KeyStash

ValueVault

CentIron

CashStick

The simulator is down, is that on purpose?

I just got back from out of town and was checking in on a few things, if you are working on it then best of luck and I'll wait patiently.

Hmmm, I hadn't though of doing a time limited offer like that. Nice idea.

I saw this and got to thinking:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/rare-gold-coin-dropped-in_n_2205731.html?utm_hp_ref=good-news

Maybe like those giving rare coins we can share our own tokens of value with those in need.

I've done some consulting work for SA in the past, and this time of year even the IT folks were getting out to help. In case you did not know, they ARE a Christian church as well as an outreach organization, but they offer their services pretty broadly. If you feel like supporting their cause with a gift of BitCoins in a kettle, I'm sure they will figure out what to do with them, at least to convert them.

Replying from mobile, so no elaborate quoting.

On timing, I think it is true that you do not care about absolute time, you do care about approximate time of intervals however. With the transaction based timing mechanism you described I believe that block time would get shorter and shorter as the network was busier, not a steady flow. Setting and trying to maintain a regular block interval is important, IMHO, and should be a mechanism that is as far from being manipulated as possible.

I also think asking or encouraging folks to keep their coins online is a mistake. Even if everyone tries, there will be plenty of times that less than 50% of coins are offline, especially if folks want to protect them. So if the currency is successful the majority will disappear.

Simpler is better, this last suggestion is so complex it will take a lot of testing to check every possible angle.

This is a very small group right now, I suggest staying here and starting tangent threads for larger conversations. This allows a wider audience to see what we are doing, and hopefully get involved.

Tor is a non-starter for me. I'm involved in a few small ventures that could later be cast in a nefarious light if I had a Tor capability in my datacenter. Some involve confidentiality clauses in contracts, etc. If I ever have a legitamate reason to setup Tor I'll have to do so in an isolated network somewhere.

Plus there is the guy who was just busted for kiddy porn in Austria for operating an exit node.

I think Tor is cool for folks who need it, but for me the costs of Tor outweigh the benefits.

OK, I have finished the thread, that took a while (because there is a lot of info here, thanks guys)

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The point of PoW in PPC is as a Clock, and an initial coin minter. Without PoW PPC does not know when 10 minutes has elapsed. Checkpoints are there to ensure that nobody does a double-spend before the network gets big enough to defend itself, as well as provide a clock of last resort (IIRC) I believe that sunny-king did mention removing check-pointing in and upcoming build. (note, I'm not reading the code, using my memory of descriptions)

The Clock aspect of PoW makes it almost impossible to move away from, or at least replace. Using an external timeserver would open up all sorts of network vulnerabilities and attacks, same with checkpoint servers, or any other centralized mechanism.

Why not do merged mining with BitCoin for the PoW, so you can keep the fork "pure" and focused on the Proof of Stake aspects?

Initial coin minting needs to be heavily deflationary too, in my opinion, that is another issue I have with PPC. No matter how far I game it out, it keeps looking like mining will ALWAYS be FAR more lucrative than holding, and since transaction fees are destroyed there is no incentive to mine PoW if we tried to just make the existing coin deflationary.

I guess my wish list is:
- Deflationary initial coin distribution that is...
- ... replaced by transaction fees over time, but... 
- ... no hard limit on coins since PoS will continue forever.
- Merged Mining with BitCoin for PoW
- Clear direction with milestones,
- and much better communication.

Cabin made a good point on transaction fees, without fees being shared with miners, how do we incent folks to include some transactions over others. We have to assume that we might get more transactions than we can handle at some point and will need to prioritize...


I Disagree with this one, the only benefit from "stake" should be during holding. If you elect to stop holding and move it, it's income stops.
I like the declining aggregate interest idea, but it would just cause folks to move coins around on a quarterly or annual basis to optimize rewards. This would however essentially require that ALL coins be stored online, or come online regularly, so it might be an overall security disadvantage. I think if you bring your wallet back online after 1 year, you should be able to get 1 year of interest, unless this is Proof of Online Stake (POS?) in which case we should actually be checking availability of coins or something. (I think)

Nice feature list, looks like my wish list pretty much.

The TH value troubles me because you are locking in the difficulty in the parameters, but then the network size is being coded in instead of derived from the difficulty or retrieved from a current data source. It's an inconsistency that bugs me, I guess.

Thanks for the update!

I see what you did there...

Thanks dude!

Thanks Aido!

I look forward to more configuration options in the registry (preferences file for you Linux pukes )

edit: have you uploaded this build yet? your github page only has one from 7 days ago...

more feedback...

I like the new chart, except that the balance field is wrapping for me. can you make the window wider, or variable width so I can see the rows without wrapping? I'd rather NOT have a horizontal scroll bar on the window, if we need on it should be on the page IMHO.

numbers are coming out better, matching up with a similar sheet I have in excel, no more 2Bn difficulty issues.


I noticed that the TH value is still hard coded in the script, any chance of pulling that from somewhere? I'm also commenting out your drop prediction since I'm seeing an increase rather than a decrease.

The big issue I ran into was when I started working on a more complex model. If you have too many lines of script it does not take it due to the URL being too long. Are there other options besides embedding the whole script?

Keep it coming, I like this thing.

Block Party

I wish I could see the look on your face when you realize that the difficulty changes and it is likely to be over 100,000,000 by the end of 2013, maybe as high as 250,000,000.

You better factor in all the folks that preordered from BFL back in June, July, August, September and October that will be getting their units before you, call it 35,000,000 difficulty

2% monthly difficulty growth is a joke, we will see something in the 10% range more likely.

Good news is that you should not lose money and can make some at the current BTC rate, and if the rate keeps going up you still have a chance to make some good money, but I would not count on more than 30-100% profit on your investment in the first year (additional 10-20% after year 1, retire after it stops making more money than electricity it burns)

Do some more research, you are in a good place with lots of info scattered around, but if you just believe the calculators you are going to lose your ass.

I think he meant me, I've gotten .00836 BTC so far!

Glad I could live up to my nickname.

That's part of it, I expect a couple price drops and capacity improved models to show up during the year. the 3x model is one with lots of worst cases in it, but if I can make a profit there...

$:BTC Ratio
BFL Chip Numbers
BFL Planned Upgrades

The biggest factor I included that Ploo didn't is the BTC:$ ratio. I'm assuming that BTC value at the end of 2013 will be at least $25-50, and might be as high as 100. The $100 scenario is the one that drives that model, so 2.4PH is possible. BFL alone is planning on selling a MINIMUM of 750TH this coming year from their first chip run alone, if they rev later in the year the total number of chips shipped by them could exceed 150k for at least 1.5PH of just for BFL. I'm guessing Tom will also have a second hardware generation and will ship 300-500TH, similar for Avalon and ASICMINER, 1/4 as much for DeepBit. This is mostly a supply-side model based on preorder numbers, announcements and estimates.

If the BTC value does not go up much, then it will be much less (like 1/10 to 1/3 of my worst case model) because we will be constrained on the demand side (like your model), but I don't see BTC NOT going up from here.

I've actually been revising my models today in light of the bASIC delay and a few other items, and I'm down to Difficulty 250M, Hashrate 1.8PH by 12/31/2013 now, but that kind of movement is typical that far out, the error bars are huge.

For your approval, the Story of Laughing Bear and the Half-Sized Reward, a children's tale.

There once was a person called Satoshi Nakamoto who invented a new kind of money called BitCoin.
BitCoin was new and small, but Satoshi knew that it could grow into something big and useful.
Satoshi invited all his friends to help him with this money as part of a big game.
Everyone who plays this game has a chance of winning BitCoins every time they play, and they could use computers to play lots and lots.
Satoshi's friends told their friends, and they told their friends, until there were tons of people with BitCoins.
And all these people playing the game made it harder and harder for others to cheat.

One of these friends was Laughing Bear, who started playing the BitCoin game with only a small computer.
One day while his computer was playing the game, it was playing and playing, and it WON!
LaughingBear was very excited because he had never won the game before.
When he looked at the block he found to win the game, Satoshi appeared in a poof of smoke.

"I have an important job for you Laughing Bear," said Satoshi, "I want you to help me with BitCoin."

Laughing Bear asked how he could help, since he liked the BitCoin game.

"Some money is worth less and less if you just keep it. Like ice slowly melting away," replied Satoshi.
I don't like that at all. I want money that grows, like a big tree.
The tree must stop growing new branches or one day risk falling over in a wind."

Laughing Bear thought about a tree going up and up and up into the sky, and then getting blown over by a little puff of wind.

"The same is true of BitCoins, if we have too many, they too will start melting away.
But we can move them around between people forever, without needing to create new coins, or ever melting away.
With no new coins, each coin will be able to buy more and more."

This made Laughing Bear ask, "I can see why the coins would be worth more and more. But if there are no more prizes, why would anyone play the BitCoin game?"

Satoshi then explained about how lots of people liked BitCoin so much, that they would pay for the prize when they used BitCoins.
"So everyone will pay a small fee that will be used for the prize," and showed Laughing Bear how he had received some new BitCoins in his prize, and some from other friends.
He also explained how every 4 years the prize is smaller, but will include some new coins for a long time.

"I understand," said Laughing Bear, "we need to keep making coins, but not too many coins. Over time I should get more from friends than new ones."

"Exactly," said Satoshi, "and there are 2 ways you can help.
First, make sure to keep playing the game to keep cheaters out.
The more the game is played, the less someone can cheat.
Second, use BitCoins to buy and sell things. The more that we use BitCoins, the more they are worth.
In much less than 4 years they will be worth twice as much, and then more and more."

With that Satoshi disappeared, leaving Laughing Bear with a half-sized reward, an extra-large fee, and a chuckle that would not stop.
Laughing Bear laughed all day, and all night, and it didn't stop until the next day, when he arrived at the Bank.

The End

Because LaughingBareBlock would be Sunblock formulated for nude beaches.

Congratulations LaughingBear!

You guys are assuming that the pool pays attention to TX fees and optimizes the block makeup.

I'm not so sure it does looking at the number of .0005 fee transactions in there. But there don't appear to be any "leftovers" in 210001, so maybe it was just coin age.

Can anyone confirm if Slush's Pool optimizes for TX fee or if this was just FIFO?

Go look at your database transaction logs to see who incremented their counter at the right time?

Just a thought.

(also to repeat it form the previous page, his name is luckybear laughingbear, there was a typo earlier (Edit: here too))

I'm thinking that the 100k chip order will last at least 4-6 months, maybe longer. We are only looking at 10-15k to cover the initial preorders that ship "though the end of the year" that cut off in September IIRC.

One of the latest tidbits that leaked from Josh was that Rev 1 (i.e. not this run, January or later) would potentially be packaged in ceramic, so there might be a 25-50% faster unit available from them within a few months. This is mixed news as early adopters will have to trade-up or resell their old unit to get the same speed, but it might or might not be worth it.

We will have Moore's law speed increases for a bit yet which is about 1.5x faster per year, as well as some catch-up that could get closer to modern processes. These are NOT the last ASICs to be produced or sold, unless bitcoin fails entirely, and soon.

I also did a rough model on log10, and it seems like the curve is too steep at the beginning, or the end depending on how many time periods you use. I'm assuming a period of large clearing batches (5k? 10k? chips/week) for backorders from mid-December (network impact date, not ship) to mid Feb. Then smaller batches once they catch up, in the hundreds of chips per week, maybe thousands if the +/- is still high.

This updates my current hypothesis:
I think BFL (and a lot of others) are making a solid bet on the long term value of bitcoin rising. We should be able to look forward to at least 50-100% price increase in 2013, maybe much, much more. Once the hockey-stick curve comes on BTC value BFL and others want to be all spun up and ready to sell into the consumer level ASIC wars that will result.

Right now we are modeling the supply side of the equations because our demand on ASIC has been starved for so long. We also have to remember to look at the demand side of the equation where more folks will rush to participate if the margins (or perceived margins by those bad at math) get too high.

So right now BFL (and others) are making some money, but when I can buy a terahash for under 200BTC, they get to say:


So, I think it's a bad idea to count out price changes, do your model at a few different price points for EoY with a linear model and see how it effects things.