[ANN] Catcoin - Scrypt meow!

[envy2010]

Tomorrow I get my new graphics card, so with the one I currently have, I should have around 1 mhash/sec to throw at Catcoin whenever needed.

The difficulty is going to drop below 30 again in about 6 hours. That will make CAT 1.35 to 1.4 times as profitable as LTC and probably shoot it to #1 on coinwarz. We need hash NOW to keep that from happening again.

We need the difficulty to drop to between 40 and 45, which will keep CAT between 1.0x and 1.1x as profitable as LTC. That will attract some miners, but not the horde. By my calcs we need to add 500 MH/s now to reach this.

[etblvu1]

Tomorrow I get my new graphics card, so with the one I currently have, I should have around 1 mhash/sec to throw at Catcoin whenever needed.

The difficulty is going to drop below 30 again in about 6 hours. That will make CAT 1.35 to 1.4 times as profitable as LTC and probably shoot it to #1 on coinwarz. We need hash NOW to keep that from happening again.

We need the difficulty to drop to between 40 and 45, which will keep CAT between 1.0x and 1.1x as profitable as LTC. That will attract some miners, but not the horde. By my calcs we need to add 500 MH/s now to reach this.

I agree 100% with this assessment. Thank you very much for keeping a sharp eye on the blockchain, and raising this alert. This is the time for the Catcoin community to come together to show unity in supporting the Coin. Everyone who supports Catcoin but have felt forced by economic circumstance to mine where it is profitable - please consider taking a break from profitable mining for a few hours and point your mining equipment to Catcoin until the difficulty change takes effect; you can feel free to switch back to mining whatever else you want after the difficulty change. This is a small price to pay to try to obtain near-term stability in the difficulty, and to keep out the miner-dumpers, pending longer-term solutions (changes at the pool level and the coin level).

And anyone with a mailing list of Catcoin supporters - I ask you - please repeat this message to your subscribers to do this, asap.

Also, this is a long shot, but are there any pools or miners with significant hashing power, who can be persuaded by payment or otherwise, to temporarily, for just a few hours,  to loan the 500 MH or so need to achieve this?

If we can achieve success at this just one time, it will be easier to repeat the formula in future situations where the difficulty is about to drop by too much, coordinate with supporters who are willing to lend hashpower temporarily - to maintain a reasonable difficulty level (the 1x to 1.1x LTC sounds reasonable to me), perhaps by a minuteman type quick action email alerts - until a systemic solution can be put in place to automatically through incentives keep difficulty levels at about this level.

Thank you,

Etblvu1

[LeoC]

I agree this needs another fork, with maximum difficulty increase AND decrease per 36 blocks set to 20%

[etblvu1]

I agree this needs another fork, with maximum difficulty increase AND decrease per 36 blocks set to 20%

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks, with very rapid coin production from coin hoppers jumping on board temporarily, and dumping everything they mine into the exchanges, until the price crashes, the miner-dumpers leave quickly, and the coin being hit with a sudden reduction in aggregate mining hashrate - and being faced with a very slow reduction in difficulty despite the fact that most of the miners have left? Please explain if I have missed something here.

I sent the dev this PM:

You're going to need to fork CAT again. The difficulty oscillation on your recent fork is flawed. You need to set a maximum limit on how much difficulty can increase and decrease. My recommendation is a 10-20% maximum increase, and 40-50% maximum decrease every 36 blocks. Start the difficulty at 25. Also make sure to fork on a block that is a multiple of 36 to avoid what happened last time. We need this to protect the coin against large hashpower coin jumpers.

And with this somewhat modified formula - again, if Catcoin gets major press and spikes in value 50x to 100x due to sudden demand, we'd see extreme profitability of the coin for many cycles of difficulty adjustment, with coin hoppers getting in on the action, 50 new Catcoins being generated every few seconds, a lot of it being dumped into the exchanges - and we'd have this hyperinflation go on for a while until the coin suddenly collapses in value as it drops in profitability (which is calculated in part based on difficulty - and equally significant - in part based on what they sell for in the Exchanges - huge rate of dumping will cause the price to crash!). Again, please explain if I have missed something here - and with respect - I appreciate your energy in effort towards helping Catcoin.

Huh? If you haven't noticed, the price is already crashing. Also wtf are you talking about, many weeks? If a 5 GH/s mining pool jumped on CAT with my proposed changes then it will go up in difficulty quickly, just not INSTANTLY like it is now. 36 blocks is nothing, where are you getting weeks from. Try hours.

I'm still waiting on my BTC to clear today.

Thank you for your show of support for the coin in buying. To address your question - my scenario is describing a crash not at current price levels, but after the hypothetical sudden increase in the value of the Coins by 50x to 100x due to something like press coverage or someone making a major breakthrough in marketing. In this case, the profitability would appear to jump 50x to 100x, yet difficulty would increase at 10%-20% per 36-block cycle. It would take many such cycles, to get anywhere close to reaching the appropriate difficulty in the face of such an increased coin valuation. In the mean time, the coin would be hyper-inflating potentially at the rate of 50 coins per tens of seconds, as a rule ending up in the hands of coin hoppers who would promptly dump it on the exchanges, and sooner or later, the coin would crash in price in the exchanges. Then, at that point, it would suddenly drop from the top of the profitability charts, and the coin hoppers would suddenly disappear, perhaps reducing network hashrate by 80-90%. But we are committed to decreasing the difficulty level at 40%-50% but it had been ratcheted up to very high levels, so it would take many iterations to bring the difficulty level back down. I believe your formula could be an improvement over what we have now - but if we are doing a hard fork again - why not address the actual underlying incentive (the fact the coin code allows cherry picking behavior) - rather than (or perhaps in addition to) just the symptom (difficulty swings)?

Using the 20% max increase, it would take 10 retargets to go up 6x, 15 retargets to go up 15x, and 20 retargets to go up 38x. With a 10x hash spike, retargets happen every 36 minutes, so in 6 hours the difficulty would climb ~4x (just like it's supposed to work now, except more gradually).

Using a 50% max increase, it would take 5 retargets to go up 8x and 10 retargets to go up 60x.

The formula is (max_increase)^(#retargets)=(total_increase)

10 retargets = 360 block solutions = 18,000 coins potentially dumped into the markets in a very short period of time, by coin hoppers, if my math is right. We are talking about a coin that was designed to be as scarce as Bitcoins, so this is not an insignificant quantity to dump into the exchanges. Could we not reduce the negative effects of this hyperinflation by specifically targeting detectable cherry-picking behavior and reducing their rewards, to encourage them to stay away, or at minimum, if they are going to come due to extreme profitability, that their profits should at least be limited, for the benefit of those who have been more loyal mining the coin?

Etblvu1

[kisa2005]

Tomorrow I get my new graphics card, so with the one I currently have, I should have around 1 mhash/sec to throw at Catcoin whenever needed.

The difficulty is going to drop below 30 again in about 6 hours. That will make CAT 1.35 to 1.4 times as profitable as LTC and probably shoot it to #1 on coinwarz. We need hash NOW to keep that from happening again.

We need the difficulty to drop to between 40 and 45, which will keep CAT between 1.0x and 1.1x as profitable as LTC. That will attract some miners, but not the horde. By my calcs we need to add 500 MH/s now to reach this.

I agree 100% with this assessment. Thank you very much for keeping a sharp eye on the blockchain, and raising this alert. This is the time for the Catcoin community to come together to show unity in supporting the Coin. Everyone who supports Catcoin but have felt forced by economic circumstance to mine where it is profitable - please consider taking a break from profitable mining for a few hours and point your mining equipment to Catcoin until the difficulty change takes effect; you can feel free to switch back to mining whatever else you want after the difficulty change. This is a small price to pay to try to obtain near-term stability in the difficulty, and to keep out the miner-dumpers, pending longer-term solutions (changes at the pool level and the coin level).

And anyone with a mailing list of Catcoin supporters - I ask you - please repeat this message to your subscribers to do this, asap.

Also, this is a long shot, but are there any pools or miners with significant hashing power, who can be persuaded by payment or otherwise, to temporarily, for just a few hours,  to loan the 500 MH or so need to achieve this?

If we can achieve success at this just one time, it will be easier to repeat the formula in future situations where the difficulty is about to drop by too much, coordinate with supporters who are willing to lend hashpower temporarily - to maintain a reasonable difficulty level (the 1x to 1.1x LTC sounds reasonable to me), perhaps by a minuteman type quick action email alerts - until a systemic solution can be put in place to automatically through incentives keep difficulty levels at about this level.

Thank you,

Etblvu1

announced on
http://www.catcoinforum.com/showthread.php?tid=341

[LeoC]

I sent the dev this PM:

You're going to need to fork CAT again. The difficulty oscillation on your recent fork is flawed. You need to set a maximum limit on how much difficulty can increase and decrease. My recommendation is a 10-20% maximum increase, and 40-50% maximum decrease every 36 blocks. Start the difficulty at 25. Also make sure to fork on a block that is a multiple of 36 to avoid what happened last time. We need this to protect the coin against large hashpower coin jumpers.

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks, with very rapid coin production from coin hoppers jumping on board temporarily, and dumping everything they mine into the exchanges, until the price crashes, the miner-dumpers leave quickly, and the coin being hit with a sudden reduction in aggregate mining hashrate - and being faced with a very slow reduction in difficulty despite the fact that most of the miners have left? Please explain if I have missed something here.

Huh? If you haven't noticed, the price is already crashing. Also wtf are you talking about, many weeks? If a 5 GH/s mining pool jumped on CAT with my proposed changes then it will go up in difficulty quickly, just not INSTANTLY like it is now. 36 blocks is nothing, where are you getting weeks from. Try hours. Then it would decrease in difficulty even quicker since the cap is higher. Right now its instantaneous both on the increase and decrease. It needs to be limited, period.

I'm still waiting on my BTC to clear today.

[ajax3592]

Im using that old wallet with litecoin logo.

Cant send coins, I sent some to a address with 0.01tx fee but no confirmations even after hour.

Any idea ?

[tolich94]

Im using that old wallet with litecoin logo.

Cant send coins, I sent some to a address with 0.01tx fee but no confirmations even after hour.

Any idea ?

Update your wallet, look in the OP thread.


And btw, people are really dumping the price now, looks like more and more people lose faith in this coin and they sell everything.

[envy2010]

I agree this needs another fork, with maximum difficulty increase AND decrease per 36 blocks set to 20%

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks...

Using the 20% max increase, it would take 10 retargets to go up 6x, 15 retargets to go up 15x, and 20 retargets to go up 38x. With a 10x hash spike, retargets happen every 36 minutes, so in 6 hours the difficulty would climb ~4x (just like it's supposed to work now, except more gradually).

Using a 50% max increase, it would take 5 retargets to go up 8x and 10 retargets to go up 60x.

The formula is (max_increase)^(#retargets)=(total_increase)

[kisa2005]

Im using that old wallet with litecoin logo.

Cant send coins, I sent some to a address with 0.01tx fee but no confirmations even after hour.

Any idea ?

Update your wallet, look in the OP thread.


And btw, people are really dumping the price now, looks like more and more people lose faith in this coin and they sell everything.

It is better if caring hands acquire CATs at low price now rather than rewarding dumpers during inflated price jumps...

[envy2010]

I sent the dev this PM:

You're going to need to fork CAT again. The difficulty oscillation on your recent fork is flawed. You need to set a maximum limit on how much difficulty can increase and decrease. My recommendation is a 10-20% maximum increase, and 40-50% maximum decrease every 36 blocks. Start the difficulty at 25. Also make sure to fork on a block that is a multiple of 36 to avoid what happened last time. We need this to protect the coin against large hashpower coin jumpers.

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks, with very rapid coin production from coin hoppers jumping on board temporarily, and dumping everything they mine into the exchanges, until the price crashes, the miner-dumpers leave quickly, and the coin being hit with a sudden reduction in aggregate mining hashrate - and being faced with a very slow reduction in difficulty despite the fact that most of the miners have left? Please explain if I have missed something here.

Huh? If you haven't noticed, the price is already crashing. Also wtf are you talking about, many weeks? If a 5 GH/s mining pool jumped on CAT with my proposed changes then it will go up in difficulty quickly, just not INSTANTLY like it is now. 36 blocks is nothing, where are you getting weeks from. Try hours. Then it would decrease in difficulty even quicker since the cap is higher. Right now its instantaneous both on the increase and decrease. It needs to be limited, period.

I'm still waiting on my BTC to clear today.

Coin-jump miners are using fractions of a percent to determine profitability, increase difficulty just a few percent beyond profitability and they will leave for the next best coin. The 4x difficulty change limit is as antiquated as the 2016 block retarget, at least for scrypt coins.

[LeoC]

I sent the dev this PM:

You're going to need to fork CAT again. The difficulty oscillation on your recent fork is flawed. You need to set a maximum limit on how much difficulty can increase and decrease. My recommendation is a 10-20% maximum increase, and 40-50% maximum decrease every 36 blocks. Start the difficulty at 25. Also make sure to fork on a block that is a multiple of 36 to avoid what happened last time. We need this to protect the coin against large hashpower coin jumpers.

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks, with very rapid coin production from coin hoppers jumping on board temporarily, and dumping everything they mine into the exchanges, until the price crashes, the miner-dumpers leave quickly, and the coin being hit with a sudden reduction in aggregate mining hashrate - and being faced with a very slow reduction in difficulty despite the fact that most of the miners have left? Please explain if I have missed something here.

Huh? If you haven't noticed, the price is already crashing. Also wtf are you talking about, many weeks? If a 5 GH/s mining pool jumped on CAT with my proposed changes then it will go up in difficulty quickly, just not INSTANTLY like it is now. 36 blocks is nothing, where are you getting weeks from. Try hours. Then it would decrease in difficulty even quicker since the cap is higher. Right now its instantaneous both on the increase and decrease. It needs to be limited, period.

I'm still waiting on my BTC to clear today.

Coin-jump miners are using fractions of a percent to determine profitability, increase difficulty just a few percent beyond profitability and they will leave for the next best coin. The 4x difficulty change limit is as antiquated as the 2016 block retarget, at least for scrypt coins.

It's far far better than what we have now, the point was to get the difficulty down slightly enough so that hopefully more average miners jumped on board when this was ranked between 3-5 in profitability, if we are ranked 15, then one retarget later we would be ranked 13, then 11, then 10 and so on. Right now we are going from rank 30 to 1 instantly. Do you not see the problem here? With my proposed changes we would slowly inch our way up the profitability ladder with the assumption that we would get enough hash power on the way up to halt the advancement before it reached the top.

[etblvu1]

I just wanted to post here now, specifically to say that I appreciate the spirited debate on the best way to fix the coin so we don't suffer wild difficulty swings. I think we are all in agreement, that ideally, difficulty would stabilize around what is appropriate for the current valuation of the coin, so that block solutions come as close to 10 minutes as possible, and hyper-inflation effects of the value of the coin going up due to sudden press attention or other marketing success, should be minimized, and if there is going to be hyper-inflation for a while - if that's unavoidable - it is desirable to keep as many of the newly created coins off of immediately being dumped into the exchanges as possible. I believe our debate is the best means to accomplish these desirable ends, and that kind of debate can only be healthy for the coin. I hope to see the best solutions implemented, and the coin soar in value. I apologize if my method of adding additional responses into an edit of the same message is a bit confusing to follow - I am still considered a new user on this forum and limited to posting only once per 10 minutes, and this was the only way I could keep up with the many good suggestions and comments.

Thank you,

Etblvu1

[envy2010]

I sent the dev this PM:

You're going to need to fork CAT again. The difficulty oscillation on your recent fork is flawed. You need to set a maximum limit on how much difficulty can increase and decrease. My recommendation is a 10-20% maximum increase, and 40-50% maximum decrease every 36 blocks. Start the difficulty at 25. Also make sure to fork on a block that is a multiple of 36 to avoid what happened last time. We need this to protect the coin against large hashpower coin jumpers.

Under this proposed permanent formula - if Catcoin gets major press and gets a sudden 50x to 100x increase in price due to sudden demand - what would prevent Catcoin from sitting at the top of profitability charts for potentially many weeks, with very rapid coin production from coin hoppers jumping on board temporarily, and dumping everything they mine into the exchanges, until the price crashes, the miner-dumpers leave quickly, and the coin being hit with a sudden reduction in aggregate mining hashrate - and being faced with a very slow reduction in difficulty despite the fact that most of the miners have left? Please explain if I have missed something here.

Huh? If you haven't noticed, the price is already crashing. Also wtf are you talking about, many weeks? If a 5 GH/s mining pool jumped on CAT with my proposed changes then it will go up in difficulty quickly, just not INSTANTLY like it is now. 36 blocks is nothing, where are you getting weeks from. Try hours. Then it would decrease in difficulty even quicker since the cap is higher. Right now its instantaneous both on the increase and decrease. It needs to be limited, period.

I'm still waiting on my BTC to clear today.

Coin-jump miners are using fractions of a percent to determine profitability, increase difficulty just a few percent beyond profitability and they will leave for the next best coin. The 4x difficulty change limit is as antiquated as the 2016 block retarget, at least for scrypt coins.

It's far far better than what we have now, and I don't see you coming up with any useful alternatives.

I was agreeing with you, the 4x change has to go. I thought 20% is a bit slow, but that still allows a 4x jump in 12,600 coins. Plenty fast.

[LeoC]

Sorry, misread my bad lol. Glad we have an agreement then.
Well I e-mailed the dev already, he just isn't active enough though.

[ajax3592]

Im using that old wallet with litecoin logo.

Cant send coins, I sent some to a address with 0.01tx fee but no confirmations even after hour.

Any idea ?

Update your wallet, look in the OP thread


And btw, people are really dumping the price now, looks like more and more people lose faith in this coin and they sell everything.

Updated, send few test coins, no confirmations after 20 minutes and 0.005tx fee

Also, it does not sync after 3 days remaining though I have 3 bars.

Maybe I could use some nodes

There is no .conf info in OP

[envy2010]

If there were real fears of hyperinflation following another change, the difficulty could be reset to 40 or 50 instead of the 16 it was set to last time. That would make the coin about as profitable as LTC initially, so miners aren't losing money, but nowhere near the top of the charts.

The actual net hash supports a 40 or 50 difficulty.

[envy2010]

Im using that old wallet with litecoin logo.

Cant send coins, I sent some to a address with 0.01tx fee but no confirmations even after hour.

Any idea ?

Update your wallet, look in the OP thread.


And btw, people are really dumping the price now, looks like more and more people lose faith in this coin and they sell everything.

Updated, send few test coins, no confirmations after 20 minutes and 0.005tx fee

Also, it does not sync after 3 days remaining.

Maybe I could use some nodes

There is no .conf info in OP

Blocks have been coming in slowly again due to high difficulty. Might take an hour to get one confirm.

[LeoC]

Look at these diff swings

98 -> 26 -> 45 -> 63 -> 29 -> 78

[etblvu1]

If there were real fears of hyperinflation following another change, the difficulty could be reset to 40 or 50 instead of the 16 it was set to last time. That would make the coin about as profitable as LTC initially, so miners aren't losing money, but nowhere near the top of the charts.

The actual net hash supports a 40 or 50 difficulty.

I agree with you about the initial difficulty reset.

I also can agree with you about the practicality and effectiveness of limiting difficulty changes - provided that coin prices are not subject to wild swings up or down. I believe press coverage and public whims are hard to predict, and a sudden rush of buyers is an ever present possibility (just look at what happened to Bitcoins last year) - and something we should welcome and be prepared for. So whatever changes we ultimately make - it should anticipate a 50x to 100x jump in coin valuation, followed immediately by the inevitable coin hitting the very top of the profitability charts - and the inevitable rush of all the coin hoppers jumping in to take advantage of that market arbitrage. We should lay out in careful detail exactly how things might play out under those happy conditions, and whether we can obtain stability at the new price levels quickly, or if hyperinflation is unavoidable in that circumstance and the prices are destined to crash immediately following the initial enthusiasm.

Upon contemplating those happy conditions - I am brought to wonder if my 50% reduction in rewards is even too conservative. If prices spike to 100x, would it be asking too much to reduce the coin revenues of cherry-pickers by 99%, and let loyal miners who had been mining before the price spike receive the full benefit of the increase - at least for a while? The new miners could then wait out a reasonable period mining the newly profitable coin - yet not enjoying profits yet - until they have continued mining it for some reasonable duration, then they could gradually be let in on the profits. I believe this can be coded in - would address hyperinflation that would otherwise occur in those conditions - and would be a great incentive to build into being loyal miners - not to mention that by avoiding minting too many coins it could allow the newly found market price to have a chance of sustaining itself - by the mere absence of a big barrage of new coins. It would give miners with a track record of mining the coin when it wasn't as profitable - a kind of inertia and stake in the coin - similar to owning a bunch of coins outright - while denying cherry-pickers the chance to get sudden profits.

Thank you for your thoughtful contributions.

Etblvu1