I feel the release approaching but there are some immediate concerns regarding the coin distribution and the state of the market it results in.
Regardless of what the richlist shows, I look at the amount of coins mined over the last months and the miniscule amounts that have been sold, so am I wrong to assume that a single dominant miner holds 20%-30% of the coin supply? And then, I'd guess the handful of other miners make up for at least 50% cumulatively.
You're a little off on the numbers, I would guess. You don't account for the premine having been redistributed and minim1ner's dumping most of his coins early on. Around 30% of all coins in existence were redistributed into circulation by these two events. In the past few weeks, we saw (what appears to be approximately) 10-15% of the coins in existence dumped by miners. I'd say all of the bot miners collectively probably hold at most around 30-40% now. That is still quite a lot, by some measures.
Problem?
This was brought up earlier in the thread by WilliamLie2 who said he had some PMing him and complaining that is was unfair that so many coins were distributed to bot miners so early. My thoughts on this haven't changed and I'll say the same again in response. Everyone has had fair and equal opportunity to choose to participate. Barriers to entry were even greatly lowered when Mini released his bot example. We're roughly 10-12 weeks in and in that time anyone could have even take some programming classes and built their own bot. You could have certainly contracted it out easily and cheaply in this time-frame. You might have even been able to convince someone to sell you their bot "off the shelf" or something. If you didn't take
some action to include yourself in this set of people getting this set of early coins, you have nobody to blame or complain to.
I think our early distribution was
far more fair and inclusive than the
vast majority of coins launched in the same time period, with their premine shenanigans, IPO shenanigans, POS shenanigans, "totally fair" stakeholder list plan shenanigans, token redemption shenanigans, burn-other-coins shenanigans, "market stabilization fund" shenanigans, multi-pool hopping shenanigans, etc etc. There are soooooooooo many "totally unfair while claiming to be the most fairest possible" distribution/incentive models now that I can't even enumerate them all here. Most of these end up being
drastically less "fair" than what has transpired with MOTO.
I may be off quite a bit but I think the point would still stand... With that information at hand, how is anyone motivated to enter the market when there are currently zero uses for the coins one could purchase,
I do agree that this is a problem, but we have to take certain problems in a certain order. All that having vendors/services adopting the coin would really do, right now, is create more targets for warp attack and increase the probability that some unscrupulous person sees more to be gained from attacking participants to steal BTC than is to be gained by mining altruistically.
As WilliamLie2 pointed out, the network is secure only by virtue of the fact that nobody is doing the attacks. If enough incentive were dangling out there for it, someone probably would.
That being said, as soon as we do pass the fork this will become pretty much a top priority for the coin's "marketing."
and overwhelming danger of massive dumps at any point above any miner's electricity spend, resulting in a very likely immediate reduction in value of anyone's theoretical investment.
Eh, I'm not so concerned with this as a significant risk for two reasons:
First, I suspect that anyone smart enough to be dominant in bot mining production is also smart enough to use an execution strategy that reduces market impact, and presumably already equipped with the trading bots to do so. In other words, if the bot miner is smart enough to not dump his MOTO immediately when mined, he's also probably smart enough to dump it slowly and carefully when he does switch from the accumulation side to distribution.
Second, such a black-swan sell off impacting the price so significantly is only really a problem if the price doesn't subsequently recover. Unlike pretty much every other alt, MOTO actually has (relatively "extreme") buoyancy in the market. With most coins when a massive sell clears out the buy side of the books that's it, it is "game over," the alt never recovers, the sell side pushes down toward 1sat, no new buyers appear, and the exchanges de-list. We've all seen it over and over again. With MOTO it seems that no matter how much gets dumped, the buy side consistently (and usually almost immediately) returns to 0.3 to 0.9 btc of depth on the books and a price roughly around 300-500. (This is what I've been referring to when I've previously pointed out that MOTO is curiously one of the only alts with a persistent "institutional block." There are very very very few coins that exhibit this behavior effect in the markets.) If the market players continue to show this "we'll buy any amount that you're willing to dump into our bids" mentality then let the miners dump away, it will be their loss in the end.
In other words, smart money is smart. Further, this is true on both sides of the market equation.
No matter how much I'm attracted to the idea of MOTO, I feel there's crucial parts missing of an ecosystem needed for sustaining the growth of both the coin's future prospects and its economy.
Again, you're not wrong. Again, I have to say that we shouldn't rush the growth. It will happen in due time, pressing the issue only introduces other risks for the moment.
Whatever happened to the online replay viewer development? Are that kind of features gonna get any attention after the first patch is released?
I can run replays in a browser, but currently without graphics. (Or, well, tbh with really messed up graphics, heh.) If anyone is interested I can push that code somewhere. (It is basically just an Emscripten build of the core engine parts.) I had started on wiring up graphics to canvas with SDL, but never finished as just having "headless" replays was sufficient for my purposes in the end. I'd probably revisit such things eventually, but other stuff keeps making it higher onto the priority list.
Also, I just got the weirdest idea. Since we gotta fork anyway, as it's a significant change, what if block rewards were boosted to 100 or so for a few hundred blocks to stimulate human mining and interest, while bot operators are busy adjusting their algorithms? It could then quickly return to normal. Just an idea, perhaps it can be changed into a better one.
I'd be hesitant to do this, but open to the idea if there is sufficient support for it and a good plan put together. I'd (personally) much rather take a "holistic" approach to those matters and adjust the TT re-target formula, diminish curve, and possibly coin cap all at the same time. I'd also prefer to consider these concerns separately from the more immediate issues, in a future fork, just to reduce the amount of surprises that might occur all at once.
If my logic is all backwards anywhere, feel free to correct me
Not at all backwards, just a little pessimistic and based on some questionable assumptions. I agree with all of it in theory, but I think there is very little pragmatic reason for concern, particularly at this juncture. Hey, I could be wrong.
