Aircoin Team -- Scrypt ASIC miners are right around the corner... they launch in quarter 2 or quarter 3 which means that the companies are probably running them right now before public release. Something must be done, Will the team change alorithm's within the coin ? Is this possible ?
We're both looking into different algorithms and their methods of implementation, as well as difficulty adjustments.
Since we have mechanisms involved to deal with inflation through the market, the effect of ASICs on a coin's exchange rate doesn't bother us very much at all. However, it can mean that only those with the budget and technology for ASIC miners would be able to mine the coin, forcing others to use an exchange.
The major problem with ASICs is the dispersion rate, as the difficulty has to constant adjust itself (and is always falling behind the ever-increasing hashrates) to cause more inflation and blocks to be solved faster than intended. The next problem is with the effect that has on the market, causing even higher short-term inflation that outruns the short-term demand increased caused by those who cannot acquire the hardware (and thus end up buying instead).
But 2 things have changed since SHA-256 ASICs came out:
1. KGW was created, giving a strong defense against both Multipools and ASICs.
2. Methods (such as AIRcoin's investment pool) to counteract inflation have been designed and experimented with.
So unlike the advent of SHA-256 ASICs, we think the effect (both because of the small difference in barrier of entry and the existing methods to counteract ASICs) of Scrypt ASICs will be minimal compared to what ASICs were for SHA-256 coins.
The next wallet version
will have tweaks to the KGW system to take Scrypt ASICs into account.
We've also looked into the various Scrypt ASICs and at current prices, do not see exceptional change like SHA-256 ASICs. This is perhaps because Scrypt ASICs are far more complex and expensive for the same capabilities, but also because they are not far away from existing GPU performance, and their benefit has less to do with barrier of entry (which is where GPUs have had a huge advantage thus far, since they were ubiquitous in their use and always available in their supply) and more do with the cost of electricity.
LOL, right!
Thoose machines mining scrypt and when they came out all crypto change in keccak or scrypt-jane.
Aniway, my aircoins today drop again.... 0,00171.
What's up?
Exchange rate can be calculated as:
(Demand rate + Investment Pool Growth) - (Supply Rate + Inflation Rate)
We know the inflation rate is about ~4.5 BTC of volume per day, and the investment pool is growing at a rate of about .52 BTC per day. This means that on a daily basis:
(Demand Rate/day + .52/day) - (Supply Rate/day + 4.5/day) = Rate the exchange rate has moved/day.
Since we know that if the exchange rate wasn't moving, then demand would be outweighing supply by about 3.98 BTC per day. Since it is falling (albeit at a small rate) that means that (by definition, as we measure demand and supply after-the-fact) that right now,
unfortunately demand is just a little lower than supply. This is, again, because 2-3 weeks of mining is being offset by 2-3 days of exchange speculation.
As the investment pool is currently leveraging only about 500 AIR to generate that .52 BTC per day in a ~12-20 BTC every 24h market, we can reasonably expect that it will be able to completely offset the inflation rate when it can either leverage ~5000 AIR or when the 24h volume is closer to 120 or 200 BTC/day. For the exchange rate to rise, it would have to grow by the same amount that the supply rate overwhelmed the demand rate.
However, if before that happens, we implement the adjustable block reward, then we can control both sides of the equation to accommodate any situation of supply or demand.
In other words:
We can't control the demand rate directly.
We can't control the supply rate directly. (It is still a free market in that sense)
We are not controlling the inflation rate (it is fixed right now), but we will be able to adjust it in the future.
We CAN control the investment pool growth, but that is limited by the size of the market, which is small.
(Demand rate + Investment Pool Growth) - (Supply Rate + Inflation Rate)
If you cannot wait for those factors to come into equilibrium, then you should sell cheap and invest in a one of the many alternative coins, and hope you'll be as successful.
