchanged for tumbler coins is a single transaction in each block with dozens to scores of inputs and outputs, exchanging at a single price.  And the client is instructed to exchange "standardized" amounts in each transaction - powers of two, to be exact - so it becomes impossible to distinguish all the people who exchanged the same standard amount from each other.  

The exchange price for tumbler coins floats with the market, but is constrained never to change by more than a tenth of a percent between blocks and never to allow anyone to be the only person who trades a particular "standard" amount - so the amount you have after a tumble should never be more than a tenth of a percent different than the amount you started with.  In theory, because all buyers and sellers get the same price in each tumbler transaction, you should break even in the long run.  In practice, because you want your coins tumbled more than the people with tumbler coins want to help you, they'll set their clients to attempt to profit from tumbling, meaning they'll sell only in rounds where the price is slightly higher, and buy back in rounds when the price is slightly lower.  So tumbling your coins will cost you slightly, and there is (slight) money to be made by holding and dealing in tumbler coins.  Also, there will be a transaction fee - but if you have an average amount of cryddits, you'll receive nearly as much in transaction fees (because of proof-of-stake blocks) as you spend on them.  

Finally, because the 'float' of cryddits vs. tumbler coins is constrained to never change prices by more than a tenth of a percent, there is likely to be more demand (or more supply) in most rounds than can actually trade in the very narrow allowed price range.  The net effect of this is that if you want to tumble a very large number of cryddits, it will take a very long time, during which the price of tumbler coins will go steadily up.  And that's fairly reasonable, because financial privacy really *should* be easier for pocket change than it is for very large transactions.  In the UI (when I figure out how to make a UI) you'll simply see the coins steadily disappearing from the account you've marked to tumble, and a few minutes later reappearing in the account you're tumbling to.  

Of course anyone can "game" this to tumble coins faster by splitting a large amount up among many wallets and instructing each wallet to tumble -- but in doing so they would risk becoming the only buyer or only seller (or the majority buyer or seller) in some of the tumbling transactions.  That would work against their own financial privacy because if they wind up exchanging for just their own coins from other wallets, they'd be getting back money that's traceable through the tumble to the transaction they wanted to keep private.

7)  Cryddits come in colored denominations.  "Black" cryddits are indivisible, equivalent to "satoshis" in Bitcoin parlance. A thousand of them make a "Red" cryddit, which in turn is one one-thousandth of an "Orange" cryddit, etc.  You can use metric prefixes if you like instead, based on the "Yellow" cryddit as a standard measure.  I'm guessing though, that it'll probably be easier for people to just accept that they have a hundred "Orange" cryddits rather than getting stuck on some conceptual bug about only having one-tenth of a "Yellow" cryddit.  Higher denominations will be green, blue, purple, and white, but no one can possibly own blue, purple, or white cryddits until many years of inflation have passed.  After all the entire money supply in the first year only amounts to one blue cryddit.  


Edit: changed post name.  Someone else may want to use "crypto-credits" and with the domain name of my choice based on it burnt, I've no reason to stick to it.

If I were running the FBI's business here (which I'm definitely not) I'd be selling by placing a limit order on the market.  Pick a price, something like USD$1000 per coin, and just let the market eat it slowly, for as long as it takes.  Or, more likely, pick a few dozen or a few hundred prices, and put smaller amounts at each of them over a period of months.

It could limit the upside of prices for a longish while, but a treatment like that wouldn't crash the market. 

Anyway, my point is they're going to sell rationally, however they do it.  I'm guessing that whomever they actually sell to will probably also manage it rationally.  So, yes, we'll see downside pressure on the market as more coins enter circulation.  But it certainly won't all hit those tiny exchange volumes at once, and probably won't hit them any faster than upside pressure compensates.

I'm more amused at the people who keep contributing dimes and dollars to the FBI, just in order to leave a public comment.  Starting of course with all the hilariously angry messages from Silk Road users themselves, and then quickly devolving into just plain begging.

Exactly.  Because every miner would like to be paid a block award, every miner will use a coinbase transaction that is different from all the other coinbase transactions.  Because after all, those other coinbase transactions would pay somebody else instead. 

Therefore, every miner is looking at a different transaction set, even if they pick up exactly the same set of transactions made by others.  And therefore, every miner would get paid on a different nonce, even if they all started from zero and picked their next nonce just by incrementing one.  And they don't.  Every time, they start on a different random number for the first nonce. 

All writers actually.  Their business, when they are good, is to get us to think about things.  Whether that's fiction writers 'kicking the hornet's nest' and making us question our own beliefs and biases, or journalists daring to tell the truth no one else dares name and making us question our institutions and leaders.


In many places around the world, like pretty much all war zones, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, most of sub-saharan Africa, and much of Latin America, Bitcoin is definitely a better system than what currently exists, because the people doing monetary policy there either are desperate, have no idea what they're doing, are corrupt, or are under too much pressure from people who are desperate, have no idea what they're doing, or are corrupt.   A 'dead' hand with mindlessly simple algorithms is better than management by actively incompetent or malicious people.  

In many other places around the world, where actual competent and reasonably honest people are doing monetary policy, Bitcoin is not remotely a better solution in terms of monetary policy.  It *is* however, a better solution as a financial network.  Nothing as good exists for cross-border money flows, including into and out of all those nations where barriers exist to honest business because the officials in those countries doing monetary policy are incompetent or corrupt.  

I'm invested in Bitcoin because it solves a multi-trillion dollar problem; how to send money quickly, cheaply, easily, and securely around the world and break down barriers to trade.  It may or may not be better monetary policy depending on where you live, it's a risky and volatile investment, and its equilibrium price when it's valued according to its utility will most likely be found through a huge cycle of bubbles and at least one 99% crash driven by currency speculation.  But I honestly believe that its value according to utility is higher than the current price, and that's why I'm invested.  

Paypal has a history of freezing any accounts involved in a bitcoin-related transaction.

Which isn't too surprising when you think about it.  Bitcoin is an existential threat to their business model.  If people can just pay each other online, there is absolutely no need for intermediaries like Paypal.

For the same reason, a large number of banks are extremely hostile to Bitcoin.

That's all right.  I don't have enough information yet to make corrections myself; I'd no expectation that anyone else would. 

Bear in mind that science fiction authors often write about adversarial propositions -- you can't write a good story without conflict to drive the plot.  As a writer you don't need to believe that either side is "right" -- you need to understand the conflicts and make the characters passionate about their causes and show how it drives their interactions. 

Later on, people will think that whichever side of the conflict the writer put the protagonist on is the side he personally believes in, and for some shallow predictable polemist writers that's true.  But that isn't how it works in general, or David Brin could never have written 'Glory Season'. During the story, the only character who remotely shares the values of the reading audience, or for that matter the author, gets killed.  He wasn't the protagonist.  In fact the protagonist was too late to save him.  And his death resulted in (and from) merely the evolution, not the resolution, of a conflict between two opposing sides both of which most of us would consider dystopian.

I believe in cryptocurrency as a concept and I'm invested in it, but I'm concerned about some of Bitcoin's economics and don't believe that Bitcoin can possibly represent the ultimate evolution of cryptocurrency.  In the long run cryptocurrency requires some refinement and evolution before it will be better than what it attempts to replace.

The simple fixed money supply, if it were the main or only form of money, would lead to fairly dire instabilities.  In the very long run, if Bitcoin were the *only* money supply, then we'd have  economic collapse because with a fixed money supply an investor could always do as well, on average, just sitting on his money as investing it in something productive.  Good thing then that it will never be the *only* money supply. 

For every complex problem (like regulation of the money supply by nation states and distrust of those who do it), there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong (like doing and allowing no regulation of the money supply at all).  I fear that Bitcoin's current approach is one of many wrong answers, that it will take actual long-term use to observe exactly how and why it is wrong, and that cryptocurrencies will need to experiment for a long time in order to find better answers.

Okay, I got the qt-wallet figured out.  It was my mistake, of course.

I had replaced '$(TOPBUILDDIR)/src' with '../src' in a 'Makefile.am' in the qt directory (which was, by the way, literally true with respect to that directory) and the 'magic' applied to pathnames by autoreconf had transformed it into something silly. 

By the time it got through to make, 'make' thought I was telling it to *build* a directory.  And the error message was completely opaque because I hadn't *told* make what to build, instead hoping for autoconf to do that.

The moral of the story is, never attempt to use a relative path in a Makefile.am file.  Autoconf will mess it up.  Instead you MUST use opaque macros to name directories. 

It's my opinion that there are way too many dependencies in the Bitcoin build. 

I get that it's convenient for development and avoids certain classes of bugs because the bugs are already worked out of some of these libraries, but... in the long run a big family of dependencies makes something fragile.  It may or may not be okay with any change in any of them.  And that's really kind of unacceptable when people are depending on this for so much value. 

I've had to learn Boost specifically to work on these sources, and mostly I'm aghast at the wasted resources, excessively long compile times, failure to use the standard libraries where they are adequate, incompatibility with C++11, etc.  Boost is convenient for development, but it's a pig and it's holding the project back from being compatible with the latest version of the language itself.  It's not worth my time -- yet -- to de-Boost the sources, but it's on my list of things to do as I develop an altcoin. 

As for others; Remote procedure calls are a good thing.  JSON is a good thing.  But I hate the JSON_spirit libraries.  Too much templatization, too much obfuscation.  Nobody can just dive into it and fix something; you have to spend a week figuring out how the thing you want to fix affects and is affected by everything else first.  I get that the Bitcoin project itself hasn't had to look at it for many builds so it's not particularly inconvenient for them; but if you're trying to adapt the sources to do something different (particularly, to replace something that's serialized in the protocols and files with something that isn't what the spirit libraries natively understand, without screwing up the rest of the serialized stuff around it), JSON_spirit is like wearing chains on your wrists. 

And then there's the database thing.  Aside from being a moving target which the build process isn't compatible with the new versions of, it's another pig.  Besides that, the only excuse for putting up with a database is if you need to use the database to share information with other applications, and if you've already got JSON remote calls you don't need it for that.  Besides, you have to be very very careful what you put into a database, because you have to regard that stuff as being shared by default, and stuff *NOT* being shared is pretty crucial to security.  So I think the database dependency needs to be ripped out too. 

Now these are all my opinions, coming at this from the point of view of an altcoin developer.  But with the heavy templatization, the clumsy and inefficient dependencies, the incompatibilities with later versions, etc etc, the Bitcoin sources are aggressively difficult to modify and adapt, and require a full-time developer just to keep up with the changes in all the crap its dependent on.

Okay, I at least made some progress on the wallet thing.  I needed to get protobuf and libqrencode; these are dependencies not apparently shared by the rest of the project.  Once I got those (in addition to what I already had) the build system is at least attempting to make the qt wallet. 

However, when it does, I still get this lovely message. 

../..: Is a directory.  Stop.

Um, yes.  What the hell did the make system expect it to be?  Every directory on my computer is a directory!

Oh, and I forgot to mention: if you habitually develop in emacs, as I do, and you want to actually work with the sources, you'll want to start out by doing 'astyle -A2 -s2' on all of the source files to put them in the indent and brace style you're used to. Of course, you may have to 'sudo apt-get astyle' first.

I've got Bitcoind compiling on linux (Debian, to be exact).

The procedure, if you have all the things it depends on, is: 

In the top-level directory of the repository, there is a file 'autogen.sh' - it's executable and you run it.  This gathers all kinds of information about your system that is relevant to the extended set of things it depends on. It makes a file named 'configure' in the same directory using all of this information. (it makes several other things too, but 'configure' is the next thing you need to run to make the build work.) 

Next, you run 'configure' -- it creates makefiles and sets environment variables and sets configuration flags for the libraries you depend on. 

Finally, you run 'make' in the top-level directory, and go get coffee or whatever; depending on your machine the first build can take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes.  It's usually faster after that, except if you change anything in the header files.

After you have run 'autogen.sh' and 'configure' you shouldn't need to run them every time you build, unless the info they depend on changes. Which it will, if you alter your system configuration or, sometimes, if you update software, but not every time you compile.

Some Gotchas:  If you're on Debian or Ubuntu, you probably have a more recent version of Berkeley db than the one that's required.  4.9 is the last version compatible with the Bitcoin sources.  If your system has automatically upgraded to 5.1, you'll need to go to the software sources and install the individual packages of 4.9.  Don't worry, all the necessary 4.9 packages can exist on the same machine as the corresponding 5.1 packages.  Don't install any of the 4.9 "-dev" packages; they conflict with the corresponding 5.1 "-dev" packages. And don't install the 4.9 meta-package; if you don't install the individual 4.9 components by hand, they'll just disappear next time you do software update - because there's a more recent version now and your system is stupidly trying to help.

I do not remember the whole list of dependencies. You will need at least build-essential, libboost-all-dev, libcurl4-openssl-dev, git, and qt-sdk in addition to the Berkeleydb stuff.  But I got everything on that list that I didn't already have when I started working with Bitcoin source, and I remember I still had to go back to the software manager several times to get more stuff, or other versions of stuff.

Now, this procedure will build bitcoind and bitcoin.cli in the 'src' directory, one level below where the 'autogen.sh', 'configure', and 'make' commands were created.  It does not build the QT wallet. 

I am still stumped about how to build the QT wallet.  There's a makefile in the src/qt subdirectory, but the 'recursive make' doesn't run it when doing the above, and when I run make in that directory, it just gives an error message that says it can't work because the current directory is a directory.  I say that isn't a good excuse, but the makefile is pure gobbledegook as compared to one written by hand that names actual files and gives specific straightforward  directions to make each one.  So I've got to wade through a lot of template crap to figure out what's going wrong.

One serious problem with a 51% attack is that the attacker can just ignore other people's blocks.  Given more than half the hashing power, eventually the blockchain he creates all by his lonesome is longer.  At which point, he pockets all the block rewards. 

Heck, he could even start mining ten or twenty blocks in the past, forcing a chain reorg when he catches up, and thereby get block rewards that were given to someone else before his attack began. 

It is not at all unusual to see seven or eight out of every nine blocks go to one of the top three mining pools.  Even the top two account for more than half.  If they collude, then they can just freeze out all other miners until they feel like letting go. 

Of course you wouldn't want to do it for more than a few hours a week or so, because hey, people would notice and then the value of what you stole would crash to nearly nothing.

Y'all may be more worried about double spends, and a merchant who finds himself out of merchandise that someone bought with coins on an orphaned fork.  But that's surely not the only thing you need to worry about. 

It varies; some are effectively the same (like Bytecoin), some have different hashes (like Litecoin), some bring new features various & sundry. 

It is important to me that the 'Fair Cryptocurrency Committee' or whatever it is eventually called, it should not strictly limit itself to simplistically judging whether a new issue follows particular rules.  I will explain why using a concrete example.

I've been working on an alt cryptocurrency, but with some major changes to the usual algorithms.  I'm concerned that some deliberate choices made for maximal fairness and for the long-term good of a cryptocurrency, with no intent of personal profit, could disqualify it  from being considered a 'fair coin'.  Note that these are not the only major changes made; merely those made specifically for the sake of fairness.  

Firstly, there will be little or no mining, meaning that maybe 10% of block awards or maybe no block awards at all will be available merely for having compute power.  All, or all the rest, will be distributed via proof-of-stake only.  For at least 90% of the blocks a smartphone with a permanent Internet connection should have as much chance of getting a block as a ten thousand dollar server.  

Secondly, if there is mining, it will not be anything that can be done with ASICs or GPUs.  This is because I believe in fairness.  These things are two or three orders of magnitude faster, for the money, than non-specialized equipment, and I do not want to support a specialized class of miners.  They tend to cause more problems than they are worth, especially when operating en masse, and it is both unfair and counterproductive in my estimation to exclude (by overwhelming) that fraction of the public that uses normal computers from mining.  Finally, miners who own specialized equipment are primarily those who are mining for profit only, and who can be expected to simply dump coins as fast as they mine them in order to buy Bitcoin.  They represent a drag on a coin's value, not an asset.

Thirdly, I object strongly to any pressure to allow mining pools, if mining is allowed at all.  Mining pools in my estimation represent an existential threat to cryptocurrencies; first in terms of centralization, second in terms of logistics by screwing horribly with the difficulty as they jump on and off and overwhelming the probably-small server infrastructure of a fledgling currency, and third in their propensity to attract miners who believe that no other cryptocurrency exists for any reason other than to dump it on the market in order to buy Bitcoin.  

Fourth, as is necessary with proof-of-stake, there will be a ridiculously large premine.  My intent is to distribute about a million units *WIDELY* (to at least a hundred thousand pubkeys) before even announcing.  People who check will mostly discover that they already own the corresponding privkey to at least one of them.  Some will own more than one; that is unfair, but can't be helped.  To the extent that addresses are held by those who do not participate, the coins that those nonparticipants could otherwise claim will (mostly) eventually be claimed on a random basis by those who do participate.  The initial blocks will be created with a script that permits more and more addresses to spend the coinage as time goes on;  each month, about ten percent of them will become spendable by an additional existing key, until the distribution is complete or until they have gone through seven keys each.  Those who participate will occasionally "inherit" a distribution award from those who do not.

During the first year about 30 thousand coins (that is, three percent of the existing million) will be created.  Thereafter each year will see three percent more coins created than the previous year.   So, 3 percent long term inflation after the initial distribution.  But absolutely no relevance to anything like a 'halving time' or 'ultimate total number of coins' criterion that a committee is likely to come up with.  This is specifically to avoid an initial phase of very high rewards, because that would attract pump'n'dumpers rather than people who simply want a currency to use.

Now, I believe that this outlines a plan for a very "fair" cryptocurrency.  In fact fairness is one of my *PRIMARY* intents in creating it.  But I also believe that because it works differently from the expected model, it is very unlikely to meet any set-in-stone criterion of "fairness" based on the usual set of expectations.  

Therefore I ask that whatever else you decide here the committee should remain free to exercise human judgement as to whether a new issue is fair, rather than merely interpreting narrow rules.

Well, this is what happens when block times are too short.  Best of luck everybody.

I have sympathy for the OP.  He offered a modest bounty a couple years ago and is now watching US$200K of his money disappear. 

I can picture getting so frustrated about that that I'd feel a deep-seated need to have been right.  In similar situations, I have made an ass of myself for similar reasons.  I'm older now, and have learned a bit about what kind of crap goes on in my not-altogether-normal mind.  I compensate for it reasonably well most of the time these days. If I felt a need to take something like this up again after two years, I would know that it was time to see a therapist. 

A very high orphan rate is normal with a very fast block time.  But, honestly, this coin could never be used as a payment network; the bandwidth requirements under any load won't allow people to keep up with the block times.  Also, fast block times bias mining in favor of centralized power.  Somebody running sixteen times as many miners, all on the same local network, is going to get FAR more than sixteen times as many blocks.

I would not be buying mining equipment at this time, unless you have some kind of deal with your local electric utility that allows you to get power at *FAR* less than the usual rate.

Such deals exist; if you commit to off-peak use only, for example, you can usually get something like a 60% discount in some places.  People irrigate fields at night using electric pumps thanks to that deal fairly near here. 

Even if you can do that, you'll probably make money far slower than you now think you will, and you'll watch as the amount of money you make drops off to near nothing faster than you expect.  I'd expect the number of bitcoins generated by mining equipment to drop by half about every two months.  So figure out what you'll make this month, double it, and that's likely to be your gross revenues from mining.  Your net profits will be much less depending on what deal you can make with your power company and whether you can get double use out of the power (like for example paying less to run your heater because you heat your house with mining equipment).