How to design a CoinChoose-resistant coin?

[mat5x]

The biggest threat to altcoins isnt ASIC mining BTC and just buying up lots of ALT for cheap, depressing the price anymore.

Coinchoose pretends that a 0.5BTC deep market represents the pricing value on 100s of BTC of several hours/days of mining by punters tracking most profitable coin. Punters think they can all mine 10000s of ALT then go to the market anytime and get full value by dumping 100x the coin volume of ALT ever traded. Ridiculous.

This creates an unnatural (and unattended!) hashing wave for new ALT, which pumps up the difficulty after a time, and then, like most coins, cause a 4x increase in diff, drops the price on the floor.

This isnt healthy for any coin, but the autominers tracking the bogus valuations on CC are a force to be watched, with 100-200MHs on scrypt, if not more.

It doesnt matter if someone DOS's CC again like yesterday, some dumbass site with some random valuation will appear, everyone will take its math as gospel, and point their miners at it (it DOES however provide some WONDERFUL price gaming opportunities, which are pretty hard to resist!) But that really fucks the market up.

So leave CC and clones as is, since there's nothing to be done about ignorance. The question is how to code a coin that resists such pump/dump waves.

Obviously a coin that retargs every block would be great, but then you have a static value vs radical change in difficulty issue, which results in TRC's yoyo difficulties.

ELC however values coins for the hashrate put in, which makes that yoyoing less effective. Unfortunately, ELC nInterval=2160 * 120s.  This mostly causes STALLCOIN (unrelated to STABLECOIN, actually, which is about horses I think), tho with ELC there's much less value loss to miners than most ALT because value ~ diff in ELC.

But ELC wont solve this, its subject to CCwaves just as much as any ALT.

I have a few ideas, but id like to get more opinions on CC's effect on ALT market first.

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[ImI]

I thought novacoin and bitbar are retargeting every block?

[mat5x]

I thought novacoin and bitbar are retargeting every block?

Ill have to take a closer look. NVC was launched before CC existed or became popular, so any coin that was lucky enough to get established before CCwaves is likely unaffected by it (until that one day they read 500% PROFITABLE...).

Bitbar ill have to check closely since its a lot newer. Ill have to see how they avoid the huge hashwave diff retarg issues without turning into a TRC yoyo.

Funny stuff, I ran some spreadsheet models on ELC with shorter retarg nInterval, and it makes pretty obvious the 30% transfer of value from future miners the CCwavers cashing in on easy diff, moving it to hard diff. (max retarg up and down on most coins is 4x, so its easy to model: throw 150MH/s ontop of 20 exactly at the first block of retarg and remove it last block of retarg and see what happens even with a sliding window avg over the next nInterval).

And thats with a coin that pays per diff, it must be much worse with a static diff.

Retargetting every block would be interesting, but there's 2 issues

1st is say there was no luck involved, and hashrate = blocktime directly. Then difficulty you are mining is actually from the previous block's time. So if 100Mh/s leaves the coin and 20MH/s remains, you're mining a coin at 5x the diff for the same reward, until retarg next block. If the blocks are long enough, creates an opportunity to jump in and out of the coin quickly to mine only the easy blocks with high hashpower, effectively transferring value from high diff miners to easy diff miners. Unfair.

2nd issue of course is luck. Cant have too small a window to measure diff or a wayward lucky or unlucky block could send the coin sprawling into high/low diffs. Most coins have /4 x4 max scaling, but 4x 2 or 3 times in a row is a big diff change. 4^3 = 64x.

[qiuness]

the problem is not coinchoose, it is all the shitcoins that are being released

[XRcode]

the problem is not coinchoose, it is all the shitcoins that are being released

You are partly right, the problem is not coinchoose... It's the idiots who believe it and run CryptoSwitcher

[anderl]

an unskilled worker blames his tools.  not sure what you mean by "coinchoose resistant"  seems like you don't understand economics or programming.  another nonsense thread on bitcointalk.

[mebezac]

This is probably a stupid idea, but how about a coin that starts with a decent difficulty, say 5 or 10 and then doesn't have a retarget, just a static difficulty. You would have to keep interest in the coin or it could end up taking a long time to solve blocks and do transactions. Like I said, this is a stupid idea as a currency because there's no way to know how long blocks and transaction times will take. But, as far as not being subject to crazy difficulty swings, a static difficulty would take care of that part of the coinchoose raping.

[XRcode]

an unskilled worker blames his tools.  not sure what you mean by "coinchoose resistant"  seems like you don't understand economics or programming.  another nonsense thread on bitcointalk.

Do you understand cryptocurrency?
Since when is it normal to have the network hashpower increase by 500x in a few minutes?

[vinne81]

This is probably a stupid idea, but how about a coin that starts with a decent difficulty, say 5 or 10 and then doesn't have a retarget, just a static difficulty. You would have to keep interest in the coin or it could end up taking a long time to solve blocks and do transactions. Like I said, this is a stupid idea as a currency because there's no way to know how long blocks and transaction times will take. But, as far as not being subject to crazy difficulty swings, a static difficulty would take care of that part of the coinchoose raping.

So then when the network hash rate multiplies by 1000x, you could have (depending on the intended hash rate) blocks each second? Hello orphans

[mat5x]

the problem is not coinchoose, it is all the shitcoins that are being released

So we should only have BTC? HOw about not even having BTC and having nothing? (Just taking your argument further).

Which central authority would you like to pre-approve coins for release, the US Govt? (im sure they're already on it, and BTC isnt in their list.)

This is the free(est?) market here, people can invent whatever they want. This allows us to discuss and create lots of coins.

Some coins fail because they're stupid, some just because of CC, some because of bad timing or luck on the market. Some really good coins have been killed (CoiledCoin) by assholes, some almost killed by premine fiascos (Novacoin).

Itll all come out in the wash. Its great that there's so many new coins, but someone needs to setup a good altcoin directory cuz I cant even keep track of what new coins EXIST never mind what their features are - and then, most importantly - what the unintended side effects are. That last thing is the biggest problem with most alts.

[mat5x]

This is probably a stupid idea, but how about a coin that starts with a decent difficulty, say 5 or 10 and then doesn't have a retarget, just a static difficulty. You would have to keep interest in the coin or it could end up taking a long time to solve blocks and do transactions. Like I said, this is a stupid idea as a currency because there's no way to know how long blocks and transaction times will take. But, as far as not being subject to crazy difficulty swings, a static difficulty would take care of that part of the coinchoose raping.

So then when the network hash rate multiplies by 1000x, you could have (depending on the intended hash rate) blocks each second? Hello orphans

Mebezac: I thoguht of this exactly - as thats what ELC is effectively. Static reward, static diff. Problem as Vinne81 says, it's network issues. If the protocol could handle 1000s of blocks per second, then we'd have no issues, but we cant. The competitive nature of the protocol to produce a winning chain is an elegant way to solve concurrency conflicts, but costs us in response times.

People think a tiny coin like FASTCOIN is ok with 7 second blocktimes, but wait til the network diameter gets a little bigger. Orphans benefit bigrigfarms as they can churn out not just new blocks but new CHAINS faster than the rest of the network. Luck itself causes mini 51%-attacks for everyone naturally, but it's exponentially higher for the more MH/s you have (and vanishingly small chance for you who has 0.1% of the hashrate).

Vinne81: this is why we designed ELC, tho I think the block retarg (nInterval) is too long. A sliding window with shorter #blocks would be better, but i have other ideas to improve on that even further - even with a sliding window, value is transferred from future miners to WaveMiners during low diff.

My idea is hyper radical, next post.

[mebezac]

This is probably a stupid idea, but how about a coin that starts with a decent difficulty, say 5 or 10 and then doesn't have a retarget, just a static difficulty. You would have to keep interest in the coin or it could end up taking a long time to solve blocks and do transactions. Like I said, this is a stupid idea as a currency because there's no way to know how long blocks and transaction times will take. But, as far as not being subject to crazy difficulty swings, a static difficulty would take care of that part of the coinchoose raping.

So then when the network hash rate multiplies by 1000x, you could have (depending on the intended hash rate) blocks each second? Hello orphans

Exactly, like I said, a stupid idea, but one that  takes care of crazy difficulty swings. As others have said, I think people blindly following coinchoose have every right to in a free market. I'll just stick to mining litecoin and bitcoin

[anderl]

an unskilled worker blames his tools.  not sure what you mean by "coinchoose resistant"  seems like you don't understand economics or programming.  another nonsense thread on bitcointalk.

Do you understand cryptocurrency?
Since when is it normal to have the network hashpower increase by 500x in a few minutes?

bitcoin and asicminer is a good example.  "since when is it normal"  not sure that equates to cryptocurrencies but it happens alot in regular life.  securities markets are a good example.  company issues a press release and millions or billions of dollars flow into the stock.  are you trying to support an idea to make markets resistance to buying and selling type mechanisms?  Again nonsense thread.

[sal002]

FYI - YaCoin is CoinChoose resilient.  Guess why?

[mebezac]

FYI - YaCoin is CoinChoose resilient.  Guess why?

I think I remember seeing it listed once very shortly and the profitability was like 300% but maybe I was just seeing things.

[sal002]

FYI - YaCoin is CoinChoose resilient.  Guess why?

I think I remember seeing it listed once very shortly and the profitability was like 300% but maybe I was just seeing things.

Yep.  Can't mine it with a GPU so it was delisted

[mat5x]

My idea is this for a CCresistant coin:

- scrypt
- 1 min nominal blocktime.
- retarg every block
- sliding window of 2 blocks avg diff calc
- reward = difficulty
- slow value decay of *T/(1+t) or gentler of value to combat inflation for scryptASIC release in future (t = time to date avg of last 200 blocks (avoid timestamp manip), T = constant Time factor)
- max incr/decr 16x or /16
- if x16, then block time drops to 1/4 of normal (15 seconds). value 1/4'd. still high enough to avoid too many orphans from goodluck series of <1s blocks.
- if /16 then block time drops to 1/4 of normal (15 seconds). value is 1/4'd.
- similar scaling for x8 or /8, then blocktime 1/2 etc
- 1/4 do blocktime 2/3rd or something. (ideally 1/sqrt of increase but i dont want too much floatmath in the code, who knows what kinda IEEE implimentations various hardware has)

The 1/4 blocktime is a good idea to allow a recalc on difficulty faster after a large change. Additionally, it makes blocks so fast, it makes it hard for hoppers to come in and out of the coin exactly on time to cause a reinforcing frequency wave like TRC has (which is over many minutes or hours for difficulty manipulation).

The 1/4 time thing effectively seperates luck from actual hashpower. Could even go 1/8th perhaps (if peopel put up with fastcoin's 7s, then for the purpose of a retarg its worth the cost of luck intefering abit).

The 2 block average really hurts luck's chances of causing two x16 increases in a row randomly.

One caveat of course is that the average time of any number of blocks isnt static (tho, check BTC< it isnt either! blocks in last interval were <10minutes by a large margin, moving from 12.2 to 15.6 difficulty!)

I still need a rundown on what the frequency of lucky blocks are producing 1/n or lower block time of normal (ie <=1/4 of normal time, how often?). My stats arent strong enough here. Lilhelp?

[mat5x]

FYI - YaCoin is CoinChoose resilient.  Guess why?

Yep.  Can't mine it with a GPU so it was delisted

Whats your reasoning behind that sal002?

YACcoin is a great thing tho, and Subtrata was 100% right about it. It encourages botnet mining, so that means when every other coin is arrested and jailed off the face of the earth, YACoin will still be around.

to a previous replier regarding "resisting market tools to assist trading":

As for market valuations, there's no reason to value a coin on what the profit of the NEXT BLOCK is. I dont see how that's intelligent either. Anyway people can do what they want, but i think you'll see that the value supposedly created by CC's predictions has NOT materialized at all. As I say, do some calculations. See the hashpower waves that come in from CC, calculate how many BTC in value that cost in hashpower, and see if the market has paid that back out (modulo people holding it). I think you'll find that the value is being 'held' by 90% because its just not materializing. Soon as any flash mined coins are dumped the value plummets because it was never actually there in the first place.

Also, we can do whatever we'd like, and I dont see how a coin that doesnt manage to allow itself to be gamed by huge hashpower waves is a detriment to the community. Explain how that works out.

[area]

Also, we can do whatever we'd like, and I dont see how a coin that doesnt manage to allow itself to be gamed by huge hashpower waves is a detriment to the community. Explain how that works out.

I don't think that's what anyone's saying. A coin that manages to solve this problem certainly brings something new to the table, and PPCoin's proof-of-stake system, if it takes over from proof-of-work eventually as planned, probably gets there.

I am glad that this conversation is happening, however, as instigating it was part of my goal of releasing CryptoSwitcher rather than keeping it for personal use.

[mat5x]

Also, we can do whatever we'd like, and I dont see how a coin that doesnt manage to allow itself to be gamed by huge hashpower waves is a detriment to the community. Explain how that works out.

I don't think that's what anyone's saying. A coin that manages to solve this problem certainly brings something new to the table, and PPCoin's proof-of-stake system, if it takes over from proof-of-work eventually as planned, probably gets there.

I am glad that this conversation is happening, however, as instigating it was part of my goal of releasing CryptoSwitcher rather than keeping it for personal use.

Hilariously you may have succeeded in your ironic goal: to raze the field of toxic ALT polluting our pure BTC/LTC/??? harvests. Lol.

'eventually' taking over unfortunately is the only thing PoS _CAN_ do, you have to wait til there's enough stake evolved. And you cant rush these things, or its too easy to get a high stake, then there's nothing seperating it from regular early mine win which destroys ALT.

At least all ALT now have an increasing reward release with block #. A side effect of ELAcoing ill have it take credit for, partially.

At any rate, consider the 1-block retarg idea... yah?

[sterob]

an unskilled worker blames his tools.  not sure what you mean by "coinchoose resistant"  seems like you don't understand economics or programming.  another nonsense thread on bitcointalk.

Do you understand cryptocurrency?
Since when is it normal to have the network hashpower increase by 500x in a few minutes?

i concur.
Having the network hash jump 500x increase diff substantially while definitely the owners of those hash rate will dump those coins. leaving the network with high diff and low price coin which pretty much kill the coin.

[Balthazar]

Topic should be renamed to "How to design a user-resistant coin?".

[mebezac]

Topic should be renamed to "How to design a user-resistant coin?".

+1 

[nonameo]

Also, we can do whatever we'd like, and I dont see how a coin that doesnt manage to allow itself to be gamed by huge hashpower waves is a detriment to the community. Explain how that works out.

I don't think that's what anyone's saying. A coin that manages to solve this problem certainly brings something new to the table, and PPCoin's proof-of-stake system, if it takes over from proof-of-work eventually as planned, probably gets there.

I am glad that this conversation is happening, however, as instigating it was part of my goal of releasing CryptoSwitcher rather than keeping it for personal use.

There is nothing wrong with proof of stake, it just doesn't supply coins fast enough for growing adoption(at least not at 1% and probably not at 3%)

I still think you need proof of work, and not just because it supplies coins faster. There is also the added security from hashing. However, hashrate needs to stay up and preferably should steadily increase.

[gyverlb]

Maybe if coins attracted users by their inherent value instead of attracting speculation large hashrate swings wouldn't matter so much as the price would rise by itself and drive mining instead of relying on pure speculation.

Most coins are simple clones of Bitcoin with only simple changes that bring only superficial advantages and often large disadvantages (switching to more botnet friendly hash algorithms that make attacks more affordable or reducing interval to a point where orphans are the norm).

Let's face it, the problem isn't that existing alt-coins aren't resistant to hashrate fluctuations caused by profitability changes, the problem is that most of them don't have any advantage unless you want to profit from speculation. Once the speculation dies down the coin dies with it.

The only coins resisting are the ones which brought new features on release :

• Litecoin with scrypt and shorter intervals
• PPCoin with proof-of-stake
• Novacoin with proof-of-stake and scrypt
• Freicoin with demurrage
• Terracoin with fast retargeting

I'm not even convinced Freicoin and Terracoin will make it. Terracoin is just a dream come true for coin-hopping: it only addresses the hashrate fluctuation (making a coin merge-minable would probably have the same result long-term if the coin was worth it). Unless you are the foundation (which gets most of the mined coins) Freicoin mining isn't worth it most of the time and really who wants to get coins that slowly disappear (I understand wanting to spend it, but being paid with it?).

All the others I know of only have short times of profitability with large periods where most miners leave. This is when they didn't simply fail on release...

I coin-hopp as I consider mining to be a business (I'll certainly pay taxes this year on my mining income so you bet I don't consider it an hobby anymore) but don't rely on coinchoose (my setup predates it by more than a year and is far more robust to the various profitability mirages: it didn't mine Feathercoin for long the last 24h for example).
For me mining, making a coin viable should not rely on the behavior of the miners but on the behavior of users. Resisting hashrate fluctuations - although a desirable property - should not be their primary concern: they should design their coins so that people want to buy them, not mine them.

[nonameo]

Maybe if coins attracted users by their inherent value instead of attracting speculation large hashrate swings wouldn't matter so much as the price would rise by itself and drive mining instead of relying on pure speculation.

Doubly agreed, value fluctuations are bad for a currency because it impairs service to its users, who would like to be able to have some confidence that what's worth N one day is not worth 1/2 N the next. A lot of people say the cyprus event was the cause of the uptick in value in BTC. I say it was more the halving of the block reward. BTC started its incline fairly before cyprus.

The only coins resisting are the ones which brought new features on release :

• Litecoin with scrypt and shorter intervals
• PPCoin with proof-of-stake
• Novacoin with proof-of-stake and scrypt
• Freicoin with demurrage
• Terracoin with fast retargeting

You can't really have novacoin on that list unless you have yacoin too. Yacoin also has proof of stake and uses a totally different(unlike novacoin's scrypt) hashing algorithm.

I'm not even convinced Freicoin and Terracoin will make it. Terracoin is just a dream come true for coin-hopping: it only addresses the hashrate fluctuation (making a coin merge-minable would probably have the same result long-term if the coin was worth it). Unless you are the foundation (which gets most of the mined coins) Freicoin mining isn't worth it most of the time and really who wants to get coins that slowly disappear (I understand wanting to spend it, but being paid with it?).

I'm not convinced either. A cryptocoin is a service. Who are the customers? Those are the people that need to be served and should be considered. Miners serve the cryptocoin and are paid in block reward.

Resisting hashrate fluctuations - although a desirable property - should not be their primary concern: they should design their coins so that people want to buy them, not mine them.

For the most part, I think you're right. However, highly fluctuating hash rates affect quality of service for the users in terms of block times and security. This is a major reason for the concern. If you can manage fluctuating hash rates without affecting service then it is not a problem.  IMO this is a good reason for having proof of stake, it helps service and security(in a way?) although I'm not really totally sure on how proof of stake secures the block chain. You'd think a large balance with lots of coin days could easily be spoofed. You can't do that so easily with hashing...

Also, rather than buy I'd say use. I mean, it's fine if people want to invest/make money on currency and exchange. There shouldn't be lots of room for it in a good currency though.

[zackclark70]

take a look at my idea https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226582.0

[mebezac]

take a look at my idea https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226582.0

I like some of your ideas, but I'm failing to see which part of it would mitigate the coinchoose effect?

[mat5x]

Topic should be renamed to "How to design a user-resistant coin?".

really, you think it unfair to design a coin that wont support and overavaluation notion of running thru 100BTC of hashes generated, based on the value of a 0.5BTC-deep buy market.

That's entirely unfair to users, yes?

Ridiculous.

Proper valuation to all users of a coin that doesnt allow gaming through the artificial side effects of a gaming a coin with an unattented client miner that measures ONLY THE NEXT BLOCK of a coin based on ONLY THE FIRST 0.5BTC DEPTH OF A BID MARKET is unfair.

Please explain harder, cuz im really not convinced. Sal002 is counting on you.

[rbdrbd]

FYI - YaCoin is CoinChoose resilient.  Guess why?

I think I remember seeing it listed once very shortly and the profitability was like 300% but maybe I was just seeing things.

Yep.  Can't mine it with a GPU so it was delisted

sal, I think it would be very useful to have a column in CC showing the total volume (expressed in BTC or dollars) across all exchanges combined for each coin in the list. It doesn't do much against the automining issue (unless that tool is enhanced to factor it in), but if you are just blindly mining whateven coin at the top, you could find yourself in a situation where you have a bunch of coins to unload but no market depth to unload it in, thus leading to a price crash situation if you were to just go ahead with it (as many miners would do).

Market depth is so very crucial in my choice about what coin to mine, personally.

[mat5x]

(switching to more botnet friendly hash algorithms that make attacks more affordable or reducing interval to a point where orphans are the norm).

that is a very specific purpose. Making a coin that is erase-from-internet-resistant has a use to all of us once the DoHS gets thru with people being clever with computers about philosophical notions of fiat symbolics (ie, money.) It's really heady stuff to get angry at people at blowing smoke in the air theorizing about the meaning of a few symbols. Free speech is dead, yo.

Back to (h)altcoins, aka "ALT".

Let's face it, the problem isn't that existing alt-coins aren't resistant to hashrate fluctuations caused by profitability changes, the problem is that most of them don't have any advantage unless you want to profit from speculation. Once the speculation dies down the coin dies with it.

Right, so removing speculation would show a coin's true value. I don't see why that's not what we should all be striving for at all times.

• Freicoin with demurrage
• Terracoin with fast retargeting

AS pointed out earlier by NOMEANSwhat, Frei is useless low value, and TRC is experiencing a continued 'attack' that is now more a 'characteristic' of the coin, the yoyo difficulty. Very curious effect, continuing for 6 months+!

(making a coin merge-minable would probably have the same result long-term if the coin was worth it).

Merged coins are worth nothing cuz they're mined for free. If they had a function to them, like DECREDITS or CREDIT or whatever the idea is (bad name!) (private message coin), then that'd be great to merge them like NMC. But they'd have no real value.

I coin-hopp as I consider mining to be a business (I'll certainly pay taxes this year on my mining income so you bet I don't consider it an hobby anymore) but don't rely on coinchoose (my setup predates it by more than a year and is far more robust to the various profitability mirages: it didn't mine Feathercoin for long the last 24h for example).
For me mining, making a coin viable should not rely on the behavior of the miners but on the behavior of users. Resisting hashrate fluctuations - although a desirable property - should not be their primary concern: they should design their coins so that people want to buy them, not mine them.

I dont think most coin creators have the resources to make such a coin. Tho i've been involved with startups and know the people to talk to, quitting my job to take on a risky launch of yet another alt coin by pouring serious cash into a real coin that people would use is not happening. And being so official about it tends to getyou labelled a 'terrorist' and arrested in the US or Peru. So this piddling around as a hobby seems ok to me, but putting serious cash into an official business doing this is left to the KIM DOTCOM random-jurisdiction-claims-DoHS/FBI-baiters of the world. Im just not that interested in all this stuff to be my freedom on it, or even my job.

Guess im failtown. But ill still fuck around with coin ideas.

[zackclark70]

take a look at my idea https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226582.0

I like some of your ideas, but I'm failing to see which part of it would mitigate the coinchoose effect?

the diff changes every 30m ( 60 blocks )  even if the diff jumps up 50x or the hashrate drops 50x  the diff would corect itself in less than 24h
there is very little other than that you can do

zack
 

[e521]

the problem is not coinchoose, it is all the shitcoins that are being released

no, the problem is people buying shitcoins, competition is never bad

[Lhunephel]

I think that QTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226918.0) is really fair and resistant to CC. The block value depends on the difficulty and the retarget interval and timespan depends on the network hash rate of the last 8 blocks. This results in a fair reward, regardless if you have 1000Kh/s or 10Mh/s. The problem simply is that nobody wants to mine the coin, because there are no periods of a very low difficulty and a higher price on the exchanges.

[digitalindustry]

Topic should be renamed to "How to design a user-resistant coin?".

+ 1

[mat5x]

I think that QTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226918.0) is really fair and resistant to CC. The block value depends on the difficulty and the retarget interval and timespan depends on the network hash rate of the last 8 blocks. This results in a fair reward, regardless if you have 1000Kh/s or 10Mh/s. The problem simply is that nobody wants to mine the coin, because there are no periods of a very low difficulty and a higher price on the exchanges.

ridiculous eh, coin is resistant to pump dump waves so no one wants to mine it.

sad state of affairs.

as for QTC retargging every  block average 8 block sliding window, how would they not have TRC pumpdump yoyo?