Anything new?
I've been in contact with (someone claiming to be) our dominant bot operator. (They have not yet done anything to confirm their identity as such.) They also claim to hold the vast majority of the coins, more than the sum of what has been claimed by the dominant bot to date.
They've expressed interest in seeing the coin succeed.
However, we have yet to come to any agreement as to how would be best to go about this.
They first proposed a move to a traditional PoW, securing blocks by hashing as in huntercoin. As I see it, this would amount to trading one unique form of mining centralization for another more commonplace one. I don't see this as an improvement. Further, as I don't see any inherent insecurity in the current work function I don't see any strict need to ditch the current work function.
Then they proposed something of a hybrid, allowing players to play levels for coins without wall-clock time limits, but not using that play to secure the block. They proposed a 50/50 split between "chain-securing" level rewards and "untimed" level rewards, allowing one "untimed" solution per secured block. However, all that this would seem to accomplish is making half of the reward given out for "free" to people who are not actually working toward securing the network. This is not how blockchain incentive should work, and there is no reason to believe that the bots wouldn't simply also claim these free rewards. Further, this would be highly complex to do in a way that does not allow for a miner to simply claim the solution found by someone else for the "untimed" reward. (It is possible, but would require some nontrivial protocol changes and would likely almost double average block sizes, contributing to db bloat.) I don't see this solution as being better than my previous "N-heads" proposal, and even done correctly it would still reduce the security of the network by half. Doing it correctly would also be significantly more complex than just implementing a "two heads" mechanism, with roughly the same security tradeoff *at best*.
I've tried to express to them that the solution is not a change in protocol, but an increase in mining strength on the network.
I've tried to encourage them to release the dominant bot's design publicly, to restore competition and end the implicit 51% attack. They claim that their bot is "pretty dumb" and that they could easily make one 10X or 100X more capable. This just confuses me, because if it were true then the obvious thing to do would be to give out their current bot and then start running the 10x stronger one.
I've tried to encourage them to consider long term viability of the network and distribution of mining strength ahead of their own profit motive.
I've tried to encourage them to treat security as necessarily more critical in the immediate term than popularity and spot price.
They've tried to encourage me to change the coin to traditional PoW, to "promote it" before securing it, to use my BTC to "restore price and generate volumes," to "try to get maximum profit from it," to "try to add moto to all major exchanges" and to "make moto more popular." None of these are concerns ahead of the security of the network. These also don't seem to align with what I would expect the concerns of the bot operator to actually be, so these things were a little surprising to me. I would think that someone capable of writing such a bot would also be capable of understanding why popularity of the coin is entirely irrelevant so long as the network continues to be implicitly insecure and at their whim.
At this point, I am not sure if I should even continue the discussion without at least requiring them to confirm their identity as the operator of the bot.
Thoughts?
