Sounds like there's probably going to be another fork then. Sigh.

I guess it will take a few tries to get this coin right.

The problem with not adjusting existing coins is that it make this a premine/instamine. If the emission schedule is changed but not as a bug fix, then earlier miners got an unfair advantage over everyone else. Certainly there are coins with premines and instamines, but there's a huge stigma and such a coin will never achieve the level of success we see for this coin. This was carefully discussed during the team meeting, which was announced a day ahead of time, and everyone with any visible involvement with the coin, you included, was invited. It is unfortunate you couldn't make it to that meeting TFT.

There is a graph here, on page 2 of this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=582080.msg6365132#msg6365132

But don't let that discourage you from checking things out on your own. Independent checking can only help.

I'd like to see a graph like that one with bitcoin's curve overlaid.

Full node operators have to approve as well, even if they don't mine, or the network breaks. Unless there is a lightweight wallet or a web wallet (which there isn't), then full node operators are everyone running a wallet.

Now in practice most of them are just going to download whatever software is on the official web site, which is fine. But if you do something a lot of them really don't like, they can refuse to upgrade and you can't force it on them, even with a majority of hash rate. Your blocks just wont' propagate to their nodes and all that hash rate might as well be mining a different coin.

The quote I posted "close to Bitcoin's original curve" is from the original announcement here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563821.0

I think there was also some discussion on the thread about it being desirable to do that.

At one point in that discussion, I suggested increasing the denominator by a factor of 4, which is what ended up being done, but I also suggested retaining the block target at 2 minutes, which was not done. The effect of making one change without the other is to double the emission rate from something close to bitcoin to something much faster (see chart a few pages back on this thread).

Not especially forum users. no.  People running nodes that aren't mining still have to validate the blocks, otherwise you get a different kind of split. Or alternately if people don't like what the miners are doing they may simply stop using the coin. Miners are not the only stakeholders in a coin, just one important one.

There will soon be a web site, and other ways of communicating. Now the forum is pretty central, but that will likely not always be the case.

It is not only a technical issue. I understand that in a technical sense you can decline to merge mine, but in an economic sense you can not. Merge mining NMC with BTC is worth about 1%. Still most people do it, but not all.

We likely will not have a situation like that here, because there is no bitcoin with a value that far eclipses every other coin.

If NMC mining were say 10% or more of the value of BTC mining, then everyone would have to merge mine or they would not be able compete. Difficulty would go up due to the extra revenue received by the other miners (so they would buy more mining gear, because it is 10% more profitable), and then anyone who doesn't merge mine will lose money.

That is what I want to avoid.

75% percent is probably a good margin for miners to approve just about any hard fork. With anything much less than that you are going to end up with a split.

Let's not forget though, non-miners have to approve too.

Yes I agree with that, as I said. To be fair though, I believe that a large portion of the current hash rate, most likely a clear majority, was active in the meeting where these things were discussed.

Merged mining essentially forces people to merge both coins because that is the only economically rational decision.

I do not want to support the ninja-premined coin with our hash rate.

Merged mining makes perfect sense for a coin with a very low hash rate, otherwise unable to secure itself effectively. That is the case with coins that merge mine with bitcoin. This coin already has 60% of the hash rate of bytecoin, and has no need to attach itself to another coin and encourage sharing of hash rate between the two. It stands well on its own and will likely eclipse bytecoin very soon.

I want people to make a clear choice between the fair launched coin and the ninja-premine that was already 80% mined before it was made public. Given such a choice I believe most will just choose this coin.  Letting them choose both allows bytecoin to free ride on what we are doing here. Let the ninja-preminers go their own way.

There is also a bug where sometimes this happens even when the blockchain is already synced. Typing "save" in the daemon process seems to fix it.

You are wrong TFT. The original announcement described the coin as having a reward curve "close to Bitcoin's original curve" (those are your exact words). The code as implemented has a reward curve that is nothing like bitcoin. It will be 86% mined in 4 years. It will be 98% mined in 8 years. Bitcoin is 50% mined in 4 years, and 75% in 8 years.

With respect TFT, you did the original fork, and you deserve credit for that.  But this coin has now gone beyond your initial vision. It isn't just a question of whether miners are on bitcointalk or not. There is a great team of people who are working hard to make this coin a success, and this team is collaborating regularly through forum posts, IRC, PM and email. And beyond that a community of users who by and large have been very supportive of the efforts we've taken to move this forward.

Also, miners aren't the only stakeholders, and while a miner voting process is great, it isn't the answer to every question. Though I do agree that miners need to be on board with any hard fork to avoid a harmful split.

For the record I approve of the voting process.

I do not approve of merged mining. It hurts this coin more than it helps it. With what we have done here we can easily build the largest and most secure network using the cryptonote design. We're well on our way to doing that already.

We should just go our own way, and leave bytecoin and its ninja-preminers to do the same.

That is my view.  

We don't agree that a reverse split amounts to "taking" coins. I also wouldn't agree that a regular forward split would be "giving" coins. It's an exchange of old coins with new coins, with very nearly the exact same value. There is a very slight difference in value due to the way the reward schedule is capped, but that won't be relevant for years or decades. Such a change is entirely reasonable to fix an error in a in coin that has only existed for a week.

How about I just give you 250 coins? The idea here is to move forward and correct the error, not rip anyone off.

Rename: Bitmonero -> Monero

Twice as many chances to get lucky?

Yup. Good luck to other pools trying to compete with this strategy, other than by copying it.

The point is, you are already mining to the max, and getting the full subsidy from the free power, regardless of which miners you use. It is a fixed amount of per month.

There will be some time when its still likely to be a problem. Almost everyone agrees with this, although I guess there are a few die hard bitcoin originalists who don't see a need to change ever.

I'm less sure about the solution though. I'd rather some mechanism that provides whatever rewards are necessary rather than trying to guess at that 20 years ahead of time, but I'm not sure at all what mechanism that is. Some small inflation rate is probably better than nothing.

It's not microscopic at 9 or 10 years, with the revised schedule. Take a look at the graph a few posts back. With the original schedule, that is more the case. With the revised schedule this is more an issue of 20 years out.  

I'm not positive but I think most of the other alts such as doge have much shorter schedules, so the issue is more urgent there.