[ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin"

[chriswen]

@Crazyivan, did you know you can borrow almost 2000 CLAMS on poloniex for 60 days at an interest rate of 2% a day. If you really think it's going to drop another 50% this week then you'll be able to double your bitcoins, risk free. I'm saying risk free because you seem 100% certain.

@xamido , these are just current stats. How much was available for shorting before?

[chilly2k]

Clams are certainly starting to look cheap.  The digger can't have an unlimited supply, and if he is stupid enough to sell regardless what the price is, then buyers should see an opportunity at some point.
I bought low and sold high last time, though no where near the lows or the highs.  I bought in again at 0.06, but think I will go for more soon if the price keeps falling.

I agree that the digger is overrated in importance, that people are scared and getting out only accelerates the price fall, 1 person doesn't make the market (unless it is Just Dice!)

Overrated in importance?

Cause of him, the price went down from 0.014 in mid August to 0.002 ATM. You can calculate %. No single coin has suffered that crash over 90 days period unless there s something seriously wrong it and unless the devs name is Homero Garza. I hold 7 different PoS coins and none of them has suffered even close price drop. The only difference is the digger. So yes, I would say, he s big time important for CLAM. With him in the game, there s no CLAM.

Remember, 0.0001 by next Monday, just watch.

Do you really mean .0001 or did you mean .001?  Big difference.  If he wanted to sell all 400K at .0001 I would come up with the 40 BTC and buy them all.  

So assuming you meant .001  .014/.001 = 14 or a 1400% drop in price.  (I'm not sure about my math).  

Have you heard of HyperStake?  It's still around and being developed.  

  It went from a high of .00009880 to around .00000200 now.  For a 49,200% drop.  
  

[chriswen]

Do you really mean .0001 or did you mean .001?  Big difference.  If he wanted to sell all 400K at .0001 I would come up with the 40 BTC and buy them all.  

So assuming you meant .001  .014/.001 = 14 or a 1400% drop in price.  (I'm not sure about my math).  
  

Exactly, the CLAM network has some inherent value because of JD. At some point there will be a bottom. It's not going to freefall to 0.

Also @crazyivan, yes it seems to have dropped 25% today and it can definitely drop more in the future because of this uncertainty.

But you have to understand exponentials. Dropping 10% every day from 0.005 results in a price of 0.00009 after 60 days. Using an assumption of an active supply of 1.5 million coins this would mean the market cap would be 135 btc. Maybe you're right. But as you can see there are people like chilly2k who are willing to buy in at that level.

[crazyivan]

Clams are certainly starting to look cheap.  The digger can't have an unlimited supply, and if he is stupid enough to sell regardless what the price is, then buyers should see an opportunity at some point.
I bought low and sold high last time, though no where near the lows or the highs.  I bought in again at 0.06, but think I will go for more soon if the price keeps falling.

I agree that the digger is overrated in importance, that people are scared and getting out only accelerates the price fall, 1 person doesn't make the market (unless it is Just Dice!)

Overrated in importance?

Cause of him, the price went down from 0.014 in mid August to 0.002 ATM. You can calculate %. No single coin has suffered that crash over 90 days period unless there s something seriously wrong it and unless the devs name is Homero Garza. I hold 7 different PoS coins and none of them has suffered even close price drop. The only difference is the digger. So yes, I would say, he s big time important for CLAM. With him in the game, there s no CLAM.

Remember, 0.0001 by next Monday, just watch.

Do you really mean .0001 or did you mean .001?  Big difference.  If he wanted to sell all 400K at .0001 I would come up with the 40 BTC and buy them all.  

So assuming you meant .001  .014/.001 = 14 or a 1400% drop in price.  (I'm not sure about my math).  

Have you heard of HyperStake?  It's still around and being developed.  

  It went from a high of .00009880 to around .00000200 now.  For a 49,200% drop.  
  

Yes, it seems I have one extra 0. I mean .001.

But I will not comment the price anymore. Dont want to be accused of trying to move the price.

@chriswen lending at 2% per day? Who takes that kind of loan???
I see only loan offers, not a single demanded loan.

[BayAreaCoins]

seems like clam is done, not much backing.

   Glad you weighed in.  I was waiting for your comment....   

On Poloniex Clams has 67 BTC in buy support.  LTC only has 44 BTC.    Does that mean LTC is done too? 

I don't mean to start a debate on the virtues of LTC, but just to point out the flaws in his assumption that Clams has no backing.   

According to http://www.litecoinsucks.com/ LTC is headed to zero

[chilly2k]

seems like clam is done, not much backing.

   Glad you weighed in.  I was waiting for your comment....   

On Poloniex Clams has 67 BTC in buy support.  LTC only has 44 BTC.    Does that mean LTC is done too? 

I don't mean to start a debate on the virtues of LTC, but just to point out the flaws in his assumption that Clams has no backing.   

According to http://www.litecoinsucks.com/ LTC is headed to zero

   And it's on the interweb so it must be true....      Plus with a site name like litecoinsucks, you know it has to be unbiased...   

[dooglus]

@chriswen lending at 2% per day? Who takes that kind of loan???

People who think the price will drop faster than that. They sell the borrowed coins, then buy them back cheaper after the price falls to repay the loan.

I see only loan offers, not a single demanded loan.

Loans are automatically taken from the existing loan offers when you buy or sell at leverage on poloniex. You never see the loan request, you only see a loan offer disappear, and a new buy or sell order on the market.

You should look into it if you're sure about the price continuing to drop. You can profit from the price moving down.

[dooglus]

With the current difficulty, a single 4.6 CLAM output/claim would be likely to take a great deal of time for a user to "claim".  So much time, in fact, that it may not even be economical to do so.

An alternative might be to give undug CLAM additional weight and chance to stake.  This would make the process of claiming more likely, but still limit digs overall.
This is, however, probably not fair to existing stakers.

To make it more fair, the block reward could be removed from digging stakes.  This would mean that undug CLAMs would not give a 1 CLAM reward when staked.
This, however, would be a change to the money supply/inflation.

An alternative might be to attribute "missed" stakes, due to claiming stakes, to normal stakers either at the next block, or into a pool/window spread out over subsequent stakes.


That would leave us with a situation where unclaimed CLAM have additional weight to stake more quickly, but are still limited based on current difficulty and the block time.  When unclaimed CLAM stake, they would not give a reward, but instead add their 1 CLAM reward into a pool.  When normal blocks are staked, that pool would be apportioned out.

Not sure how I feel about this idea - interested to hear what dooglus, xploited, and the rest of the gang think.
It is definitely more simple than the idea I outlined yesterday; though without some of the additional advantages.
Will give it some thought.

All this just to make it fairer to require that distribution outputs stake before they can be dug? I don't see how that solves our "problem". Maybe it will slow down the digging, but it won't change the end result - the active supply is getting inflated 50% by someone who plans to dump all the new supply. Dragging that out so it takes 2 years instead of 1 year doesn't help us, I don't think.

Requiring that old outputs have to stake before they can move also destroys fungibility. Some coins in my wallet would be of a different class than others. That was one of things you seem keen to avoid.

Did you see my question about how the fee-per-byte would be set? I may have missed it but I didn't see you answer.

[tspacepilot]

Don't over-complicate the solution and don't be overly idealistic.
Not directed at any particular idea, and not meant to be rude, but keep it in mind as a mantra.

I have seen many devs, coins, and communities make this mistake time and time again.
The simplest and fastest implemented ideas that actually make a big difference are the best ones.

Well, the simplest and fastest idea to implement is always "do nothing", closely followed by "cut off all digging with a hard fork".

Neither seems optimal.

I guess I'm still not understand the crisis here.  Surely when the CLAM devs decided to distribute so many clams to BTC addresses they did this on the understand that someone might come along and dig them.  Wait, more than "understanding", I think it's actually an invitation, right?  So what justification is there to try to undo that invitation when someone comes along to take you up on it?

The best rationale that I've seen for making changes has to do with the idea of an "unfairness" related to those who are digging sooner basically financing those who dig later due to the storage of the UTXO corresponding to undug clams (did I get that right?).   If I do understand that argument correctly, I can see some validity to it.  But I would say to move forward with any changes which devalue undug clams with extreme caution, give people 6 months to a year to prepare.  Otherwise you risk impugning your own trustworthiness as developers of CLAM.  As SuperClam was saying, the promises made at the original distrubution should be seen as sacred, and undoing them shouldn't be an off-the-cuff response to someone selling a lot on the market.

[xploited]

With the current difficulty, a single 4.6 CLAM output/claim would be likely to take a great deal of time for a user to "claim".  So much time, in fact, that it may not even be economical to do so.
...
It is definitely more simple than the idea I outlined yesterday; though without some of the additional advantages.
Will give it some thought.

All this just to make it fairer to require that distribution outputs stake before they can be dug? I don't see how that solves our "problem". Maybe it will slow down the digging, but it won't change the end result - the active supply is getting inflated 50% by someone who plans to dump all the new supply. Dragging that out so it takes 2 years instead of 1 year doesn't help us, I don't think.

Requiring that old outputs have to stake before they can move also destroys fungibility. Some coins in my wallet would be of a different class than others. That was one of things you seem keen to avoid.

I had a similar reaction. It doesn't really change much just provides a digging limit. It does provide a more solid expectation on the rate of dig's but ultimately like you say, it seems the same end result.  

The way I see it is the current digger is already part of the network. Any plan that trys to stop or limit the current digger is going to fail imo. So it seems to me that any changes we might make are really meant to effect future digging. I don't think spreading out the length of time to dig large amounts has the net effect we would be looking for.

CC's first purposal is very interesting. One thing it doesn't seem to help is the supply inflation from digging. I'm not sure if thats a good thing or a bad thing. It would no longer be in the hands of someone who plans to dump them all but the supply still inflates at an unpredictable rate with potentially large jumps in total supply. We could choose to burn all or some of the fee's associated with dug outputs keeping the supply from inflating from the older dig outputs but Im not sure the implications of that to the model.

Mind you any change short of removing digging alltogether has that unpredictability inherent. Halfing the dig rewards on a set schedule and burning the excess would provide more predictability then currently which gets even better over time while still keeping around the digging aspect of clams.

I'm still not sure of the best way forward. In my mind this diggers 500k (or whatever he currently has left, 350kish) are going to be continued to be dumped until hes done. Im not sure theres anything to stop that. I also tend to believe the market will bare it and eventually recover. I'm not sure of time frames or bottoms but I don't see this one digger being enough to end clams. I know for sure I'm not prepared to let it die or give up and I know I'm not alone.

My real concern is directed to the next digger, and the one after them.

Interestingly (at least to me) there is no reason I can see the dig reward only has to go down in value. You could base the total possible current dig amount on a percentage of the total supply within a given window (like difficulty adjustment) making digs more valuable as the supply increased but still giving a much more predictable inflation rate.

Thats a really rough idea and I'm sure is full of holes.

Surely when the CLAM devs decided to distribute so many clams to BTC addresses they did this on the understand that someone might come along and dig them.  Wait, more than "understanding", I think it's actually an invitation, right?  So what justification is there to try to undo that invitation when someone comes along to take you up on it?

But I would say to move forward with any changes which devalue undug clams with extreme caution, give people 6 months to a year to prepare.  Otherwise you risk impugning your own trustworthiness as developers of CLAM

Your right, it is an invitation.. and I don't think anyone is really on board with revoking any invitations. However, leaving the invitations open ended has created uncertainty and potentially needs to be addressed. I believe a balance needs to be found between investors / stakers and diggers. The fact that the amount available to be dug is 14x the amount that is currently active after almost a year and a half of clams is in my mind a problem.

I do absolutely agree. Any change needs to be considered carefully and ample time needs to be given.  

[SuperClam]

With the current difficulty, a single 4.6 CLAM output/claim would be likely to take a great deal of time for a user to "claim".  So much time, in fact, that it may not even be economical to do so.
An alternative might be to give undug CLAM additional weight and chance to stake.  This would make the process of claiming more likely, but still limit digs overall.
This is, however, probably not fair to existing stakers.
To make it more fair, the block reward could be removed from digging stakes.  This would mean that undug CLAMs would not give a 1 CLAM reward when staked.
This, however, would be a change to the money supply/inflation.
An alternative might be to attribute "missed" stakes, due to claiming stakes, to normal stakers either at the next block, or into a pool/window spread out over subsequent stakes.
That would leave us with a situation where unclaimed CLAM have additional weight to stake more quickly, but are still limited based on current difficulty and the block time.  When unclaimed CLAM stake, they would not give a reward, but instead add their 1 CLAM reward into a pool.  When normal blocks are staked, that pool would be apportioned out.
Not sure how I feel about this idea - interested to hear what dooglus, xploited, and the rest of the gang think.
It is definitely more simple than the idea I outlined yesterday; though without some of the additional advantages.
Will give it some thought.

All this just to make it fairer to require that distribution outputs stake before they can be dug? I don't see how that solves our "problem". Maybe it will slow down the digging, but it won't change the end result - the active supply is getting inflated 50% by someone who plans to dump all the new supply. Dragging that out so it takes 2 years instead of 1 year doesn't help us, I don't think.
Requiring that old outputs have to stake before they can move also destroys fungibility. Some coins in my wallet would be of a different class than others. That was one of things you seem keen to avoid.

That was an idea suggested by a user earlier - I was playing devil's advocate and attempting to build on it to make it more reasonable.

I think your fungibility argument is accurate.
The digs would be placed into a separate state, such as immature or a new state labeled "unclaimed" or something.

Interestingly, it would incentivize new users to have familiarity with the client and staking - a net benefit for the network.

Did you see my question about how the fee-per-byte would be set? I may have missed it but I didn't see you answer.

I haven't worked out every alternative, but I think it could be set in a variety of ways - the key idea being to find trustless variables which give us data on either demand or supply.


blocksize
This creates a sort of conglomerate "supplier" and artificially sets supply.  You would have a moving window for target blocksize.  Target blocksize would be based on a window of previous blocksizes, increasing when average blocksize is greater than the previous target and decreasing when it is below.  This would usually create a bloat risk whereby an attacker could create spam transactions perpetually forcing the blocksize upward.  Enforced minimum-per-byte-per-block fees would positively correlate and rise with block size.  This should make demand move opposite of supply until they find equilibrium.  It would also make bloat attacks such as the one above more costly the farther from the natural equilibrium it is pushed.  Space above the target blocksize would be available for transactions, but come with either a progressively higher enforced minimum per byte or a reduction in subsidy which would make in uneconomical for a staker to include transactions below a certain per-byte-per-block fee.  This would allow additional space in each given block above the target, at the cost of increased fee - which gives us DDoS resistance without artificial ceilings.

coin-days-destroyed
This gives us a measure of money supply velocity.  It could be viewed as a proportion between days-destroyed / total-days-created or in other forms.  This is a measure of demand.  I haven't dug into this much but it seems like there should be a reasonable way to utilize coin-days to measure transaction activity/velocity and adjust the fee upward during times of increased activity and downward during times of decreased activity.  In this case, supply would be a vertical line and the system would find equilibrium by adjusting the demand curve upward or downward via adjusting fees which would in turn place inverse pressure on the measure of demand.  This would result in a supply-demand gap at equilibrium - but, in this case as smooth pointed out earlier, "suppliers" don't exist in the conventional microeconomic sense, so this likely doesn't represent the inefficiency it would in a normal market.

subsidy reduction
In this case, we apply a cost to supply.  It is similar to the target blocksize window idea hinted at in that idea, except we do not have a target.  Instead, we create a progressive curve that penalizes subsidy on blocks as total byte-size increases.  This decrease must be offset by the fees paid in the transactions included (which raise total byte-size) and suggests that a staker would be unwilling to include transactions in which the cost of inclusion is below the reward(fee) of inclusion.  This turns the vertical supply line into a sloped line and places downward pressure on demand via fees.


Pretty much anything which applies pressure on either the supply and demand curves could be used to create an inverse relationship and adjust them to find equilibrium.

In the end, even utilizing trustless chain data you end up picking a sane floor/ceiling and drawing a curve or line between the two.  The additional data simply shifts that line upward or downward.

[YoyodyneSystems]

Clearly having massive chunks of 500k or 1 million coins that can just show up and be sold right away is the main issue.
This issue must be solved and is the only real problem that I see with CLAM. Almost everyone seems to agree at this point (aside from diggers with newbie accounts).
Once it's solved it should have a rather positive effect on the market.

The optimal course would be to match the emission rate that we would be seeing if the coin was a standard PoW or PoS.
Also you must account for the fact people were buying the coin the last year or so assuming the digging had crawled to an end and most new coins would be from staking. So the emission should reflect that.

CLAMs has been out for about 17 months so how about a solution that pins the max amount of coins per day to approximately an emission of the staking plus some small percentage (0.05% or less per day) for the equivalent PoW ("limited digging"). Just chose the optimum formula to achieve this rate however is needed. 500 clams per day would be 1.25 BTC right now on the PoW side of emission. The market can handle that plus the staking amount without issue I think. My numbers and thoughts on this may be a little off in terms of how this applies to CLAMs distribution but I think you get the idea.

Just think about what the market can handle per day in emission rate. It all revolves around that.
And the change has to be significant and abrupt considering the rate of decline we are seeing.

Balance...

[smooth]

All this just to make it fairer to require that distribution outputs stake before they can be dug? I don't see how that solves our "problem". Maybe it will slow down the digging, but it won't change the end result - the active supply is getting inflated 50% by someone who plans to dump all the new supply. Dragging that out so it takes 2 years instead of 1 year doesn't help us, I don't think.

It helps because it slows down the process and gives people time to respond to changes in supply and for the market to reach an equilibrium in an orderly manner, rather than having some whale digger dumper drive the price down quickly and create unnecessary volatility.

[smooth]

Also you must account for the fact people were buying the coin the last year or so assuming the digging had crawled to an end and most new coins would be from staking.

They ASSUMED incorrectly.

So the emission should reflect that.

Why should the emission reflect a bad bet that some people made? That's absurd.

[YoyodyneSystems]

Also you must account for the fact people were buying the coin the last year or so assuming the digging had crawled to an end and most new coins would be from staking.

They ASSUMED incorrectly.

So the emission should reflect that.

Why should the emission reflect a bad bet that some people made? That's absurd.

It's the bet everyone made. In reality the method of distribution was flawed from inception. There is still time to fix it.
Up to you guys what you do from here. Nothing else to say really.

[smooth]

It's the bet everyone made.

Everyone? Really? What about people who looked at CLAM and thought was overvalued so they didn't buy. Maybe some of these people are buying now (clearly someone is) or will buy if the price drops some more. We've already had one person on this thread state explicitly that he will buy if the price drops enough.

[jd1959]

Hi guys

I'm pleased to see so much debate about the current situation. I have a completely different thought and that is there are some Bitcoin people that actually hate all alt coins. I mean really hate, as far as they are

concerned alts just detract from Bitcoin. If such people have many addresses they have many Clams, they would be quite happy to dump hard hopping to destroy an alt. IMHO they don't care about how much they get

just how much damage they can do

Jon  

[smooth]

Hi guys

I'm pleased to see so much debate about the current situation. I have a completely different thought and that is there are some Bitcoin people that actually hate all alt coins. I mean really hate, as far as they are

concerned alts just detract from Bitcoin. If such people have many addresses they have many Clams, they would be quite happy to dump hard hopping to destroy an alt. IMHO they don't care about how much they get

just how much damage they can do

Jon  

Is it possible to tell whether the claimed CLAMs being dumped now come from BTC or one of the other chains? Maybe that has been answered before, but I don't remember seeing it.

[SuperClam]

Hi guys
I'm pleased to see so much debate about the current situation. I have a completely different thought and that is there are some Bitcoin people that actually hate all alt coins. I mean really hate, as far as they are
concerned alts just detract from Bitcoin. If such people have many addresses they have many Clams, they would be quite happy to dump hard hopping to destroy an alt. IMHO they don't care about how much they get
just how much damage they can do
Jon  

Is it possible to tell whether the claimed CLAMs being dumped now come from BTC or one of the other chains? Maybe that has been answered before, but I don't remember seeing it.

I believe they are BTC claims; at least the ones I personally looked up.

Don't quote me.

[BayAreaCoins]

With the current difficulty, a single 4.6 CLAM output/claim would be likely to take a great deal of time for a user to "claim".  So much time, in fact, that it may not even be economical to do so.

The current difficulty of digging their single 4.6 Clamcoins or staking with their single 4.6 CLAMs?