limiting increases to 2%, 6% and 10% stabilizes the difficulty,
It's actually 2.041%, 6.38% and 11.11% as per main.cpp, lines 673-678: if(nActualTimespan<(nTwoPercent*16)) //less than a minute?
nActualTimespan=(nTwoPercent*45); //pretend it was only 10% faster than desired -- Actually 100/90=1.1111
else if(nActualTimespan<(nTwoPercent*32)) //less than 2 minutes?
nActualTimespan=(nTwoPercent*47); //pretend it was only 6% faster than desired -- and so on
else
nActualTimespan=(nTwoPercent*49); //pretend it was only 2% faster than desired
Not that it makes a big difference. I will refrain from commenting on the comments' phrasing. Yes or 10%, 6% or 2% of current difficulty. I agree the phrasing of comments could be done better but nonetheless it's irrelevant. |
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Well, my reasoning was that the difficulty is calculated from the time it takes to generate 240 blocks, and that time varies +-20% all the time. However, you are correct that limiting increases to 2%, 6% and 10% stabilizes the difficulty, but it stabilizes it to a level below where you would get a block every 3 minutes. But apparently that's what is wanted? That is exactly what I wanted. I do not want to "target" 3 minute blocks like 3 minutes is some magic ideal number to hit (like BTC people think 10 is). It's simply the maximum where you want to be to conduct business reliably. I still claim, that difficulty drops can be quite big just from the variance, if not as big as in my example (33%), but say 20%. It certainly will not "maintain that level within 2%", or I'm completely misreading the source. However, since those kinds of drops are corrected very fast, it might not be a problem in the end.
Difficulty drops of small amounts will exactly match whatever the drop off is. There is only a limit of a 4x dropoff, and this is kept at 4x to make malicious mining pools have to wait before attempting another attack, thereby reducing their profits from such a thing. If the difficulty drops "too much" so that 3 minute blocks aren't hit, and it less than 3 minutes, that is fine, and part of the algorithm. SolidCoin's api is changing so that businesses can rely not on some "confirmation" magic number, but a base of time and confirmations. Again, as a business owner and experienced programmer I know exactly what is needed for bulletproof handling of real transactions. |
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Could you please explain this more or less in layman terms? Why is it that miners dropping from the network have no effect on transactions processing? Why does Bitcoin have this weakness and SC is immune? Ok well currently bitcoin retargets itself every 2016 blocks. At ideal speeds (10minutes) this is 2 weeks of time. If there is a 400% drop off in mining power (ie the current 10Thash becose 2.5Thash) then BTC blocks will now average 40 minutes in length instead of 10 minutes. However as we have also seen with Bitcoin recently, 10 minute ideal blocks don't always occur even when difficulty is evenly matched. We have been forced to put up with close to 90 minutes blocks. SolidCoin on the other hand isn't trying to target staying at 3 minute blocks. If we are at 3 minute blocks and a 400% drop off in miners occurs 3 minute blocks now take 12 minutes. Very close to Bitcoin's "ideal" block speed. So in a severe mining drop off a user of the SolidCoin network is barely going to notice the fact that blocks are happening 400% slower, as 12 minutes is still relatively fast, especially compared to Bitcoin. What SolidCoin guarantees is low block variance, that is, the amount of time a single confirmation takes will always be within an acceptable range even under sever conditions. I designed SolidCoin because as a business which uses Bitcoin I know what is currently delivered is completely subpar for the modern world. Bitcoin is VERY susceptible to a competitor like SolidCoin "diverting" it's mining power as people become more aware of the new and better network. Basically meaning if you have holdings in BTC today, it's not known if you will be able to do anything with those BTC tomorrow. If you want a current example of this, ask anyone who owns NMC, IX or I0Coins that are all based off the original bitcoin code. |
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Please explain why he's wrong coinhunter.
Sure, since the difficulty can only raise in three bands 2%, 6% and 10%, and decrease to whatever level is necessary (upto 4x) where is he getting this 20% figure from? If we are at target hash rate it will maintain that level within 2%. The other thing to consider is the target hash rate is more like "the maximum" wanted, it's different to BTC where 10 minutes is "Desired". "3 minutes" isn't necessarily desired in SolidCoin, it's the maximum. CoinHunter, I am wondering how did you expect "Maximum coin generation of 18.9 million (18900000) to be reached by ~2022" if you do think that 3 minutes is not necessary for a block and 3 minutes is the maximum in solidcoin. Because I can't tell you exactly what it will be. All I can say is at 3 minute blocks it will be roughly 2022.  Even bitcoin developers can't reliably tell you their chain lifetime. Bitcoin could be dead in a week. Yet no bitcoin developer realizes it. SolidCoin will still be working, and very fast, as long as someone is hashing. Just check the average block times over it's current life vs any other chain. Then look at the massive amount of mining power variance. Miners have very little influence over the speed and reliability of the SolidCoin network, and this is what end users and businesses want. Reliability. They don't want to have to tell their customers "oh 20% of the miners electricity costs were too high this week so they stopped mining and that's why there was a 12 hour waiting period for your sale." |
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Please explain why he's wrong coinhunter.
Sure, since the difficulty can only raise in three bands 2%, 6% and 10%, and decrease to whatever level is necessary (upto 4x) where is he getting this 20% figure from? If we are at target hash rate it will maintain that level within 2%. The other thing to consider is the target hash rate is more like "the maximum" wanted, it's different to BTC where 10 minutes is "Desired". "3 minutes" isn't necessarily desired in SolidCoin, it's the maximum. |
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Don't know if this issue has been already brought up, but as I understand it, there is a problem with SolidCoin retarget algorithm that will manifest itself when the difficulty reaches the hashrate. Since it considers only the last 240 blocks when retargeting (correct me if I'm wrong), there will be huge fluctuations in the difficulty level. I ran some quick simulations, and you can expect the difficulty level to regularly fluctuate between +-20% where it "should" be, and more than that in some rarer cases. So every once in a while, you'll have situations, where the "real" difficulty according to the "real" hashrate should be 10000, but SolidCoin target is actually 12000 and drops to 8000 with one retarget (33% drop), and all this while the hashrate is static. LOL, you better rerun your tests again. Could we please get a clue in here. |
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What would happen on Bitcoin if that happened? Say it dropped to a dollar tomorrow and stayed there for a month. How long would it take for transactions to go through then? It would likely would take about 3-6 months to reset, and until then people would be jumping from BTC to SolidCoin or perhaps nothing at all (being disillusioned with the whole p2p currency thing). |
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http://solidcoin.info/how-to-mine-solidcoins.phpI have started making a step by step guide to mining SolidCoin. I have had many PMs and emails about how to mine them so hopefully what I have put up there is a good start for anyone new to the mining business. I'll be packaging GUIMiner with all the SolidCoin mining pools also for ease of use.
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And before long you'll have that nice fast network all to yourself. Chris buddy, even though you seem to be a rather bitter and annoyed person, good luck with whatever you're doing. Just wanted to make sure I get this in quote for later in case you edit. |
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...are all irrelevant to Bitcoin. Only the more frequent difficulty retargeting actually defends SolidCoin from anything, and it's an attack that Bitcoin isn't even vulnerable to. In order to get Bitcoin stuck in the same difficulty trap that Namecoin and Ixcoin are currently in, you'd have to destroy miners' faith in the future value of the currency in a very short amount of time. If you can pull that off, Bitcoin would be pretty much dead anyway, so whatever. Just wow, if you read this back and don't understand the hilarity of what you're saying then ..... "Bitcoin isn't even vulnerable to that" - "But if you can pull that off it will die" Haha. Wow. The scenario where SolidCoin price starts to rise and rise , encouraging more and more miners away from Bitcoin is a likely one, and it will destroy the Bitcoin network as it has no defense against such things. Unlike SolidCoin. Bitcoin owners could wake up in 3 days and find that their confirmations are now taking 12 hours, nearly every site supporting them is taking 3 days to confirm any transfers they make. If you do not see how very vulnerable Bitcoin is then you are not worth continuing a debate with, as it is obvious to anyone with a passing understanding of the protocol. Bullshit. Bitcoin was publicly announced when the blockchain was started. It took two years to reach a price of $1. There was ample time to buy/mine plenty of bitcoins if you thought it was going to take off. Most people (myself included) didn't think it would and didn't bother. If SolidCoin were to ever take off, it'll be the same situation. It's bullshit is it? Considering we can number the guys who mined the first million Bitcoins on a single hand how is it bullshit when SolidCoin has over 10000 individual owners of coin already? Just because Bitcoin was available publicly doesn't mean much at all, it takes time for a concept such as a "p2p currency" to become well known. I suspect SolidCoin wil also be deemed unfair to "X" once it has global acceptance, simply because we didn't get millions of people making that first coin. "They only got over 10000". So I can categorically say SolidCoin's existence is more fair than Bitcoins. Whether it's "fair" from the majority of the worlds viewpoint we will wait and see. From the price and hashrate charts, it looks more like people are jumping overboard. LOL, yeah except did you notice we can survive a drop in half of hashrate and the network is still 3 times faster than Bitcoins? What other chain can do that? None. |
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Could you also add totals to your excellent page? ie the total BTC being bid and total SC being sold ? And maybe any other similar things if you think about it! Sent you a small personal donation, thanks again. |
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There is no bounty for this because the people who can set it up get a lot of reward from the visitors, and a ~$1000 bounty isn't really going to entice them. Ruxum will have added USD support soon and 2 more exchanges are looking at adding it. I've also discussed this with MTGOX and they appear interested but are waiting on some checkpoints to be reached first.
Part of what needs to be done to make any cryptocurrency successful globally is finding easier ways to get traditional fiat money into the system. I hope to find a solution to this with SolidCoin.
Will really depend on the volume, with Mt. Gox bitcoin level of volume it is definitely worth it, with the volume that the lesser bitcoin exchanges do honestly not sure that it is worth it. I will probably still end up doing it, bounty would have been nice though... If you do it we will still link to you and give you customers, provided you offer a nice clean service. |
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Are you really making your stand on 3 minute blocks vs. 10 minute blocks? That's the reason we're all supposed to switch blockchains, because you think 10 minutes is too long and 3 minutes won't cause scalability problems?
...
The reason I stress the protocol is that everything else can be fixed without switching blockchains. Hell, even if there's a problem with the protocol, it can still be fixed if you achieve consensus on the change. So why start over? If you absolutely can't work with the mainline client devs, you can always fork the client and stay on the same blockchain. Your ego trip would last longer too.
You are wrong. The developers aren't going to change some core things in Bitcoin, I already discussed this with some of them prior to making SolidCoin. The consensus from them was it was never going to change, and there was no purpose to it. You sound like them, are you one? What these "developers" don't understand however is that people that use Bitcoin, actually want fast confirmations. They want a fast network. This is why SolidCoin is successful, it's fast and always will be. My other protocol changes are intelligently designed to protect SolidCoin from a variety of attacks that Bitcoin cannot. This isn't subjective, it's something that Bitcoin doesn't do that SC does. Your argument that "it's easy to make those changes" is irrelevant because no one before me made those changes and Bitcoin is still vulnerable to them regardless of your banter. If Bitcoin was to adopt them it's going to be a major PITA getting people to accept it. On top of the protocol improvements SolidCoin's start has been many times more fair than Bitcoins. Again this isn't subjective. Educate yourself here :- http://solidcoin.info/five-reasons-to-own-solidcoins.php and see why people are jumping aboard. |
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Can't work it out with the dude if he's not going to answer PMs, which he isn't. Front page of funkykit.com, posted when there were still numerous bounties available for publicity, got a reply from him saying he'd read it and asking if I was claiming the promotional bounty. I said yes, and that was the last I heard from him. I figure if he can't resolve it in private or be bothered with PMing me, I might as well drag it out into the open and see what happens. I certainly don't lose anything from doing so, though an unresponsive promoter doesn't help Solidcoin much. There's an old saying about squeaky wheels and such, generally it's even true. Hence the squeaking. Well I'm sorry for the confusion here. Your message said you were *about to do* something for promotional bounty. Given how many PMs and requests I got when I see someone say they are going to do something I don't process it until I have verified it, and seeing as you said about to do it instead of done I didn't check and forgot about it, I apologize. If you join the SolidCoin forum and post a message in the bounty forum the new bounty manager can sort you out with one of the current bounty prizes for that one. There is now someone dedicated to processing those bounties as I was inundated with requests, processing over 120 valid ones, and sorting through another 80 or so that were spam or not valid. I and others appreciate your SolidCoin support so please don't think there was any ill intention here to wrong you. |
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No sure where to post this question, but I am solo mining solidcoins right now, and my miner said I had 1 accepted, but nothing has shown up in the wallet. How do I know when I have solved a block, and how can I check? I usually pool mine, so I am new to this aspect.
Thanks.
I'll be writing an article on this today actually, so you should be able to check the site later today for some more info. But basically in your SolidCoin client you will have a transaction added when you find a block, it will be classed as a "generate" . |
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There is no bounty for this because the people who can set it up get a lot of reward from the visitors, and a ~$1000 bounty isn't really going to entice them. Ruxum will have added USD support soon and 2 more exchanges are looking at adding it. I've also discussed this with MTGOX and they appear interested but are waiting on some checkpoints to be reached first.
Part of what needs to be done to make any cryptocurrency successful globally is finding easier ways to get traditional fiat money into the system. I hope to find a solution to this with SolidCoin.
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run: solidcoin-linux32-102 open: Settings - > Your receiving address -> Ok -> CRASH Segmentation fault We are aware of this issue on Linux, for some reason it doesn't affect the other platforms so we suspect it's something to do with wxWidgets on Linux. Hopefully we will sort it out soon, does clicking the X instead of OK still crash? |
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There is a minimum fee yes, and there's a good reason for that as well, but in the future when profit from mining coins dwindle the profit from the fees will be crucial. And there will be major competition on this. And many different levels of fees which might mean that you can send your money with a non-existent fee and wait for hours or send them with the current widespread fee level to get the transaction to move with the next block.
What happens with Solidcoin is the worst thing possible, it's implementing a heavy control element in a deregulated, decentralized free market currency. Essentially introducing socialism in it. Because in the future when the profit from Solidcoin mining drops there will only be one fee and there is absolutely no way to have one fee that is acceptable to everyone. You can certainly put a fee that keeps the mining going but when a competitive cryptocurrency has a better fee system where you can actually send your money with far less or non-existent fees (although you would have to wait a bit), Solidcoin is going to perform very badly.
Only users that are happy with the fee level will continue to use it. And on the other hand if you set a fee that is fine with all users, a lot of miners will quit. This is why Bitcoin has the system it has and any excuses about "unknown variables" are just stupid and implies a low understanding of economics.
How easy the fee system is for the user depends on how the client is done and how it explains the whole thing to the user. Currently the Bitcoin client is still in its infancy and a regular user can't understand the whole complexity of the fee system but when the issue actually becomes relevant I'm quite sure the Bitcoin end-user tools are on another level. But for Solidcoin there is no choice other than to forget about the fixed fees or become, in the future, inferior to Bitcoin on one major attribute.
Firstly, people are paying $40 fees at the moment to wire stuff around the world. Them paying a cent to transfer any amount within minutes to the other side of the world isn't going to be a problem. The "slow chain" that comes out with the no fee will be competing against the fastest transaction speeds in the world with SolidCoin. If anything it is Bitcoin's variable fees which increase due to size of transaction that are more like socialism. The cost to transport 0.01KB vs 0.1KB is miniscule in reality yet big in BTC. Please understand that the fees will be balanced appropriately between the need of the network to remain super fast and the need of the users to pay a low amount for that privilege. If you believe FreeSlowCoin is going to take off then by all means start it up and test it out. |
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Solidcoin is a fine fork but the fixed fees part is a BIG mistake. That makes me believe that the founder doesn't really understand Bitcoin or the economic theory behind it at all. The whole point of "unknown", "variable" fees is that the market decides what the fees are and more importantly, the user decides how fast he wants the transfer to go through.
Of course this whole issue has pretty much no relevance in Bitcoin or Solidcoin at this stage, but in the future it is one critical attribute. I like Solidcoin but I think this attribute will ruin it in the long run compared to Bitcoin. The fees part is perfect in Bitcoin, change it back if possible.
Considering there is already a minimum fee in the Bitcoin client I'm not sure what you mean in the latter part. SolidCoin's fee's aren't fixed to 0.01 forever. They are merely fixed to a value at a specific time, something which is reasonable for miners yet still very low for people conducting transactions. It will be lowered when appropriate, the new SolidCoin api extends a function so that developers can query the fee and know it in advance. This is extremely important. Currently every time you want to send funds in Bitcoin you could get a different fee amount applied, automatically with no say from the developer. It is the people that think unknown and variable fees are good , and who support clients which slosh the remainder as a fee that I think don't understand what people actually desire. They desire to know the cost of something prior to doing something rather than getting the bill in the mail after. |
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I'm talking about the protocol. You know, that thing that's actually kind of difficult to change once a blockchain gets established? What have you done that can't just be released as a modified client for the Bitcoin blockchain? By my count: - Difficulty algorithm aims for 3 minute blocks instead of 10 minute blocks. Achieved by changing one constant. Of questionable merit, due to scalability concerns.
- Difficulty retargets more often. Achieved by changing one constant. Essential for an underdog blockchain to survive, but not really relevant for Bitcoin.
- Difficulty increases limited to +10% per retarget. Achieved by changing one constant. Essentially an extra subsidy to miners, not relevant for Bitcoin.
- Block reward changed from 50 to 32. Achieved by changing one constant. Irrelevant except for the psychological factor, see also: Ixcoin.
Any other PROTOCOL changes that I missed? If not, then are these really supposed to be your grand innovations that we're all expected to switch blockchains for? For a start many of those things if you look in the code aren't a "constant". I can tell you haven't looked at the code because you would see there is 3 bands of increase, 2%, 6% and 10%. So already you're coming from a ridiculously ignorant position. Secondly the majority of the Bitcoin procotol works well, so the majority of the the protocol needs little changing in my mind, but when it comes to the important things I did change them, as small as they may be. They make SolidCoin a resilient network, BETTER than Bitcoin. This isn't subjective. Thirdly if you think all that Bitcoin is about is the protocol you probably share the same characteristics as many of the developers, most with their heads in the sand. Where is the ease of use to get grandma using it? Where are the tools to help developers make secure sites so that MyBitcoin.com's aren't happening every second week. Where is the education of the people who are now losing money for others through careless mistakes? Where are the optimizations to the most commonly called APIs? We have sites going up and down like a yoyo as they try to balance a broken program. Since I took the Bitcoin source and made SolidCoin there have been "3 commits" to Bitcoin in a week and a half. None adding or fixing anything. Meanwhile hundreds of lines have been added to SolidCoin, 40 or so bugs have been fixed and the network is capable of defending itself against a variety of scenarios Bitcoin cannot. So carry on with your ignorant thoughts if you want to continue coming across as a fool. |
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