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

[dooglus]

I have been a bit out of the loop, but I see that another whale digger has appered!

Where are you seeing that?

I expect you are noticing that the price is down over the last few days, and jumping to the conclusion that new coins have been dug up, but checking the blockchain I see very little digging since the "whale digger" in December:



Here's a close-up of the time since the whale digger stopped digging:



Note how almost all of the inflation of the money supply in the last 5 months has been a result of staking, not digging, and how recently the total number of coins staked into existence overtook the number of coins dug into existence again.

I expect that this drop in price is the result of someone selling a big batch of CLAMs that they bought cheap from the whale digger in December. They've been holding them until now, hoping the price would go up further, and have just given up waiting. That's just my guess however.

OK, I see what he's saying: stopping the lottery reduced the reward from 1000 CLAMs to 1 CLAM per block, so that means the lottery system was like a pre-mine.

You cut my quote off too early. Check the following two paragraphs and you'll see why the lottery wasn't like a pre-mine at all. It earned you 0.1 CLAMs per block almost all the time, and more very rarely, for an average of *less* than 1 CLAM per block:

OK, I see what he's saying: stopping the lottery reduced the reward from 1000 CLAMs to 1 CLAM per block, so that means the lottery system was like a pre-mine.

Maybe this chart can help show the reality of the situation. Pay attention to how the green supply curve changed when the lottery staking system ended on October 25th last year:



Hint: stopping the lottery caused the supply to increase much more quickly than before.

The lottery was rigged though... which would be a fairly sneaky way of "premining".

Rat4 (the Blackcoin creator/what clam is forked from) allegedly did it.  

He had around 30% of all the Clamcoins in existence at that point as I recall... or more.

I think the lottery was poorly thought out, but not intentionally exploitable. I didn't hear that Rat4 was ever thought to be a major holder of CLAMs. It's possible though.

[smooth]

You cut my quote off too early. Check the following two paragraphs and you'll see why the lottery wasn't like a pre-mine at all. It earned you 0.1 CLAMs per block almost all the time, and more very rarely, for an average of *less* than 1 CLAM per block:

That's not really so clear. Getting coins earlier under PoS is worth more than getting the same number of coins later, because of compounded staking. Someone who exploited the lottery gaining hypothetically 30% of the coin supply then in existence and then continuously staked would have a lot of coins now. I have no idea whether either happened.

[dooglus]

That's not really so clear. Getting coins earlier under PoS is worth more than getting the same number of coins later, because of compounded staking. Someone who exploited the lottery gaining hypothetically 30% of the coin supply then in existence and then continuously staked would have a lot of coins now. I have no idea whether either happened.

It's always better to get in early than later for sure. My point is that there were many less CLAMs created by staking during the three months that the lottery ran than in any three month period since then. If you're looking for "the premine", the lottery isn't it. I would suggest that the "whale digger" is a much richer seam to mine if you're looking for a foundation for building a conspiracy theory.

Here's a picture showing the scale of the two things : the whale digger claimed almost 10 times more CLAMs than all the lottery winners combined:



Edit: oh, but I see your point. The lottery created ~60k CLAMs into a market cap of maybe 70k, almost doubling the supply, whereas the whale digger created 500k into an existing supply of 800k, adding only around 60% to the supply, so it's possible that the lottery winners would have ended up with a bigger share of the supply than the whale digger, if they had held and staked their winnings.

[smooth]

Edit: oh, but I see your point. The lottery created ~60k CLAMs into a market cap of maybe 70k, almost doubling the supply, whereas the whale digger created 500k into an existing supply of 800k, adding only around 60% to the supply, so it's possible that the lottery winners would have ended up with a bigger share of the supply than the whale digger, if they had held and staked their winnings.

Exactly. 60k coins way back when is not directly comparable with 500k coins much later. As I've pointed out before during the "let's ban digging" discussion, diggers are already being diluted by letting their CLAMs stay undug for so long, and it gets worse and worse for them as time goes on.

Now if someone had dug 500k during (or immediately after) the lottery era, then indeed 60k would have been worth a lot less in future staking, but that isn't what happened.

[dooglus]

Edit: oh, but I see your point. The lottery created ~60k CLAMs into a market cap of maybe 70k, almost doubling the supply, whereas the whale digger created 500k into an existing supply of 800k, adding only around 60% to the supply, so it's possible that the lottery winners would have ended up with a bigger share of the supply than the whale digger, if they had held and staked their winnings.

Exactly. 60k coins way back when is not directly comparable with 500k coins much later. As I've pointed out before during the "let's ban digging" discussion, diggers are already being diluted by letting their CLAMs stay undug for so long, and it gets worse and worse for them as time goes on.

Now if someone had dug 500k during (or immediately after) the lottery era, then indeed 60k would have been worth a lot less in future staking, but that isn't what happened.

OK, but I think the late 500k dig is still 'bigger' than the 60k lottery, even when adjusted for inflation.

The 60k lottery winnings diluted a 70k supply, so the lottery winnings represented 60/130 of the supply. By the time the whale digger appeared, a further 450k had been staked. The lottery winnings would have staked 60/130 of that, or 207k, and so would have been worth around 207k+60k = 267k in total. The digger dug up 500k coins, so around twice as much even after adjusting for inflation.

But yeah, the whale digger was only twice as big as all the lottery winners combined, not ten times as big as I previously claimed.

[kito]

My router has upnp setup does work with the clam coin client.   I saw same thing in the bitcoin core client but then it was fixed at some point.  Anyhow, what are the correct udp or tcp ports that need to be opened for home router to accept inbound traffic.

Thanks.

[almightyruler]

I think the lottery was poorly thought out, but not intentionally exploitable. I didn't hear that Rat4 was ever thought to be a major holder of CLAMs. It's possible though.

Not sure if this would considered exploitable, but you could have gained quite an advantage by only staking selectively. Staking disabled by default; call GetProofOfStakeReward right after a new block arrives, then enable staking ONLY if the reward for the next block is sufficient. In addition to not wasting stakes on 0.1 reward blocks, by ignoring those the overall weight when it does attempt to stake would be greater.

[Kiritsugu]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

[zazarb]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

[smooth]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

Any of those are fine, it doesn't really matter. The main thing is just not to have one huge output.

[Kiritsugu]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

Any of those are fine, it doesn't really matter. The main thing is just not to have one huge output.

Damn does it really take 40-50 days for the first reward?

[smooth]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

Any of those are fine, it doesn't really matter. The main thing is just not to have one huge output.

Damn does it really take 40-50 days for the first reward?

I think that was per-output. If you have many of these small outputs, one of them will stake sooner.

Currently you need something in the neighborhood of 1000 CLAMS to stake once per day.

[Kiritsugu]

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

Any of those are fine, it doesn't really matter. The main thing is just not to have one huge output.

Damn does it really take 40-50 days for the first reward?

I think that was per-output. If you have many of these small outputs, one of them will stake sooner.

Currently you need something in the neighborhood of 1000 CLAMS to stake once per day.

Damn, looks like I'll need to do some more collecting then.

Thanks fellas!

[Johnny00]

If you have 1000 clamp would just stake them or keep them on just dice site?

[tspacepilot]

If you have 1000 clamp would just stake them or keep them on just dice site?

If I had 1000 clamps, I would sell most of them, but keep a few to help me with carpentry projects.  Now, if I had 1000 CLAMS, I think what I would do with them would depend on how I got them.  Sudden gift, or recently dug: I'd probably sell half and stake half.  If I just bought them, I'd probably stake for a while and hope the price climbs a bit too.

[Johnny00]

Yes sorry clams. Auto correct. I can't run a computer 24/7 though so that's an issue

[SuperClam]

Yes sorry clams. Auto correct. I can't run a computer 24/7 though so that's an issue

An alternative option, if he is still doing it: 
User 'smooth' was staking some CLAM for users. 
 
Otherwise, it is important that you stake consistently - it is likely more efficient for you to pool your CLAM at JD. 

[smooth]

Yes sorry clams. Auto correct. I can't run a computer 24/7 though so that's an issue

An alternative option, if he is still doing it: 
User 'smooth' was staking some CLAM for users. 
 
Otherwise, it is important that you stake consistently - it is likely more efficient for you to pool your CLAM at JD. 

Yes the staking pool is still open, but has only small users, so the stake rate is fairly low. It does consistently stake every few days or so.

Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1200703.0

Post there or PM me if interested in joining.

[dooglus]

Congratulations to The Great CLAM on reaching the one million blocks milestone!

It's been a while since I replied to posts here, so here goes:

My router has upnp setup does work with the clam coin client.   I saw same thing in the bitcoin core client but then it was fixed at some point.  Anyhow, what are the correct udp or tcp ports that need to be opened for home router to accept inbound traffic.

You want tcp/31174 open to the world for p2p connections, and tcp/30174 open locally if you want to use RPC. Don't open the RPC port globally unless you know what you're doing.

Can we get an updated bootstrap?

I've been updating it semi-regularly here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623147.msg9772191#msg9772191

I did just update it too.

I think the lottery was poorly thought out, but not intentionally exploitable.

Not sure if this would considered exploitable, but you could have gained quite an advantage by only staking selectively.

It was exploitable for sure. I don't think it was designed to be exploitable; I think it was an accident. I did point out to the developers (on Jul 23 '14) that it seemed exploitable soon after it was launched (on Jul 12 '14) but it was already live by then:

--- Log opened Wed Jul 23 07:30:10 2014
07:30 <dooglus> so I guess we're going to do a hard fork some time soon-ish
07:30 <dooglus> I wonder if we should do some math on the lottery reward before that
07:30 <dooglus> I suspect it's game-able at the moment
07:33 <dooglus> suppose I have 1000 CLAM
07:33 <dooglus> I could split it into 200 piles of 5
07:34 <dooglus> each pile would stake every few days at best, giving me at best 100 stakes per day, or 10 CLAM per day?
07:35 <dooglus> alternatively, I could leave it as a single pile of 1000, and modify the client to only let it stake if it wins the lotto
07:35 <dooglus> after 10 days, it will have a weight of 10,000 and so will be entering the lottery very very often
07:36 <dooglus> I only let it post if it wins a decent amount
07:36 <dooglus> I suspect that after 10 days it will have won more than the 100 CLAMS I could have earned by splitting and staking honestly
07:37 <dooglus> and if not, after 20 days it will be entering the lottery twice as often, since it will be twice as old, twice the weight
07:37 <dooglus> whereas my piles of 5 won't be significantly different than they stated - earning 10 CLAM per day
07:42 <dooglus> the issue is that the frequency at which I can "enter" the lottery goes up linearly
07:42 <dooglus> whereas the cost of withholding is pretty linear

It turns out that the cheating that happened combined this with manipulating the timestamps on blocks. See how the timestamp on block 163967 is 6 minutes earlier than the that on the previous block:

--- Log opened Thu Oct 23 22:57:51 2014
23:04 <dooglus> SetBestChain: new best=66045c13690ec7a7242c  height=163966  trust=1539530299233  blocktrust=21933643  target=195  date=10/21/14 06:27:48
23:04 <dooglus> SetBestChain: new best=ef7b492dcf436a6c5790  height=163967  trust=1539540973066  blocktrust=10673833  target=402  date=10/21/14 06:21:40
23:04 <dooglus> the timestamps are very wrong - but they actually arrived very close together
23:04 <dooglus> the 2nd had nSubsidy: 93442202719.000000
23:04 <dooglus> >900 reward

so it turned out it was even more exploitable than I had previously thought.

Can anyone tell me a good size for each input in desktop wallet to maximize staking?  I was told 10-15, I was thinking 25?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

To maximize staking, smaller is better until you get to the point that your wallet is using all available CPU checking your outputs. You need to balance that against the future transaction fees required to recombine your outputs when you want to spend them. Note that splitting won't speed up staking, it will only reduce the effect of the 500 block maturation time after an output stakes.

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

If you only have 30 CLAMs, you will be waiting an average of 30 days to stake no matter how you split them. If you have 3000 CLAMs and split them into 100 piles of 30, each of the piles will be waiting an average 30 days to stake, but one of them will get lucky and stake early. You can expect a few of them to stake each day on average. If instead you split them into 1000 piles of 3, each will be waiting about a year to stake, but you can still expect a few of them to stake each day on average. And each time one of your 3's stakes, it is only making 3+1 CLAMs inactive for 500 blocks, whereas when one of your 30's stakes, it is making 30+1 CLAMs inactive for 500 blocks, which is clearly less efficient from a stake-as-much-as-you-can perspective.

Any of those are fine, it doesn't really matter. The main thing is just not to have one huge output.

I recently noticed that over 50% of the Just-Dice hot wallet was unavailable for withdrawal. Upon investigation I saw this massive stake transaction. A large deposit had staked before I got a chance to split it up. It split as it staked, but by then it's too late - all the outputs are unavailable until they get 500 confirmations.

[zazarb]

Congratulations to The Great CLAM on reaching the one million blocks milestone!

these issues haunts me as well dooglus  mention about ~30 clam input, but I think This applies only to very long-term,
because first reward you have to wait very long-  40-50 day. (in case 10-15 input , even 3-4 month)

If you only have 30 CLAMs, you will be waiting an average of 30 days to stake no matter how you split them. If you have 3000 CLAMs and split them into 100 piles of 30, each of the piles will be waiting an average 30 days to stake, but one of them will get lucky and stake early. You can expect a few of them to stake each day on average. If instead you split them into 1000 piles of 3, each will be waiting about a year to stake, but you can still expect a few of them to stake each day on average. And each time one of your 3's stakes, it is only making 3+1 CLAMs inactive for 500 blocks, whereas when one of your 30's stakes, it is making 30+1 CLAMs inactive for 500 blocks, which is clearly less efficient from a stake-as-much-as-you-can perspective.

I know it is, in theory, should be, but I practically everything comes out longer, maybe I unlucky , example: recent two my inputs of 141clam, according you theory average waiting time should be ~7 day, but I got reward after 13 day for first, and  for second input of 141clam already 10day without reward.
P.S.
@dooglus 
 maybe you have information about clam wallet in  yobit exchange ? I waiting withdraw already week, with status - "Transfer from cold storage", and any respond for support.