[ANN][XEL] Elastic Project - The Decentralized Supercomputer

[jeffthebaker]

I bought into XEL before the disclaimer that "THESE ARE DONATIONS ONLY" were put on the ICO page, as well as the restrictions from US based individuals from "donating" (I am from US). Should I be concerned?

altcoins are high risk investments I think you are not aware of this. 100% loss is not unlikely.
Having this mindset, I am not concerned at all about this great project

Oh believe me, I understand how altcoin investing works. I am sure I have a broader experience with altcoin investing than you.

With that being said, my concern lies in disclaimers and restrictions being added to the ICO campaign AFTER I made my purchase.

It I remember correctly, the original Elastic project was abandoned at some point (at a point where the ICO already started) and Lannister took over. Don't ask me how this all happened exactly, I didn't follow Elastics development closely at that point.
I agree that there is a point of concern which could potentially need some solving, but as there is no real dev team, "someone" would have to come up with a solution and the community would have to vote on it (which is possible via the voting system used before).

Okay gotcha, that makes sense. I just threw a bit of BTC in without really doing much research. Good to know there are still people working on getting XEL to mainnet, however.

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[ttookk]

Why is it so bad to have the network mine on one job at a time? A Job gets processed by the whole network, then the next, then the next? If we either set a fixed PoW reward, or we could implement a function for miners to reject a job, and if enough miners reject a job, it gets terminated, I don't see that much of a problem. I mean, if we have a fifth of the network each working on five different jobs, or if those five jobs get worked on one after another is in a general sense not important, is it? If we want job authors with big funds to "cut line", maybe they can buy a premium spot in the line by having higher PoW rewards?

That was my suggestion as well the other day.  I suggested we rotate through the work packages each block.  Keep in mind with Elastic, any miner can mine any package they want at any time to get bounties.  We are just discussing POW rewards.  I still feel the reality of this is that if an author really wants miners to work on their package, they will set the bounty accordingly and this POW discussion is moot.  POW really just needs to cover the electricity, Bounties are what you really want.

Edit: As I've said before, If I was mining I'd probably go after jobs with the best bounties and turn off POW on my miner altogether.

Your thought was more about a rotation system, though, right? Where, wenn for example there are three jobs, the order would be block from 1, then 2, then 3, then 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,… right? At least I thought it was meant that way.
I'm thinking of a different idea:

Every X blocks there is a fixed number of PoW jobs that can be used, let's say 1,2,3,4,5.

Job authors can bid on those spots, as if they were in an auction(although I'm not sure whether readjusting of bids wouldn't be too complicated or necessary, so it wouldn't be a "real" auction, just that whoever paid most, "wins"). The one who pays the most (as in PoW reward per block) gets the first spot, second and so on. The auction ends at a certain block and the resulting number and order of jobs is fixed. If you want a premium spot in the next round, you'll have to pay for it.

Obviously, this idea still has flaws, here are the ones I see with my underfed brain at the moment:

You could fuck the whole network, by sneaking in a bid with a lot of work for a very low reward. Most miners would turn their machines elsewhere, the network would stall even more, deadly spiral. The most obvious solution would be to have a minimum award per block (which we would probably have anyway), but that would vary depending on XELs worth. Another solution could be to have a minimum price based on the average price submitted, as in jobs with a PoW reward that's lower than 2/3 of the prices already submitted are denied. Problem would be that it would be either possible to kick out reasonably priced submissions by setting a ridiculously high price, or, if previous submissions can't be denied, to get at least some jobs at minimum prizing.

How exactly do you correlate PoS blocklength and -time to nuber and complexity of PoW packages? Since their blocktime isn't fixed, you can't really determine the number of possible spot beforehand, can you? You could probably "sell" a fixed number of PoW packages and auction off the new ones, once this group of work packages starts do be mined.
And what happens if miners work on jobs that are very fas along in the qeue? Once it's their time, they'd have a bunch of packages ready to throw on the market, unless the hash of the previously mined block needs to be included somehow. This however might divert computing power from the network, wouldn't it?

Still, I like the auction idea and I think having one job being worked at at a time(whether until the job is done or in a rotation system) is the way to go.

Crazy idea time: you might even fork XEL a couple of times and have XEL1, XEL2 and XEL3, this way, you could still work on different jobs at the same time. But that is obviously neither here nor there


I forgot some stuff I thought about, because I'm too hungry to think dtraight at the moment, but that's about it.

Where is Hunterminercrafter by the way? Haven't read from him for quite some time…

[coralreefer]

Your thought was more about a rotation system, though, right? Where, wenn for example there are three jobs, the order would be block from 1, then 2, then 3, then 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,… right? At least I thought it was meant that way.
I'm thinking of a different idea:

Every X blocks there is a fixed number of PoW jobs that can be used, let's say 1,2,3,4,5.

Job authors can bid on those spots, as if they were in an auction(although I'm not sure whether readjusting of bids wouldn't be too complicated or necessary, so it wouldn't be a "real" auction, just that whoever paid most, "wins"). The one who pays the most (as in PoW reward per block) gets the first spot, second and so on. The auction ends at a certain block and the resulting number and order of jobs is fixed. If you want a premium spot in the next round, you'll have to pay for it.

Yes, my suggestion was a rotation, and as you pointed out, there are a lot of ways to accomplish a similar scheme...but, either way, there would only be one job per block eligible for for POW rewards and that sets the global difficulty.

But in your suggestion you pointed out a main issue EK is struggling with right now.  First, even though we call this POW it has nothing to do with moving the blockchain like a traditional coin, only POS does that.  It's simply proof that the miner is actually working to solve on of the available bounties.  And also unlike other coins, these jobs don't have a fixed complexity (i.e. bitcoin is always sha256d).  In elastic you could have a job that is very complex...miners only getting 1 Evals/sec which suddenly get ends, now all of them jump over to a super simple job that runs at 1M Evals/s...all within the same block.  This is very difficult to account for as now the network is now going to get flooded with POW submissions until the retargetting takes place.  Remember this all happens between blocks where in a traditional coin, the retargetting is done after the block is solved.

The issue we are encountering is probably more similar to what multi-algo coins like Myriad encounter, but still they only juggle 4 algos...we have to juggle an infinite # of possible algos.

But I think we just need to pick any direction at this point and move forward.  I personally like having only one package eligible for POW per block (regardless of how you pick which one is the eligible one), but I'm not the one coding that piece, so I'll be happy with whatever the group decides.

[ttookk]

Your thought was more about a rotation system, though, right? Where, wenn for example there are three jobs, the order would be block from 1, then 2, then 3, then 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,… right? At least I thought it was meant that way.
I'm thinking of a different idea:

Every X blocks there is a fixed number of PoW jobs that can be used, let's say 1,2,3,4,5.

Job authors can bid on those spots, as if they were in an auction(although I'm not sure whether readjusting of bids wouldn't be too complicated or necessary, so it wouldn't be a "real" auction, just that whoever paid most, "wins"). The one who pays the most (as in PoW reward per block) gets the first spot, second and so on. The auction ends at a certain block and the resulting number and order of jobs is fixed. If you want a premium spot in the next round, you'll have to pay for it.

Yes, my suggestion was a rotation, and as you pointed out, there are a lot of ways to accomplish a similar scheme...but, either way, there would only be one job per block eligible for for POW rewards and that sets the global difficulty.

But in your suggestion you pointed out a main issue EK is struggling with right now.  First, even though we call this POW it has nothing to do with moving the blockchain like a traditional coin, only POS does that.  It's simply proof that the miner is actually working to solve on of the available bounties.  And also unlike other coins, these jobs don't have a fixed complexity (i.e. bitcoin is always sha256d).  In elastic you could have a job that is very complex...miners only getting 1 Evals/sec which suddenly get ends, now all of them jump over to a super simple job that runs at 1M Evals/s...all within the same block.  This is very difficult to account for as now the network is now going to get flooded with POW submissions until the retargetting takes place.  Remember this all happens between blocks where in a traditional coin, the retargetting is done after the block is solved.

The issue we are encountering is probably more similar to what multi-algo coins like Myriad encounter, but still they only juggle 4 algos...we have to juggle an infinite # of possible algos.

But I think we just need to pick any direction at this point and move forward.  I personally like having only one package illegible for POW per block (regardless of how you pick which one is the eligible one), but I'm not the one coding that piece, so I'll be happy with whatever the group decides.

Hmm, yes, you point out valid things I didn't think of. Still, wouldn't a rotation system make matters even worse? I mean, if you work at one job after another, you could use the difficulty retargetting system proposed by E-K and when the job is done, you start the next one, do the retargetting, work the job and so on. In a rotation system, the difficulty would change all the time, wouldn't it?
Maybe I just don't get it, though…

Anyway, I think it's safe to say that a "one job at a time" system would make a lot of things easier, while the advantages of an "all in" system don't look that big to me.

[coralreefer]

Hmm, yes, you point out valid things I didn't think of. Still, wouldn't a rotation system make matters even worse? I mean, if you work at one job after another, you could use the difficulty retargetting system proposed by E-K and when the job is done, you start the next one, do the retargetting, work the job and so on. In a rotation system, the difficulty would change all the time, wouldn't it?
Maybe I just don't get it, though…

Anyway, I think it's safe to say that a "one job at a time" system would make a lot of things easier, while the advantages of an "all in" system don't look that big to me.

I think "one job at a time" simplifies retargetting for 2 reasons.  1) The initial target for the job would be that last target this job had...it wouldn't start from where the job that just ended left off.  2) It wouldn't be as likely (at least I don't see any incentive to do so) for the authors to try to "game the system" or "sabotage" other jobs by messing with the POW, where in the current design I believe this is a concern (i.e. create "dummy" jobs to draw miners away from other jobs...the elastic version of ddos'ing)

[ttookk]

Hmm, yes, you point out valid things I didn't think of. Still, wouldn't a rotation system make matters even worse? I mean, if you work at one job after another, you could use the difficulty retargetting system proposed by E-K and when the job is done, you start the next one, do the retargetting, work the job and so on. In a rotation system, the difficulty would change all the time, wouldn't it?
Maybe I just don't get it, though…

Anyway, I think it's safe to say that a "one job at a time" system would make a lot of things easier, while the advantages of an "all in" system don't look that big to me.

I think "one job at a time" simplifies retargetting for 2 reasons.  1) The initial target for the job would be that last target this job had...it wouldn't start from where the job that just ended left off.  2) It wouldn't be as likely (at least I don't see any incentive to do so) for the authors to try to "game the system" or "sabotage" other jobs by messing with the POW, where in the current design I believe this is a concern (i.e. create "dummy" jobs to draw miners away from other jobs...the elastic version of ddos'ing)

But couldn't you create a job that takes ages and drive off other job authors? Or otherwise stall the PoW jobs? That could be an attack vector – not even an attack vector, and I think I understand why parallel jobs or a rotation system would be desirable now: There may be jobs that don't really have a "bottom" and that could go on really long. You'd have to have some mechanism to cap job size, otherwise job authors might lose interest, once a really big job comes along and occupies the system for a long time.
But if you'd cap the "job size" somehow, it would be kind of like a "big" rotation system, since the job author could resubmit the job.
But what would be a "long time"? Are we talking about minutes, hours, days?

[coralreefer]

But couldn't you create a job that takes ages and drive off other job authors? Or otherwise stall the PoW jobs? That could be an attack vector – not even an attack vector, and I think I understand why parallel jobs or a rotation system would be desirable now: There may be jobs that don't really have a "bottom" and that could go on really long. You'd have to have some mechanism to cap job size, otherwise job authors might lose interest, once a really big job comes along and occupies the system for a long time.
But if you'd cap the "job size" somehow, it would be kind of like a "big" rotation system, since the job author could resubmit the job.
But what would be a "long time"? Are we talking about minutes, hours, days?

Not sure.  Just keep in mind...any miner can mine any job they want any time.  There won't ever be a restriction on this.  All we are debating are POW rewards...which I've always said, I don't think are going to be too relevant if this takes off.  Nothing stops you from mining any job you feel like.

Edit:  Anyway, I've rambled on about this long enough.  As EK said, it's time for the community to make a decision by Sunday.  I'll modify the miner I posted for whatever approach we take.  I'll just be happy if we can move past this.

[wwdz99]

It seems to me Evil-Knievel making everything to help the project. I've never heard about lannistor. It's not good really.

Well, many people here are doing what they can do make this project happen, take a look at hunterminercrafter for all the security research, at ttookk for all his ideas, at coralreefer for the highly efficient C miner, at me for all the wallet and backend work.

We are working our asses off. I for example am spending day (and sometimes night) to work on this while I could as well just go ahead and find some nice lovely daytime job. We have no contract here. I think it's unfair to say that (which of course includes us all) this is "not good"  .

Well done.

[boltz]

Is there anyway to get in posesion of my coins ? Sorry i don't have enough time to follow anymore but i love u guys .

[ttookk]

But couldn't you create a job that takes ages and drive off other job authors? Or otherwise stall the PoW jobs? That could be an attack vector – not even an attack vector, and I think I understand why parallel jobs or a rotation system would be desirable now: There may be jobs that don't really have a "bottom" and that could go on really long. You'd have to have some mechanism to cap job size, otherwise job authors might lose interest, once a really big job comes along and occupies the system for a long time.
But if you'd cap the "job size" somehow, it would be kind of like a "big" rotation system, since the job author could resubmit the job.
But what would be a "long time"? Are we talking about minutes, hours, days?

Not sure.  Just keep in mind...any miner can mine any job they want any time.  There won't ever be a restriction on this.  All we are debating are POW rewards...which I've always said, I don't think are going to be too relevant if this takes off.  Nothing stops you from mining any job you feel like.

Edit:  Anyway, I've rambled on about this long enough.  As EK said, it's time for the community to make a decision by Sunday.  I'll modify the miner I posted for whatever approach we take.  I'll just be happy if we can move past this.

So what you are saying is, we could create a PoW reward order, but not a working on job order. Still looks ok, doesn't it? But what would happen is a job in qeue gets finished before it is its turn? The PoW block must be mined anyway, because they are payment to get a spot on the list, right?

How do we let the community decide? Vote? Or by "general positive feeling towards a solution displayed in this thread"?
I would like to hear E-Ks opinion on having an order, too.

Is there anyway to get in posesion of my coins ? Sorry i don't have enough time to follow anymore but i love u guys .

No, not yet. You can claim them when the mainnet starts and there is no ETA on that yet.
Is there a really easy way to create an email signup system? If yes, somone(or I…) could create one, people can sign up and it would be only used to say "mainnet starts in X days". Or maybe "we have this decision and want you to vote on it", too. Although I wouldn't want to let it become a newsletter…

[HmmMAA]

It seems to me Evil-Knievel making everything to help the project. I've never heard about lannistor. It's not good really.

Well, many people here are doing what they can do make this project happen, take a look at hunterminercrafter for all the security research, at ttookk for all his ideas, at coralreefer for the highly efficient C miner, at me for all the wallet and backend work.

We are working our asses off. I for example am spending day (and sometimes night) to work on this while I could as well just go ahead and find some nice lovely daytime job. We have no contract here. I think it's unfair to say that (which of course includes us all) this is "not good"  .

I have to say that i really appreciate your contribution to this project guys . I cannot contribute as i'm limited by the language barrier and tech knowledge . Watching closely this thread and i hope you will make it till the end .
By the way , where is hunterminercrafter ? Haven't seen him posting for quite a time .

Edit . I'm not sure if it is mentioned by ttookk or coralreefer , every work should be "weighted" , not sure how - and if - this can be done . It should not only be based by reward but also by the amount of work that has to be done .

[ttookk]

(…)

Edit . I'm not sure if it is mentioned by ttookk or coralreefer , every work should be "weighted" , not sure how - and if - this can be done . It should not only be based by reward but also by the amount of work that has to be done .

I am not sure whether there is a way to objectively weight a work before it is executed in a similar way as assessing the difficulty of a regular PoW job, but in case the job is considered undervalued, miners won't work on it, leading to the job author adjusting the price (or waiting really long for execution). This would be a kind of "weighting" and we would need this kind of weighting anyway, because with XELs worth changing, the reward has to change, too. Otherwise, the Elastic network runs the risk of becoming unprofitable, if the worth of its tokens drops too much.

[wwdz99]

Is there anyway to get in posesion of my coins ? Sorry i don't have enough time to follow anymore but i love u guys .

Hi man,good things worth waiting.

[ttookk]

(…)

Edit . I'm not sure if it is mentioned by ttookk or coralreefer , every work should be "weighted" , not sure how - and if - this can be done . It should not only be based by reward but also by the amount of work that has to be done .

I am not sure whether there is a way to objectively weight a work before it is executed in a similar way as assessing the difficulty of a regular PoW job, but in case the job is considered undervalued, miners won't work on it, leading to the job author adjusting the price (or waiting really long for execution). This would be a kind of "weighting" and we would need this kind of weighting anyway, because with XELs worth changing, the reward has to change, too. Otherwise, the Elastic network runs the risk of becoming unprofitable, if the worth of its tokens drops too much.

…Thinking about it a little more, jobs that need bruteforcing can be assessed quite easily. That can be done by any instance on the network, but in the end, I think this is the miners job to figure it out, whether they are willing to work on a job for the reward offered. It may be handy to have a warning label in the client, warning a job author that the reward is under a certain threshold, but since this threshold could vary greatly, I don't see much use in an "official" weighting.

[Evil-Knievel]

(…)

Edit . I'm not sure if it is mentioned by ttookk or coralreefer , every work should be "weighted" , not sure how - and if - this can be done . It should not only be based by reward but also by the amount of work that has to be done .

I am not sure whether there is a way to objectively weight a work before it is executed in a similar way as assessing the difficulty of a regular PoW job, but in case the job is considered undervalued, miners won't work on it, leading to the job author adjusting the price (or waiting really long for execution). This would be a kind of "weighting" and we would need this kind of weighting anyway, because with XELs worth changing, the reward has to change, too. Otherwise, the Elastic network runs the risk of becoming unprofitable, if the worth of its tokens drops too much.

Sorry ttookk, I had the flu and was pretty knocked out in the last 3 days.
I will catch up with all posts now,
but here is a silly idea that I got while spending days in the bed:

What if we just use the minimum target value over the last X jobs, and use a very fast retargeting mechanism to quickly adapt to a "good" value per job.
There is some natural lower bound in execution time (due to the hashing and pseudorandom number generation overhead) and most jobs (if not totally exaggerated) will be close to that execution value. So in most cases this could be a good first estimate. More complex jobs would be estimated wrong (and hence receive the full 20pow/sec limit) but only for a short time until the fast retargeting kicks in.

Not sure if this is usable? At least there wont be any "too optimistic" estimations causing the difficulty to be too high for the job to receive any PoW.

[Riseman]

You guys are doing great in terms of development. Thanks for the hard work.

I believe there were still some 30% or so XEL left when the donation period ended. Instead of distributing those unsold XELs to the donators (prorated) why dont we put them up for dev bounty? i.e. we can bring in some really talented devs to work full-time on XEL for those unsold coins. That will speed up the development. I dont see why anyone would have any objection to such proposal. 

Isn't that what the donated BTC are for?

[ttookk]

You guys are doing great in terms of development. Thanks for the hard work.

I believe there were still some 30% or so XEL left when the donation period ended. Instead of distributing those unsold XELs to the donators (prorated) why dont we put them up for dev bounty? i.e. we can bring in some really talented devs to work full-time on XEL for those unsold coins. That will speed up the development. I dont see why anyone would have any objection to such proposal.  

Isn't that what the donated BTC are for?

Indeed they are. Plus, 30% are a lot in the hands of what will be a small group of people. I don't like the idea very much.

@Evil-Knievel: sorry to hear about the flu, get well soon! You idea proposed sounds good, as far as I understand it. How do you feel towards the "one PoW job at a time" discussion?

[ImI]

You guys are doing great in terms of development. Thanks for the hard work.

I believe there were still some 30% or so XEL left when the donation period ended. Instead of distributing those unsold XELs to the donators (prorated) why dont we put them up for dev bounty? i.e. we can bring in some really talented devs to work full-time on XEL for those unsold coins. That will speed up the development. I dont see why anyone would have any objection to such proposal.  

not going to happen as it would be a breach of contract. but if funds are needed we can easily put up some voluntary fund that gets BTC/XEL.

[coralreefer]

Isn't that what the donated BTC are for?

I'm not sure what the plan is for the BTC, but it doesn't appear to be for dev bounties.  I spent 2 months working on my miner for XEL and have tried to contact Lannister for several weeks asking about a bounties for the miner with no response.  Not really much incentive to keep working on it at this point.

[Lannister]

Isn't that what the donated BTC are for?

I'm not sure what the plan is for the BTC, but it doesn't appear to be for dev bounties.  I spent 2 months working on my miner for XEL and have tried to contact Lannister for several weeks asking about a bounties for the miner with no response.  Not really much incentive to keep working on it at this point.

What's good coralreefer?

On my system, bitmessage, from time to time, does not work reliably for some reason. And it just so happens, today is such time. This is, needless to say, rather unpleasant. However, I am following this thread with great interest and it's especially fascinating to see the progress you all made so far. It goes without saying that you play a key role here and your work is badass. I will reward you handsomely later today and throw some BTC your way. Is your BTC address still correct? And keep in mind that you are solely responsible for paying the appropriate income taxes.

For a few months now I am struggling with serious health issues. Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you've had a bunch of bad days and there's different ways you can deal with it. I know for my personal well-being and sense of balance, finding some work that takes me away from my computer would be a good thing, but I do love overseeing this project as it progresses and I will stay with you till the end.