As you may be aware, Ixcoin is an experiment to see what will happen when no more coins are minted.
Unfortunately it is a "sudden death" experiment: Ixcoin will go on minting 96 coins per block until, one day in the not so far away future, suddenly there will be no coins minted per block.
That is maybe a little more radical than really necessary since most coins taper off their minting, so that by the time there is no minting at all the number of coins minted has declined over time.
Ixcoin, being a long-established merged-mined coin, has a difficulty that is quite respectable as alt-coin difficulties go, so it would be a pity if the sudden death of minting caused merged mining pools to drop it or miners who merged-mine privately to drop it from their merge.
So it would maybe be a nice idea to try to get some transaction volume going on the coin before minting stops.
The hope would be that if there is some reasonable volume of transactions there will be a corresponding reasonable quantity of transaction fees to entice miners into continuing to include Ixcoin in their merges.
Thus the thought has occurred to me that maybe the "
CPU mining" concept could be of some use in this matter.
Hitherto the idea had been that that kind of "
CPU mining" would typically be used as a means of distributing coins that either avoided the use of a blockchain (due to the huge expense/security problems that blockchains involve) or secured their blockchain by some other means. Maybe Ixcoin could be used as an example of a blockchain that is secured by some other means?
In other words, since the Ixcoin blockchain is already secured by means of merged SHA256-based mining, it could serve as a blockchain for the proposed type of "
CPU mining" provided that some actual Ixcoins were available for such "
CPU mining" to distribute.
The difference between using this kind of "
CPU mining" for a new type of coin and using it for an already established coin such as Ixcoin lies, of course, in the fact that Ixcoin has already distributed a lot of its coins and its miners rightfully expect that the remaining coins it will mint up until the sudden death of minting will be distributed to them as usual.
Thus in order for this kind of "
CPU mining" to work with Ixcoin, it would be necessary that Ixcoins somehow be available for this proposed kind of "mining" to distribute. That basically means that "mining" operations of the proposed kind are going to need "capital investment" of Ixcoins. That is, a capital sum of Ixcoins that can hopefully be used to establish steady streams of transactions on the Ixcoin blockchain. (As it would be better to use the "capital" to set up sustainable flows than to just spend it directly on transaction fees until it has all een consumed by transaction fees.)
This thus leads to the idea of sustainable "
CPU mining" businesses that are able to sustainably conduct and attract fee-paying transactions on the Ixcoin blockchain.
Which in turn leads naturally enough to the idea that a business, in order to be sustainable, ultimately requires customers to "do business with".
Research, experiment and in the field practice of this concept of "
CPU mining" so far has tended to lead to designs in which the server expenses are covered by annual account fees; usually these annual fees, the cost to participants of one account on the server, is about one BiTCoin per year. Annual fees have been found to be preferable over using shorter periods not only because of the administrative/book-keeping costs of subscriptions and the renewal of subscriptions increase the faster people have to renew but also because longer minimum subscription periods favour long term participants over "quitters", "tire-kickers" and such and might even also discourage "griefers" from subscribing on impulse just to "grief" other participants.
This Ixcoin proposal though differs from previous work in this field in that Ixcoins are not proposing to distribute "newly minted" coins in this way. With Ixcoin we do not have some vast number of coins being minted that we want or need to distribute. On the contrary, with Ixcoin the minting is going to die a sudden death in the not too distant future. So one may question whether the trivial subscription fees other deployments of "
CPU mining" are using would suffice in the case of Ixcoin, by considering whether just those subscription fees alone could possibly provide enough Ixcoins to enable the project to generate enough on the blockchain transaction fees to keep SHA256 miners merged-mining Ixcoins.
Would it be useful to charge much higher subscription fees for accounts on the server than other deployments of this kind of "
CPU mining" have thus far been charging, in order to generate more income in Ixcoins?
Or would it be better to incorporate some kind of "capital investment" scheme(s) in addition to subscription fees in order to come up with "enough" Ixcoins?
-MarkM-
