All of this is necessary unfortunately. Out of the alts come a few pearls of innovation as well as biggest scams to protect against. The pearls of innovation drives the coin of the future and the scams drive the controls required to mitigate against to produce the robust new virtual currency ecosystem that will be in place over the world in the next 20-50 years. It was the same with the colonising of the Wild West in the USA and the advent of the current banking system. The best advice is to tread carefully and wisely as volume, volatility and FUD are all drivers for opportunity. The old diggers in the gold rush of the late 1800s had to endure gangs and lawlessness, but today there are beautiful cities there. The old banking system had to endure train robberies and tons of fraud, but today we have a robust fiat banking system. In 20 years this alt coin environment will be looked at just as we look at the above mentioned time periods. Just make sure that you don't get caught with your pants down and lose your life savings or bread money. For the rest watch innovation and history unfold and don't get involved in the gun fights.

It is sad.

The number one rule in crypto is not to invest money that you cannot afford to lose otherwise you will be praying for miracles and end up losing your possessions. If you follow that rule you should be fine as it is all high risk and highly speculative. The second most important rule is tot always look at how strong the fundamentals are then you can know if it is a quick pump and dump or something for the longer term. Buy into coins with strong fundamentals and hold them through the waves. The third rule is that if you feel very lucky, throw up a coin and if it falls on heads buy into a new no-name startup coin like an ICO and if it falls on tails take the money that you would have put into an ICO and put it on number 20 on the roulette table as the odds are about as good to become rich quick with crypto.

Sounds intriguing.

Pumpers buy so that the price goes up. N00bs and general traders then think something is up and follow the buy trend like dumb blindfolded sheep pumping the price even higher. If the pumpers can create enough hype and the general traders throw all caution in the wind the pumpers can get lucky with the general traders pumping the coin on their behalf. The pumpers then do their calculations and wait until the bases are loaded with other traders' buy orders and then wham dump their holdings when the buy orders are large enough to cover their holdings. This was a classic example and many people lost a lot of money with crave.

Good question. Normally an ICO should be backed by plans and proper fundamentals, otherwise it is putting your money on red or black on the roulette table. Maybe the safety net of a % buy wall by the exchange plays a role, or the practice of a dev team buying up the ICO to create a false sense of demand sometimes plays a role. Since there are no fundamentals with EKN, people probably took a chance and if it fails there is the % buy wall to recover their money. However, an ICO sold out in a few hours raises the eyebrows. Lets say a DRK/DASH creates an ICO with its fundamentals supporting it, it would make perfect sense for an ICO to sel out in a few hours. On the other hand a coin with the characteristics that I posted a few posts back being sold out in a few hours does not make sense.

It is all up to the dev here to create the supporting fundamentals or it will fail. They have 25 BTC to do it with.

Have you read the thread from the start? Do you even know what they dynamics currently are and why certain things are planned?

If it is too good to be true then it is too good to be true.

- Unknown coin
- Unknown and unproven dev with no rating
- No block explorer
- Poor grammar on OP with lots of mistakes
- No concrete plans
- 1.5% POS % p/a s too low and will not work
- X13 will be hash raped by the large farms that will probably put 2.5m/3m POW into one or two hands to be dumped hard.

2m coins sells out in 4 hours - 25 BTC. mmm...  My gut feel tells me it does not add up for people to be so gullible to put 25 BTC on red/black. Maybe the ICO investors knows something others don't?

Please prove me wrong by fixing/mitigating the above points.

That is a super cool feature/tool in the wallet in the link and it takes the guess work away. What would you say would the optimal split size for Anal be, what are the attributes to take into account for calculating optimal split size and does it reset your coin age if you do a split/combine? What are the risks that everyone have to take note of for the fork and beyond?

Happy with 60s for now, as well as the suggested time drift parameters presstab made based on his excellent POS interview. The suggested periodic monetary policy review can look at current conditions (market, use, specs, chain, inflation etc.) and make the necessary adjustments. By the time bloating becomes a problem, someone in alt-cryptoland would have researched a solution to ease the burden on the user eg. online stacking service combined with a lite wallet and online blockchain. BTC on the other hand seems to be doing OK with a 20+GB chain.

60s is fine with me.

Excellent interview and explanation of time drift. Agree with your suggested specs for time drift.

Regarding block time. The compounding period is subject to the law of diminishing returns and the total % of POS interest is fixed to 125% nominal interest if I understand POS design correctly. At some point the number of compounding periods have a very small impact on the total. Initially the impact is greater but later on it does not matter if you use 100,000 or 1,000,000 compounding periods. See graphs below that is based on the total population of coins that therefore own all stakes and a starting number of coins of 141,195. However, I understand the impact of number of blocks on the size block chain. BTC is 20+GB over its life, although it must be said it depends on the number of tx in a block. Having said this, in the case of BTC there might be 1,800 tx in one block during 10min, but with a 60s block chain it might have had 180 tx per block so the net increase would be the fixed bits per block excluding tx. If the fixed part is large then yes there would be a much more bloating. I think the answer is in the intended use. Will the coin be used more for just paying on a website or will it be used for day to day retail payment? If the intended use is not block time sensitive, then a longer blocktime can be used. If the use is time sensitive, then a shorter block time must be used.

I would still keep with the 40s and re-evaluate in a year or so if the decision is based on inflation of coin alone. It is a different matter if the decision is made on bloating of the blockchain. Any other views from the community?

Up to 100,000 compounding periods in a year and for that matter up to 788,400+



Up to 365 compounding periods in a year



Up to 12 compounding periods in a year



EDIT:

I just had a look and compared the experimental 10K blockchain size and BTC blockchain sizes at approximately the same height of 360,000 blocks. 10K is around 400MB and BTC 20+GB. This seems to indicate that the tx content of the blocks contribute much more to bloating than the fixed overhead since 10K is pretty empty tx-wise.

I would support measures to make the chain more robust. Block time of 120s however is long for retail especially if you add the confirmations. Inflation is something that can be sorted out with a future monetary policy review.

In order to compare the options, one has to calculate the interest compounding by stake. For a 40s block time there will be 788,400 blocks in one year on average and for 120s block time there will be 262,800 blocks in a year on average. This works out to 492,818 coins after one year 40s stakely compounded and 492,815 coins 120s stakely compounded (3 coins difference). Compare this to the graphs above where the total worked out to 490,089 coins daily compounded after one year (±2,000 coins difference). Unless my calculations are way off and made a mistake and someone can post a better estimate, the block time seems to have immaterial impact on inflation. Unless a longer block time has a material improvement on the robustness of the chain, I would recommend keeping it at 40s or perhaps even make it 30s.

Perhaps go with 8 hours which is not too long and not too short.

That is too high for now. Look at the graph above.

Yes, everyone is stuck. That is the whole point of the upcoming fork. Currently if you want the chain to move you have to send coins manually. If you send >10 coins to another address you will trigger the next POS block. The fork is needed to fix the stuff up that the original dev did when he released a broken wallet.

Just a correction, 30 days is the max coin age after which the coins will lose eligibility for staking and have to be moved not min as you mention. It is the min coin age that needs to be agreed upon and 3 hours seems fair. What this means is that once coins are moved, it will be eligible for staking (mature) after 3 hours. Once it stakes, the coins will take another 3 hours to mature again before it gets into the staking queue. The current min coin age for Anal is 24 hours, meaning that once you move coins or once you get a stake, it will take 24 hours before the coins start to stake. The longer the min coin age the more people will keep their coins in their wallets and off the exchange in order to not lose their place in the staking "queue". If it is too long though with a too low reward, then people will just say stuff the staking and take their profit on the exchange. Alternatively a min coin age of 8 hours can be used which is also much better than 24 hours but not too short as to cause coins to be moved to exchanges too easily.  A min age of 30 days will not work as that menas one stake every 30 days which will stall the blockchain.

The options to chose for min coin age (min stake age) would therefore be 3 hours or 8 hours or keep it at the current 24 hours imo. Perhaps another vote.

Here are analysis graphs of coin supply and inflation over a one year period for the options in the poll. The important thing to ask is what will the "thing" of the coin be. If it is quick profits, high inflation and short lifespan then the POS staking % must be high. If it is retail adoption, longer term profits, longevity and low inflation then the coin must have lower POS staking %.  The answer lies somewhere in the middle of these 2 extremes.

The POS staking % must be just enough to incentivise the miners to stake so that the blockchain remains secure and widely distributed. There must also be a match between adoption and total coin supply - it would be difficult for millions of people to use 100,000 coins for example, but it would take some time to get that sort of distribution. There must be just enough coins released into the market to match demand for use. I would recommend a 6 monthly monetary policy review of inflation, adoption rates and mining stats and do a fork with adapted specs accordingly to align to the market conditions. Coin halving in POW is a rudimentary automated attempt at this. With successful implementation, after 6-12 months there will be enough funds to hire the best devs to design spectacular wallets and implement whatever features and specs are required at the time to meet market conditions.

I think it is best to leave the high POS staking % to Spots and Co who are geared to R&D those types of chains and high coin supply. Too low and no-one will stake. Based on the graphs below I see the sweet spot and safest initial % being at 10% per month which is somewhere between 100-125% per annum. Both of these answers will therefore be ok whichever is the higher of the two in the vote.

The other important specs to decide on are the min and max coin age. Max coin age is easy and can be 30 days. Min is more difficult. Too low and it would be too easy to move coins around between wallets and exchanges with no incentive to keep it on any side, but it would help a lot to have lots of small stakes to keep the chain rolling smoothly. Too long and liquidity might be impacted as people will keep coins in their wallets but if lots of movement occur, there could be less distributed staking and fewer coins qualifying for staking to keep the chain rolling. I would recommend a lower min coin age of 3 hours to keep liquidity higher and to keep the options open. It might have a slight negative impact on inflation than the graphs below due to more smaller stakes happening and real compounding being stakely compounded.

All graphs assume starting coin supply of 141,195 and work on daily compounding. The more accurate method is stakely compounding but daily is ok for illustration purposes.

5% per annum / 0.41% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 148,413. Total coin supply after 2 years 156,022



10% per annum / 0.83% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 165,000. Total coin supply after 2 years 172,404



25% per annum / 2.08% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 181,158. Total coin supply after 2 years 232,592



50% per annum / 4.19% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 232,393. Total coin supply after 2 years 383,021



100% per annum / 8.55% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 382,236. Total coin supply after 2 years 1,037,606



125% per annum / 10.80% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 490,089. Total coin supply after 2 years 1,706,931



250% per annum / 22.73% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 1,693,907. Total coin supply after 2 years 20,460,888



480% per annum / 47.99% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 16,412,349. Total coin supply after 2 years 1,932,841,328



500% per annum / 50.41% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 19,982,242. Total coin supply after 2 years 2,866,671,797



1000% per annum / 124.98% per month. Total coin supply after 1 year 2,646,050,378. Total coin supply after 2 years 50,946,611,318,415



Potential implementation method of a POS % halving after an annual monetary policy review, assuming that was the decision taken for 4 years in a row. POS % starts at 125% per annum and is halved annually. It does not have to be halved but can just be reduced according to market conditions. Total coin supply after 1 year 490,089, after 2 years 915,902, after 3 years 1,250,651 and after 4 years 1,462,110.

Good work.

My wallet had "invalid checkpoints". Then became unresponsive. Made backup of wallet.dat file, removed all and re-downloaded blockchain. Wallet works fine. However if I put the wallet.dat with coins back the app crashes everytime. Cannot get to a point to do repair wallet. I might have to revert to a very old backup.

Some interesting analysis of the blockchain as at block 33764.

Average number of blocks per day - 713.  I would have expected an average of 1440 per day to match the number of minutes per day at 60s per block. This seems to indicate that the average time is 120s per block. During POW however, the combined POW and POS blocks were 1400 which was closer to the expected number.



Average POS reward per day - 171 but the first few days were slow. A more representative sample was therefore the average of last 10 days - 200. This means on average 200 coins are added to the money supply per day. Compare this to 3600 Bitcoins added per day. Inflation is much lower than BTC which is good. Furthermore, 200 coins on 115,000 money supply is 0.17% per day or 5.22% per month - roughly half of the 10% I would have expected.



Top 20 POS rewards so far. At number one was 2.52681454 earned with block 33684.



I have not taken BTC halving into account, but at current levels, assuming a starting point of 200 MTR POS rewards per day, the inflation catchup point are as follows:

Inflation intersection per day at 5%/m - around Jan 2020



Inflation intersection per day at 10%/m - around Aug 2017