ByteCoin Poll (PLZ Sticky)

[ahmed_bodi]

Right, as many people know i've been planning on working on fixing bytecoin by implementing a merged mining patch. As i can see im almost ready and will put it on testnet in a day or 2. I also have a pool ready which will have merged mining on the backend but i will auto-exchange daily and double up the block reward.
Now here comes you're part:

I would like people's opinion on the following:
1) The Merged Mining Patch
2) Changing the retarget structure so it retargets more frequently, (every 30 mins?)
3) When to hard fork?

[jdebunt]

1) YES!
2) it would be a good thing if you ask me
3) Not sure :<

[TheSpiral]

1) Yes. Always good to see more merge-mined coins, especially modern ones.
2) I'm not a huge fan of fast retargets, though I doubt it'd matter much if it was merge-mined.

[ahmed_bodi]

good replies so far, would any of u guys be willing to host some bytecoin testnet nodes with the new client so i can mine and test the network?

[meta.p02]

(1) Neutral on this.
(2) If this coin is to survive, fast retargets are a must.
(3) Block #19K seems to be a good time (at current hash rate of 18GH/s, ~15 days)

[ahmed_bodi]

currently in the client im building its set to 20k to allow for any increases in hashrate or delays in testing

[Metatron]

1. Yes
2. Good
3. Seems right 20K

TY

[ahmed_bodi]

Your Welcome no negative replies so far, compiling my client now and sticking it on the test network

[aa]

I'll run the client. Send/post a link.

[ahmed_bodi]

sure

EDIT: I managed to build the merged mining daemon off an old version of the client, going to update the checkpoints and everything and then release it

[ahmed_bodi]

is there anything u guys think i should add in?

[mr_random]

The whole point of Bytecoin is that it's a pure copy of Bitcoin. Making it different turns Bytecoin into one of the million other alt coins around here. Plus if merge mining is successful then the difficulty retarget will become a smaller issue than at present.

[ahmed_bodi]

i can agree but the diff is something that needs to be looked at, im thinking of setting the diff to be a static value at the hard fork so we can bring it down to a normal level

[movellan]

The whole point of Bytecoin is that it's a pure copy of Bitcoin. Making it different turns Bytecoin into one of the million other alt coins around here. Plus if merge mining is successful then the difficulty retarget will become a smaller issue than at present.

Agreed. The future potential of BTE is it's 1:1 relationship to BTC. Messing with the blockchain and hard-forking just benefit those who want quick profits right away. It benefits only miners who are currently promoting the changes. I believe those who are able to conventional-mine BTE with modest hashing should continue to do so. This will give the difficulty time to come down slowly by the end of the year hopefully making block generation quicker.

It's a possibility that the increasing difficulty and hashrate BTC is currently experiencing will put many off mining Bitcoin. Also remember it's only three years to the next BTC payout halving and the coin may not be as desirable at 12.5 per block unless the price has risen quite a bit. This may make Bytecoin, with it's 1:1 copy a popular alternative to investors. What do you say, $50-$100 per BTE in three years? Better to moderately mine now than screw up the blockchain to suit a few greedy opportunists.

Just my 0.02 BTE.

[ahmed_bodi]

possible and true. However until the last pool it was technically considered dead. Even now its blocks every 12 hours. So something has to be done to fix it

[meta.p02]

Just want to point out... If not for the max 4x difficulty decrease, even if the remaining blocks till 20160 were all found now, the difficulty would drop by a factor of 9, to 3.8K.

Right now it's going at 93 blocks found in the past 288 hours (1 block every 3.1 hours), suggesting a hashrate of 13.79GH/s. At this rate the next diff adjustment will be in 169 days and 7 hours. Perhaps we could get people who mine just for fun (i.e. not expecting much profit) to put their hashpower onto this coin? 336MH/s here, 336MH/s there and pretty soon you'd have a whole lot of gigahashes per second.

I hope to set up a pure-SHA pool soon, and when (if ever) I get it I will include Bytecoin as one of the choices.

[ahmed_bodi]

i already have a pure SHA pool for bytecoin i just need to clean up the frontend. Im planning on making it PPS too to increase the users

[mr_random]

i can agree but the diff is something that needs to be looked at, im thinking of setting the diff to be a static value at the hard fork so we can bring it down to a normal level

I'm confused. My understanding was that you are working on a merge mining patch. Would that not vastly improve the situation once implemented due to the significant increase in network hashrate?

I'm strongly of the opinion that tinkering with Bytecoin's difficulty or retargeting will destroy it's USP (unique selling point). We already have hundreds of coins similar to Bitcoin but 'a little different'.

[ahmed_bodi]

the merged mining would give it a more consistent hashrate. Think of the current hashrate + mmpool hashrate = new hashrate after the fork. What i was thinking of doing was setting the hashrate at the hard fork to something slightly lower in order to increase the block times. However i am in 2 minds about that

[movellan]

i can agree but the diff is something that needs to be looked at, im thinking of setting the diff to be a static value at the hard fork so we can bring it down to a normal level

I'm strongly of the opinion that tinkering with Bytecoin's difficulty or retargeting will destroy it's USP (unique selling point). We already have hundreds of coins similar to Bitcoin but 'a little different'.

+1 - The "tinkering" that is being considered includes forking the blockchain, which should be rejected out-of-hand, as it destroys Bytecoin's uniqueness as a pure BTC clone. These "forkers" want to profit at others expense just to make it easy for themselves to merge-mine multiple alt coins. Motive is pure profit and damn the blockchain integrity.