No somebody is totally screwing with it and has stuffed something with it!
The new self appointed "takeover dev" mat5x who has NO permission whatsoever to touch it, also has not replied to any of my PM's!
From what I gather reading his "stuff all" posts on this forum, he seriously has no idea what he's doing, and has took it upon himself that he can just walk in and takeover elacoin.
This is BS, I have been supporting/mining this coin for over 3 months!!! I know all coins are down across the board since a week after MT Gox shut down, but I have never seen elacoin drop to the prices they are at now. This has been the most stable coin I have ever mined, that's why I put my money and equipment into it.
What Im trying to say is that the context of his last comments were basically saying he was going to mess with the algo. What the fuck for, I have no idea! Again who is this idiot???
Well about 3-4 days after that was posted my mining quota that I get, because remember I've been mining it for 3 months suddenly dried up!!!
I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrating this is!! I have spent over 5K on equipment and have had a good return from mining eleacoin, only to have this total stranger and newbie walk in and stuff up all I have done.
This is total BS. I am quickly losing all interest for anything to do with mining whatsoever and advocating to others to stay away!
I have never read so much BS from daydreamers in my life! I finally got a system worked out that pays my electricity bill and some fucking noob comes in and destroys it!
This is fucked!
I wont make fun of your broken english as you may be ESL. However I will attack your inconsistent arguments are lack of evidence.
1) No one has an 'permission' to do anything with any coin. 5 of us had the password, they drifted away, i changed it after 8 months for security reasons. those who deserve to have it will get it when necessary and the community agrees.
1b) Read the code changes on github. It has not changed in a long while (except a 2 months ago bengt added the missing macOSx libraries to the mac client. how terrible of him to fuck with the market like that! yes i allowed that by adding his code changes to the elacoin repo.)
2) per above, the code hasnt been changed at all. I have many improvements in mind, but i want to do one big change, not many (forking is annoying.)
3) who is the authority that knows what they're doing with any coin? If you want a govt-approved authority, go back to fiat trading. Here it's a community effort, and I have never gone against what the community says (however, I do tend to ignore the loud ranty jerks). I pay attetion to Windmaster and Retep because they are calm, reasonable people and have shown great knowledge of the code bases of various coins, and even how the economics/market reacts to various aspects of algorithms. It takes time to earn that respect, so you wont find me making changes suddenly just because a couple people yell loudly and throw a fit.
4) As for 'taking it over', the coin woulda just died as no one was taking care of it at all. I dont know who ISNT a stranger - I've been THE MOST visible person in elacoin. There absolutely IS NO ONE ELSE, or if there is please name them.
I am not paid for doing this, I mine a bit like everyone else does. The coin's value woulda been 0 like all the other abandoncoins out there. Thing is, when sometimes it looked like I was wasting my time, someone else saw how the fundamental idea behind the coin was good and the coin kept resurrecting itself. Quite suprisingly in some ways, and its still going now.
5) you dont understand cryptocurrencies if you think that I can control the price (without even making any changes to the code, either!). Coins are traded on the whims of the market, and *COIN code is setup to ensure there's no central authority. You can game any coin you want, you can 51% (or 30%) attack it, you can setup huge buy and sell walls if you have serious money to move around (though in ELC's case I think thats only 10-20 BTC worth, maybe a bit more now with the big hashrates we had). Im sure many many other coins have been messed with by people like that - even bitcoin is sometimes. Welcome to the real open market. Governments tend to walk in to such situations and make rules so the winners dont win TOO much because the losers get sore and pissed off and stop electing that government. So there's a little bit of regulation (though the US has shown how little that can be).
Here in the real coin world it's SERIOUS BUSINESS. Any gaming and buywalling you want to setup is entirely 'legal' because there's no law but the coin's code. That's it. If you dont like it, go play with bluechips (and have fun with the fees). Side note: the coin's code is public, go read it and find the part that makes mat5x rich. It's right there in line 508 in main.c.
If you want to get the coin's market value up, then either pump it (dont forget to dump it at the right time!) or do something more long term constructive like poker26 is like setup a website and get merchants involved.
This is all your own risk and responsibility. Poker26 has way more invested than you I think and he isnt whining like a baby. Man up or GTFO. SERIOUS INVESTORS ONLY.
6) your system is incredibly fragile if it requires a coin's value to stay static. All coins go up and down, some insanely (like 100x value spread in weeks). Go mine hashcows.com or something instead (multicoin mine pool).
AS FOR CHANGING THE ALGORITHMthis is the only part of your post that has any actual merit. You'll notice im not ignoring this point.
I ran the code I inserted for reward calc by the community, and no one caught the issue of the implicit int64 vs double causing a floor() (ie throw away the decimals). 4 of us even threw up a testnet for 4 days to mine it and we didnt catch the issue (mostly because we couldnt get the diff up high enough to notice). 5+ people (who were the biggest holders of the coin at the time, so the ones with the most at risk) read the code and we all missed it. Maybe its a newb mistake, in which case leave the coin and stop mining it immediately. (Trust me, so many other coins have way more serious problems beyond value calculation, such as security holes enabling people to steal coins wholesale.)
We'd like to fix that. Im not even sure it's THAT important, except at low difficulties where the flooring causes a bigger 'gap' between 'intended' value and actual - actual is slightly lower than it should be - the lowest is when the diff is 1.99, then the base reward (before timescaling) is 1.00 - so thats basically 49% lower value than it 'should be'.
But there is no 'should be'. There's what people say with their mouths and keyboards, and that could be bullshit, and then there's the coin's code.
The coin's code is 100% gospel, and anything anyone says about it can be ignored.
READ THE CODE. Everyone knew full well that's how the reward would be calculated, so they went in with open eyes (or could have).
It's up to the community to decide if we want to fix this, I think it would be good as it honours the original smooth-reward idea.
The only other fix i'd like would screw over the multimine/hashwave/coinchoose pools. They couldnt just rush in and mine value away from other miners then leave when the difficulty goes up. For regular coins where the reward is static, this matters greatly. It SHOULDNT matter to elacoin, but because of some complicated side effects (which im happy to explain if anyone cares to pay attention for 5 minutes and THINK, I have a few google sheets that show how it happens), it still benefits the hash wave miners somewhat to the detriment of long term miners.
(The effect is weird, but tangible. I'd love to reverse that effect somehow without directly fucking with the difficulty/reward code which is naturally beautiful (
DIFF = REWARD). I have some ideas but i need to model them out first.)
The partial solution to this is not to have such a long retarget time. There's no real need for a long retarget time at all, because nominally, reward = diff.
Doesnt matter if diff goes to 100, cuz reward goes to 100. Doesnt matter if diff is 1, then reward is 1. xMH/s of mining gear will always get the same number of coins over time. The difficulty just affects how often the rewards come in (and, pools already smooth that out by paying some small constant amount (1 elc for eg) at a time. So it shoujld make absolutely NO difference what the difficulty is for the reward.
Very smart readers who pay attention to any coins at all will say then "well then why not just static diff and reward, of, say 1, forever?" That'd be great, but when 1.5GH/s comes in to mine, we get 0.1s long blocks. This is bad because thats way under the network diameter and thus unfairly benefits whomever found the last block (usually large pools) causing orphans for other miners. It's too fast a block time. So we scale it up to ensure we're about 2 minutes per block. Same deal when the hashrate is very low, we should scale it down (because at that point xactions take too long, so do confirms for solomining).
Since reward ~ diff, then diff doesnt matter, only block times being reasonable does. Keeping block times reasonable means measuring the current block rate in some accurate way - bitcoin did this by averaging blocks over time, so that luck of finding 10 blocks really fast isnt interpreted as 10x hashrate coming in, and then the diff goes up by 10x, slowing things down (and in bitcoins case, because reward = STATIC VALUE, it makes the blocks worth 10x less per minerhashrate) - in elacoin the diff going up doesnt matter, so our only concern is having reasonable block times.
My suggestion to sort out luck vs actual hashwave is to retarget every block as many other coins do (and they with static rewards, which i think is nuts to use an instant retarget! totally
gameable like Terracoin was!) - but with some modifications.
Maybe windmaster can comment on this idea: luck can happen, but it cant sustain itself long. It's exponentially decreasingly likely to get 2 very fast blocks in a row (if it's 1/4 chance of a 1/4 time block, then 2 in a row is 1/16). My idea is that if the block time suddenly goes to 1/16th of normal, that the next block becomes diff/4 (much easier = faster) to get a new 'measure' of the network hashrate. That block will also be worth 1/4 as much, so the same amount of coins/time always comes out, we're just 'resampling' the network hashrate more frequently. Same deal with slow block, if a block is suddenly 16x slower for eg, then we resample in 1/4 of the time (basically, the square root). The reason I dont want to go any faster than 1/4 (off our nominal target of 2 min) is because 1/4 x 2 minutes is 30 seconds, thats a bit of a fast block time. 30s would be fine but there's jitter in that value, and some blocks will be even faster randomly (1/2 would be faster, 1/2 slower). I dont want to get down into the 1-2 second range at all, and only want to see 10-15s blocks rarely, or it will encourage orphans/stales for soloists, etc. (You can see 1-2 second blocks in bitcoin still these days. Rare, but it happens. Worldcoin which I think had a 15s blocktime(?) seemed insane to me, as that'd generate 1-2s blocks FREQUENTLY, risking your transactions going missing, and lots of orphans for smaller miners.)
So thats a pretty reasonable change in that it just increases the accuracy of the retargets, and does it more often, so huge blocktimes of 20 minutes dont become the norm after a hashwave from coincchoose or middlecoin rolls by.
Unfortunately this means anyone who DOES have a good 'game the coin and rip everyone off!' idea will be left high and dry. So sorry! I think the community will support that general idea however.
So those are the two 'major' changes, which arent that major at all.
The other idea I've had is looking at scrypt-n to ASIC-proof Elacoin, but i dont know if the community WANTS elc to be ASIC proof or not. Should move this seperate topic to a new thread probably.