yes no one suggest 25x or 50x reward increase. however, if your purpose is to FUD the coin to death, then keep trying. community concensus here, people. no central authority: remember what BTC is about! Milkshake hasnt been around since 4hrs after launch, so, he's pretty much gone.
The hashrate is low and the blocktimes are in the 2-4hr range, 60-120+x slower than intended right now.
Ultimately, the idea is scaling the reward with difficulty, as per the original release. However the original code didnt start doing this til diff=24 and we never got there. Also, it said "halving every 9 months (194400 blocks)" but the math in the code doenst reflect that. It's * 1/(n+1) where n is # of 270-day periods. (UTSL / RTFM!)
Right now with a diff of 4.35 things are slow. And the reward is 1.00.
Ultimately we've mostly agreed on this:
-
reward = difficulty, smoothed to ELAtoshis. this means if you throw 1MH/s into the coin, you get 1MH/s worth of coins out, always, forever, modulo the time-based scaling mentioned below
- keep the
1/(n+1) 270-day periods scaling, smoothed out (ongoing smooth reduction, not a 'halving' event like with BTC)
-
fixing current situ with hard fork: - set difficulty=1.1, giving a 1.0 ELC block now (due to 270d period scaling), ie exactly what the reward is right now
- min reward based on diff is always 1 (then scaled by 270d-period scalings, keeps miners interested producing a minimal threshold hashrate for the coin)
- allow a difficulty retarg in 1/4 the normal interval (we're jsut past 8*2160 '3-day' intervals now, so at 8.25 * 2160 = 17820th block retarg
- another retarg at 8.5 * 2160 = 18360th block to allow proper readdjusting for new miners joining on (or lack of hash power to reduce diff more if slow)
- one more adjustment retarg at 8.75 * 2160 = 18900th block for more adjusting
- regular retarg schedule at 9 * 2160 = 19440 and every 2160 blocks ('3 days' if we hit a proper hashrate giving 2 min blocks)
- keep the 4x and /4 maximum retarg scaling parameters (bet you didnt know about those! yes max 4x increase or decrease)
- keep the max # of coins as is
- hard fork around block #17760 (at 17747 now with 2-4hrs/block)
Theory behind this:
- original idea of ELC was thus. Milkshake said 18 month periods (moore's law) but picked 9. Not sure why. Maybe he's bad at math. Changing it to 18 would be a major disruption to orig. schedule, so leaving it is best
- many coins right now are just valued by those mining them. there's no global market of trading corn for ELC, or CNC or even BTC's right now. only miners and speculators are valuing them.
- btc has serious delfation. there's no 'set right amount' of inflation that should counter it, but pegging a coin to the amount of mining power required to produce it seems fair
- there will be improvements in technology (maybe not for scrypt?) - so we'll keep the 9 month 1/(n+1) reduction, which is LESS aggressive than BTC, LTC, etc, and will be a deflating force on the inflation of more miners/higher diff = more coins per block
- anyone who says with any certainty "they know whats going to happen" and "the coin will inflate insanely!" or "delfate insanely! do we need another BTC?" is just wrong - you have no idea what will happen, neither do any of us. Right now, immediate and medium term APPEAL seems to be a good mode of addressing coin's creation/management, and pegging it to mining power seems equitable. If it inflates insanely, big deal, we're just as bad as any other coin (check out the trading rates for many new coins, i dont have enough decimal 0's around to price them).
The increasing diff/reward vs the decreasing 9 month 1/(n+1) will balance out the coin (not perfectly, but how could you without pegging it against a real world currency - and how you going to do that, flood the market with buys and sells with your $1million float in the same way real govts manage currencies?). Any more than that no one can say.
EDIT:We didnt set diff to 1.1, we let it scale down by up to /16 (which is what it will likely be in 3 blocks at the fork). However, reward is 1.00 fixed until block 18360, then reward = diff * scaling on the 270d period applies. 1.1 woulda been a slow block rate unless we got major hash power in which we werent certain of.
At the 0.27 difficulty, the reward of 1.0 will be higher than usual but is designed to re-attract miners to the coin. However, its only 270 coins worth (so dont whine about total devaluation of the coin
