You don't buy new STD at GER from the reserve. You buy new STD at the upper bound as I derived it - in fact you'd buy it at a higher rate if you buy a large(r) chunk. It was the marginal cost of an infinitesimal additional investment in STD.

There's no need to integrate here, the dev also doesn't do it. There is also no gradual selling as you describe it - all of it is sold at once and at the GER. The GER does not change during selling, as it is AMC/MMS, i.e. guaranteed for all coins, even coins that will be mined in the future.

It would be good if the dev adds some formulas to his website and his example just as I did in my posting. That way mathematically inclined people could follow his arguments way easier.

You would make a certain loss with your "system". I think you are missing that you get less STD per BTC invested as the reserve gets depleted. Work the numbers and you'll see.

If you double the AMC (AMC=the BTC reserve) right after the IPO you get half the STD reserve - which has just been cut to 100Mio STDs. So you buy 50Mio STDs for 15 BTC, whilst initial investors bought 100Mio STDs for 15 BTC. Selling immediately loses you more than 1/2 your BTC.

If I was a scam-dev creating standardcoin I would not run with the BTC after the IPO - I would wait if STD's go up in value as that naturally gets more BTC into the reserve. Once that number is high enough (like 10.000 BTC?) I'd run...
...but I believe pulling such a scam actually has a pretty bad impact on my real-live job, so no-thank-you.

Well... you assume that people will actually sell using the rate offered by the "reserve exchange". I find that highly unlikely (unless there is a trust issue), because:

• if the free market price M >> GER then every trader will sell on the free market.
• if the free market price is very close to GER then a trader would buy STD, as the downside risk is almost zero. The GER works like an implicit PUT Option for the pricing of STD's, and this Option has a value >0.

In other words I doubt that anyone will sell at your exchange (at least if there is a secondary market) - unless the coin dies.

I haven't checked your update in detail, so some numbers in the following might be somewhat off, but the principle remains.
In the beginning STD's will trade between [1,2]*GER, or more generally [1,2/F]*GER where F is the fraction of the reserve left for sale. As/If the price of the coin rises the reserve will slowly be depleted. Now suppose the price rises to 10*GER, then obviously people will buy from the reserve till buying from the reserve is more expensive than 10*GER.

Hence we know that 2/F=10 and therefore F = 1/5. In other words if the price was to go up 10x then you'd have to find buyers for 80% of the reserve STD's. This is not easy.

Besides the trust/security issues I find this an interesting concept and way to increase the market cap of a coin as the demand increases.

Hi ghibly79,
you are incorrect regarding the 40BTC - the price guarantee does not guarantee the initial investment. In essence the investment of initial investors and other investors buying from the reserve is used to implement the guarantee of ALL investors and miners.

This coin is not a scam if the exchange and BTC reserve run by the dev is trustworthy and hopefully the BTC reserve is secured against hacking. But there are other concerns, as I have described in my original post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=522874.msg5908692#msg5908692 . Point 1) was addressed by the dev, but I believe the others remain.

I'm not endorsing this coin, I'm just having fun watching people struggling with math or full of greed, fanboys and all that jazz. Popcorn, please!

Happy to get some donations if anyone found my post(s) helpful. I added a BTC address to my sig: 1NoV8NFSB7eiuK2aABFtBTdUdXhbEdG7Ss
You early adopters should be thanking me for spotting this... 

No worries about the partnership, I wasn't really serious. I've got too much to do anyways, and this was a rather simple defect. I'm more interested starting a BTC exchange that can't be hacked like Gox... have a few ideas, but too lazy to get going. 

To be honest, it feels like I'm the only one on this forum that understands the system and the math behind it correctly... either I'm a genius or there are a lot of high school kiddies on here.

Regarding your comment: no, the initial investors buy at a bad price. I think someone on the forum also already noticed it that buying after the price valuation phase gives you STD's at roughly half price.

Here are the details: the +1 in 1/(AMC+1) does not make a difference, it is a quantisation effect, as it relates to 1 additional BTC invested. However, to get the true marginal rate for buying STD's you'd have to consider an (infinitesimal) small additional investment of x BTC from the reserve. The accurate formula then is:
S STD's received for x BTC invested:
   S = (x/(AMC+x)) * F * (MMS/2)
   S = F*x*MMS/(2*(AMC+x))
Hence the price paid in BTC/STD is:
   x/S = 2*(AMC+x) / (MMS*F)
simplifying yields:
   x/S = (2/F)*(AMC/MMS + x/MMS)
   x/S = (2/F) * (GER + x/MMS)
Obviously x can be very small, as a buy may choose to buy 0.01 BTC worth of STD's etc.
Taking lim(x/S) for x->0 (i.e. an infinitesimal small buyer) we get the result I stated initially:
   x/S ~= (2/F) * GER

It is possible to fix this, but I can't be bothered going through that now. You can make me a partner, though and I'll think about it again.
Oh well, I guess the simplest fix would be to half the number of STD's received in the S = ... formula.

Not sure I understood the initial post, but I'm pretty sure I understand what happens longer term.

Assuming that the dev is trustworth and doesn't run away with BTC or STD... the price guarantee simply puts a lower bound (GER or "price guarantee") on the price, as well as an upper bound (the price you can currently buy from the remaining 50% reserve). The lower bound is at 1/4 of the value invested by early investors and hence they have to accept a possible 75% loss.

The upper bound can be derived as follows:
F = fraction of stored STD available, where 0 <= F <= 1
F/2*MMS = stored STD available
(1/AMC) * F * (MMS/2) = STD's received for one additional BTC invested (there's a tiny rounding approx in here)
(2/F) * (AMC/MMS) = (2/F) * GER = price in BTC/STD to buy from stored STD's

Hence, after the IPO the upper bound is 2*GER. As more people buy from the stored STD the GER goes up and the upper bound increases much faster than the GER.

In other words, after IPO at price z BTC/STD the market price will be between [0.25,0.5]*z BTC/STD or equivalently [1,2]*GER. Whilst it is traded between these bounds NOBODY will buy from the stored STD, but rather from a normal exchange.

Problems:
1) The initial investors in the IPO overpay - they could buy the coin for half of what they paid right after the IPO!
2) The price guarantee is useless as/if more people buy from the stored STD. If 90% of the stored STD were sold the price would be bounded between [1, 20]*GER.
3) The coin cannot go up easily! In addition to the coins generated by the miners there are 50% (!) of the total coins available for sale. Their marginal price is 2x the price paid be the initial investors and goes up slowly as the stored STDs are depleted.
4) The price can actually fall below GER if there are concerns that the dev is trustworthy. See Mt Gox.

Dear initial investors: your only hope can be that more people do not understand the mechanics.

This is great news, finally somebody also getting to the criminal part of Mr. Karpeles behaviour.

A theft might explain BTC at MtGox vanishing, but not the missing EUR, GBP and USD balances, no matter what kind of accounting you do! Person A deposits 1 BTC, Person B 1000$, they trade on Mt Gox and then 1 BTC gets stolen. Mt Gox still has 1000$ - their bank account has not been robbed. I find it outrageous that Karpeles even dares to pretend he is a poor victim. What he did is fraud and he should be in prison for that.

It is clear that Karpeles must have used client currency deposits either to pay for running his business or to buy and pay out missing bitcoins. No matter what, he has fraudulently delayed the filing of bankruptcy by months if not a year (there were irregularities at Mt Gox in summer 2013) and he probably has even misappropriated client funds.

Care to substantiate your claim?

And by serious coin you surely mean 1000-5000 coins, but nothing like the 500.000 that were handed over in the first 15h. Just look at the block explorer link I've posted - difficulty started at <0.000x and was still <=0.038 after 15h.

I don't really mind if the dev gets some easy coin as an incentive for his work - work that hopefully occurs in the past and future. I hold some coin as well. What I dislike is the dishonesty saying that it was "not" premined at all. A low difficulty at the beginning is similar to a premine, so vertcoin has an effective premine of at least 0.5%. We should be at block ~8000 but we are at ~23000.

I'm pretty sure the 2016 block adjustment + extremely low difficulty setting was ONLY chosen so that the dev (and whoever was there on the first day) could make a killing in number of coins minted. You guys are aware that almost 10.000 blocks or 500.000 VTC and hence about HALF of all coins in existence were mined on the first day because of these "unfortunate" and "accidental" settings? http://explorer.vertcoin.org/chain/Vertcoin?hi=9499&count=500

In other words, about 17 days worth of coin creation happened within 15h. This would have not been possible if VTC had a fast difficulty adjustment. So I think this setting was intentional at the beginning. But it can/should be changed now.

I fully expect difficulty to increase towards 10000 soon(ish). At that point it would most likely level off for some time, as this is the point where GPU's are just barely profitable, so they'd keep on leaving the network while ASICs enter the scene.

ROI would be achieved in 5-6 months with LTC, maybe sooner if price goes up or with the odd altcoin. Of course, price drops would make it more difficulty.

The more interesting question: (How) are you going to mine when difficulty is 10k? Not at all? Or you get an ASIC?

Roadmap is up on alpha's website. Hopefully there will be more updates soon.
https://alpha-t.net/news/roadmap-outline/

Haha, it just shows you how bad build quality is in the UK.

I've got single glazed glass in London - and trust me the rent is steep enough to buy a 5MH/s device each month.

Yes, they moved from 64 to 66 Dickenson Road:
http://www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/alpha-technology-%28int%29

Your sex attacker is a cab driver from Glasgow:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3459361.stm
(this is his 2004 attack also mentioned in your link)

Check out Mohammed Jafar Akram on LinkedIn to find the right guy.

Just read a bit into this thread; all I can read in your posts is:
1) you bought some graphics cards, hoping to make a quick buck
2) now you are scared/upset that it doesn't work out

Part of me wants to be really tough with you. Because your expectation is to make a quick profit. And you apparently did not do any research before jumping into mining. You just thought of the free 900-1200$/month you'd make. No risk, no skills needed, no work involved. And as it doesn't work out you suddenly talk about coins dying. What now? If it was that simple to make money, I'd rent out a warehouse and run 100's of 7950's.

The story repeats itself every 6-12 months. We've already been there in June 2013. Many new coins had crazy high profitability for some time - but then suddenly they lost value and Litecoin was the most profitable altcoin to mine. And eventually a rig like yours would make 2-6$/day after energy costs. Which sounds like a fair price to me.

Read this about a guy who made a loss mining litecoin in 2013; learn from his mistakes:
http://reckoner.com.au/2013/08/im-done-mining-litecoin/


Now regarding the economics of altcoins. Let me ask you:

Why would anyone pay you $30-40 a day for running 2x7970 or 3x7950? There is almost no special skill involved, no market entrance barrier and if you thought you could make a quick buck, so did 10.000's others!.

Profit maximising by all miners (and switching coins/pools) is going to equalize the profitability of all listed coins. Soon LTC will be as profitable as most other altcoins. Because people like you learn how to pick the most profitable one and increase the difficulty to be on par to its market price.

The other effect is that more people jump onto the mining bandwaggon and drive up the difficulty overall until it is barely profitable to mine any coin. We are talking $2-5/day after energy costs for your 1500kH/s - which sounds about fair.

This is a free market and YOU have to find a niche where you can compete in mining, for example:
a) low energy costs? (as low as 0.10$/KWh in the US)
b) well informed regarding new altcoin releases?
c) can take a lot of risk/have money => invest in ASICs?

There is tons of other ways to add value to the community and hence to make money. You could start trading, develop better coins, run a mining pool, create a website for spending coins, lottery, poker etc.

And eventually all coins may die with you holding a bag full of BTC.

I actually lost 20% hashing performance on my 7950.
But I'm on an old version of drivers (13.4) and use settings on my 7950 that do not max MHz on mem and gpu (=>lower power). I'd guess it's the driver.

Ich sehe nicht, dass Du auf meine Argumente ueberhaupt eingegangen bist.


Diese Schlussfolgerung macht keinen Sinn, da altcoins nicht identisch sind wie ich oben dar gelegt habe. Auch wenn ein altcoin den gleichen Algorithmus dahinter hat. Du kannst natuerlich alles ignorieren, dass macht aber Deine Hypothese nicht richtiger.



Beweise bitte a). Aber Du wirst es nicht koennen. Denn wie gesagt, das Equilibrium wird bei gleicher Profitabilitaet erreicht, nicht bei gleichem Preis.

Was bei Dogecoin passiert, ist einfach: Die Profitabilitaet wird demnaechst aehnlich der von Litecoin sein. Es gibt zwei Moeglichkeiten dies zu erreichen: 1) Difficulty geht hoch oder 2) Preis geht runter. Wir hatten mehrere Tage 1) und nun kommt 2) dazu mit dem Preisverfall. Inzwischen liegen wir irgendwo bei 200% Profitabilitaet?
Man kann also leider keinen Riesengewinn mehr einstreichen durch Dogecoin-mining. Aber es ist Markteffizienz und daher ok.
Trotzdem wird sich der Preis von Dogecoin NICHT an Litecoin Preis annaehern. Auch nicht der Gesamtpreis des Netzwerks pro Tag. Nur der Mining-Profit. Das ist Marktwirtschaft und auto-switcher deswegen zu verdammen ist kindisch.

Zu b) anti flash mining oder wie Du das auch nennen moechtest hat meines Wissens einen anderen Grund. Wenn Du lange genug dabei bist, wirst Du Dich an FTC und CNC Launches erinnern. Das Problem war, dass die Mining-Rate und Difficulty wahnsinnig nach oben geschossen ist und dann beim ersten Preisverfall keiner diese Coins mehr minen wollte. Damit kam das Netzwerk zum Stillstand und Transaktionen brauchten ewig, da die Hashrate zu klein war um neue Bloecke zu minen. Das ist uebrigens eine Variante des coin-Tods. FTC brauchte z.B. einen Fork und viel Muehe des Devs zur Wiederbelebung.

Neuere coins versuchen durch kuerzere Difficulty Anpassung dieses Problem zu umgehen. Es gibt andere Probleme dabei, wie z.B. TRC sie hatte.

So long, Frohe Weihnachten.
jomay

Deine Herleitung ist falsch, auf so vielen Ebenen... besonders falsch liegst Du bei der Annahme, dass der Wert eines Altcoins durch das Angebot bestimmt wird. Wenn ich nur alle 2 Jahre einen Handtasche fertige, wird diese trotzdem nicht wertvoller als eine Luis Vuitton Tasche sein!

Rein mathematisch ist das Equilibrium erreicht, wenn jeder altcoin die gleiche Profitabilitaet hat. Und dies wird durch auto-switchern (wenn sie denn funktionieren, was ich bezweifle) schnell erreicht.

Dies sagt aber NICHTS ueber den Kurs oder Marketcap der altcoins im Equilibrium aus. Zum Beispiel entstehen pro Tag Litecoins im Wert von ~500.000 USD (28800 LTC = 24*24*50, Preis ca. 17USD). Wenn der Preis gleich bleiben soll, muss dieses Volumen muss jeden Tag absorbiert werden, entweder durch miner, die ihre coins behalten oder durch externe Kaeufer.

Ein unbekannter altcoin wird niemals ein 500.000USD investment pro Tag anziehen koennen. Diese 500.000USD bei LTC sind durch viele Aspekte (mehr oder weniger) gerechtfertigt, z.B.:
a) Boersenlisting, inklusive LTC/USD cross
b) hohes Boersenvolumen
c) Stabilitaet des Netzwerkes, kein 51% Attacke moeglich
d) reale Transaktionen
e) Bekanntheitsgrad, Mediabuzz, ...

Mit Verlaub, Deine Theorie von "Konvergenz" ist grosser Quatsch.

Hmm, not sure I can help you much further, as I don't own a Sapphire and cards from different manufacturers tend to behave differently.

Did you check the box "force constant voltage" in the settings box , as well as "enabled voltage control" etc?

Regarding reading out voltage, I know that cgminer is completely unreliable and will not report the correct voltage. MSI Afterburner should be reliable, though. If you want definite accuracy and some more information on voltage, temps (also VRM temps) I'd use the the GPU-Z utility.

why don't you post the graphics card setup screen (whatever you get if you press 'G'). That would be way more informative.
Also, you may consider mining a "slower" coin such as litecoin for testing your HW setup. If the pool is too slow to supply work etc.  you can also get low utilization IRRESPECTIVE of your HW setup.