FWIW Elacoin is #3 on CoinChoose.com now  - and there's only a handful of coins > LTC, so its a fierce market.

So... uh... consider that.

@Windmaster any comments on the interval retarg timing stuff?

Which changes?

The algorithm for the code has not changed in 10 months:

https://github.com/elacoin/elacoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp

line 910+

Just thought of something. Elacoin has an open ended market for coin production. I havent yet modelled what hash rates will produce how many coins - there's an exponentially decreasing (to asymptotic 1/infinity but progressing at the rate of 1/(root N) i think? (hows my calculus now!)) scale factor on the coin of reward = diff * [ 194400 / (194400+ block#) ]. That will reduce the total # of coins over time (as technology improves and creates faster hashrates, was the original idea). however as more miners/tech comes in they push it up. These are two competing factors.

Unfortunately, the scale factor was supposed to be a proxy for 'time passed' of 9 months, assuming a 2 minute block time. Even Bitcoin, which has enjove exponential growth of about 1-1.5% DAILY (!!) for like, 2 years, doesnt have 10 minute block times usually. Reason is not just because of luck, but on average the block times are shorter than they should be (because retargs happen every 2000ish blocks, and new miners are adding more power every minute to BTC). (This is actually related to the issue with a hashwave coming in to mine a coin and stealing value).

In ELC because of the giant hashwaves and rounds of 2-5 second blocks during them with low difficulty, we plow through a large # of blocks quickly. That means the time metric isnt really being adhered to (just like it hasnt in bitcoin either because of constant growth). In fact, ELC's "clock" may be more accurate than bitcoin's because we havent been growing 1.5%/day (sorry kids, no ASICs yet.) (edit: actually our block chain is slow)

And my idea of having as short as 1/4 time blocks will impact that even more. It only matters because of the scale factor in the reward equation 194400/(194400+block#) - being supposedly related to 9 months of time having passed.

In fact, we're at block: 89775 in 312.345 days, that's almost exactly 5 min per block - so we're quite behind the original schedule. Interesting. I figured we'd be ahead. (we're 2.5x behind the 2min target.)

My idea to fix this was instead to reduce the reward scale not by time (since time by # of blocks would become inaccurate with the shorter blocks) but by TotalWork. Every time a block is produced, if the total work isnt greater than the last block, the block is rejected as invalid. (This is the total work of the whole block chain to date and this is how almost ALL coins work to validate a new block coming in, this isnt a new idea of mine etc etc its already in the code and is in LTC's code since last year). So we could instead decay the value by total work, since that's the original idea in the first place. That'd roughly be equivalent to the total # of bitcoins in the world, since REWARD = DIFF, and DIFF * blocks_to_date = totalwork.

Basing it on total work would give a predictable rate of coin emergence too, but it wouldnt be "how many coins per time" it'd be "how many coins for how much total mining ever done". Makes it very different from other coins, because it's all oriented towards work done, not time passed.

Comments? (and the comment that 'people are relying on the coin emergence rate to calculate the total future value of the market!' is total bullshit cuz no one can predict the hashwaves of 2GH/s for X hours accurately. And in fact ,those hashwaves have slowed DOWN the coin from 2 minutes, not sped it up.)


(edit: fixed formatting errors and some prepositions)

I didnt realise how little you understood about coins. I wont be smug, but I might suggest you get some more education before you speak. You're not even making sense.

No one can change the algorithm arbitrarily in Elacoin (heh, that gives me an idea: a coin client that downloads a new algorithm whenever the main dev wants them to!

To make a new algorithm _EVERYONE_ has to download (manually) the new client and install it. Every pool, every exchange. Even YOU. Did you notice yourself redownloading a new client to get the 'new algorithm' recently, or ever?

I see why securities are regulated now. So that idiots cant come in and spew nonsensical conspiracy theories when they lose money. At least there's a govt agency in place to make these people go through before anyone wastes time with investigating "russian drunks" (nice racist slur, buddy!) are 'meddling with the coin on the open market'.

(And yes, they and others are meddling with the coin(s) -- all coins, pump dumping, engaging in reputation attacks by ranting on bitcointalk.. hey wait! thats what you're doing! Are you trying to make the price go up or down, though, I cant tell!)

Anyway. You dont deserve to be addressed til you can write something that's barely negligibly true or applicable to ANY coin, never mind elacoin only, cuz you clearly dont understand how software or computers work, never mind cryptocoins.

as for taking over the coin a few weeks ago.. uh. wrong, go read the irc logs. I was _THERE_ when the genesis block was forged (my attempt was beat out by 15 seconds by xrns who got one created first.)

(course this just ads fuel to the fire, you're going to claim whoever mined the genesis block controls the coin (and the temperature of your thermostat, I think). Right?

Why would you bother checking if anything he says is true? Why not just take him at his word without asking anyone else who's been involved since day 1?

I wont make fun of your broken english as you may be ESL. However I will attack your inconsistent arguments are lack of evidence.

1) No one has an 'permission' to do anything with any coin. 5 of us had the password, they drifted away, i changed it after 8 months for security reasons. those who deserve to have it will get it when necessary and the community agrees.

1b) Read the code changes on github. It has not changed in a long while (except a 2 months ago bengt added the missing macOSx libraries to the mac client. how terrible of him to fuck with the market like that! yes i allowed that by adding his code changes to the elacoin repo.)

2) per above, the code hasnt been changed at all.  I have many improvements in mind, but i want to do one big change, not many (forking is annoying.)

3) who is the authority that knows what they're doing with any coin? If you want a govt-approved authority, go back to fiat trading. Here it's a community effort, and I have never gone against what the community says (however, I do tend to ignore the loud ranty jerks).  I pay attetion to Windmaster and Retep because they are calm, reasonable people and have shown great knowledge of the code bases of various coins, and even how the economics/market reacts to various aspects of algorithms. It takes time to earn that respect, so you wont find me making changes suddenly just because a couple people yell loudly and throw a fit.

4) As for 'taking it over', the coin woulda just died as no one was taking care of it at all. I dont know who ISNT a stranger - I've been THE MOST visible person in elacoin. There absolutely IS NO ONE ELSE, or if there is please name them.

I am not paid for doing this, I mine a bit like everyone else does. The coin's value woulda been 0 like all the other abandoncoins out there. Thing is, when sometimes it looked like I was wasting my time, someone else saw how the fundamental idea behind the coin was good and the coin kept resurrecting itself. Quite suprisingly in some ways, and its still going now.

5) you dont understand cryptocurrencies if you think that I can control the price (without even making any changes to the code, either!). Coins are traded on the whims of the market, and *COIN code is setup to ensure there's no central authority. You can game any coin you want, you can 51% (or 30%) attack it, you can setup huge buy and sell walls if you have serious money to move around (though in ELC's case I think thats only 10-20 BTC worth, maybe a bit more now with the big hashrates we had). Im sure many many other coins have been messed with by people like that - even bitcoin is sometimes. Welcome to the real open market. Governments tend to walk in to such situations and make rules so the winners dont win TOO much because the losers get sore and pissed off and stop electing that government. So there's a little bit of regulation (though the US has shown how little that can be). 

Here in the real coin world it's SERIOUS BUSINESS. Any gaming and buywalling you want to setup is entirely 'legal' because there's no law but the coin's code. That's it. If you dont like it, go play with bluechips (and have fun with the fees). Side note: the coin's code is public, go read it and find the part that makes mat5x rich. It's right there in line 508 in main.c.

If you want to get the coin's market value up, then either pump it (dont forget to dump it at the right time!) or do something more long term constructive like poker26 is like setup a website and get merchants involved.

This is all your own risk and responsibility. Poker26 has way more invested than you I think and he isnt whining like a baby. Man up or GTFO.  SERIOUS INVESTORS ONLY.

6) your system is incredibly fragile if it requires a coin's value to stay static. All coins go up and down, some insanely (like 100x value spread in weeks). Go mine hashcows.com or something instead (multicoin mine pool).

AS FOR CHANGING THE ALGORITHM

this is the only part of your post that has any actual merit. You'll notice im not ignoring this point.

I ran the code I inserted for reward calc by the community, and no one caught the issue of the implicit int64 vs double causing a floor() (ie throw away the decimals). 4 of us even threw up a testnet for 4 days to mine it and we didnt catch the issue (mostly because we couldnt get the diff up high enough to notice). 5+ people (who were the biggest holders of the coin at the time, so the ones with the most at risk) read the code and we all missed it. Maybe its a newb mistake, in which case leave the coin and stop mining it immediately. (Trust me, so many other coins have way more serious problems beyond value calculation, such as security holes enabling people to steal coins wholesale.)

We'd like to fix that. Im not even sure it's THAT important, except at low difficulties where the flooring causes a bigger 'gap' between 'intended' value and actual - actual is slightly lower than it should be - the lowest is when the diff is 1.99, then the base reward (before timescaling) is 1.00 - so thats basically 49% lower value than it 'should be'.

But there is no 'should be'. There's what people say with their mouths and keyboards, and that could be bullshit, and then there's the coin's code. The coin's code is 100% gospel, and anything anyone says about it can be ignored. READ THE CODE. Everyone knew full well that's how the reward would be calculated, so they went in with open eyes (or could have).

It's up to the community to decide if we want to fix this, I think it would be good as it honours the original smooth-reward idea.

The only other fix i'd like would screw over the multimine/hashwave/coinchoose pools. They couldnt just rush in and mine value away from other miners then leave when the difficulty goes up. For regular coins where the reward is static, this matters greatly. It SHOULDNT matter to elacoin, but because of some complicated side effects (which im happy to explain if anyone cares to pay attention for 5 minutes and THINK, I have a few google sheets that show how it happens), it still benefits the hash wave miners somewhat to the detriment of long term miners.

(The effect is weird, but tangible. I'd love to reverse that effect somehow without directly fucking with the difficulty/reward code which is naturally beautiful (DIFF = REWARD). I have some ideas but i need to model them out first.)

The partial solution to this is not to have such a long retarget time. There's no real need for a long retarget time at all, because nominally, reward = diff. Doesnt matter if diff goes to 100, cuz reward goes to 100. Doesnt matter if diff is 1, then reward is 1. xMH/s of mining gear will always get the same number of coins over time. The difficulty just affects how often the rewards come in (and, pools already smooth that out by paying some small constant amount (1 elc for eg) at a time. So it shoujld make absolutely NO difference what the difficulty is for the reward.

Very smart readers who pay attention to any coins at all will say then "well then why not just static diff and reward, of, say 1, forever?" That'd be great, but when 1.5GH/s comes in to mine, we get 0.1s long blocks. This is bad because thats way under the network diameter and thus unfairly benefits whomever found the last block (usually large pools) causing orphans for other miners. It's too fast a block time. So we scale it up to ensure we're about 2 minutes per block. Same deal when the hashrate is very low, we should scale it down (because at that point xactions take too long, so do confirms for solomining).

Since reward ~ diff, then diff doesnt matter, only block times being reasonable does. Keeping block times reasonable means measuring the current block rate in some accurate way - bitcoin did this by averaging blocks over time, so that luck of finding 10 blocks really fast isnt interpreted as 10x hashrate coming in, and then the diff goes up by 10x, slowing things down (and in bitcoins case, because reward = STATIC VALUE, it makes the blocks worth 10x less per minerhashrate) - in elacoin the diff going up doesnt matter, so our only concern is having reasonable block times.

My suggestion to sort out luck vs actual hashwave is to retarget every block as many other coins do (and they with static rewards, which i think is nuts to use an instant retarget! totally
gameable like Terracoin was!) - but with some modifications.

Maybe windmaster can comment on this idea: luck can happen, but it cant sustain itself long. It's exponentially decreasingly likely to get 2 very fast blocks in a row (if it's 1/4 chance of a 1/4 time block, then 2 in a row is 1/16). My idea is that if the block time suddenly goes to 1/16th of normal, that the next block becomes diff/4 (much easier = faster) to get a new 'measure' of the network hashrate. That block will also be worth 1/4 as much, so the same amount of coins/time always comes out, we're just 'resampling' the network hashrate more frequently. Same deal with slow block, if a block is suddenly 16x slower for eg, then we resample in 1/4 of the time (basically, the square root). The reason I dont want to go any faster than 1/4 (off our nominal target of 2 min) is because 1/4 x 2 minutes is 30 seconds, thats a bit of a fast block time. 30s would be fine but there's jitter in that value, and some blocks will be even faster randomly (1/2 would be faster, 1/2 slower). I dont want to get down into the 1-2 second range at all, and only want to see 10-15s blocks rarely, or it will encourage orphans/stales for soloists, etc. (You can see 1-2 second blocks in bitcoin still these days. Rare, but it happens. Worldcoin which I think had a 15s blocktime(?) seemed insane to me, as that'd generate 1-2s blocks FREQUENTLY, risking your transactions going missing, and lots of orphans for smaller miners.)

So thats a pretty reasonable change in that it just increases the accuracy of the retargets, and does it more often, so huge blocktimes of 20 minutes dont become the norm after a hashwave from coincchoose or middlecoin rolls by.

Unfortunately this means anyone who DOES have a good 'game the coin and rip everyone off!' idea will be left high and dry. So sorry! I think the community will support that general idea however.

So those are the two 'major' changes, which arent that major at all.

The other idea I've had is looking at scrypt-n to ASIC-proof Elacoin, but i dont know if the community WANTS elc to be ASIC proof or not. Should move this seperate topic to a new thread probably.

Waiting to see what the fall out of the malleability situation is, as there's bound to be some code updates on other coins. We're going to refactor all the new fixes that LTC has gathered into the coin, and also possibly do a retarget every block with KGW or whatever (though in my opinion other coins doing that with a FIXED value per coin not based on the difficulty is dumb, it ONLY works if the value follows the difficulty).

Have a few other ideas based on some analyses I've done as well to keep this a fair mined coin for all gpu users.

I dont get it. What are you bringing thats new here? Some huge name on your board of directors, someone who is like running google's play store  or apples itunes?

THen why do you need your own coin for that?

Oh cuz the tech is different! I know, you solved transaction malleability in wallet calculations of balances! That's awesome because it's sorely needed in every coin now, including
bitcoin.

Im also glad to see you are working off the latest LTC source to ensure you have all the latest fixings and repairs to wonky code.

Please confirm all of the above.


Also outline your middlecoin pool resistance concepts that wont leave it at huge diff with no hashes after the hashwave tsunamis you out to 10,000s blocktimes.

More reasons to keep coins - we're going to update the code to the latest LTC once they fix transaction malleability in balance calculation in the wallet. Also a few other
tweaks here and there, this will make it one of the few coins that is going to bother fixing xaction malle... waiting to see updates in LTC world see how it goes.

This site will be merged shortly with elacoin.com, please standby.

Thanks for the donations!

donations: EMdD6x9G458xam1DmKoACfBe5yzDA479Eb

looks like we have some donations in already? who sent those?

Unfortunately, the original effort was a scattered group of people that rescued a good-idea-coin from someone who wanted to premine and dump. (milkshake!) they screwed up the crc/whatever on the genesis block, so had to rerelease, then realised there wasnt any profit in no premine, so left. We rescued it because we liked it.

Unfortunately this means there was a bunch of us, and not a coherent group. Various people funded stuff with their own pocket cash like domains, and what not. So some of them are still in
their control and either want too much $$ for them or are incommunicado.

We have elacoin.com in control (I do...) but I have to set it up yet (dayjob...). People hate premines, but I see why they exist, yet that is somehow stealing from the public. Dont quite get that sense of entitlement to free websites, free abes (explorers) etc etc. Fucking internet - everything's free (and low quality). If you wanna explain it to me, I'd love to hear it.

In the meantime, elacoin.com will be back up soon when I can set it backup somewhere safe (yes money out of my own pocket for a reallife service that doenst take ELC (or ltc or btc) _AND_ is DDOS proof (or no point).

Unless someone wants to donate to the bounty pool.. fat chance eh?

I am assembling a core of people againt to get things going, we did fix the OSX client recently... more changes coming, just slow, no hype, and out of real people's pockets, not some giant corporation trying to pump dump with imaginary money..

erkmos fixed he mac binary by remembering to include the  relevant libs.

as for the price is up, its up and down all the time i think this coin will survive because reward ~ diff and isnt a new 5 minute old coin.

however thats up to you people and the market.

We are actually fixing that. Our mac dude forgot to include the libraries needed... stay tuned.

Ill buy that for a dollar!

People seem to be automining it or choosing it by hand. We don thave projects in the works to get the IMF to use Elacoin for all world projects right now, but that's not necessarily a sign the coin is dead.

howd the diff get to 17 and 1GH/s earlier today if only diehards are mining it? it's lots of new miners obviously.

hype pump and crash ('to the mooncoin, cat!') are over, yes, definitely. you cant invent a coin out of thin air that's 6 months old and past the hype stage.

you tell me!

I see people say "I dont know what these alt coins are, but 'goldcoin' sounds good because I've heard of gold before! So Ill buy that!" Derp.

When that's what it takes to get people into a coin, you know it's going to crash.

I think elacoin has some notional residual value because the current value of new blocks is based on how much mining power is out there. That's a kinda vote on the existence of the coin - put your hashes where your mouth is kinda thing.

You'll notice elacoin's profitability has been relatively stable, not swinging 100x like other crapcoins. Yes, it swings, but so does bitcoin, but much under 10x from week to week.

Can't say why. Maybe we got something here.

lol wut?

I dont control anything in the coin specifically except the source code, and have not put out any new code in months (ie we're keeping it stable as it is, warts and all). That way everyone knows the code/rules going forward. Just because I take an interest in this coin doesnt mean Im scamming. I have no power to ( in fact, anyone who has sold coins lately has probably sold some to me, so you've been cashing out on my dime.)

This just shows people _STILL_ dont understand how cryptocoins work at all. The only centralized control in ELC is four entities:

• cryptsy who could fuck with the bidding to influence the coin one way or other. Or get hacked and get coins stolen. I have no stake in cryptsy (or even contact with them).
• scryptmining.com which is a pool which could either walk away with stored coins, pay out less, or do a 30% attack (per the Stanford Cornell paper) as they hold lots of hash power, or get hacked. same for the other pool.
• middle coin which is a floating pool vs most profitable coin. same deal above - with additional hash power to throw at any coin to hashtsunami it to fuck the difficulty up so high itll be forever before it comes down.
• CoinChoose which lists relative coin difficulties/reward/profitability. He could fake any numbers he wants and many floating pools would follow it however he wanted. He could pumpcrash any coin he wants pretty easily.

(edit: in case you're really new to all this ALL coins suffer that same points above, including bitcoin.)

Do you use any of the above? If so then you are contributing to centralized authority of a distributed coin, weakening its resistance to takeover and authority. This breaks things way more than I could ever hope to.

I just happen to believe that the coin will go higher eventually, and be a good store of value for miners since the reward is constant per mining KH/s. If you don't, then sell me your coins.

So explain how it's a scam.  It's just as much a scam as people calling those who mined btc in 2011 'scammers' for being early adopters and risking their power bills for an unproven (still, as yet) idea. Standard response to people who didnt mine BTC in 2010/11 is 'cry more, noob.', amirite?

did the calculation for the hell of it:

 69503.5 ELC exist as of block 46322

ill be setting up a page with more stats soon.