Terracoin Difficulty Question

[modcom]

Is there a site like www.allchains.info for TRC difficulty??

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[Syke]

http://dustcoin.com/mining

[modcom]

http://dustcoin.com/mining

I know about dustcoin, but it doesn't show when the difficulty changes, date/time, or the next expected difficulty level. That's what I'm looking for.

[crazy_rabbit]

Is there a site like www.allchains.info for TRC difficulty??

I generally follow Coinotron and Vircurex as they have little boxes that show the current difficulty. Perhaps we could ask allchains to add TRC however.

[vpoolserver]

http://trc.vpool.us/stats

[Sunny King]

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

Someone please make a chart to trace back when this all started

Code:

height difficulty
96000  5001
96030  8254
96060  2671
96090 10580
96120  3830
96150  9622
96180  3270
96210  8391
96240  3029
96270  9203
96300  2330
96330  8029

[celkaris]

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

I'm affraid the total network hashrate is too low now, so this is still possible

Once over 700 - 800 Ghashes/s this "game" will probably be more difficult (requiring bigger hashrate to be significant enough)..

It looks like people are jumping from one currency to another, according to each chain difficulty / profitability.

I really think this - on the long-term - is not profitable for anyone, not the miner himself, nor the involved blockchains ...

[Sunny King]

Oh I forgot was it coinotron that implemented the auto mine most profitable altcoin or something? Is that the reason terracoin now behaves like this?

[celkaris]

Oh I forgot was it coinotron that implemented the auto mine most profitable altcoin or something? Is that the reason terracoin now behaves like this?

I read this coinotron feature was disabled a year ago.

New sites (dustcoin/...) pointing out the coins profitability probably helped increasing this behaviour, dunno

[mr_random]

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

Yeah unfortunately it looks like a failure of Terracoin that is being exploited.

Terracoin or 'Terriblecoin'... 

[crazy_rabbit]

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

Yeah unfortunately it looks like a failure of Terracoin that is being exploited.

Terracoin or 'Terriblecoin'... 

This is a positive feature that responds quickly and accurately to market forces. What sense does being stuck with some other miners difficulty make after they have left the chain? The real abuse of difficulty comes when someone with large hash power jumps on a chain like LTC or BTC where the retarget is measured in many days. For the first number of days their immense hash power gets to abuse the low difficulty and mine an extraordinary amount of coins. When the difficulty FINALLY gets around to adjusting, they jump off, leaving everyone else to suffer the higher difficulty for a long period of time while they wait around for it to retarget, when the larger miner jumps back on and abuses it for another stretch of time.

With TRC large miners get only a short window of opportunity to abuse low difficulty, and small miners only have to suffer a brief period of time after large miners jump off the chain.

It's more fair, more responsive and more egalitarian. Free market in action.

[Sunny King]

This is a positive feature that responds quickly and accurately to market forces. What sense does being stuck with some other miners difficulty make after they have left the chain? The real abuse of difficulty comes when someone with large hash power jumps on a chain like LTC or BTC where the retarget is measured in many days. For the first number of days their immense hash power gets to abuse the low difficulty and mine an extraordinary amount of coins. When the difficulty FINALLY gets around to adjusting, they jump off, leaving everyone else to suffer the higher difficulty for a long period of time while they wait around for it to retarget, when the larger miner jumps back on and abuses it for another stretch of time.

With TRC large miners get only a short window of opportunity to abuse low difficulty, and small miners only have to suffer a brief period of time after large miners jump off the chain.

It's more fair, more responsive and more egalitarian. Free market in action.

Wow okay rabbit I guess you are really a die-hard fan that has to defend every bug of terracoin as a feature. It's a short windows yeah but it comes every hour so if you add them up suddenly it's not so short any more. I am sure large miners can afford to tweak their programs to only mine terracoin every other 30 blocks, while the smaller miners suffer.

Maybe someone can start a pool to take advantage of this, just to show how ridiculous it is to claim this as a feature.

[crazy_rabbit]

This is a positive feature that responds quickly and accurately to market forces. What sense does being stuck with some other miners difficulty make after they have left the chain? The real abuse of difficulty comes when someone with large hash power jumps on a chain like LTC or BTC where the retarget is measured in many days. For the first number of days their immense hash power gets to abuse the low difficulty and mine an extraordinary amount of coins. When the difficulty FINALLY gets around to adjusting, they jump off, leaving everyone else to suffer the higher difficulty for a long period of time while they wait around for it to retarget, when the larger miner jumps back on and abuses it for another stretch of time.

With TRC large miners get only a short window of opportunity to abuse low difficulty, and small miners only have to suffer a brief period of time after large miners jump off the chain.

It's more fair, more responsive and more egalitarian. Free market in action.

Wow okay rabbit I guess you are really a die-hard fan that has to defend every bug of terracoin as a feature. It's a short windows yeah but it comes every hour so if you add them up suddenly it's not so short any more. I am sure large miners can afford to tweak their programs to only mine terracoin every other 30 blocks, while the smaller miners suffer.

Maybe someone can start a pool to take advantage of this, just to show how ridiculous it is to claim this as a feature.

Actually it's one of the things that really did attract me about TRC, no kidding. I'm a small miner myself and I was frustrated from the previous LTC rise when the difficulty went up significantly from some exceptionally large miners that came on board, but whom left as soon as the difficulty went up leaving us with a few days of frustratingly high Difficulty. I know I'm not alone in this, the BTC-E chat box had lots of small miners grumbling and watching litecoinpools retarget estimator, just waiting for it to go down again.

I'm not saying that you couldn't be right regarding having this exploited by a miner or pool that regularly jumped back and forth, although I think the effect is much more pronounced right now because the hash rate is relatively so low so relatively few large miners jumping on really makes big waves. When the rate is (hopefully) might higher and the number of miners much larger, I'm would hope that this effect won't be so pronounced.

That said, many of the big miners seem to be jumping on when the diff is low and profitability high. They in general seem to dump their coins pretty quickly, which adds more coins into circulation, which i also think is a good thing. It's more important to get coins into as many hands as possible at this stage of the game. Small miners are more likely to hoard (in my opinion) given the small number of coins we make. Large miners, even if only mining monetarily for the profit, are a helpful part of the economy. 

[Sunny King]

I'm not saying that you couldn't be right regarding having this exploited by a miner or pool that regularly jumped back and forth, although I think the effect is much more pronounced right now because the hash rate is relatively so low so relatively few large miners jumping on really makes big waves. When the rate is (hopefully) might higher and the number of miners much larger, I'm would hope that this effect won't be so pronounced.

When the hash rate was low hundreds I didn't notice this. Look rabbit, I think it is already being exploited by some big miners, that's why it's jumping 3x back and forth consistently. And there would be more of them joining the force. I highly doubt this problem is now going to go away by itself as there can only be more and more people catching onto this, including the medium and small miners, as the profit motivation is quite large.

Both ppcoin and devcoin adjust faster and smoother than litecoin, the extreme and naive approach of terracoin is not a better solution.

[tacotime]

Why is terracoin difficulty jumping around 3x back and forth? Anyone else see a pattern here? Looks like some big miners are exploiting the fast difficulty adjustment. I guess so much for the supposed feature 'miner jump resonance free'

Someone please make a chart to trace back when this all started

Code:

height difficulty
96000  5001
96030  8254
96060  2671
96090 10580
96120  3830
96150  9622
96180  3270
96210  8391
96240  3029
96270  9203
96300  2330
96330  8029

Was kind of waiting for this, I published that python exploit script a while ago and I figured someone would jump on it...

It's good to see that someone's put one hour of my hard work into use I guess.

[crazy_rabbit]

I'm not saying that you couldn't be right regarding having this exploited by a miner or pool that regularly jumped back and forth, although I think the effect is much more pronounced right now because the hash rate is relatively so low so relatively few large miners jumping on really makes big waves. When the rate is (hopefully) might higher and the number of miners much larger, I'm would hope that this effect won't be so pronounced.

When the hash rate was low hundreds I didn't notice this. Look rabbit, I think it is already being exploited by some big miners, that's why it's jumping 3x back and forth consistently. And there would be more of them joining the force. I highly doubt this problem is now going to go away by itself as there can only be more and more people catching onto this, including the medium and small miners, as the profit motivation is quite large.

Both ppcoin and devcoin adjust faster and smoother than litecoin, the extreme and naive approach of terracoin is not a better solution.

Lets assume that your right- that bigger miners are going to catch on to this and en mass start jumping on and off, and for theory sake, lets assume the difficulty jumps by 100X each time.

The worst that happens is that we would need to start taking into account the "average" difficulty when making mining decisions which would show a much higher rate. We could also add a few metrics to our understanding of coins- oscillation rate of difficulty and price, the relationship between the two.

It's not like TRC would stop working because the difficulty would be so variable. Maybe it might be frustrating for miners or pools, but like you said- someone is probably going to develop a script that allows you to automatically switch. Indeed for CGminer I keep a number of different Sha-256 coins as alternative pools and CGminer switches between then if one pool becomes inaccesible. Would be cool to build a plugin that would automatically switch between coins based on Profitability.

That said, how long does it take for PPC to mature when you mine them? I'm speaking off the top of my head here, but I think TRC coins mature much faster- which is a plus. If your mining TRC only for BTC, your coins should be available faster for you to sell at the price you thought you were mining at. I'm not convinced that price needs to follow difficulty- and especially if the rate oscillates to dramatically, miners will have to make their value assessments based on other factors.

[tacotime]

The problem is mainly in transaction times... as this gets worse it could slow to one block an hour and take forever to confirm.  This would effectively halt the chain if it became severe enough, as no one can transfer their coins to anyone else in a reasonable amount of time.

You need to hard code a fix for the difficulty algorithm if you want to correct this.

[Sunny King]

The problem is mainly in transaction times... as this gets worse it could slow to one block an hour and take forever to confirm.  This would effectively halt the chain if it became severe enough, as no one can transfer their coins to anyone else in a reasonable amount of time.

You need to hard code a fix for the difficulty algorithm if you want to correct this.

It's not that bad as the jump is capped at 4x I think.

[celkaris]

The problem is mainly in transaction times... as this gets worse it could slow to one block an hour and take forever to confirm.  This would effectively halt the chain if it became severe enough, as no one can transfer their coins to anyone else in a reasonable amount of time.

You need to hard code a fix for the difficulty algorithm if you want to correct this.

It's not that bad as the jump is capped at 4x I think.

And that "problem" will disappear once the network gets a higher constant hashrate, it's currently under 200GH/s on average, any other chain with relatively short difficulty adjust delay and such a low overall hashrate would have the same 'problem' with current hardware.

Bitcoin did not ran into this because dedicated hardware and farms came while the overall network hashrate was already big enough to be hard to overtake.

[crazy_rabbit]

Personally I would welcome someone implementing some sort of auto-hopping based on difficulty. If the possibility exists to profit by taking advantage of the retargeting of TRC, then everyone should have the advantage equally. Perhaps even more intricate mining strategies would develop over time, taking into account coin maturity, profitability, even other factors like electricity or heat generation.