[ANN] Catcoin - Scrypt meow!

[hozer]

There needs to be a cap of 20% on difficulty increases, and 30% on difficulty decreases.
I can't think of anything else that needs to be changed.
Retarget time is good. Block rewards and such are good. Max coins is good.
Literally the only thing fucking with us are the large hashrate coin jumpers.

My publicly declared prediction based on this model has come true - so if the same model predicts problems with this proposed solution - it may be worth taking heed and adjust it or do whatever it takes so the solution we eventually implement will be successful in light of the proven model of how difficulty levels, coin exchange markets, coin hopper psychology interact.

Etblvu1

What do you predict if we retarget every block based on the last 36 block average?

With rational-only economic calculations, I think coinhoppers will still have an advantage, but since it's a gradual change, rather than a step change, I think the psychology and market dynamics will be dramatically different.

[LeoC]

Blah

If the stars align by some miracle and this coin gets that type attention, then we will we see what happens.
Until then, you are theorycrafting, something you have done over and over and over without really bringing much to the "reality" table.
You have consistently shown that you have no idea how these altcoin systems work and constantly bring up far fetched coding examples into the equation such as the loyalty rewards.
I can say without a fathom of a doubt that your systems would fail immediately.

To fix the issue, you need to understand the problem. The problem isn't coin jumpers themselves. The problem is how the current coding reacts to these coin jumpers. In this case, the reaction would be a wild oscillation in difficulty. My proposal was simply to limit the range of this oscillation. This gives regular folk a chance to catch the train and hopefully stay on it. Anything else you would like to add?

What do you predict if we retarget every block based on the last 36 block average?

With rational-only economic calculations, I think coinhoppers will still have an advantage, but since it's a gradual change, rather than a step change, I think the psychology and market dynamics will be dramatically different.

Personally I like this idea and it is superior to mine and quite possibly the best option. Maybe increasing it to 72 for more stability, 36 blocks are mined rather quickly (assuming we get over 500mh).
Proof of stake is also good to combat mine/dumpers.

[etblvu1]

If the stars align by some miracle and this coin gets that type attention, then we will we see what happens.
Until then, you are theorycrafting, something you have done over and over and over without really bringing much to the "reality" table.
You have consistently shown that you have no idea how these altcoin systems work and constantly bring up far fetched coding examples into the equation such as the loyalty rewards.
I can say without a fathom of a doubt that your systems would fail immediately.

To fix the issue, you need to understand the problem. The problem isn't coin jumpers themselves. The problem is how the current coding reacts to these coin jumpers. In this case, the reaction would be a wild oscillation in difficulty. My proposal was simply to limit the range of this oscillation. This gives regular folk a chance to catch the train and hopefully stay on it. Anything else you would like to add?

No, the problem is neither the coin jumpers themselves, nor how the coding reacts to the coin jumpers. The coin jumpers are not a given. The problem is that the code specifically rewards coin jumper behavior, which creates the coin jumpers who are actually just people responding to incentive to try to maximize profits - and seen this way - who can blame them. If coin jumping is specifically rendered unprofitable, by implementing strategic coding changes, then by definition, profit-seeking behavior would no longer involve coin hopping into and out of Catcoins (or else they would be jumping in and out of mining for uneconomic reasons, and there is no evidence people who do this are a significant factor in what we are suffering). I submit that this is exactly an accurate model of how incentives cause coin jumping, which in turn cause wild difficulty fluctuations. Without fixing incentives, coin jumpers will continue to seek "maximum profits" by means of jumping in and out of Catcoin mining, which is a different modality from choosing the coin and mining it over an extended duration. This in turn must inherently destabilize the difficulty levels of the coin. It is a very simple cause-and-effect chain.

There is no way to combat coin jumping unless EVERY single altcoin got together and created some impossibly difficult shared code to prevent people from doing so.

This is untrue. If any one altcoin (or even any significant number of pools supporting that one altcoin) stopped paying for coin jumping behavior, the coin jumpers would respond to the new economic incentives and leave the coin out of their coin hopping activities. Just ask any coin hopper if they would move their gear to mine Catcoins, if they knew that during easy difficulty times, they would receive only a fraction of the coins, while those who had been mining would receive the full amount of coins. I can pretty much guarantee they will say no way and that they would stay away from the coin. No coordinating with other altcoins is required.

Those mean the same thing, so is the coding a problem or not?

There are subtle differences in meaning depending on how you use language. Your formulation implies that coin jumpers are a given - like they are changes in the weather - that they will inevitably come regardless of what changes you make to the code - like it will rain once in a while no matter what you do to your home - the best you can do is prepare for them. The only thing you can do is respond to the inevitable comings and goings of the coin jumpers then is by means of clever methods to adjusting difficulty in a way that outsmarts them, and frustrates their plans to maximize profits. My formulation by contrast specifically says that coin jumping is a volitional act on the part of those seeking to increase profits - that the positive incentive to coin jump is embedded in the code - and that this can be repaired by application of engineering principles - and coin jumping would stop once there is no economic incentive to engage in that conduct. Moreover, I would say when profits are involved, any attempt to cleverly outwit profit-seekers by any static formula would eventually by defeated by profit-seekers who will always apply creativity to find a way to beat the averages by understanding the rules and incentives set by the code. We would end up seeing the same problems over and over again in different forms ad infinitum, until the source of the problem is finally repaired (or the coin dies or lingers in obscurity for lack of such a repair).

What do you predict if we retarget every block based on the last 36 block average?

With rational-only economic calculations, I think coinhoppers will still have an advantage, but since it's a gradual change, rather than a step change, I think the psychology and market dynamics will be dramatically different.

In a sense, it's hard to apply the model directly to this proposed difficulty adjustment formula because the model I am using presupposes some kind of predictable difficulty over time - but apart from that, and in a casual application of the model and observing the coin markets - I would predict the coin would have a very randomly looking profitability graph, and it would land at random times, for a couple of minutes at a time, at the top of profitability charts - and get random spikes of major hashing power - and long-term miners would see on-going profitability of less than LTC, while sophisticated coin hoppers find ways to monitor the blockchain and know exactly when to jump in and snipe the few coins that can be had before the averaging formula move the difficulty out of rage of profitability again. There are coins like Galaxycoin exhibiting this kind of wild fluctuation in difficulty/profitability, and the reputation of that coin was not helped by being known for this type of fluctuation. I do not see this as an immediately catastrophic change like, like the suggestion to cap difficulty level changes to something narrow (which has a good chance of killing the coin in the aftermath of the first significant spike in the value of the coin in the markets) - but I do see it can drain 1) the reputation of the coin from the fluctuation and 2) enthusiasm for the coin among miners who see consistent profitability below LTC. These may then prevent the coin from gaining momentum to see any significant value spikes to begin with - and would tend to linger long-term as a low value coin without much hope of increasing in value. But like I said, this one is hard to predict because it does not fit the model I am using, and this is partly conjecture on my part. I apologize if I misrepresented your formula or intent in any way.

Etblvu1

[LeoC]

No, the problem is neither the coin jumpers themselves, nor how the coding reacts to the coin jumpers. The coin jumpers are not a given. The problem is that the code specifically rewards coin jumper behavior, which creates the coin jumpers who are actually just people responding to incentive to try to maximize profits - and seen this way - who can blame them. If coin jumping is specifically rendered unprofitable, by implementing strategic coding changes, then by definition, profit-seeking behavior would no longer involve coin hopping into and out of Catcoins (or else they would be jumping in and out of mining for uneconomic reasons, and there is no evidence people who do this are a significant factor in what we are suffering). I submit that this is exactly an accurate model of how incentives cause coin jumping, which in turn cause wild difficulty fluctuations. Without fixing incentives, coin jumpers will continue to seek "maximum profits" by means of jumping in and out of Catcoin mining, which is a different modality from choosing the coin and mining it over an extended duration. This in turn must inherently must destabilize the difficulty levels of the coin. It is a very simple cause-and-effect chain.

Those mean the same thing, so is the coding a problem or not? Seriously dude, leave this conversation to the adults.
In your "system" we would outright ban anyone looking to make a profit. That's dumb on so many levels. Almost as dumb as the loyalty system.
Meanwhile in the system that we have been talking about, profit miners will be allowed to mine and have an incentive to mine, but would not destabilize the currency, which is a far superior method.
There is no way to combat coin jumping unless EVERY single altcoin got together and created some impossibly difficult shared code to prevent people from doing so.

Hozer lets implement your system before this thread gets ultra derailed with pointless theorycrafting. I've got over 10k coins, I'm the last person who would want to this drop further.

[envy2010]

Lets hold on a minute here guys. The next difficulty drop and jump are inevitable right now, but with a little luck the difficulty will drop to ~10 and then bounce right back (with the 4x max change) to 40, which is about what the market value says it should be. That should spur some interest and help get CAT a little stability (and at least make another fork survivable).

Now, about getting the diff down to 10...

edit: facepalm this plan, the diff can't drop below 19.73, and then it will go right back to 80.

[hozer]

What do you predict if we retarget every block based on the last 36 block average?

With rational-only economic calculations, I think coinhoppers will still have an advantage, but since it's a gradual change, rather than a step change, I think the psychology and market dynamics will be dramatically different.

In a sense, it's hard to apply the model directly to this proposed difficulty adjustment formula because the model I am using presupposes some kind of predictable difficulty over time - but apart from that, and in a casual application of the model and observing the coin markets - I would predict the coin would have a very randomly looking profitability graph, and it would land at random times, for a couple of minutes at a time, at the top of profitability charts - and get random spikes of major hashing power - and long-term miners would see on-going profitability of less than LTC, while sophisticated coin hoppers find ways to monitor the blockchain and know exactly when to jump in and snipe the few coins that can be had before the averaging formula move the difficulty out of rage of profitability again. There are coins like Galaxycoin exhibiting this kind of wild fluctuation in difficulty/profitability, and the reputation of that coin was not helped by being known for this type of fluctuation. I do not see this as an immediately catastrophic change like, like the suggestion to cap difficulty level changes to something narrow (which has a good chance of killing the coin in the aftermath of the first significant spike in the value of the coin in the markets) - but I do see it can drain 1) the reputation of the coin from the fluctuation and 2) enthusiasm for the coin among miners who see consistent profitability below LTC. These may then prevent the coin from gaining momentum to see any significant value spikes to begin with - and would tend to linger long-term as a low value coin without much hope of increasing in value. But like I said, this one is hard to predict because it does not fit the model I am using, and this is partly conjecture on my part. I apologize if I misrepresented your formula or intent in any way.

Etblvu1

I intend to take the coin-hoppers money by being better at math and mining. We'll see if this proves true or not.

Step 1: release 1-block retarget with 36 or 72 block averaging. So just plan on 2 more hardforks, the first for one-block retarget, the second for tweaking the averaging time
Step 2: get a consensus on https://bitbucket.org/dahozer/catcoin/wiki/Stake-mine which should clobber coinhoppers, AND make Catcoin unprofitable for scrypt ASICs. Deploy on a 1 or 2 month update window. (hardfork number 4)
Step 3: buy a big lot of powercolor LCS cards and make cat warmers. Sell a few to coinhoppers.

[LeoC]

With the amount of money I've invested into CAT, I'm thinking of dumping $10k on a scrypt mining rig and pointing it here. Autosell off of course

[Maverickthenoob]

I've received a lot of hate from several people via PM about me "abandoning MY project", that people invested real money into this, that I shouldn't be able to sleep with the damage I've done to people letting the price of the CAT go down, etc etc.
This is not MY coin, I don't control it and I don't decide its price. This coin is property of everyone who holds any amount of CAT and trust me when I say that I only have a very few amount of them. Please go and blame the people who hold dozens of thousands of CATs (not me) and didn't donate for giveaways or bounties when they were made with hopes to promote this feline.
Because the robbery happened into my house I had to take a 2nd job that is now using most of my previous spare time, so I can't work on the coin like I did before. But hey, this is a community, patches are accepted on the Github repo and you don't need my help to promote the CAT or create services around it. Do you?

It will be at least several weeks until I can get enough free time again to donate to non profit (for me) internet projects. So I will be accepting patches, suggestions and OP modifications requests in the meanwhile (If you get a consensus about the current situation of the difficulty changes, then I will implement it, just like I did on the hard fork). If you want this cat to be successful, take some action yourself! Don't keep waiting someone else to do the job for you.

Your timing is perfect KR105, I'd like to extend some of your thoughts. Those of us on IRC have been putting a group of people together to help manage the day-to-day activities of our coin. We obviously don't own the coin, nor are we interested in "taking it over", but with the communities blessing we'd like to represent it and form a leadership team for the coin. This would allow KR105 to attend to the issues in his life he needs to, while still being available when required.

Over the course of the past several days, we have acquired most of the social media feeds and websites that were created for Catcoin at launch. We've done this to unify our public image and ensure that all data is up to date and accurate. We are in the process of making the Catcoins.biz website our official content, but on the catcoins.org domain. This decision was decided upon because many people voiced their displeasure with the ".biz" extension, and many stated it detracted from the legitimacy of our currency. Also, the content of that website is more complete, and ultimately useful than the content on the .org domain.

We've acquired the Facebook group www.facebook.com/Catcoinz, and it has been renamed to https://www.facebook.com/CatcoinOfficial. This page has almost 7000 likes and receives quite a bit of attention on a daily basis. I personally will be undertaking the overhaul of the information on this page, and will be adding a couple of other admins to help me with this, as there is a significant amount of data and resources to document and publish. If anybody wishes websites, games, pages or other information to be listed please send me a message here or on the page directly, and I'll ensure that it is added ASAP.

NyanCat, has acquired access to the CatcoinOfficial twitter feed, and will be providing more regular updates on that page. We're looking for a few more reliable people to help with social media content as a whole, if you'd like to help please message one of us and we'll go from there.

We'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our team as it is now (IRC usernames are used here, but are mostly the same as the Bitcointalk usernames):

KR105 - Creator and Dev of Catcoin
Mack25 - Developer of the .org website and also developer of the CatFlip website
Raistlinthewiz - Developer and GitHub source contributor with commit access.
Dogeles - Developer of the .biz website and also GitHub contributor with commit access.
Sir_Knee_Grow - Catcoin subreddit mod/creator and owner or the ##catcoin IRC channel
hozer - developer/tester with bitbucket/mercurial catbox tree
ZeroDrama: Prominent forum and IRC contributor who has been active since launch, heavy contributions to the last fork
NyanCat - Current admin of the twitter feed, and representative to our polish and spanish communities

And last but not least:

Maverickthenoob: Facebook page admin, code tester and general Catcoin supporter. I've been mining this coin since day one. I love the community behind this coin and the potential we have to be something great.

Obviously we're always looking for more talent and always open to suggestions and content from the community. We are a democracy, we want suggestions, nominations, content and ideas from everyone on how to make this coin the absolute best it can be. We have some really exciting new ideas that are being discussed as we speak, and as we flesh out the ideas a bit more, we'll bring them to the table for the community to see and vote on. We've created such a large team to diversify our talents and to make it so that no one person has too much influence on the coin. We are absolutely for this community, and want nothing but the best for our coin. Our team is very committed to honesty, integrity and transparency. Our IRC chats are logged and at some point once we get some more infrastructure in place they will be made available for everyone to see.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say that we're really excited about this coin as a whole and we really hope that we are able to continue being the absolute best community of all the altcoins.

Long live Catcoin!

P.S. If anyone wishes to nominate more members for our team or has any concerns about or current members, feel free to post it here, or come on IRC and chat with us! We are especially interested in nominations of people from the forums that are not regulars of IRC to diversify our team even more!

P.P.S Fork discussion is already ongoing, so I didn't mention it here, I'm sure we will come up with something amazing as a community to solve our diff issues once and for all!

##catcoin on freenode!

[LeoC]

I'm thrilled to see some support
I nominate myself as Chief Thread Observer

[etblvu1]

What do you predict if we retarget every block based on the last 36 block average?

With rational-only economic calculations, I think coinhoppers will still have an advantage, but since it's a gradual change, rather than a step change, I think the psychology and market dynamics will be dramatically different.

In a sense, it's hard to apply the model directly to this proposed difficulty adjustment formula because the model I am using presupposes some kind of predictable difficulty over time - but apart from that, and in a casual application of the model and observing the coin markets - I would predict the coin would have a very randomly looking profitability graph, and it would land at random times, for a couple of minutes at a time, at the top of profitability charts - and get random spikes of major hashing power - and long-term miners would see on-going profitability of less than LTC, while sophisticated coin hoppers find ways to monitor the blockchain and know exactly when to jump in and snipe the few coins that can be had before the averaging formula move the difficulty out of rage of profitability again. There are coins like Galaxycoin exhibiting this kind of wild fluctuation in difficulty/profitability, and the reputation of that coin was not helped by being known for this type of fluctuation. I do not see this as an immediately catastrophic change like, like the suggestion to cap difficulty level changes to something narrow (which has a good chance of killing the coin in the aftermath of the first significant spike in the value of the coin in the markets) - but I do see it can drain 1) the reputation of the coin from the fluctuation and 2) enthusiasm for the coin among miners who see consistent profitability below LTC. These may then prevent the coin from gaining momentum to see any significant value spikes to begin with - and would tend to linger long-term as a low value coin without much hope of increasing in value. But like I said, this one is hard to predict because it does not fit the model I am using, and this is partly conjecture on my part. I apologize if I misrepresented your formula or intent in any way.

Etblvu1

I intend to take the coin-hoppers money by being better at math and mining. We'll see if this proves true or not.

Step 1: release 1-block retarget with 36 or 72 block averaging. So just plan on 2 more hardforks, the first for one-block retarget, the second for tweaking the averaging time
Step 2: get a consensus on https://bitbucket.org/dahozer/catcoin/wiki/Stake-mine which should clobber coinhoppers, AND make Catcoin unprofitable for scrypt ASICs. Deploy on a 1 or 2 month update window. (hardfork number 4)
Step 3: buy a big lot of powercolor LCS cards and make cat warmers. Sell a few to coinhoppers.

I had a similar idea which might work temporarily, but these kinds of ideas change the character of the coin - but the idea is to make a hybrid coin that requires solving the block solution using both SHA256 and Scrypt (where the solutions match up on both methods, which means the difficulty level would appear to be very low, but having a coincidence of a solution between both would be rare) - then anyone who wants to mine the coin profitably would need to add something like a Block Explorer ASIC to their computer, and anyone mining GPU only would inherently stay away from mining the coin. And unless other coins copy the exact same hybrid formula, the coin would inherently not be profitable for any coin hopper to mine. But people are very motivated to seek profits - so any static solution that does not specifically address the root cause will eventually be defeated by dynamic human creativity seeking clever way to defeat the static solution. Similar dynamics are at work when you see how iPhones keep getting jailbroken, or how hackers keep finding workarounds to security fixes by software vendors. Except with coins, we don't get to keep releasing new hard forks before exchanges and users get frustrated and drop the coin. That is why I favor permanently fixing the incentive over any temporary workarounds to incentives that remain active.

My acid test for any modification to a coin codebase is this - would you  feel comfortable applying this same change to the Bitcoin code base itself, and bet the farm that it would not mess up an already successful coin? I am willing to apply this acid test to my own suggested changes - since my changes are designed to kick in only under circumstances that Bitcoin essentially never sees. If you were to change Bitcoin so its difficulty graphs became erratic - or changed it so that difficulty cannot adjust very quickly - I would expect that coin to do worse than it is doing right now. And if my estimation is true, we should not be applying that change to Catcoins either. On the other hand, Bitcoins and Litecoins have both done fine with very long retarget times - they have suffered very little effect from coin hoppers - so we can emulate that success by implementing long retarget times together with eraditation of coin hopping by eliminating from the code the incentive to coin hop. And that code can be back-ported to LTC and BTC fine without affecting the way they work - because they already don't have coin hopper problems so the back-ported modification would not affect their operations one iota. I challenge anyone to name a more conservative possible coin modification (so little chance of messing up Bitcoin if backported), with so much potential to improve the value of the coin (introduce unprecedented stability in difficulty for a minor altcoin).

etblvu1 - K, now go code it and come back with the results.

Despite the fact I've said I do not have familiarity enough to immediately code C++ in Linux, this is nonetheless a fair statement. If I cannot persuade by arguments or payment to cause the coding changes to happen, then no matter how valid the case for implementing the change, it will not see implementation. So if anyone has the skills and capabilities to make changes to the Catcoin code base and open to discussing with me 1) a simplified specifications of the changes I am proposing that should not be too hard to code, and/or 2) how many CATs you would charge me to implement such changes, and/or 3) willing to help me get up to speed with the programming environment (I have programmed in 20 different programming languages, including some C++, but in a Windows environment) - please PM me with how you can help/what you need.

-The loyalty system, although it's a good idea, but I believe it won't work simply because it creat more hassle to miners, that would want to join or that are mining but when the difficulty rise beyond a certain level (that they are losing money on electricity and hardware rather than making some) will just leave, not to mention that there is already the pools PPLNS penalty.
But the idea is good, so I suggest if this idea to be implemented, we should take it the other way, instead of punishing people that leaves you reward people that stay mining, this can be implemented pool side, lets people who mine for a week without non stop (a small intereption is acceptable should get a reward of extra cats depending on the hashrate, not this has to be discussed with pool owner and concensus should be made it) lets just take the example from commerce, this would be like the fidelity card for a supermarket, the more thing you buy from that supermarket the more reward you get. but again might be too much hasle for pool owners so overall, I think the idea is good, but in terms if feasability and implementation it is not. so tl,dr Good Idea not going to work

Thank you for this thoughtful response to my suggestions. I submit that since the logic would kick in only rarely (right after the difficulty dropped more than 50%) and otherwise the coin operates exactly the same way, it would only prove to be a hassle for people engaged in sophisticated profiting-maximizing strategies of coin hopping. If coin hopping people find the coin too much hassle to mine and stay away from the coin, I submit this would improve the coin rather than damage the coin. People who do not coin-hop to try to maximize profit would virtually never notice this mechanism at work - except that they seem to see more profits during easy difficulty times than with other altcoins - which if anything should attract more miners who want to keep their rigs pointed to the coin. So I ask you this question directly - if we increased the number of steady miners, and totally eliminated coin-hop-profit-maxmizing miners, do you really believe it would make the coin worse off vs. better off? And which type of miners do you believe dominate in the BTC and LTC mining scene, and how does this relate to the perceived stability of of those coins?

Etblvu1

[LeoC]

Fork with proposed fixes at block 20880 (36*580) would be nice. We are currently on block 20725.

etblvu1 - K, now go code it and come back with the results.

[kuroman]

Ok guys I've been reading the comments I missed recently, although some of them are pretty long (I might be writting one my self right now) but overall it was intereseting and there are some great ideas. (I will take this opportunity to apology in advance for the langage massacre that's going to happen in the few next paragraphs )

Edit : Please take a few minutes to read the whole post I tried to synthetise as much as I could, if you can't you can jump to the different conclusion and Summuries per each paragragh and I apology for the lenght

So without further due, here is my take on some of the points mentioned

-The loyalty system, although it's a good idea, but I believe it won't work simply because it creat more hassle to miners, that would want to join or that are mining but when the difficulty rise beyond a certain level (that they are losing money on electricity and hardware rather than making some) will just leave, not to mention that there is already the pools PPLNS penalty.
But the idea is good, so I suggest if this idea to be implemented, we should take it the other way, instead of punishing people that leaves you reward people that stay mining, this can be implemented pool side, lets people who mine for a week without non stop (a small intereption is acceptable should get a reward of extra cats depending on the hashrate, not this has to be discussed with pool owner and concensus should be made it) lets just take the example from commerce, this would be like the fidelity card for a supermarket, the more thing you buy from that supermarket the more reward you get. but again might be too much hasle for pool owners so overall, I think the idea is good, but in terms if feasability and implementation it is not. so tl,dr Good Idea in theory but not going to work from a practical point of view (coding and implementation)

-Stoping services like multipools, middlecoin and such from joining the party when the difficulty is low, this won't work, we are in a free market, if we try to prevent others from joining and we start to ban and make barriers for others business then the whole point of cryptocurrencies is denied here. tl,dr not going to work and it's counter productive

So what's the solution:

well lets analyse the problem first : the problem is PROFITABILITY and volatility (although the ladder is not a problem right now as the prices are pretty stable and coin seems to be pretty steady) and this is what makes people swing from coin to coin.

So how can you make the coin profitable so people wants to mine and keep mining it ?

Lets define the profitibility of the coin so we can understand, profitability would be :
Mined coins per time unite (hour/day/week whatever) x price of the coin - expensise, this can be translated to a relation between Price of the coin and difficulty we can find a relation to a K factor between Minedcoins per time x price and price / difficulty

So to increase profitability there are theroritically a couple possible combination one of these is enough to increase profitability: increase the amount of coins per block, increase price of coin, reduce difficulty, reduce the block time (which will results in more coins).

In practice, increasing the amount of coins per block or block time, will make the coin lose credibility and value so it's not feasable, as for coin price, we can do something about by making the coin more desirable trough advertising, giveaway, the coin being adopted by more services, but this again will be limited and the coin will always follow the offer and demand and market in general, but again we should keep working on this but it's a long term work and not going to solve the current problem. so we are left with difficulty. Difficulty follows the Hashrate, a good profitabilty difficulty is around 30sh (at current price) and that's what's we are getting with our current hashrate, now the problem as mentioned before is when other pools joins in when difficulty is low, and make it rise to the moon and leave, the first fork reduced the difficulty retarget which make the retarget faster and solved a part of the issue, but it didn't solve at all the issue of difficulty swing.
So tl,dr in practice we should focus on advertising the coin and getting more services to enhance the coin ecosystem and increase it value, but this a long term work, in short term we should focus on difficulty especially solving the problem of the difficulty swing

So how to solve the problem of difficulty swing ?

I think the part of the solution was mentioned before, which is to reduce the amount of difficulty jumps, I think the current maximum factor is 4x but going from 30 to 80 is still huge and without reaching that limite, so I think that the paramater that should be modified, is that factor, and make it something like 1.5 or something like that (to be discussed of course we can do the math it's not that hard to find an ideal number), but not only for difficulty increase, it should be for the decrease aswell, because it's the sudden decrease that makes other pools join in, so with a factor like that the difficulty will reach a level where it will become steady.

So to resume everything, we should keep working on enhancing the coin with a long term plan, which would be building a strong advertising plan, also pushing the coin to as much services as possible, another important part is getting media recognition (I tried to writte a wikipedia page but there are no "good" references that I could use) this can be easly done, by tiping webmagazines and techsites and stuff like that, just make sure you writte something that may get their attention and make them writte a whole artical about it. Short term would be fixing the coin parameters to solve the issues we are having with the Difficulty (difficulty swing) , And the most obvious solution for me is to reduce the maximum change factor from x4 to something more realistic (if it is possible code wise but I think it is)

Regards,

[NyanCat]

My work (background image made by nebajoth):


Bitcointalk does not allow to add image to signature

[envy2010]

So to resume everything, we should keep working on enhancing the coin with a long term plan, which would advertising plan, pushing the coin to as services as possible, getting media recognition (I tried to writte a wikipedia page but there are no "good" references that I could use) this can be easly done, by tiping webmagazines and techsites and stuff like that, just make sure you writte something that may get their attention and make them writte a whole artical about it. Short term would be fixing the coin parameters to solve the issues we are having and with the Difficulty and the most obvious solution for me is to reduce the maximum change factor from x4 to something more realistic (if it is possble code wise but I think it is)

This is pretty much spot on. I think having the diff adjust after every block is a good idea, but basing the next diff on the last 36 blocks does not provide enough protection against 10+ GH/s pools, which right now can find 36 blocks in a matter of minutes and still leave us with high diffs. Using a full 2016 block average as the basis for the adjustment (or limiting each block's diff change to about 1%) would provide better  long-term stability, which is really what we are looking for.

[kuroman]

I've received a lot of hate from several people via PM about me "abandoning MY project", that people invested real money into this, that I shouldn't be able to sleep with the damage I've done to people letting the price of the CAT go down, etc etc.
This is not MY coin, I don't control it and I don't decide its price. This coin is property of everyone who holds any amount of CAT and trust me when I say that I only have a very few amount of them. Please go and blame the people who hold dozens of thousands of CATs (not me) and didn't donate for giveaways or bounties when they were made with hopes to promote this feline.
Because the robbery happened into my house I had to take a 2nd job that is now using most of my previous spare time, so I can't work on the coin like I did before. But hey, this is a community, patches are accepted on the Github repo and you don't need my help to promote the CAT or create services around it. Do you?

It will be at least several weeks until I can get enough free time again to donate to non profit (for me) internet projects. So I will be accepting patches, suggestions and OP modifications requests in the meanwhile (If you get a consensus about the current situation of the difficulty changes, then I will implement it, just like I did on the hard fork). If you want this cat to be successful, take some action yourself! Don't keep waiting someone else to do the job for you.

Your timing is perfect KR105, I'd like to extend some of your thoughts. Those of us on IRC have been putting a group of people together to help manage the day-to-day activities of our coin. We obviously don't own the coin, nor are we interested in "taking it over", but with the communities blessing we'd like to represent it and form a leadership team for the coin. This would allow KR105 to attend to the issues in his life he needs to, while still being available when required.

Over the course of the past several days, we have acquired most of the social media feeds and websites that were created for Catcoin at launch. We've done this to unify our public image and ensure that all data is up to date and accurate. We are in the process of making the Catcoins.biz website our official content, but on the catcoins.org domain. This decision was decided upon because many people voiced their displeasure with the ".biz" extension, and many stated it detracted from the legitimacy of our currency. Also, the content of that website is more complete, and ultimately useful than the content on the .org domain.

We've acquired the Facebook group www.facebook.com/Catcoinz, and it has been renamed to https://www.facebook.com/CatcoinOfficial. This page has almost 7000 likes and receives quite a bit of attention on a daily basis. I personally will be undertaking the overhaul of the information on this page, and will be adding a couple of other admins to help me with this, as there is a significant amount of data and resources to document and publish. If anybody wishes websites, games, pages or other information to be listed please send me a message here or on the page directly, and I'll ensure that it is added ASAP.

NyanCat, has acquired access to the CatcoinOfficial twitter feed, and will be providing more regular updates on that page. We're looking for a few more reliable people to help with social media content as a whole, if you'd like to help please message one of us and we'll go from there.

We'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our team as it is now (IRC usernames are used here, but are mostly the same as the Bitcointalk usernames):

KR105 - Creator and Dev of Catcoin
Mack25 - Developer of the .org website and also developer of the CatFlip website
Raistlinthewiz - Developer and GitHub source contributor with commit access.
Dogeles - Developer of the .biz website and also GitHub contributor with commit access.
Sir_Knee_Grow - Catcoin subreddit mod/creator and owner or the ##catcoin IRC channel
hozer - developer/tester with bitbucket/mercurial catbox tree
ZeroDrama: Prominent forum and IRC contributor who has been active since launch, heavy contributions to the last fork
NyanCat - Current admin of the twitter feed, and representative to our polish and spanish communities

And last but not least:

Maverickthenoob: Facebook page admin, code tester and general Catcoin supporter. I've been mining this coin since day one. I love the community behind this coin and the potential we have to be something great.

Obviously we're always looking for more talent and always open to suggestions and content from the community. We are a democracy, we want suggestions, nominations, content and ideas from everyone on how to make this coin the absolute best it can be. We have some really exciting new ideas that are being discussed as we speak, and as we flesh out the ideas a bit more, we'll bring them to the table for the community to see and vote on. We've created such a large team to diversify our talents and to make it so that no one person has too much influence on the coin. We are absolutely for this community, and want nothing but the best for our coin. Our team is very committed to honesty, integrity and transparency. Our IRC chats are logged and at some point once we get some more infrastructure in place they will be made available for everyone to see.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say that we're really excited about this coin as a whole and we really hope that we are able to continue being the absolute best community of all the altcoins.

Long live Catcoin!

P.S. If anyone wishes to nominate more members for our team or has any concerns about or current members, feel free to post it here, or come on IRC and chat with us! We are especially interested in nominations of people from the forums that are not regulars of IRC to diversify our team even more!

P.P.S Fork discussion is already ongoing, so I didn't mention it here, I'm sure we will come up with something amazing as a community to solve our diff issues once and for all!

##catcoin on freenode!

Maverick if you need extra admin for fb/twitter, or if you need a project coordinator, code tester and so on and so forth I'm here to help as much as I can

[janos666]

Literally the only thing fucking with us are the large hashrate coin jumpers.

And that's because in the current situation, it seems like it's the coin which have to adapt to the market to be profitable for miners.
It's not like we have a coin with it's fixed specs and the market must accept a certain price which makes it profitable for the miners to generate the coin supply.
It's the coin micromanagement, which tries to adjust the coin parameters to adapt to the current (floating average) market price.

But there is a huge flaw in this system because the price isn't stable and it aims ~0 because investors like cheap coins. So, if you make it easier to mine, the price just goes down again, and so on...


By the way, keeping the difficulty artificially lower is technically the same thing as increasing the block reward. (And this can also inflate the existing coins further, just like the last adjustment.)


It seems like CAT thought it has several spare lives anyway, so it can start from BTC specs and then walk the way of the succeeding altcoins step by step. Yesterday lower retarget time, today milder diff adjustment, tomorrow a bigger coin supply to fix the problem caused by the increased reward... as long as we reinvent DOGE. We could just start with a 1:1 DOGE copy-paste. It would have been so much easier.

[Maverickthenoob]

Maverick if you need extra admin for fb/twitter, or if you need a project coordinator, code tester and so on and so forth I'm here to help as much as I can

Kuro, you've been quite active on the forums during this coins lifecycle, I personally would be happy to have you. Any objections?

I'd also like to personally nominate envy2010 and janos666 for addition to our team. Are you two interested?

[kuroman]

-The loyalty system, although it's a good idea, but I believe it won't work simply because it creat more hassle to miners, that would want to join or that are mining but when the difficulty rise beyond a certain level (that they are losing money on electricity and hardware rather than making some) will just leave, not to mention that there is already the pools PPLNS penalty.
But the idea is good, so I suggest if this idea to be implemented, we should take it the other way, instead of punishing people that leaves you reward people that stay mining, this can be implemented pool side, lets people who mine for a week without non stop (a small intereption is acceptable should get a reward of extra cats depending on the hashrate, not this has to be discussed with pool owner and concensus should be made it) lets just take the example from commerce, this would be like the fidelity card for a supermarket, the more thing you buy from that supermarket the more reward you get. but again might be too much hasle for pool owners so overall, I think the idea is good, but in terms if feasability and implementation it is not. so tl,dr Good Idea not going to work

Thank you for this thoughtful response to my suggestions. I submit that since the logic would kick in only rarely (right after the difficulty dropped more than 50%) and otherwise the coin operates exactly the same way, it would only prove to be a hassle for people engaged in sophisticated profiting-maximizing strategies of coin hopping. If coin hopping people find the coin too much hassle to mine and stay away from the coin, I submit this would improve the coin rather than damage the coin. People who do not coin-hop to try to maximize profit would virtually never notice this mechanism at work - except that they seem to see more profits during easy difficulty times than with other altcoins - which if anything should attract more miners who want to keep their rigs pointed to the coin. So I ask you this question directly - if we increased the number of steady miners, and totally eliminated coin-hop-profit-maxmizing miners, do you really believe it would make the coin worse off vs. better off? And which type of miners do you believe dominate in the BTC and LTC mining scene, and how does this relate to the perceived stability of of those coins?

Etblvu1

Thanks for your reply, as I explained before the Idea is great, but the problem is how are you going to implement it, code wise I mean, and are you going to do it pool side or on the source code and on the blockchain directly? this is the point I'm trying to explane, it's hard if not impossible to code such a solution, also punishement was never a good solution it always drive people of, with such a system, I think the best would be to reward to loyal people, and this can be done pool side relatively easly but this will again need a cordination between all the pools to have set parameters and qualification for such bonus that everyone would like.

The thing about BTC/LTC, is that they are well established, and pretty stable, there is no alternative to BTC/LTC combo, you trade cats for either then to fiat and not the other way around, and there will always be people mining BTC/LTC because it's a sure value and well estblished, Cat is still young 2 weeks old or so, it needs at least a couple of months to mature and reach such a true stability and when that's happen, you can have a true loyalty system because the coin it self will be really relevant. So to resume I think a reward loyalty system would be good and would enter in the case of the long term project of making this coin valuable and relevant, a punishement system I'm affraid will have negative effect and push off people from joining, (some people wants to try other alternative from time to time without having to pay a price for that for example)

[janos666]

Maverick if you need extra admin for fb/twitter, or if you need a project coordinator, code tester and so on and so forth I'm here to help as much as I can

Kuro, you've been quite active on the forums during this coins lifecycle, I personally would be happy to have you. Any objections?

I'd also like to personally nominate envy2010 and janos666 for addition to our team. Are you two interested?

Thank you, but I think I am too pessimistic for a marketing person.
But feel free to contact me about any ideas if you think I can be a significant help.
I am still a CAT holder myself.

[LeoC]

Catcoin is bouncing, 25000 to nearly 40000, much profits!