NOBL 1.1 Hard Fork Specifications
In summary: June/July fork: total coins to 5 billion, 'smooth halving' every six months. Still under consideration: Algorithm change & merge-mining. Since release we've made a very strong point of going against the grain, taking our time to build and analysing (as best we can) where we, as well as the majority of our community, believe we should head. While we understand the immediate value in forking to new hot specifications to justify a rise, longer-term we feel they have the potential to damage or cripple a coin. We pride ourselves in not rushing forward with only $$ on our mind, and try to keep a critical and analytical mind focused on cryptocurrency longer-term rather than short-term profit trains.
Saying that, there are a number of things we are sure of with NOBL specifications we feel could have been done a lot better. We've learnt a lot, so please allow me to indulge myself. It feels somewhat weird in this environment proposing a fork while admitting the changes won't switch over for two months. We like feedback, we like being sure, we like testing and we don't like feeling pressured into something because a certain specification becomes hot for that month. I love the speed and demand of this scene, marketing, working, promoting and providing services/infrastructure. However, when it comes to something as definite as a hard fork for a cryptocurrency that represents real peoples money I just can't bring myself to give it a timeframe of a week or two. I genuinely hope you can appreciate and respect that approach.
The key specification we knew and admitted to wanting to change from early on was both the inflationary supply of NOBL and the high amount of coins. After a lot of discussion and 'soul-searching' we know we do not want to continue with 7 million NOBL added a day to supply for inflationary reasons and we feel the fifteen billion coin cap is unnecessary. Don't get me wrong, I personally feel total supply and total coin amount is purely a psychological thing; I think market capitalisation and inflationary 'damage' are far more important for determining the value of each coin. To add, the fork comes at this time for the reason that the 'reserves' (if spent at current rate) will be mostly gone by then, so any accusation of us using this to increase the value of our holdings won't hold any weight.
PoW vs PoSOn the other hand though, there are points made in my
PDF I also feel are very important when you combine cryptocurrency and 'sound money' policies. There are two mottos we are starting to apply to our stance on cryptocurrency and proof of work. One being a) 'Good things come to those who work' and b) 'Proof of work: invest in the system, work for your coin, provide value to the network.' We like miners, we like security, and we think the principle of investing in hardware and doing 'work' for a coin is how coins should be distributed to community members and/or the miners providing us with a working ledger.
Mining means the ability to introduce money to the system is controlled by an agreed upon protocol and is in the hands of anyone willing to invest in and work for the system, rather than in the hands of governments, central banks and other self-interested groups. Being able to mine a coin brings in new community members, it allows those interested in cryptocurrency to 'get involved' in a way that doesn't involve directly paying another holder an 'entrance fee'. It is for these reasons as well as ongoing 'ledger security issues' with PoS that we will not be switching from PoW.
AlgorithmOne thing we will say about mining, while we will not switch algorithm right now and I am fairly positive towards accepting ASICs longer term in our
PDF, I will be more than willing to publicly state I was wrong about them the second we can be 100% certain that they are destroying the scrypt scene. In that case we will act swiftly to switch to whichever algorithm has proven itself by that time. In some ways it actually feels that the longer we stay a scrypt PoW coin, the more unique we become as half a dozen a day become x11 or PoS.
Inflationary PressureA long period of high inflationary pressure is not something we want to let get out of control. Our consistent block reward at our price levels has been fairly good to us in terms of not putting too much downward pressure from excess supply (that seemed to have come from other factors). However the current rate of seven million coins a day without a halving or reduction in sight is the wrong approach and something we would like to address. We are proposing the following approach:
For the first 6 months, 5,000 coins per block are mined. From 6 months, every day a reduction of 1% is applied until we reach the point of 2,500 coins per block mined. This is in effect a halving only done gradually (a 'smooth halving'), taking approximately 70 days to be done and addresses the problem of a dramatic and sudden drop in coin supply, hashrate and # of miners. From that point 2,500 coins per block are mined for six months, at which point we do the 1% reduction per day again down to 1,250 coins. This happens again for the 625 coin point, and the 312 coin point. To make this clearer,
see this spreadsheet.
Total in CirculationWith the 'fix' applied to inflationary pressure, we felt the 15 billion total coins was also unnecessary and want to cut that down to 5 billion. With around 3.6 billion coins mined after three years and only 449,280 (0.012%/day inflation) being added to supply every day thereafter, the 5 billion total coin mark will not be reached any time soon. One of our biggest concerns with reducing miner rewards and having a final cap on total coins is the issue of 'cost versus reward' some worry coins like BTC will face in the future. As block rewards reduce in size, will the transaction fees and smaller coin rewards be enough to make up for the mining cost of increased security? Will a perpetual block reward be required in the future to ensure those securing the system are getting compensated properly? We can't answer that right now, but this change in specifications gives us a few years to follow more case studies and see where this scene is going.
I will be adding on to this post over the next 24 hours if necessary to clear the air or add something I've missed, as well as provide some more info. It's getting late in Australia so I will be off soon, but there can be a lot of questions answered and concerns addressed. Taking our time to do things right leaves a lot of room open for discussion, improvement, feedback, and lets us reconsider important aspects if things change. It lets us share the github with a couple of respected developers we know, and it will let me 'disappear' (read: 2.5 hour drive to Canberra for meetings and a nice setup for some hardcore tinkering with new ideas) for a week in July to testnet this as well as some other tricks up our sleeves on a batch of 20+ computers with some new friends we've made down under.
Added: Merge Mining?Personally I believe if we are to see many cryptocurrencies together coins of the same algorithm will be merge-mined together, so all miners are effectively securing and being paid out by all coins at the same time. Merge-mining will solve 51% and miner competition issues. However because it is only just being considered and discussed around the scrypt scene there is no reason whatsoever to rush into embracing it just yet until public sentiment towards it (and understanding of it) improves. This could be 6 months or it could be 12 months down the road, who knows.
