[ANN] Catcoin - Scrypt meow!

[envy2010]

...Essentially all it does is make it so if somebody drops in and starts mining during particularly easy difficulty times, their reward is cut in half, just for that one difficulty cycle. If they stay and continue mining, they would get full rewards from the next block forward.

I assume the network checks blocks submitted by a node during the last difficulty cycle(s), in order to determime loyalty. How does this keep miners from hopping on pools during low diffs, since the user and network sides of the pool node are completely separate?

If people want to leave mining the coin during easy difficulty times, that means the profitabilty must be really bad, because the people who had been mining are receiving twice as many coins as people who want to drop in and start mining. Then we have a legitimate issue with the coin having lost a huge amount of market appeal. However, it is not very likely that someone who has been mining the coin long-term would stop mining it while they are earning twice as many coins as people who start mining - plus, if they do, the difficulty level would adjust to one step easier yet, to compensate, through existing mechanisms, so there is no systemic problem. You do make a good point - the halving of rewards should be extended to subsequent difficulty cycles, until the difficulty eventually goes up, not just be limited to the one easier difficulty cycle after a hard cycle.

On a more general note, once the mechanism in place, the coin hopping pools would pretty quickly stop including Catcoins in its calculations, out of economic necessity, because they are after "profits" and they would not be profitable enough, receiving only half of the rewards, by jumping into mining Catcoins during easy difficulty times. And by nature, they won't stay through a high difficulty time, to qualify to receive full rewards during the next difficulty period. So reward paid out would approach 100% going to loyal miners (defined as any miner willing to mine the coin for at least two continuous difficulty cycles, including a difficult cycle). Which would dry out the supply of cheap coin to the dumpers. Almost all of the coins would end up in the wallets of people who believe in Catcoins and employ a strategy of mine-and-hold. This should lead to price increases, simply because there is no longer a stream of cheap coins being sent continuously to coin dumpers / coin hoppers.

Keep in mind also, this mechanism is designed to make itself unnecessary to be invoked except in rare cases. Once it is known that it is futile to try to profit by mining the coin temporarily when the difficulty level gets easy, in a "jump in, get rich quickly, jump out" sort of a way, the difficulty fluctuations should become more modest, which should cause this mechanism not to trigger very often. The goal is to have stability in the mining difficulty curves such that the reward mechanism simply never engages at all. It is best seen as a fail-safe only, so it can handle situations such as when a big miner decides to jump in without being careful, and drives difficulty up, that it does not open up an opportunity for a bunch of profiteers to jump in when they leave, cause the difficulty to go way up, which is then followed by the difficulty level becoming ridiculously easy (which in medical analogy is like suffering insulin shock for diabetics, or drug withdrawal symptoms for someone addicted to drugs). The high temporary hashing, is kind of like drugs - causes a temporary sense of the coin's importance, but is followed by a crash and massive sell-off which is the withdrawal symptoms.

I'm still not seeing how the network would decide if a node is a long-term miner or a jumper. Would it be purely based on blocks found at the last few difficulty levels?

Also if a dedicated CAT pool earns these incentive blocks, will the pool operator have to determine how to distribute them fairly to the pool? PPS and PPNLS won't work for this, so a new system would be required to keep new miners from jumping into an established on easy difficulties and getting doubled blocks.

[etblvu1]

I'm still not seeing how the network would decide if a node is a long-term miner or a jumper. Would it be purely based on blocks found at the last few difficulty levels?

Also if a dedicated CAT pool earns these incentive blocks, will the pool operator have to determine how to distribute them fairly to the pool? PPS and PPNLS won't work for this, so a new system would be required to keep new miners from jumping into an established on easy difficulties and getting doubled blocks.

Thank you for your thoughtful questions.

1. Yes, a loyal miner is defined as a miner whose address is on the blockchain record showing mined block(s) in the previous difficulty level, and deemed for that reason to have the right to receive full reward on the current easy difficulty level.

2. How a CAT pool should deal with the credits - there are no doubt various creative ways to do this - but the essence of it is that if someone jumps into the pool during easy difficulty times which was so extreme as to trigger the mechanism - they should not see full benefits of that easy difficulty - and any benefits the pool earned by earning credits previously should be distributed to those who were in the pool during the previous difficulty era. Perhaps the easiest way would be keep everything the same but to simply award them half-shares during exceptional circumstances (i.e., conditions which would cause the mechanism to fire), and upgrade them to full-shares once they have served out the single easy difficulty era where the mechanism was in force, when they joined the pool.

[nous]

Cryptographic
Anonimous
Transactions
It's too serious to say meow.

Think this one more like real coin and more serious. CATcoin doesn't need rebranding, but let this coin be.
(Mars landscape from athlas, earth's position from my head, Earth not up to scale)

Oh-so-cool design. Serious stuff.

[strelok369]

Guys, (only watch topic a little, but not read, difficult exams) i think you are go
around POS(proof of stake), when mining more simple on wallets(addresses),
which have more coins (i can mistake, but something like this). It have positive side "mine to keep",
but a negative too "mine to keep to mine to keep" or simply currency turns into "bag of gold" for dark
day and don't circulate (no reason to spend money). It's a mechanism, which known for some time.

I'm understand, that your mechanism is different, but it's realy hard to differ "loyal" miner from jumper.
The hashing is like roulete the target diff hash can be found on first millisecond or after hundreds of
years of calculations the question of probability. The output of hasing function (if we will give it any
input sequence(exept inverse hash function, existence simple form of which is question of crypo resistance))
made to be most alike random seqence with uniform law of distribution of probability to prevent
"attack of days of births"(it's code theory slang, so i can mistake with translation).

So(for clear crypto currency theory we need to examine only cases with solo mining)
If miner is "loyal" it's not prevent him from not founding a single block (try to solo mine BTC on cpu now,
my lost 100BTC ) before diff recalc. With pools simplier, but it's a question in relative "loyal"/"jumping" pools
hashrate and scale of network. What the source diff recalc purpose in synthetic model(every agent
have the same hashrate)? Exactly: for network scalability.

[NyanCat]

https://twitter.com/CatcoinOfficial

CatCoin Team is proud to announce that we survived the fork. Twitter will be more active from now on. More news soon!

[envy2010]

CAT up to #3 on coinwarz. Prepare for the hash influx!

[NyanCat]

[loader140]

I think we should get CAT off of coinwarz as it FUCKS with the diff every time it goes down, then it goes high when then they leave then rejoin after all the hard work is done by the loyal miners

[envy2010]

I think we should get CAT off of coinwarz as it FUCKS with the diff every time it goes down, then it goes high when then they leave then rejoin after all the hard work is done by the loyal miners

And now it's #1 on coinwarz. Not good.

[Maverickthenoob]

We just got pounded by something. This wallet: http://catchain.info/address/9WCWQxNRQUTd5euTJyQ8Z9TaCPj6Ay9T4s whoever it is has successfully pushed the diff up 3 days in a row. Honestly that's pretty low, but I guess that's par for the course these days.

[loader140]

We just got pounded by something. This wallet: http://catchain.info/address/9WCWQxNRQUTd5euTJyQ8Z9TaCPj6Ay9T4s whoever it is has successfully pushed the diff up 3 days in a row. Honestly that's pretty low, but I guess that's par for the course these days.

Is that deffo not a pool address before they payout? as that 'thing' would have to have A LOT of hash rate like a 1/4 of it because he found like 3 blocks in a row (MORE THAN ONCE) which is why I think it is a pool.

Also it could be the hack thing what went around for LTC, FTC etc a while back, the way you could FAKE hashrate and it accepts it when it should actually be rejects but I don't think it would be that but being on coin warz I think is ruining coins like this that needs a loyal community right noe, coinwarz is good for good well established coins i.e bitcoins, litecoins etc where they can afford to lose a few M/hash here and there but we can't

[LeoC]

CAT is making another move

[envy2010]

We just got pounded by something. This wallet: http://catchain.info/address/9WCWQxNRQUTd5euTJyQ8Z9TaCPj6Ay9T4s whoever it is has successfully pushed the diff up 3 days in a row. Honestly that's pretty low, but I guess that's par for the course these days.

Is that deffo not a pool address before they payout? as that 'thing' would have to have A LOT of hash rate like a 1/4 of it because he found like 3 blocks in a row (MORE THAN ONCE) which is why I think it is a pool.

Also it could be the hack thing what went around for LTC, FTC etc a while back, the way you could FAKE hashrate and it accepts it when it should actually be rejects but I don't think it would be that but being on coin warz I think is ruining coins like this that needs a loyal community right noe, coinwarz is good for good well established coins i.e bitcoins, litecoins etc where they can afford to lose a few M/hash here and there but we can't

It can't be a hack since it found 21 of the 36 blocks on that low diff. It is either a multi-coin pool or a LARGE scrypt farm. Based on the blocktime for this address it has between 675 and 1675 MH/s, which puts it in the HashCows and MultiPool area. Neither of those look like they mined any cats recently though. Anyone else have ideas?

[LeoC]

Multipool is 10gh/s and it would have driven difficulty into the stratosphere so it wasnt them.
Hashcows said they wouldn't do it, and it isn't appearing on their site anymore.
Someone that uses Hashcows and doesnt convert to BTC should check to see if they have CATS.
It's not a hack because a hack would mine far slower than what is detailed in the blockchain, it's real Gigahash.
The only explanation is probably either a mining farm or some foreign multipool clone that we don't know about.

[loader140]

but how can the scrypt farm have more than 200+ M/hash as the net hash rate is only 350M/hash so it cant be a giant farm as the net hashrate would have gone up to minimum 0.9-1G/hash

[LeoC]

Because they are gone... for now

[envy2010]

but how can the scrypt farm have more than 200+ M/hash as the net hash rate is only 350M/hash so it cant be a giant farm as the net hashrate would have gone up to minimum 0.9-1G/hash

The network has no idea what the actual instantaneous hashrate is, it can only calculate a probabilistic range from the observed average block time. The nethash tool in the wallet can't see a change in hash faster than at least 20 blocks (I don't think it was updated for the new 36-block retarget?). This miner doesn't stay for much longer than that. In and out, suck off all the easy coins, pump the diff back up, and then go mine something else... it's killing alt-coins.

[LeoC]

Cryptographic
Anonimous
Transactions
It's too serious to say meow.

Think this one more like real coin and more serious. CATcoin doesn't need rebranding, but let this coin be.
(Mars landscape from athlas, earth's position from my head, Earth not up to scale)

Nice coin design, now get out of here stalker.

[etblvu1]

Guys, (only watch topic a little, but not read, difficult exams) i think you are go
around POS(proof of stake), when mining more simple on wallets(addresses),
which have more coins (i can mistake, but something like this). It have positive side "mine to keep",
but a negative too "mine to keep to mine to keep" or simply currency turns into "bag of gold" for dark
day and don't circulate (no reason to spend money). It's a mechanism, which known for some time.

I'm understand, that your mechanism is different, but it's realy hard to differ "loyal" miner from jumper.
The hashing is like roulete the target diff hash can be found on first millisecond or after hundreds of
years of calculations the question of probability. The output of hasing function (if we will give it any
input sequence(exept inverse hash function, existence simple form of which is question of crypo resistance))
made to be most alike random seqence with uniform law of distribution of probability to prevent
"attack of days of births"(it's code theory slang, so i can mistake with translation).

So(for clear crypto currency theory we need to examine only cases with solo mining)
If miner is "loyal" it's not prevent him from not founding a single block (try to solo mine BTC on cpu now,
my lost 100BTC ) before diff recalc. With pools simplier, but it's a question in relative "loyal"/"jumping" pools
hashrate and scale of network. What the source diff recalc purpose in synthetic model(every agent
have the same hashrate)? Exactly: for network scalability.

Hi Strelok369,

Thank you for your thoughtful post.

Yes, in a sense you are right, that if everyone just mined and kept coins, the coins may become of little use, because nobody would be buying or selling them. This is not what I would consider an ideal situation either. But what I am proposing is that the artificial boost in the number of people engaged in mining and immediately dumping, due to a flaw in the difficulty reward mechanism, is actually causing an excessive number of people to mine coins purely for the reason of dumping it immediately on the market and by eliminating the ill effects of this flaw, we can reduce (but not eliminate) people mining and putting coins on the market. This would diminish the supply somewhat, of the coins entering the Exchanges, and reduce the downward constant pressure on coin prices (relative to Bitcoins and Litecoins, both of which people tend to hang onto more), which could allow the coin to join Bitcoins and Litecoins, in accumulating value without this dumping negative price pressure.

Incidentally, I also noticed Litecoins are starting to climb higher on some profitability charts - I predict Litecoin itself will not be immune to the negative effects of wild difficulty jumps, there are quite a few gigahashes out there that are roaming the lands looking for easy difficulty levels, and once LTC is affected, it will either cause LTC to go down in value due to dumping on market activities (joining other altcoins in having this problem), or LTC will implement a loyalty reward type mechanism, to maintain its value. It would be kind of ironic if after proposing the mechanism here in the Catcoin thread, if LTC were to be the first to implement the mechanism. But they may have to, to avoid getting sucked into the wild difficulty swings, which could occur if LTC stays near the top of the profitability charts for any significant duration.

For everyone reading this - I had some thoughts today as to how Catcoins can start benefiting from the logic of loyalty credits, leading to more modest difficult level changes over time, even before implementing any coding changes in the coin itself - by having one or more pools implement some simple logic/policy changes - to reward loyal miners at the expense of opportunistic ones. I will post more on this a bit later.

Etblvu1

[envy2010]

Multipool is 10gh/s and it would have driven difficulty into the stratosphere so it wasnt them.

Only about 4 GH/s actually coin-hops on MultiPool, but they don't mine CAT anyway.

Hashcows said they wouldn't do it, and it isn't appearing on their site anymore.
Someone that uses Hashcows and doesnt convert to BTC should check to see if they have CATS.

People would see pretty quick on Hashcows if they were mining something and not putting it in the front page stats. I doubt it's them.

It's not a hack because a hack would mine far slower than what is detailed in the blockchain, it's real Gigahash.
The only explanation is probably either a mining farm or some foreign multipool clone that we don't know about.

Or it's Middlecoin, which has mined CAT a few times. Middlecoin does very fast coin-hopping, switching on average every minute or so. Even though it's 11 GH/s it might only find a CAT block every 3-5 minutes depending on how many other coins are in the rotation.