Growing difficulty eases cheating

[Kouye]

Disclaimer : Me be drunk and non native speaker.

We do have some solid input now about the mining power growth.
We know that pre-mining is a serious issue, with the difficulty starting too low (and often, too secretly).

Why not try to create a new coin with smarter difficulty adjustment ?

For example, a 'V' diff curve, with a a few random factors:
- Big fluctuations, to make it harder to know for sure if it really hit the bottom
- Over a period of ~20 years, randomize the difficulty lowest peak between 7 and 13 years of coin mining time.

Making it very hard to mine at first would prevent pre-mining abuse, and would also turn most people off, as they would wait for a better time. But if random fluctuations are big enough, it could allow some of the couragous miners to get some loot, too.

Then as the difficulty lowers over time, more and more people would get interested and mine, until it raises again, but it would be hard to really know when it hits the bottom, because of the fluctuations.

And then it grows back normally as we are used to with current coins.

No more pre-mining.
What's wrong with that ?

[Elwar]

Good luck with your new alt coin.

[Kluge]

Why is it so much worse when devs pre-mine, but it's okay that they "post-mine?" What if the devs just end up mining the first 2% of coins in all existence within the first couple months either way? Does it really matter whether or not a few peons are sticking their toes in?

[Kouye]

It wouldn't be as easy, since everyone could check the diff rating curve, and decide to mine when they think it's a good time to go.
Devs would have to share the blocks with all the other contributors, so they would not be able to feed upon the early blocks.

But I'm failry new (and drunk), so I might have missed something.
Do not hesitate to laugh at me, but I wouldn't mind an explanation if this is really a shitty idea.

[jhansen858]

Your obviously drunk, and your english isn't too good. 

[coastermonger]

V difficulty curve with a few random factors.... right.

I assume you're one of the many people feeling just a little bit of remorse for not joining in the early mining days of BTC.  But designing NEW alt coin that starts off difficult to mine at first, then gets easier at some point in the future, and then gets much harder will also be problematic.

In the early days the coins may be scarce, which may drive up their value, but other people will have the expectation that it will get easier to mine in the future and thus, the price is clearly too high.  So either no one will buy it at first, or the ones who do will be stupid.

When the difficult drop eventually comes, the amount of extra coin created will skyrocket, meaning every miner will be pouring out too much money and the market will faceplant. 

The ONE major thing that bitcoin did wrong was with the block reward halving.  I would not have chosen a "halving the reward roughly every 4 years" approach because it encourages big, big spikes.  After the halving in December the coins became much more scarce all at once and what did we see? The biggest price spike yet.  If bitcoin is around in another 4 years will we see it again? absolutely.  A gentler method would have been to gradually step down the reward, like by 1% every week or so on and so forth.  But 50% introduces major volatility. And is volatility generally bad? It's arguable, but overall I would say yes.  People want some volatility, but $260 to $50 shifts in a day are insane

[tclo]

Good luck with your new alt coin.

Yes there aren't many coins out there now so yours will get noticed for sure.

[sdp]

Good luck with your new alt coin.

Yes there aren't many coins out there now so yours will get noticed for sure.

Sarcasm meter : **********************************************************100%

Hmm....  I thought so.

[BitAddict]

No pre-mining = No spread the word = Fail

[Kouye]

Sorry for the late reply.

I'm not planning to issue another alt coin, and I am far from having the required skill to do so, but was just trying to find a way to avoid this pre-mining habit, which I'm not jealous of, but it looks like people are now creating coins just to get a couple millions secured before releasing them.

And it just sounds wrong to me, as I really hope (and beleive) those will become the future currency.
I understand the V curve idea might be a fail to get enough popularity at first, and would cause a undesired volatility.

So, apart from hoping for a coin to be announced a month before release and having only 5 or 10 blocks mined off at start - for testing purposes, would there be a way to avoid devs and his friends to pile up coins before the release ?

Maybe just a linear difficulty setting averaging the overall difficulty of BTC over a period of 20 years ?
But then again, who would mine those when you can solo-mine entire blocks of all the new alt coins, hoping for one to become a new standard...

Ideas, anyone ? 

[Ignore@YourPeril]

OP: You are correct, this is called a bell-shaped distribution, and if you hit the timing correct with peak interest this will be a far superior way of distribution than that of bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110708.msg1207805#msg1207805

[Kouye]

Very interesting thread, thanks for pointing this out!
It'll probably take months for me to understand all the talk about the market stuff, though, I'm new to this... And pretty much allergic, too, tbh

Just trying to give ideas about a way to introduce a new coin fairly.

The fact that people issuing new coins can get hands on tons of them before releasing them publicly actually kills the whole concept of a new independant currency, in my opinion - opinion of a total ignorant newcomer, but mine still.

And since I really want to see banks die and crypto currencies raise, this saddens me.

[Adrian-x]

@ Kouye
I share similar sentiment, the referenced link above introduced a distribution model to address the problem. Someone named the idea Gausscoin, if you search for it you will find a few thoughts on the idea.

If there is enough momentum and interest I would love to be involved.

[GSnak]

Sorry for the late reply.

I'm not planning to issue another alt coin, and I am far from having the required skill to do so, but was just trying to find a way to avoid this pre-mining habit

I don't think you need to worry about it, even the coins released lately that haven't been premined have been a fail. Recycling the litecoin source is played out.