It helps because it slows down the process and gives people time to respond to changes in supply and for the market to reach an equilibrium in an orderly manner, rather than having some whale digger dumper drive the price down quickly and create unnecessary volatility.

In the case of burn, as you indicated in your previous message, the money supply of the old coin is shrinking at the same time the network value is shrinking. Thus old coin price P=T/M where T is the value of the old network and M is the money supply of the old network. As people migrate (burn) you have T and M both approaching zero (but not necessarily at the same or even a constant rate) and P is not well formed and highly unstable as M shrinks. (Even cypherdoc understood this!) By contrast, in the case of a spin-off that obsoletes the old network, you simply have P=T/M where T approaches zero and M is fixed, so this expression is well formed, and P is simply a clear measure of value where the market will naturally absorb speculative fluctuations between old and new, allowing stability and transparency.


This is an illusion. Prior to the spin-off (in fact prior to it even being conceived!) the future coins are embedded the old coins. But after the spin off it is not. You can even imagine a analogy of an metal coin being physically cut in two. Each of "old (post)" and "new" represent "half" of "old (pre)", and you can't make an equivalence between old (post spin-off) for old (pre spin-off), since it is physically a smaller asset. So there is no doubling of money supply, only a reconfiguration, as with taking one ounce gold coins and splitting them each into two half-ounce coins.


To the contrary. It is that people may continue to use the old coin without creating an instability that would in turn both (at different times) encourage and discourage switching that makes this more of a (stable) meritocracy than burning. People simply choose how they value the old and new networks. If the value stays with the old, then the developer has not done a very good job of making "upgrades" that other people actually perceive as such!

Another way to see this is to consider that a two-way peg is also a meritocracy in the sense there is no asymmetry that might serve to influence users to structurally prefer one side of the peg or the other. But since you are not proposing a two-way peg then it is clear there must be an asymmetry.


Investors express their choice in the spin-off model in the value they decide to attach to each of the new assets (as above, the original version of the "old" coin simply ceases to exist). If you do not allow this (because you want to force users to choose) then you are introducing an irreversible choice which has a value that is non-linear, complex and very likely unstable.


Can you actually prove this takes longer? I don't think so. I actually kind of suspect the opposite (but can't prove that either).


This does not retain value for the old coin, thus you lose confidence. Why should I buy your new coin when you just destroyed the value of your old one? With the spin-off model, value and confidence are retained for existing investors. It is simply an upgrade with no reset of distribution (again assuming it is actually an upgrade!).


Now I think you are recognizing that the burn model can actually discourage upgrading and you are trying to "fix" that by creating a time penalty. But, again, you are trying to force an outcome instead of letting people freely choose the "upgrade". If people resist burning that tells you something about your so-called upgrade. You don't need to corral them by creating a time penalty.


Of course people vote in the market! That's what people do every time they make a trade of anything. They are voting that what they buy is more valuable than what they sell.

The problem is that when you embed the options, you create non-linear valuation and instability. The spin-off model removes the optionality from being internal to the coin value by making access to the new network unconditional and non-perishable. People still of course have the option (i.e. vote) whether to use the new network or not. In fact that is essential to giving it a value at all.

It is okay that we disagree on this point for now, but I'm reasonably confident that after you think about this some more you will eventually recognize that the embedded option is the source of instability, rather than allowing uncoupled market prices to naturally absorb differences in demand. Indeed you are attempting to use the instability to force, or at least encourage, investors to upgrade, thus behaving in a way other than meritocracy.

Is anyone interested in doing a large block auction? I know several people who have complained about it being hard to get liquidity on Bittrex for more than a few thousand coins.

The idea would be some period (maybe 24 hours) where large block buyers and sellers (maybe 25k minimum or some other number) would place coins in escrow and then bid over the course of the auction for highest/lowest price. At the end of the auction trades that match would execute at the same price. Coins that don't trade would be returned of course.

We'd have to get interest from both buyers and sellers for this to make sense.

Yes that's why I called it a USP.

It isn't an external element. It is internal to the CLAM blockchain, and it has been there all along, even if investors for a time foolishly chose to ignore it.

Did you claim your "free" CLAMs?

Why was your claim any more legitimate or less "external" than anyone else's?


Agree. For one thing dooglus has already told us that he has been dumping. That's clearly his right, as they are his coins, but it has an effect on the market nevertheless. For another, has anyone considered that perhaps all this talk about impairing or (less likely) eliminating a big part of the USP of CLAMs is potentially spooking the market?

And finally I agree that the recent big wins on JD have also likely spooked investors. The first big win was bought by dooglus so that saved the market from a big dump (though maybe dumped by him now?). The second big win was promptly donated back to the JD investors, sparing the market from another big dump. But maybe investors have wisely recognized that their luck will eventually run out and sooner or later someone will win big at JD and actually want to sell their coins (not to dooglus) to buy a car or something.

No, in a spin-off system the coin supply in the old system is not decreasing. People keep both their new and old coins, but as an obsolete system with a clearly-superior replacement, the old coin should become worthless or at least nearly worthless. This removes both the negative feedback that discourages upgrading and also the instability of burning being an irreversible (and potentially in the case of catastrophic failure, perishable) process.

You can't really enforce merge mining in a decentralized system. You are thinking in terms of being the developer "in charge" of what code people run and how to manage an upgrade process, instead of a developer who releases an upgrade people might choose to adopt because it is better.

I'm not even saying this is a good way to do development, but if you really want a fully decentralized system where you are not controlling anything, that's how you have to approach it.

EDIT: Also, by claim date having passed in my previous post I'm referring to the ex date on the old chain. Claims are frozen but can be claimed on the new chain for a very long time, potentially forever (any successor spin-off chain should also respect predecessor chain claims directly, ideally, though in practice that may not matter all that much). So there are no issues of potentially missing out or preferring to wait, both of which potentially give rise to instability. It just happens without any active participation being needed and old coin owners can pick up their new coins at their convenience.

If CLAM aspires to be a major coin (say top 10-20) then 12 million unclaimed CLAMs is not an obstacle to doing so. At the current price that puts the fully-claimed market cap at a relatively modest $6 million.

If CLAM is just going to be a house coin on one altcoin gambling site, then it probably can't get to $6 million market cap and you should probably just do whatever you want with it, since you run the only major economic actor that matters to the coin anyway.


There will always be investors at some price, just as there are now.

Maybe what happened here is that the market was irrationally exuberant and got ahead of itself. Surely everyone knew that there were 12 million more coins out there. People either believed (without a strong basis for believing) that those coins would nearly all stay buried for a good long time, or that sufficient market demand existed to absorb coins that were going to be dug up. That turned out to be wrong. Investors adjusted to more realistic expectations (and perhaps continue to adjust).

There is no rational basis to say that the current price with a $6 million fully-claimed market cap is too low, at the current stage of development of this coin and community. It may even still be too high, and people investing need to really think this through for themselves, but at some price there will be investors, as long as anyone is still using the coin.

While I'm intrigued by the idea of staking to claim and perhaps slowing down the rate somewhat (and also somewhat with storage fees), I largely agree with chilly2k that trying to dictate a market price or market behavior is foolish.

You can only do this if the old coins even functions, isn't weakened and attacked, etc.. That in turn will be reflected in the market as a sort of black swan risk that is extremely difficult to reason about or handle, leading to things being generally unstable. That is one reason why I find spin-off claims to be preferable. Once the claim date is passed, the claims are frozen, the state of the old coin no longer matters, and claims are not perishable.

The possibility remains that people would prefer the old coin, since the only actual transition process is that the value of the old coin declines and the new coin increases (other than that, people are free to continue to use the old one if they prefer), but in a situation where ongoing development is occurring, presumably people would strongly prefer the new-and-improved version (or if not, is it really improved?)

Claims can be made against a new coin with another ICO, but the added dilution adds to the risk that the market will reject it. Such is the nature of true decentralization. You can't simply corral people to the new coin if you don't deliver enough value. (This may also weaken confidence if there isn't a strong social contract, since people have no idea how much they will be diluted in future versions, nor how many times.)


The "other user" was probably cypherdoc himself. He certainly didn't understand the technical details and probably not really the financial/economic details either, but he still had a very good intuition that there is more complexity and risk to this story than just "Two way peg. Full stop."

True, but to win any battles you have to recognize them as battles worth fighting. I see a lot of people (not only here but also in other threads, reddit, etc.) assuming and accepting that Monero is just going to follow right in Bitcoin's footsteps.

Unless your objective is primarily price increases, I don't see the purpose of doing that, and many reasons fight against it. Plus it becomes questionable whether Monero can successfully achieve Bitcoin's price increases without some very strong differentiators, so this may be entirely pointless, not just pointless in terms of social and technological goals.

chennan, it is very unclear whether a system that becomes centralized can maintain integrity even on things like the number of coins, and certainly in terms of Monero's core goal of privacy. Those in control of centralized mining and transaction processing has a lot to say over what forks get introduced, and absolutely centralized control could at least block all private transactions, forcing people to identify themselves and potentially agree to other conditions, or be banned from the system.

phishead, in addition to calling into doubt the integrity of the system, and stopping privacy, centralized miners can certainly enforce blacklists, whitelists, etc. Centralization isn't just a question of mining either. Coinbase is probably the largest Bitcoin company and for the most part their customers never have direct access to Bitcoin. They are a bank and can do whatever they want or whatever the government tells them to do. KYC, spying, banning unpopular or controversial types of business, locking accounts, seizing coins, even fractional reserve, the list is endless.

That's exactly why I asked that question. Do you think that Monero being centralized, regulated, etc. actually has a useful purpose? Because I pretty much don't.

Every single trade has someone buying. People are betting that this is indeed the bottom, and they stand to make nice gains from here. You apparently disagree. Have you sold all your CLAMs (if nothing else to rebuy lower)?

That being the case (people want centralization, Bitcoin is going there, Monero is no different), I'm not sure there is a point to any of this. Is this all just about hoping for The Big Pump so we can cash out to fiat and buy Lambos or are we actually trying to accomplish something here?

How much would your stake get back?

Those are all statements about BTC itself. Yet somehow the market still seems to value BTC orders of magnitudes more than coins that started with a new distribution and don't have that baggage (though they likely all have their own), so it is hard to argue that sort of distribution is a huge, huge problem.

Anyway, the discussion here wasn't about spinning off from BTC, it was spinning off from earlier versions of a coin in development to later versions.

Also, exchanges should distribute the spin-off coins to customers, not keep them. In some cases that has been done for spin-offs, dividends, etc. although cryptsy at least has a particularly awful policy of explicitly claiming they own everything.

Just to clarify I wasn't suggesting it shouldn't be done (I think I even said that in the first message) or that it shouldn't be done if it can't be perfect. I was only pointing out some of the perhaps less obvious complications with it.

I'm also skeptical to the extent that the intent is to kill off unclaimed CLAMs in (large) part or whole in order to drive the current price higher. On top of potentially killing trust by creating a precedent of tinkering with parameters when some investors don't happen to like what the market is doing to the price, the magnitude of the fee to do that would have to be quite large to make a big dent in a 4.6 CLAM UXTO being held for a couple of years, and that would likely have big impact on other uses of the coin.

But if the intent and magnitude of it is in line with actual costs and making the coin more efficient and therefore more valuable, then it seems like a good direction to pursue.

One other complication by the way is that a large stakeholder can simply mine his own transactions without broadcasting them, and keep the fee. Or even make a deal with a large stakeholder to mine the transactions and rebate much of the fee. Unless there is a large demand for transactions and/or a small block size, the cost of doing this remains close to zero.


I think that is very possible and good reason to not try to prop up the price with tinkering. Consider if nothing radical is done and the coin still gets through it. The added value from proven resiliency will be significant.

New Zealand, India, Spain, and Mexico need some Monero love. Others too of course, but those were obvious to me.

You're missing the point a bit, I think. When I was mining back then it wasn't so much about getting the coins, so there wasn't an arms race or carrot aspect to it, really. Buying coins was certainly an option, though it was probably a bit more hassle than mining at the time. The motivation was more about the fun of being an essential part of the system itself, and getting more and more people involved, to promote Bitcoin and keep it all decentralized. That was why I always solo mined, even when it got to the point of taking months to get a block. I was more interested in the fun of being a direct part of the system that seemed to have so much potential than I was in consistent income.

I'm not sure that cryptocurrencies can ever truly succeed without keeping the fun in it. It just becomes a corporate machine that is narrowly focused on its profit margin at the expense of broad participation and inconvenient social objectives, as Bitcoin largely has. But in doing so that destroys its reason to exist at all. Centralized systems likely have higher profit margins.

Just do start_mining? The testnet difficulty must be pretty low so you'll get blocks within a few minutes I'd guess. You'll have to wait for them to mature though.

Yes


No. You have to also have coins to stake. Even if you have a few coins you are not a significant staker and have no significant say in the decision whether to include transactions (the next block will just include them even if you don't, and you will still incur the storage cost).

Unless you want the system to concentrate into one where only the largest stake holders actually run nodes and stake. (Not so different from the present, but is this really the ideal?)

Even then, there is a time disparity. Storage costs are paid to the staker now, but costs are incurred by anyone running a node in the future (or alternately in the past if you view the fee as backward-looking which seems to be implied by the structure). Again, trying to bring these into equilibrium has consequences that are probably not what is desired (set of node operators and stakers becomes static).

I feel the same way about mining. When I first learned about Bitcoin, it was a totally run by individuals, democratic, decentralized, p2p, etc. I was among those mining it and I felt that my role in the mining made me a true part of the system. It wasn't a bank or other regulated financial service, it was a piece of software you ran on your computer, and that's it. It was disruptive and totally unlike anything else current or previous, and exciting and appealing for that reason. Now the whole thing is run by big corporations in massive data centers (third parties to almost everyone) and subject to all manner of regulations under which you can maybe stay out of trouble if you are careful but will likely violate if you look at it the wrong way. Not so interesting, nor so different from other payment systems.

That transition represents an inherent loss of subjective value, which as rpietila points out is probably not unrelated to the decline in price.

The loss of fun is quite bad for something still an the early adopter phase.