Ok, I've done as much research on this as I know how but admit that I'm far from an expert...so I'm asking.

Understanding that the ultimate "payoff" should be the same, has it ever been considered to modify block reward instead of modifying difficulty?

Again, being a relative newb, I've probably missed at least something if not most things but, here's what I'm thinking:

• One of the issues with Bitcoin/Namecoin and potentially any other coin that isn't resistant to ASICs is that as the difficulty increases, hashes/sec vs. reward pushes the smaller/home players out of the market.
• As more and faster ASICs are introduced, any prior investment is rendered more and more obsolete.

If, for example, Block Reward was modified (and possibly difficulty to keep things from getting utterly ridiculous but not 200,000,000+) every say 20 blocks or something like that, you could keep the release rate of coins per hour consistent, regardless of difficulty or global hash rate.

One other issue I've thought about with regards to the ultra-high difficulties on SHA-256 coins is that if a new one comes out and someone wants to "kill" it, they just throw their ASIC miner at it for a couple of hours, crank the difficulty into the stratosphere and then walk away from it.  It takes WEEKS for the difficulty to come back down and only after a concerted effort by a small community to even keep chugging away at blocks until the next adjustment (or in some cases multiple adjustments).

As a potential "fix" to what I see as a weakness, I was wondering how well this would work:

• Certain wallet IDs would be incapable of holding any coins.
• Those wallet IDs/addresses, starting with the one that mines the genesis block, would be able to perform "maintenance".  For example, if that address is used to mine a block, it could force a difficulty adjustment back to something "realistic" within one block without having to wait for the next natural adjustment.
• Additional maintenance addresses could be created and then included in the code for the wallet.
• There would be severe limitations placed on what the maintenance addresses could do.  They couldn't modify the block reward or reverse transactions or anything like that

Lastly, while everyone wants to tie their cryptocurrency to the price of fiat...what if there was no way to directly convert/tie the "value" to local fiat for exchange.  Only a mutually agreed upon value when used for barter?  The "handshake" at the end of a closed deal.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was one of the ultimate goals of bitcoin but it's something I've been wondering about.

Anyway, just some musings that I don't have the knowledge to answer for myself or ability to code on my own.  Figured I would throw them out there.

[designed to fail]

I thought I noticed a pattern emerging with the truly staggering number of alts that were released over the last couple of weeks and so I did a little digging, not like data mining digging but I did put some time into searching and reading through a painful number of [ANN] threads.

Things I noticed:
1) there seemed to be a "core" group of alt-miners that just freakin' enjoy mining stuff...doesn't matter what it is;
2) there were almost always new members on a thread asking for help setting up everything from .conf files to cgminer batch files;
3) EVERY...SINGLE...LAUNCH, without exception, was, is and will be an orphan-fest-orama;
4) within ten minutes of launch, the lucky/fast/prepared/experienced miners were creating [WTS] threads for for ridiculous amounts of coins.

Why does this matter and what am I suggesting?  Well, first of all I don't even know if it's possible and if it isn't then what I'm suggesting simply won't work.

NewBit - the name is a combination of Newb and BitCoin

It would be a coin (NWB...notice the distinct LACK of a "C" at the end...that was SO May 2013!) that has the following characteristics:

LiteCoin clone so we can use scrypt and allow the newbs to use their CPUs if they just don't have a good enough GPU and to prevent it from being ASIC attacked...however...
Even if it were attacked it wouldn't matter because
1) the blockchain is destroyed and recreated every 30 days -- BY DESIGN
2) coins "expire" or age out after 5 days -- BY DESIGN
3) the difficulty would be FIXED to never rise above a certain level...period
4) sufficient block reward to make the experience "enjoyable"
5) minimal confirmations necessary (5? 10?) because...the blockchain is destroyed every 30 days
6) long enough block target to at least try to keep orphans to a minimum at first (nothing is going to eliminate them though)

But WHY?
To reset the coin and start over every 30 days.  The purpose of the coin is NOT to be used as a commercially viable alternative to ANYTHING.  It's designed as a...coin with training wheels.  I got the sense that people were releasing coins (aside from pump and dump to become overnight quadzillionaires) because they could and because frankly, solo mining can be a rewarding experience when you see that 20 or 50 or 524,288 show up in your wallet.  Coins would expire or age out for the same reason.  Why pump and dump something that is going to cease to exist and be re-created in less than a month?

It would, for this coin at least, prevent some of the craziness surrounding the coin and hopefully kill the religious zealotry because this coin is designed to fail from the very beginning.  We know when it's going to die because the birth certificate has an expiration date.

What else would be needed?
Well, the community would need to support it.  I don't mean try to get it on Cryptsy or any other exchange, I mean we as a community would need to pull together, if you were interested and make the first page of posts USEFUL to the newb.
1) a .conf file that is ready to cut and paste on day one with addnodes if necessary;
2) pools set up and ready to run as soon as it is re-launched on the first day of the month (or the fifteenth, or the 8th at 8:17 AM MST...whenever we decide);
3) sample batch files that, in many cases, should work for ANY configuration.  I don't know if this is possible because I have an nVidia GPU on my laptop (work laptop, only computer I use) but it seems that there are some general "fallback" settings that should "always" work, regardless of your card if it's an ATI/AMD.
    cgminer batch file(s) - AMD/ATI GPU
    cudaminer batch file(s) - nVidia
    minerd batch file(s) - CPU
    stratumproxy batch files - Set up a local stratum server
4) links, inside the thread, to download any/all necessary tools:
    pooler-scrypt
    guiminer-scrypt
    stratumproxy (if they don't want the whole guiminer-scrypt bundle)
    Any tools useful to identify hardware
    Any other tools we decide would be helpful
5) PRE-COMPILED BINARIES for the Windows-qt wallet
6) Documentation/explanations of the process to get things going

But...but...but isn't all that stuff already out there on the forum (or) but...but...but that stuff IS already out there on the forum.
Yes, yes it is.  Spread out somewhere in 217 PAGES of threads...each thread being heaven only knows how many pages long.  Consolidation is the key.  Put it all in one place.

Why would I want to be a part of this/waste my time on this/invest any effort in this at all?
If you see it as a waste, you wouldn't and...well, the ignore button is right over there below my name.  On the other hand, why do we have bitcoin, the altcoins?  It's so they will get used.  Why do we have this forum?  I sincerely hope it isn't so we can all have an echo chamber and talk about how great we think crypto-currencies are amongst ourselves because that does nothing to further the cause.
This would be there so that people new to the phenomenon (no, I really don't think it's a craze or a phase) can get their questions answered, see it work, be "successful" in this new arena and have a positive experience and do it all in an environment/ecosystem where the only thing they have any potential to lose is a little bit of electricity while they learn.

So, is an expiring coin and a mutually agreed upon monthly deleted block-chain something that can be done?

Ideas, comments, suggestions...disparaging remarks?
   

After hearing about it for a couple of years and lurking for a month or two I finally made my account.

Now I'm here!

And...that's pretty much all there is.

--DL