[ANN][MOTO] Motocoin

[WilliamLie2]

Heh, with all those bots average mining speed in last 2000 blocks was 1 block in 65.848 seconds. Target time was increased. But bots can mine much faster, I saw that insane race when blocks were mined in mere seconds with lots of softforks.

[HunterMinerCrafter]

256 small maps is ok only if there will be no easy map among them. If it would always be possible to choose easy map among those 256 maps then this selection algorithm shall be included into game distributive itself. Also this preselection algo shall be fast enough to be used on an older hardware. A poor human player without any programming skill shall be able to compete on a par with programmer and a datacenter owner. Any preselection algorithms shall be either public and usable or there shall be no such algorithm at all by design of a map generation algorithm.

May be the map random seed be dependant only on previous block and some kind of stupid heuristic or a bot will be included into game distribution to make a viable map selection process deterministic. All the players will try to solve the same map.

I think at this point we're pretty much all agreed that limiting map count is a total non-starter....

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

Heh, with all those bots average mining speed in last 2000 blocks was 1 block in 65.848 seconds. Target time was increased. But bots can mine much faster, I saw that insane race when blocks were mined in mere seconds with lots of softforks.

So now we have a competition of a fast but stupid bots? This will finally led us to the point when microseconds in level submitting time is counting. Faster network connection will be crucial not a gamer skill. This is ruining the concept of proof of work.

[WilliamLie2]

Heh, with all those bots average mining speed in last 2000 blocks was 1 block in 65.848 seconds. Target time was increased. But bots can mine much faster, I saw that insane race when blocks were mined in mere seconds with lots of softforks.

So now we have a competition of a fast but stupid bots? This will finally led us to the point when microseconds in level submitting time is counting. Faster network connection will be crucial not a gamer skill. This is ruining the concept of proof of work.

No, just bot owners intentionaly limit their bots. When they will stop doing this, then retarget will set target time to very low value and bots will need to enumerate more maps, this will slow down them.

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

No, just bot owners intentionaly limit their bots. When they will stop doing this, then retarget will set target time to very low value and bots will need to enumerate more maps, this will slow down them.

Are you sure? There is no competition on a target time then. Bot shall solve the level below the time threshold but do it FAST. Bot owners will compete in speed of level submission to the network not a target time optimization.

Actually this is not the same for humans only because the game speed is proportional to real time. And only because of this. Fastest solutions were dominating because they were able to submit them faster than slow solutions. But this is not the case when we talk about bots.

[HunterMinerCrafter]

No, just bot owners intentionaly limit their bots. When they will stop doing this, then retarget will set target time to very low value and bots will need to enumerate more maps, this will slow down them.

Are you sure? There is no competition on a target time then. Bot shall solve the level below the time threshold but do it FAST. Bot owners will compete in speed of level submission to the network not a target time optimization.

Actually this is not the same for humans only because the game speed is proportional to real time. And only because of this. Fastest solutions were dominating because they were able to submit them faster than slow solutions. But this is not the case when we talk about bots.

TargetTime is entirely independent from block rate... we will (and should) always be competing on TargetTime threshold!

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

TargetTime is entirely independent from block rate... we will (and should) always be competing on TargetTime threshold!

This is far from the original satochi blockchain idea. Threshold value by itself is not a subject for a competition. Finding a block that just fit above the threshold as quick as possible shall be the subject for a competition. I can't really understand how this can be achieved if bots can find a level solution that fits a threshold and requiring far less time than a threshold itself.

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

[psychocoin]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

Who would do something like this and why?

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

Who would do something like this and why?

Doublespend. Mine 300k motocoins. Sell them on c-cex for bitcoins. Build an alternative chain fork and sell them again. Then do this ntimes until they stop motocoin trading.

[HunterMinerCrafter]

No, just bot owners intentionaly limit their bots. When they will stop doing this, then retarget will set target time to very low value and bots will need to enumerate more maps, this will slow down them.

Are you sure? There is no competition on a target time then. Bot shall solve the level below the time threshold but do it FAST. Bot owners will compete in speed of level submission to the network not a target time optimization.

Actually this is not the same for humans only because the game speed is proportional to real time. And only because of this. Fastest solutions were dominating because they were able to submit them faster than slow solutions. But this is not the case when we talk about bots.

You are half right, and half wrong.  They compete on both.

Game time is not really proportional to real time to either a bot or human miner, since both can speed or slow time as much as they'd like at will.  (Would anyone like a patch that makes the speed/slow of time step in different increments?  )  Fastest (run time clock) solutions should always dominate in the long run, bots or no.  The problem right now is that the vast disparity between the required target time and the time it takes for bot to meet that target time overwhelms the humans by quite a bit.  (Hence my attempts at proposals to give the humans the option of more wall clock time.)  There is, however, a minimum bound on run times, and if we approach those bounds the map reset frequency would drop again, giving humans more chance even if no change to the coin were made.  We don't really know yet how well bots would handle this, in general.  I suspect the current iteration of bots might not make the cut.

We don't know yet where the equilibrium is for humans or for bots, so we don't actually know yet how competitive humans/bots could be.  Only time will tell.  For the moment the bots still seem to be "winning."

[HunterMinerCrafter]

This is far from the original satochi blockchain idea.

There is only one specific difference in what we can say (so far) about the properties of moto's PoW, and that is that unlike partial-collision where we know that each added bit to target precisely doubles the computational effort we do not know yet what the resource requirement requirement curve for moto mining will be.  If that curve turns out to be something like a flat, constant line because someone does some clever math and can literally solve blocks at will then the coin is dooooooooooomed.  If someone reduces the whole challenge to a 3sat then I'd sell my wife and kids to buy buy buy because I don't expect anyone to break NP in reasonable ways any time particularly soon.

Threshold value by itself is not a subject for a competition.

If this is true, then bitcoin doesn't work.  BTC difficulty is just a threshold number for a hash.

Finding a block that just fit above the threshold as quick as possible shall be the subject for a competition.

If this were true of moto because threshold isn't competitive, then it would be just as true for btc.

I can't really understand how this can be achieved if bots can find a level solution that fits a threshold and requiring far less time than a threshold itself.

It is because right now that threshold is not really much of a challenge for anyone at all, human or bot.  In general, however, it still holds true.

[HunterMinerCrafter]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

This is precisely the same as a 51% attack.  To do it (probabilistic)  successfully you would need to not only be mining your new chain to catch up, but also keeping up with the real chain's pace of new production as well, so you need to have above 50% of the total hashing strength on the network. (the hashing strength to keep your chain in pace with the rest of the network as a whole, plus some extra to get ahead.)  This is still not different from the first fpga and GPU miners and later the early asic miners on BTC.

I could produce blocks well above 1 per 5 seconds, but why?  It would not be worth the energy spend to grab the couple of bucks on the buy side of the books, and it would certainly destroy the coin and any hopes of getting more than that in the future.  For anyone with the hashing strength the rational thing to do is just mine the coin normally to secure and strengthen the network and collect the subsidy.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself.

I'm not sure I follow you.  How would this be different from any other coin, where someone holding an overwhelming majority of the hashing strength can rewrite tx history at will to a depth relative to their network dominance?

An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself.

I think I've already beaten this horse to death, but they are directly connected.  Finding "any path that makes it to the coin" is quite a bit easier than finding a path that makes it to the coin with a target near the minimum bound on run time, for both bots and humans.  Try it yourself in ForFun mode. 

This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now.

No, fork attack complexity is only very low right now.  It is, however, much higher than it was a week ago, and will be much higher next week, and so on.  This, too, is true of any successful crypto where difficulty increases steadily.

Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

It is only compromised in the same way that the first FPGA and GPU miners "compromised" bitcoin, which is to say basically not at all in the long run.

[WilliamLie2]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

What you describe is 51% attack. But you couldn't mine blocks just with 60 sec target time, if you want blocks only with 60 seconds target time then you need to ensure that average spacing between blocks is more than 60 seconds to prevent difficulty retarget to set target time to lower value; to produce longer chain this you will need to set time for some blocks far in the future and network will not accept such blocks.

[radi324]

Are there going to be any fixes for this whole bot issue?

[HunterMinerCrafter]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

What you describe is 51% attack. But you couldn't mine blocks just with 60 sec target time, if you want blocks only with 60 seconds target time then you need to ensure that average spacing between blocks is more than 60 seconds to prevent difficulty retarget to set target time to lower value; to produce longer chain this you will need to set time for some blocks far in the future and network will not accept such blocks.

I'd just like to say that I find it very reassuring that you seem to have a solid grasp (at least much more solid than anyone else in this thread, and quite a bit more solid than most people I talk to in general, heh) on block-chain semantic fundamentals.  I think if this project were in the hands of one of the (many) less capable altcoin devs out there that there would be little hope for this coin.  You seem to be quite up to the task at hand (even despite our complicating your life a bit with our own tasks!) and that gives me great confidence in the future of this coin.

I very much look forward to working with you in developing and bettering moto, the first true 3.0 crypto!

[DeepCryptoanalist3]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

What you describe is 51% attack. But you couldn't mine blocks just with 60 sec target time, if you want blocks only with 60 seconds target time then you need to ensure that average spacing between blocks is more than 60 seconds to prevent difficulty retarget to set target time to lower value; to produce longer chain this you will need to set time for some blocks far in the future and network will not accept such blocks.

If I understand this line correctly https://github.com/motocoin-dev/motocoin/blob/e13a143890b9f6a035294dc27d729890641d2b0a/src/main.cpp#L1197:

int bnNew = 2*Current - Median - (Current - Median)*nTargetTimespan/nActualTimespan;

then if Median is equal to Current... then bnNew will be equal to Current no matter what nActualTimespan is. Even if nActualTimespan is close to zero the new complexity threshold will not be changed.

[HunterMinerCrafter]

Are there going to be any fixes for this whole bot issue?

I'm starting to feel like I'm screaming into the wind on this, but here goes again!

This bot "issue" is not a problem that needs some "fixes" like a bug or design flaw.  The bots have greatly increased the security of the network, and will continue to do so.  The problem is that the prevalence of the bots, in their current form, put the parameters of the work challenge into a strange in-between point where the difficulty is neither low enough nor high enough for human players to even have an opportunity to compete.  This is unfortunate, but is also (one way or another) entirely temporary.  Either the semantics of map reset will be patched to afford humans more opportunity to compete while we are still in this odd midpoint phase, or the coin will be left alone entirely and eventually difficulty re-targeting will (probably?) reach a point where bots can no longer find solutions so quickly that humans have no opportunity to even try (albeit probably a while from now, as it is in bot miners' best interests to increase their hashrate as slowly as possible while still remaining competitive with other miners) and the human mining game will become playable again.  (The one big, unknown wildcard in this depends on what the actual computational complexity of an ideal solver would be.  If there is a possible deterministic linear integer solver (someone PLEASE convince me that there is not?!?!?!) then not only would humans never be able to compete again, but the coin as a whole would be entirely non-viable.)

Whether we patch and hard-fork to give humans opportunity right now, or wait until opportunity presents itself to humans again naturally, remains to be seen.  Even if/when such a patch is added to the network by devs there will need to be a consensus around the upgrade.  If the majority hashing strength does not adopt the patch, then the network will fork and users will have to wait for the natural adjustment anyway.  Hooray for global digital consensus mechanisms.

Myself, I will be quite likely to adopt any patch the developers put out.  I very much *want* humans to be competitive again, even though this may seem directly at odds with my actions of botting.  (This may seem counter-intuitive and not rational, but I assure you that on a long curve it is entirely the rational thing for a botter.  Think about it... our botted up coins are just a waste of our time and electricity if there is no interest in the coin.)

[aliser]

News
https://www.coinader.com/?cur=MOTO&ccur=BTC

[HunterMinerCrafter]

There is one more idea I want to share.

If there is a bot owner who can produce a viable solution for every possible starting block that fit in say 60 sec threshold and require less than 60 sec for this...  then this botowner is now probably building an alternate blockchain fork from 8000 block. And he will publish this blockchain shortly. His blockchain will be longer than the current blockchain because he can catch it up very quickly. If he can produce a solution in 5 sec then he needs a 5000 * 5 sec ~ 7 hours to produce a chain of 5000 blocks with solutions close to 60secs. Motocoin network will accept his new chain because his chain will be longer than the current one and it is done. This is not a 51% attack this is something different because attacker do not even need a lot of computation power to achieve this.

In other words. A bot owners can produce a blockchain fork as long as they want, each block in the forked chain will contain a solution close to 60sec. Bot owner needs far less time to achieve this than the sum of the thresholds for blocks in the chain itself. An actual block computation complexity is not connected to the threshold itself. This compromise the main idea of a blockchain. A blockchain fork attack complexity is very low now. Motocoin is literally compromised now. I am out.

What you describe is 51% attack. But you couldn't mine blocks just with 60 sec target time, if you want blocks only with 60 seconds target time then you need to ensure that average spacing between blocks is more than 60 seconds to prevent difficulty retarget to set target time to lower value; to produce longer chain this you will need to set time for some blocks far in the future and network will not accept such blocks.

If I understand this line correctly https://github.com/motocoin-dev/motocoin/blob/e13a143890b9f6a035294dc27d729890641d2b0a/src/main.cpp#L1197:

int bnNew = 2*Current - Median - (Current - Median)*nTargetTimespan/nActualTimespan;

then if Median is equal to Current... then bnNew will be equal to Current no matter what nActualTimespan is. Even if nActualTimespan is close to zero the new complexity threshold will not be changed.

This is entirely what I'd expect, if the current rate is the same as the average rate then no adjustment is necessary.  Are your proposing that if solution times remain consistent, we should retarget?  Should we make the challenge easier or harder in such a case, and by how much, exactly?

If hashing strength on a sha coin remains constant would you expect changes in difficulty targets??

You are a smart fellow, but there seems to be a theme emerging in a lot of your posts.... you say "moto is flawed because motohashing has BLAH problem" but when we take your arguments and replace "moto" with "bitcoin" and "motohashing" with "sha" they entirely stop making sense.  If we assume that the work function itself is computationally challenging at low bounds (still an open question, but likely true?) than there is little/no difference in semantics from litecoin, and the moto racing might as well be scrypt.  For any argument against moto to succeed with this complexity assumption the argument would also have to hold up against "clasically hashed" coins as well.  If your argument doesn't make sense in the context of sha hashing it likely won't make sense in the context of moto path hashing, unless you can first show that our complexity assumption about the hashing itself is flawed.  (PLEASE do so!  Seriously!  I desperately want to see someone do some real science around a complexity analysis of this work function.  I'd be doing so myself but I'm far too busy with my bots, my dayjob, a web based replay viewer, and living life.)