[BTE] If we are going to make to the next retarget we must be zelots

Unfortunately mining isnt going to be profitable until the next re-target, thats right every second you spend mining bytecoin instead of bitcoin is time spent losing money. But you should do it anyway, and ill explain why.

We are in very dangerous territory right now. Bytecoin was a 1:1 copy of bitcoin which means it was released with a difficulty target of 1 just like bitcoin was. This made sense when bitcoin was released since there were very few miners using very primitive mining hardware. These days with asic this is no longer the case, so releasing bytecoin with a dificulty target of 1 was a huge mistake (hindsight is always 20/20). This incentivized massive amounts of mining power to enter into the market in an attempt to capitalize on blocks that were coming in so fast they were limited only by the latency in the network (as it turns out this is about 1 minute). The problem is that the bytecoin network interpreted this as meaning that there was far more hashing power legitimately interested in bytecoin than there actually was. After the retarget those looking for quick profits left the network and caused the re-target to massively over compensate.

This presents a very serious risk of creating a destructive feedback loop. Miners abandon the bytecoin network because blocks are coming in to slowly and this causes blocks to come in more slowly which causes more miners to abandon which causes blocks to come in more slowly until we never see another block again.

So then the question is why should you mine at a loss? The answer is that if you are holding bytecoin and we do not make it to the next retarget than your bytecoin will be worthless. If you are holding bytecoin and we do make it to the next re-target than they will almost certainly have a very bright future and be outrageously undervalued at current prices. So it is in your interest, if you are holding bytecoin, atleast for the time being, to mine at a loss. If we make it to the next re-target than it will be smooth sailing from there on, we know this because bytecoin is just bitcoin2 and we know bitcoin works.

If we ever get to the point where a single block takes more than 24 hours we will know that bytecoin as we know it is dead but this is not necessarily the end of the story. If we do encounter this feedback loop of death we can potentially hard fork. In this fork we would need to manually set the difficulty to where it should have always been. I think this is possible because there are so few of us. In fact i think i know almost everyone involved in bytecoin and i could send each person a personal message so hard forking should be very possible.

With that being said it would still be best to avoid this entirely by sticking with our resolve to mine even at a loss, because the rewards will be great if we can only be patient.

thanks for taking a look! anon136 signing out.