Thanks OP for asking this question.  People are finally starting to ask it and to think about it.  This will be an issue long before the last coinbase satoshi is handed out in 2140 because bitcoin's distribtution curve is a rapidly converging geometric series.  Already more than 3/4 done.  

As you know if you have looked at woodcoin, there are ways to do coinbase distribution without rapid convergence, and without infinite inflation.  

But lets look instead at the possiblities for what happens to the original bitcoin around 2030 or so when the coinbase reward drops below fees:


1)  Mining Centralization.  This is the NXT model.  Fees stay low but miners keep mining at high security because they hold a lot of BTC and want to see BTC still work so that their coin will hold its value.  I find this hard to believe but it's a possibility.    

2)  Large Fees.  This is how Satoshi said (briefly in passing) that it would work.  Security against double spends will be paid for by large fees on transactions.  As long as not too many people flee to other coins and they stick with btc (at this point solely because the market values it highly) this could work.  The network becomes a high-value-tx network only, as transactions on the scale of a case of beer simply won't be able to afford to get into the blockchain.  This is what most people envision; there is some stability question from a game theory perspective though, as users wishing to use coin for small tx will flee to other coins.  

3)  Coinbase Adjustment.  This hardfork is sacrilege to suggest at this point and I see 0 chance of it happening.  However to make the list theoretically complete it should be here.

4)  Pro-bono mining.   This also seems quite farfetched, but you never know.  People might just mine the thing because they love the community or some such.  

5)  Flight to other coins.  There could be a more stable and robust diverse public coin ecosystem at that time and markets will evaluate coins accordingly.  My suspicion is that it will be more complex than I can predict at present.  

      

Iamnotback makes some very good points about currency above, but then suddenly chooses to say


i.e.
"oh and by the way, please ignore everything i say".

Why?  Just make your points without also saying "and the sun rises in the west".  

Hüüre geil!!! 

The question makes no sense because anything can be used as a currency, such as beer or rice or gold or litecoin or even toilet paper issued at no cost to the issuers though of course that wouldn't be recommended  

Your deposits are safe!  Really.  We're just, you know, getting a few coins, like in case of cryptolocker emergency.  Yeah. 

no specs on the hardware in that box?  it's running btcd on linux i assume? 

Good points.. 

  Yayayo is right, these political manifestos can't be applied isomorphically to our issues with bitcoin.  I happened to run across the material, and saw some application worth sharing; draw you own conclusions.

  Kakmakr is right, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Kleptomania is rampant in the orcish lands. 

  Daffadile, we need more MCs.  Groll, perhaps better our heads to ache now from words than later from worse injuries.   

  Justdimin, thanks for your comment   If one person got something out of it I wasn't wasting my time.  Tweren't me, I just happened to stumble across the right book. 

   

 

http://frass.woodcoin.org/strategic-tricks-used-against-the-coinsman/

What could be the two most important political writings of the past decade were both written from prison cells, by political prisoners who spent substantial time in solitary confinement.  One is the "Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization" by Abdullah Öcalan, who had been an important member of the PKK.  The other is "Maroon the Implacable", by Russell Shoatz, who had been an important member of the BPP.

The latter of these describes in one section the problems which plagued a certain liberation movement of people striving for self determination and to escape the existing yoke of an oppressive system.  The American history presented is all too often ignored, and some parts in particular are relevant to the situation which faces current users of public coin systems ((A system where some people work for economic tokens and others simply issue arbitrary quantities in private at no cost is an oppressive system)).  The author outlines how great progress in a first wave of change in such a battle can be lost.  Here's the quote from Russell Shoatz which inspires this post:

  
It might be that you don't see eye to eye with me on this analogy of black liberation to bitcoin.  You might consider bitcoin of use as a revolutionary tool, or the opposite: as a counter-revolutionary tool.  You might disagree with my opinion that bitcoin is being adopted by what is effectively a global maroon community, giving individuals and communities democratic leverage against authoritarian systems such as states, republics, corporations, or plantations.  However you probably will not disagree that the use of bitcoin or public coin represents some kind of change to the status quo, compared to the system of the late 20th century.  From here, we must recognize that there are forces, not necessarily consciously due to single or multiple specific actors but forces none the less which collectively work to hold the status quo in place and which use the above techniques to trick "The Youth" (that is, those spear heading the change).  In other words: strategic tricks that work against your vision of success for crypto.  To quote Russel Shoatz again:




If we are to learn from this history, and to not make the same mistakes, we must pay close attention to this kind of sage analysis.  So lets consider how the six tricks are used against the youth so that we might escape a lost generation or worse in the struggle to obtain a sane financial system, or at least to give us respite from the debt slavery and rule-by-counterfeit systems as we strive towards more enlightened social systems.

Co-Option



Sound familiar?  It should.  Venture capital dollars have "poured into bitcoin" in a process called co-option.  The best and the brightest spearheading the bitcoin revolution (or counter-revoluation if you prefer) were given jobs, titles, and other supposed benefits, provided they play according to certain scripts.



I will avoid mentioning names in this post, because it would be too long.  However mentioning them is important.  Stick to your vision and say no to the sugar coated bullets.  Notice and understand the forces of co-option before you make those important decisions.

Glamorization of Gangsterism

This is perhaps part of the story of the rise of bitcoin as well, in a different way.  Ponzis, exit scammers, web-wallets, premines, wallet thieves, pump-and-dumpers, cloud-miners, ASIC non-deliverables, fake-hacks, real-hacks, and obsolete miners: All have a certain glamor about them if we read the forums and focus only on the fact that they "got the money".  But is this going to help us reach our goals?  Gangsterism ostracizes us from the mainstream and pits us against each other.  You will be happier in the end to call out scammers and to hold the hands of those who might fall prey to gangsters rather than to take advantage of these people for supposed short term gains.  We should at the very least be wary of the pitfalls and the innate push by the status quo to lure us too far down this path.

Separation from the most Advanced Elements

This is really tricky.  It's hard to know who the most advanced elements are or where to find them.  Forums are co-opted, and people claiming to be the most advanced almost never are.  It takes constant vigilance, as there is no authority capable of simply telling you.  We must continuously search ourselves.  We must be willing to consider the opinions of those who might have appeared crackpots, co-opted, or wrong in the past - just in case.  We must be willing to abandon those leaders who might have become co-opted, degenerate, or simply lost their touch and would lead us astray.  We must be wary of forming tight-knit groups that discard potentially vital intelligence as being external.  What makes this task harder still is that we must above all continue to be decentralized.  This is an earlier theme of maroon success, continually mentioned by Shoatz, and fortunately for us one at which bitcoin excels.  However, it makes adherence with the most advanced elements a constant struggle.

Indoctrination and reliance on passive approaches

Because the conflict is an economic one, we might be tempted to say this trick is less applicable.  However the key is education, and in this theater reliance on passive approaches is a major mistake.  Without active education and insistence on the use of public verifiable exchange, when monetary exchange is deemed necessary, there will be no further progress and our remarkable gains will be lost.  Indoctrination in this theater is massive, as every school, movie, TV show, songs, organized religions, nearly every possible facet of media will tell us that privately issued currency is money and that we should just accept that.  On the other side there is almost no regular education of information theory, encodings, public-key encryption, or open-source software management.  To avoid losing ground we need an active approach, simply "Hodling" is not enough.

Raw Fear

From the early days of bitcointalk raw fear was there.  "FUD" of all sorts, yes, and also "bitcoin will be banned".  I'm sure you know the name of at least one coinsman who has been imprisoned or robbed by agents of state or fiat for their noble efforts, as well as various propaganda designed to make their efforts look less noble.  As one early commenter put it:  "Nearly every serious student of the subject seems to believe that Bitcoin will be ruthlessly suppressed in the near future.  The only disputed details appear to be: what form the ban will take, and how it will be enforced."

However in the case of bitcoin, numbers, appearances, and crucially finances are on our side in addition to just common sense, decency, and history.  Educating people in the problems with privately issued currency might seem risky if you just consider the powerful forces in question, but it isn't.  Henry Ford spoke eloquently on the topic, as well as many others over the last century from all positions in the social hierarchy.  If you aren't calling out specific names, then you are not drawing specific ire - and also, you are not alone.

Rest assured - more bank accounts and paypal accounts will be closed, and more arrests will be made.  However if we plan ahead for such contingencies, and recognize the trick that fear can play to make us weak, keeping in mind that this is our chance today to make a difference, we can make decisions which properly weigh all possibilities.

Drugs

It's tempting to go off on a tangent because drug education and policy is in such a barbaric sorry state, but I'm going to avoid that for now.  We should keep in mind that we will need all our wits about us to navigate this period wisely, and whatever that means in terms of your drug use is for you to determine.  The thing I've personally seen do the most damage to bitcoiners is that king of defocusing agents, the amphetamine, the worst damage of course (as all drug abuse) coming from when it is taken regularly, and with false expectations as to its potential use.

Hopefully I'll get an electronic version of these books up here for you soon.  For now, that's all folks.

To be more specific, lets look at the Princeton researchers results from:

"On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward"
Carlsten, Kalodner, Weinberg, Narayanan

http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf


"Our results suggest a different view.  We see the block re-
ward as integral to the stability of the mining game.  At a
minimum, analyzing equilibria in the transaction-fee regime
appears dramatically harder than in the block-reward regime,
which is a cause for concern by itself."

Thanks Klarki  
Well yeah, exchanges are free to list public coins.  I'm sure woodcoin will be on others.  

If you had something else in mind, message me  

In other news, some people are figuring out why LOG makes sense:  

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-reward/#comment-21888

Apple is not stupid, ok maybe.  On the other hand, people who are suckered into not only using their backdoored products but also paying for it,.. 

Good answer from Spoetnik  

I will add that any single coin can, for the right price per unit time, be DDOSed.  Having others means you can still get TX through.  If there were only one, any problems with it (network or cryptoprimitive) would be fatal to commerce.  With many, there is resilience and strength.  Public coin is a hydra.  Backup plans are always recommended. 

Two Years of Chopping LOG
http://frass.woodcoin.org/woodcoin-two-years-of-chopping-log/

Happy birthday Woodcoin!

I'm going to use this excuse to take a look at the current state of the network and review the motivation behind using woodcoin.

Part 1 PRICE


Fig. 1   Market Capitalization of Woodcoin over first 2 years.

 
Woodcoin is a small coin listed with a capitalization of ~200BTC.  This puts it at the 109th largest "mineable and non-premined" coin listed on coinmarketcap.  As you probably know by looking at this metric before, it is easily skewed by small distributions of stackers, small volume, and coins burned or lost.  I expect many of the coins in this top 100 list to disappear just like paycoin did.  The half a million LOG sent to the address WeHonorTheForestsAndTheTrees4pPXTQ are not included here so really the spendable coins are at least 6% smaller than reported.

Woodcoin is fully public and decentralized with no ICO, no registered foundation or corporation, nor any solicitation or acceptance of fiat currencies during its creation.  If you squint a bit you can see this in the charts.  One immediately notices in Figure 1 that the usual fractal pattern exhibited in most coins (large fast pumps followed by slow decreases) are not visible here.  Where are the pump and dumps?  Where is the ICO spike?  Woodcoin shows a stable (but slow) growth, which is no surprise to those who understand the supply curve (see details below).  Of course because woodcoin is open to all, this is no guarantee of future behavior.

While woodcoin is currently listed on at least four currently operating exchanges, most all of the volume is on C-CEX.  They have proved to be reliable and trustworthy custodians as of today, and have also shown consistent growth over the last two years.  You know the deal with exchanges by now.

It's also worth pointing out that C-CEX reported LOG trading for as high as 8000 sat (during one emptying of supply about six months ago) and a couple of faucets currently sell them in small quantities for 0 sat.  That should give you an idea of the ranges of prices.

The total supply (including permanently tied LOG) is now just over 8 million LOG.  This is out of a maximum of 27.6 million LOG, which as you probably know, will take a long time to chop

 

Part 2 HASH RATE



Fig. 2  Hash rate of LOG choppers over the first two years of woodcoin.

The constant battle which is a proof-of-work network has been very exciting to watch here.  Recently (as in yesterday) the difficulty has touched all time highs.  There are quite a lot of skein hash functions being calculated, to say the least.  The network is currently in the GPU phase of growth, which is to say that the vast majority of the hashpower appears to be in GPU rigs.

There have also been hash withdrawl "attacks" which began almost a year ago, in November of 2015.  Certain GPU farmers dedicated their relatively large rigs to chopping LOG for short time periods, then left the network when the difficulty increased, presumably to mine other coins.  This led to periods of very long block times.  LOG users waited patiently and the network recovered as it should.  While some people reported being annoyed by long confirmation times, all transactions went through.  In addition to complaints there was much discussion on what could be changed (with a fork) to alter these dynamics.  A recent talk by Mark Friedenbach at Scaling Bitcoin in Milan touched on these issues.  Difficulty adjust algorithms such as the one employed by woodcoin look dreadfully simple to a control systems engineer (why is there no PID controller?), but their simplicity and resilience make them work - even if at times their overshoots and undershoots are aggravating.

This summer further hash warfare activity was detected on the network, in the form of block withholding "attacks".  These enabled certain woodcutters to re-chop blocks of LOG (which had been chopped by hash-withrdawl players as discussed above) after the original hashpower was withdrawn.  This caused a certain amount of confusion but good will was displayed by all involved as no transactions were reported double-spent, despite indications that some woodcutters had the power to perform a dreaded 51% attack.  The woodcutters involved even went so far as to generously refund any smaller choppers who had lost their rewards as orphans.  This led one woodcoin user to ask me "Why is it raining LOGs?"  There were even one or two chain reorganizations that numbered as high as thousands of blocks.  While hardly a selling point on the security of woodcoin transactions at that moment, this was very exciting to see that the consensus network can recover from such shenanigans.  Small and decentralized proof of work chain dynamics can be very exciting.

Also related was a brief "Quantitative Easing" period sponsored by the secretive dwarven Kawg trust, in which large transaction fees were paid to woodcutters.  There are rumors that another period of quantitative easing or QE2 will emerge on the network.

Overall the network has behaved well, which even after 8 years of watching bitcoin blocks appear still seems somewhat of a miracle.  Lets not forget this was proven by some of the very best cryptographers to be impossible

Part 3  MOTIVATION

The real motivation is for our betters, the trees, to survive and thrive, and for us to secure our life support and to gain a second spaceship to ensure survival of Gaia.  We fight Sauron's colonial empire within as well as the crawling radiative chaos Nyarlathotep without.  That's a long story we won't get into here.  To get started with that, one thing we need is to remove the gaping wound on humanity and middle earth which reliance on private coin issuance has opened, and to do that we need a strong ecosystem of public coins.  Woodcoin aims to be one of these coins.

When I presented the logarithmic supply curve, and implemented it with the woodcoin genesis block two years ago, I didn't go out of my way to explain it.  Some people figured it out anyway.

The problem we are solving here has been largely overlooked, but it hasn't gone away.  Namely:  What is going to incentivise miners on the bitcoin (or other geometric supply curve coin) network when the block subsidy reward drops to near zero?  Satoshi's answer, and perhaps the only answer that makes any sense, is transaction fees.  However, we have a large segment of bitcoin users who fear that large transaction fees will push users to other coins.  Some even suggest raising the maximum block size to avoid these large fees.  In addition to this big question mark of how the network will work when block subsidies drop to near zero, as they do rapidly in a geometric release curve, this rapid release makes the supply look unattractive to new users for another reason: it appears as a premine and as an unfair distribution.  Currently more than three quarters of all bitcoin to ever be mined are already in the pockets of early adopters.  Many critiques of BTC harp back to this point.  [Half the LOG will be released by 2305.  Three quarters won't be hit for thousands of years after that, I'll let you do the calculation.]

One potential way around these problems which has the advantage of simplicity is to have a constant inflation.  This is the solution of dogecoin and of ethereum: an eventual minimum non-shrinking block subsidy.  This plan has its attraction, but it also might scare new users away because it means that the money supply is not capped.  As time crawls on, value in a single token thus inevitably goes down, and long term store-of-value seekers flee.  Another uncapped strategy is that of many proof-of-stake coins, namely an constant percentage reward, leading to a still faster exponential supply growth.



Fig. 3  Three existing supply curves, taken from Margrit Kennedy "Interest and Inflation Free Money".  Curve A is a geometric release, like bitcoin or litecoin.  Curve B is a constant subsidy, like doge or ethereum.  Curve C is a constant percentage inflated release like most proof of stake coins.

The logarithmic supply takes a middle road between the geometric release curve and the constant release curve (A and B in figure 3). Unlike a constant release curve, the supply is capped - there is a limit which will never be passed (technically due to the discrete nature of the supply, in continuous fields logarithms are unbounded).  However it approaches this limit incredibly slowly which ensures there will be some subsidy to support securing the chain.  Further, there is always an advantage to securing the network today, as compared to securing it tomorrow.  Every block is worth less than its prior.

Part 4 IMPLEMENTATION

Once you understand the purpose of the logarithmic release function, the rest of the woodcoin design mostly follows.  The satoshi codebase was the choice of instantiation, due to the relatively well tested nature and the existing tools to work with it.  Several clients have emerged, as well as tools for address manipulation and so forth.  Simplicity is an overall goal here, as we want people to be able to use this just as easily as any other public coin.  Design consideration was conservative, as recommended here.

Once the supply curve was decided, the big question was what to use for a PoW hash.  It's not a good idea to use a hash function that other big coins are already using (for background see why Doge is now mergemined on litecoin or why NMC is now mergemined on Bitcoin).  At the time, Quarkcoin had just come out and people were excited about chaining together hash functions to make it more difficult to do custom hardware.  As I saw it, custom hardware was an eventuality for any coin if it lived long enough to become popular, and chaining hash functions only made the thing more complex and I saw it as reducing the value.  At the time SHA3 was just being chosen, and one of the potential candidates was the Skein function.  Bruce Schneier and three fish told me it worked, the NSA rejected it, some research suggested it was fast and would be relatively easy to optimize in custom hardware, and so I went with that.  I wasn't about to roll my own hash function yet, sorry   [It's worth pointing out that woodcoin is the current leader in pure Skein hashrate].

The only other major thing different about woodcoin is the elliptic curve.  I've written about this before so I'll spare you the discussion again.  I went with something different than bitcoin because it was easy, well tested, and recommended by many of the experts.  Conservatism again, boring but that's the way it is.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Part 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to all the great folks I have met through this project!  Keep up the good work in all endeavors, public coin and otherwise.

Two Years of Chopping LOG
http://frass.woodcoin.org/woodcoin-two-years-of-chopping-log/

Happy birthday Woodcoin!

I'm going to use this excuse to take a look at the current state of the network and review the motivation behind using woodcoin.

Part 1 PRICE


Fig. 1   Market Capitalization of Woodcoin over first 2 years.

 
Woodcoin is a small coin listed with a capitalization of ~200BTC.  This puts it at the 109th largest "mineable and non-premined" coin listed on coinmarketcap.  As you probably know by looking at this metric before, it is easily skewed by small distributions of stackers, small volume, and coins burned or lost.  I expect many of the coins in this top 100 list to disappear just like paycoin did.  The half a million LOG sent to the address WeHonorTheForestsAndTheTrees4pPXTQ are not included here so really the spendable coins are at least 6% smaller than reported.

Woodcoin is fully public and decentralized with no ICO, no registered foundation or corporation, nor any solicitation or acceptance of fiat currencies during its creation.  If you squint a bit you can see this in the charts.  One immediately notices in Figure 1 that the usual fractal pattern exhibited in most coins (large fast pumps followed by slow decreases) are not visible here.  Where are the pump and dumps?  Where is the ICO spike?  Woodcoin shows a stable (but slow) growth, which is no surprise to those who understand the supply curve (see details below).  Of course because woodcoin is open to all, this is no guarantee of future behavior.

While woodcoin is currently listed on at least four currently operating exchanges, most all of the volume is on C-CEX.  They have proved to be reliable and trustworthy custodians as of today, and have also shown consistent growth over the last two years.  You know the deal with exchanges by now.

It's also worth pointing out that C-CEX reported LOG trading for as high as 8000 sat (during one emptying of supply about six months ago) and a couple of faucets currently sell them in small quantities for 0 sat.  That should give you an idea of the ranges of prices.

The total supply (including permanently tied LOG) is now just over 8 million LOG.  This is out of a maximum of 27.6 million LOG, which as you probably know, will take a long time to chop

 

Part 2 HASH RATE



Fig. 2  Hash rate of LOG choppers over the first two years of woodcoin.

The constant battle which is a proof-of-work network has been very exciting to watch here.  Recently (as in yesterday) the difficulty has touched all time highs.  There are quite a lot of skein hash functions being calculated, to say the least.  The network is currently in the GPU phase of growth, which is to say that the vast majority of the hashpower appears to be in GPU rigs.

There have also been hash withdrawl "attacks" which began almost a year ago, in November of 2015.  Certain GPU farmers dedicated their relatively large rigs to chopping LOG for short time periods, then left the network when the difficulty increased, presumably to mine other coins.  This led to periods of very long block times.  LOG users waited patiently and the network recovered as it should.  While some people reported being annoyed by long confirmation times, all transactions went through.  In addition to complaints there was much discussion on what could be changed (with a fork) to alter these dynamics.  A recent talk by Mark Friedenbach at Scaling Bitcoin in Milan touched on these issues.  Difficulty adjust algorithms such as the one employed by woodcoin look dreadfully simple to a control systems engineer (why is there no PID controller?), but their simplicity and resilience make them work - even if at times their overshoots and undershoots are aggravating.

This summer further hash warfare activity was detected on the network, in the form of block withholding "attacks".  These enabled certain woodcutters to re-chop blocks of LOG (which had been chopped by hash-withrdawl players as discussed above) after the original hashpower was withdrawn.  This caused a certain amount of confusion but good will was displayed by all involved as no transactions were reported double-spent, despite indications that some woodcutters had the power to perform a dreaded 51% attack.  The woodcutters involved even went so far as to generously refund any smaller choppers who had lost their rewards as orphans.  This led one woodcoin user to ask me "Why is it raining LOGs?"  There were even one or two chain reorganizations that numbered as high as thousands of blocks.  While hardly a selling point on the security of woodcoin transactions at that moment, this was very exciting to see that the consensus network can recover from such shenanigans.  Small and decentralized proof of work chain dynamics can be very exciting.

Also related was a brief "Quantitative Easing" period sponsored by the secretive dwarven Kawg trust, in which large transaction fees were paid to woodcutters.  There are rumors that another period of quantitative easing or QE2 will emerge on the network.

Overall the network has behaved well, which even after 8 years of watching bitcoin blocks appear still seems somewhat of a miracle.  Lets not forget this was proven by some of the very best cryptographers to be impossible

Part 3  MOTIVATION

The real motivation is for our betters, the trees, to survive and thrive, and for us to secure our life support and to gain a second spaceship to ensure survival of Gaia.  We fight Sauron's colonial empire within as well as the crawling radiative chaos Nyarlathotep without.  That's a long story we won't get into here.  To get started with that, one thing we need is to remove the gaping wound on humanity and middle earth which reliance on private coin issuance has opened, and to do that we need a strong ecosystem of public coins.  Woodcoin aims to be one of these coins.

When I presented the logarithmic supply curve, and implemented it with the woodcoin genesis block two years ago, I didn't go out of my way to explain it.  Some people figured it out anyway.

The problem we are solving here has been largely overlooked, but it hasn't gone away.  Namely:  What is going to incentivise miners on the bitcoin (or other geometric supply curve coin) network when the block subsidy reward drops to near zero?  Satoshi's answer, and perhaps the only answer that makes any sense, is transaction fees.  However, we have a large segment of bitcoin users who fear that large transaction fees will push users to other coins.  Some even suggest raising the maximum block size to avoid these large fees.  In addition to this big question mark of how the network will work when block subsidies drop to near zero, as they do rapidly in a geometric release curve, this rapid release makes the supply look unattractive to new users for another reason: it appears as a premine and as an unfair distribution.  Currently more than three quarters of all bitcoin to ever be mined are already in the pockets of early adopters.  Many critiques of BTC harp back to this point.  [Half the LOG will be released by 2305.  Three quarters won't be hit for thousands of years after that, I'll let you do the calculation.]

One potential way around these problems which has the advantage of simplicity is to have a constant inflation.  This is the solution of dogecoin and of ethereum: an eventual minimum non-shrinking block subsidy.  This plan has its attraction, but it also might scare new users away because it means that the money supply is not capped.  As time crawls on, value in a single token thus inevitably goes down, and long term store-of-value seekers flee.  Another uncapped strategy is that of many proof-of-stake coins, namely an constant percentage reward, leading to a still faster exponential supply growth.



Fig. 3  Three existing supply curves, taken from Margrit Kennedy "Interest and Inflation Free Money".  Curve A is a geometric release, like bitcoin or litecoin.  Curve B is a constant subsidy, like doge or ethereum.  Curve C is a constant percentage inflated release like most proof of stake coins.

The logarithmic supply takes a middle road between the geometric release curve and the constant release curve (A and B in figure 3). Unlike a constant release curve, the supply is capped - there is a limit which will never be passed (technically due to the discrete nature of the supply, in continuous fields logarithms are unbounded).  However it approaches this limit incredibly slowly which ensures there will be some subsidy to support securing the chain.  Further, there is always an advantage to securing the network today, as compared to securing it tomorrow.  Every block is worth less than its prior.

Part 4 IMPLEMENTATION

Once you understand the purpose of the logarithmic release function, the rest of the woodcoin design mostly follows.  The satoshi codebase was the choice of instantiation, due to the relatively well tested nature and the existing tools to work with it.  Several clients have emerged, as well as tools for address manipulation and so forth.  Simplicity is an overall goal here, as we want people to be able to use this just as easily as any other public coin.  Design consideration was conservative, as recommended here.

Once the supply curve was decided, the big question was what to use for a PoW hash.  It's not a good idea to use a hash function that other big coins are already using (for background see why Doge is now mergemined on litecoin or why NMC is now mergemined on Bitcoin).  At the time, Quarkcoin had just come out and people were excited about chaining together hash functions to make it more difficult to do custom hardware.  As I saw it, custom hardware was an eventuality for any coin if it lived long enough to become popular, and chaining hash functions only made the thing more complex and I saw it as reducing the value.  At the time SHA3 was just being chosen, and one of the potential candidates was the Skein function.  Bruce Schneier and three fish told me it worked, the NSA rejected it, some research suggested it was fast and would be relatively easy to optimize in custom hardware, and so I went with that.  I wasn't about to roll my own hash function yet, sorry  [It's worth pointing out that woodcoin is the current leader in pure Skein hashrate].

The only other major thing different about woodcoin is the elliptic curve.  I've written about this before so I'll spare you the discussion again.  I went with something different than bitcoin because it was easy, well tested, and recommended by many of the experts.  Conservatism again, boring but that's the way it is.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Part 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to all the great folks I have met through this project!  Keep up the good work in all endeavors, public coin and otherwise.

ACK

Thanks crypto-trade.net !  

Woodcoin now trades on four exchanges that I know of, listed in the OP.  I have updated some information there about pools too.  

Congrats to woodcutters on chopping 400K blocks!  Soon we will pass the block height of mainnet bitcoin, this will be another major event.  

In other news the difficulty topped 200 for the first time last night.  WOW!!  

Baruk Khazad!  Keep up the good work  <3

Yup, I've had this conversation with people in a dozen or so countries, from PhDs to dropouts, from mega-rich to mega-poor, and everyone agrees:  the only way forward is for the US dollar to crash.  This would universally help all people in all walks of life. 

Keeps the economy?  What does this mean?  Far more people use RMB than USD, so it's not most popular as in most people use it..  and 1 USD is worth less than 2 thousandths of a btc, so it's not most popular in trade value..  I wonder what you meant by that? 

The council of the privately held KAWG fund has agreed to embark on a program of subsidized woodcutting. 

If you've been on the fence about chopping LOGs, this might be just the incentive you need to sharpen up that NVidia chainsaw.  It won't last forever.     

Happy woodcutting!