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

[Youghoor]

Too many wallets are not easy to manage.

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[chilly2k]

I was hoping it would be relatively simple, but have just spotted a problem with it:

Currently we treat both staking rewards and player losses as "income" for the bankroll, and split it equally between those providing the bankroll. But with the proposed scheme, where you only deposit a fraction of your bankroll, and leave the rest locally, we don't want to consider the whole amount as active for staking (since it isn't). And that breaks the whole scheme (I only track the percentage of the bankroll that each user owns - I don't update their balance every time something happen, and don't want to).

I guess the solution is to treat staking rewards differently. They happen relatively rarely; the bankroll changes due to betting many times per second, and due to staking at most 4 times per minute. I can reduce the frequency at which staking rewards are credited to investors if necessary, and have them treated as a special kind of 'investment' event. This complicates things, but not too much.

  I'm not understanding how you can only accept a portion of the bankroll and leave the rest local. Are you planning to use the time lock thingy? 

  If you required everyone to have the same percent in the active bankroll, you would be exactly where you are today.  Each persons percent would be the same.  But I'm sure you will have some people that want to have all of their clams on the JD site.  If you made those the only options, the investors stake would either be X% or X% * percent really on JD site.

  I'm not sure how the system handles investing/devesting.  Does it take a snap shot at that point and update everyones balance? 

  And what happens if the bankroll falls below a certian point?  Is there a call option?  Some way you can gaurentee you can get the funds.  I'm not worried about you or me, but there are some that would be hessitent to send in addition funds to cover losses. 
   

I have tried running multiple copies of the client on different sites. I found that it really doesn't handle orphans very well. When both clients found a block at the same time, the one with the smaller weight would quickly get left behind, since its block would be orphaned. It would take up to 30 blocks before the smaller weight client realised this and did a reorg. For those 30 blocks it would see all the new blocks it received as "orphans" (which is weird, since they aren't) and would continue clinging to the hope that the single block it had staked would be accepted.

I should really have looked into this and fixed it, but instead all I did was move all the coins back to a single wallet to avoid the problem.

   Do you actually see the orphans in your clients transactions?  IE in the qt client?  I thought you just ran the daemon in Linux, but I could be mistaken.  I've just started staking locally again.  I haven't noticed a problems with orphans since the last fork. 

   Was there anything special about running 2 wallets on your end that you can think of?  Wouldn't it be the same as everyone else VS the JD wallet?   I moved clams into my personal wallet and got a stake about 1 hour after the blocks became mature.  And another 7 hours later.  No orphans in that time. At least not in the QT transaction list.   

[dooglus]

  I'm not understanding how you can only accept a portion of the bankroll and leave the rest local. Are you planning to use the time lock thingy? 

No, it's like this:

The bankroll is 90k, you deposit 100 and say "I have 9900 locally and want to invest the whole 10k with you". That makes the bankroll 100k in total, and you are 10% of it. You risk up to 0.5% of your total investment per roll, ie. 50 CLAMs. You get 10% of all losing bets, and lose 10% of all winning bets. If the site makes a net loss of 1000, you suffer 100 of that loss, and your actual deposit is all gone. You get divested at that point, and have lost your 100.

I can't tell, and don't care if you really have 9900 locally or not. You were risking up to 50 CLAMs per roll. If you only really had the 100 you deposited, then that's really risky behaviour. But it's only risky for you, not for JD. Once it's gone, you're divested.

But if you really DO have 10k CLAMs, it would make sense to send just 100 of it to JD and just tell it about the other 9900 you hold locally. Then your counterparty risk is vastly reduced, since only you have control of the majority of your coins. And the centralisation issue is moot, since 99% of your coins are no longer in the JD wallet.

  If you required everyone to have the same percent in the active bankroll, you would be exactly where you are today.

I won't. You can have 100% of your coins on deposit if you want to - then we'll stake them for you, and charge 10%. But why not stake most of them for yourself and keep 100% of the rewards?

  I'm not sure how the system handles investing/devesting.  Does it take a snap shot at that point and update everyones balance? 

The site just has a list of what percentage of the bankroll each investor owns. It calculates the size of individual user investments by multiplying their percentage by the current bankroll. When anyone invests or divests, all the percentages are adjusted accordingly.

  And what happens if the bankroll falls below a certian point?  Is there a call option?  Some way you can gaurentee you can get the funds.  I'm not worried about you or me, but there are some that would be hessitent to send in addition funds to cover losses. 

When you lose your actual deposit, you are forcibly divested. You aren't allowed to risk coins that aren't actually on deposit. You just risk a higher percentage of them based on the amount of coins you claim to hold locally.

   Do you actually see the orphans in your clients transactions?  IE in the qt client?  I thought you just ran the daemon in Linux, but I could be mistaken.  I've just started staking locally again.  I haven't noticed a problems with orphans since the last fork. 

I can't run the Qt client - it's just totally unresponsive. I've not looked into it very much, but I suspect it is updating every transaction (perhaps with the 'confirmations' count) every time a new block is received. The time it takes to update everything is longer than the time between blocks, so it's just constantly busy and unresponsive. I was just watching the debug logs on the clients. There's a message in all caps about orphans that I saw each time a new block was received.

   Was there anything special about running 2 wallets on your end that you can think of?  Wouldn't it be the same as everyone else VS the JD wallet?   I moved clams into my personal wallet and got a stake about 1 hour after the blocks became mature.  And another 7 hours later.  No orphans in that time. At least not in the QT transaction list.   

Actually, yes. Most times when I saw this problem I was staking from the same wallet on two different machines. That will obviously cause a lot of "race conditions" since they will both be staking at the same time always. The blocks they made had different hashes, but the same content. I'm not sure why the hashes were different, come to think of it. I'll look into this situation more when I get a chance. In another test, I imported just one of many privkeys from one wallet to the other, so the smaller wallet would be staking a subset of the blocks from the bigger one, but causing races when it did stake. It took a long time for the smaller wallet to recover from having a single block orphaned, and I don't know why.

[J. J. Phillips]

Keep in mind that however age is included, stakers will (legitimately) split their clams to optimize their rewards.

I don't know the real numbers, but suppose JD has 25,000 transaction outputs staking with 4 clams on each. No matter how many of these have recently staked, most of them necessarily haven't staked recently and will have some age saved up.

I doubt there is a modification that would cause JD to stake fewer blocks. There could simply be a modification that the same *address* cannot stake twice in a row, but this has the obvious workaround that JD (and everyone else) would use different addresses for each staking output.

I can give you the numbers if you like, but pretty much we have 216k CLAM split into 54k piles of 4 CLAM each. Those 4's become 5, 6, then 7, and then 4+4 and the cycle repeats. Transaction fees get added in, and change from withdrawals too, so the actual picture is really messy.

The point of adding age back in is the following:

Suppose you have 10 CLAMs and are solo-staking. You stake for 20 days and eventually manage to stake a block. Unfortunately JD stakes a block at the same time, and goes on to orphan your block. You lose. And now you'll probably be waiting another 20 days to get another chance to try again.

With age, it will still take you 20 days on average for your first chance to stake (since all the competition is also aging), but if you get orphaned, your age doesn't get reset, and so you are likely to get your 2nd chance of staking after less than 20 more days. You will be getting to stake more and more often as your age (and thus weight) increases, and so will eventually get a block accepted.

The downside of reintroducing age is that it removes some of the incentive that currently exists for people to run their client 24/7.

Thanks for the numbers. I might write a little python code to simulate what might happen with different coin age options. If I do, I'll post the results.

[dooglus]

Thanks for the numbers.

Actual numbers:

http://privatepaste.com/9533a910e0

It ends:

  501 5.00010000
  8316 5.00000000
  42365 4.00000000

which means we have 501 outputs of size 5.0001, 8316 of size 5, and 42.3k of size 4.

Edit: I'm surprised we only have 2 of size 7. I would have expected lots of the 4's to have gone 5, 6, 7 by now. I guess it takes longer to stake than I realised.

Edit2: those two 7's are here if anyone's interested:

http://khashier.com/tx/71d76437d72d9f581a4973bd1855f375073ca89cccc45a3666ab72ad181e3b7e
http://khashier.com/tx/faa31666e0575f985fce72ef910faa4298f5af793514f6ea8d9defd0e5a9998a

[Jbanna]

No, it's like this:

The bankroll is 90k, you deposit 100 and say "I have 9900 locally and want to invest the whole 10k with you". That makes the bankroll 100k in total, and you are 10% of it. You risk up to 0.5% of your total investment per roll, ie. 50 CLAMs. You get 10% of all losing bets, and lose 10% of all winning bets. If the site makes a net loss of 1000, you suffer 100 of that loss, and your actual deposit is all gone. You get divested at that point, and have lost your 100.

I can't tell, and don't care if you really have 9900 locally or not. You were risking up to 50 CLAMs per roll. If you only really had the 100 you deposited, then that's really risky behaviour. But it's only risky for you, not for JD. Once it's gone, you're divested.

But if you really DO have 10k CLAMs, it would make sense to send just 100 of it to JD and just tell it about the other 9900 you hold locally. Then your counterparty risk is vastly reduced, since only you have control of the majority of your coins. And the centralisation issue is moot, since 99% of your coins are no longer in the JD wallet.

This is absolutely brilliant and revolutionary. Margin investment on gambling dice? holy shit. Doog, I greatly hope you go through with this implementation  

[BayAreaCoins]

New service to add to the OP please:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

[hopenotlate]

New service to add to the OP:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

wow that's really a good news for clams.

I 'm a long time player at FortuneJack and never had issues with them.  I only used BTC there  until now and can definitely state doposits and withdraw works regularly and quickly at FJ.
My opinion, for what it matters, on them is they are reliable ( they also pay regularly and in time for their signature campaign I'm joining at trhe moment).

good job CLAM

[picolo]

No, it's like this:

The bankroll is 90k, you deposit 100 and say "I have 9900 locally and want to invest the whole 10k with you". That makes the bankroll 100k in total, and you are 10% of it. You risk up to 0.5% of your total investment per roll, ie. 50 CLAMs. You get 10% of all losing bets, and lose 10% of all winning bets. If the site makes a net loss of 1000, you suffer 100 of that loss, and your actual deposit is all gone. You get divested at that point, and have lost your 100.

I can't tell, and don't care if you really have 9900 locally or not. You were risking up to 50 CLAMs per roll. If you only really had the 100 you deposited, then that's really risky behaviour. But it's only risky for you, not for JD. Once it's gone, you're divested.

But if you really DO have 10k CLAMs, it would make sense to send just 100 of it to JD and just tell it about the other 9900 you hold locally. Then your counterparty risk is vastly reduced, since only you have control of the majority of your coins. And the centralisation issue is moot, since 99% of your coins are no longer in the JD wallet.

This is absolutely brilliant and revolutionary. Margin investment on gambling dice? holy shit. Doog, I greatly hope you go through with this implementation  

Other dice sites already had this option that lower the risk of losing all your coins in case of the site disappearing.

[lovewiki]

New service to add to the OP please:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

Great, one more good website is accepting CLAM.

This will certainly attract more people to start using CLAM and make this coin even stronger. 

[picolo]

New service to add to the OP please:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

Great, one more good website is accepting CLAM.

This will certainly attract more people to start using CLAM and make this coin even stronger. 

More people will hear about CLAM and the velocity of clam may increase with this new option to use clam but you can play at fortunejack with bitcoin so if you never used clam you will not use it to play fortunejack

[Jbanna]

No, it's like this:

The bankroll is 90k, you deposit 100 and say "I have 9900 locally and want to invest the whole 10k with you". That makes the bankroll 100k in total, and you are 10% of it. You risk up to 0.5% of your total investment per roll, ie. 50 CLAMs. You get 10% of all losing bets, and lose 10% of all winning bets. If the site makes a net loss of 1000, you suffer 100 of that loss, and your actual deposit is all gone. You get divested at that point, and have lost your 100.

I can't tell, and don't care if you really have 9900 locally or not. You were risking up to 50 CLAMs per roll. If you only really had the 100 you deposited, then that's really risky behaviour. But it's only risky for you, not for JD. Once it's gone, you're divested.

But if you really DO have 10k CLAMs, it would make sense to send just 100 of it to JD and just tell it about the other 9900 you hold locally. Then your counterparty risk is vastly reduced, since only you have control of the majority of your coins. And the centralisation issue is moot, since 99% of your coins are no longer in the JD wallet.

This is absolutely brilliant and revolutionary. Margin investment on gambling dice? holy shit. Doog, I greatly hope you go through with this implementation  

Other dice sites already had this option that lower the risk of losing all your coins in case of the site disappearing.

damn.. i'm outta the loop then

[pawel7777]

New service to add to the OP please:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

Great, one more good website is accepting CLAM.

This will certainly attract more people to start using CLAM and make this coin even stronger. 

Not only they accept CLAM, but they also launched Coin Swap service, that means you can trade CLAM for other coins.

CLAM & Coin Exchange service have been officially added to our website. Good luck playing and let us know if you will have any questions

[seedtrue]

New service to add to the OP please:

https://fortunejack.com/

They now accept CLAM.

(I have not made a deposit/withdraw yet, but plan to do so after Christmas.)

They are a Bitcoin Foundation member and the website is fully licensed by Law of Saint Kitts and Nevis, owned and operated by the "Nexus Group Enterprises", LLC.

this is very good news.

[SuperClam]

Announcement and link concerning FortuneJack added to the OP post.

The service appears to be legitimate and have a history/user base.

We rely on user reviews of services to verify addition to the OP post, and look forward to hearing about your experiences.

[dooglus]

Announcement and link concerning FortuneJack added to the OP post.

The service appears to be legitimate and have a history/user base.

We rely on user reviews of services to verify addition to the OP post, and look forward to hearing about your experiences.

I just tried it. I was able to make an account, and found the dice game.

When I clicked on 'my bets', I got a spinning circle of dots that never stopped spinning:



When I hit reload I got this:



I guess they're having some problems at the moment.

[FortuneJack]

Announcement and link concerning FortuneJack added to the OP post.

The service appears to be legitimate and have a history/user base.

We rely on user reviews of services to verify addition to the OP post, and look forward to hearing about your experiences.

I just tried it. I was able to make an account, and found the dice game.

When I clicked on 'my bets', I got a spinning circle of dots that never stopped spinning:



When I hit reload I got this:



I guess they're having some problems at the moment.

Hi,

There was a minor problem, it is solved now.

[lumeire]

ForttuuneJack loooks cool. 

[J. J. Phillips]

I wrote some python code to simulate what might happen with different coinage possibilities.

https://privatepaste.com/ae9dfdbb6c

It starts with 69917 txs staking, 75% of which are "JD" and are distributed with values based on the stats published by dooglus a couple of days ago. The remaining 25% are "Not JD" and have a similar distribution of value. It starts assuming the block count is 69917 and every tx is marked with which block it appeared, chosen at random.

The code is slow. I ran it with 5 different coin age algorithms for 1500 "ticks" of a clock. This takes about 5 minutes but it corresponds to what would be a few hours of really staking. I'll give the results below, but they really should be run for much longer to get more reliable numbers. So far it doesn't seem like there is any difference between the algorithms. In every case JD stakes about 80% and there in about 4% of cases Not JD could have staked but got orphaned.

Each coinage function assumes coins mature after 510 blocks. After that the age is either (1) constant [like clams is now], (2) depends on the log of age (i.e., how many blocks old it is), (3) depends on the square root of the age, (4) depends linearly on the age, (5) depends on the square of the age.

(1) Constant, like now:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_const_mature510)

Total blocks: 270
JD would stake: 218 -- 80.7407407407%
Not JD would stake: 52 -- 19.2592592593%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 4.81481481481%

(2) Log age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_log_mature510)

Total blocks: 368
JD would stake: 295 -- 80.1630434783%
Not JD would stake: 73 -- 19.8369565217%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 3.53260869565%

(3) Square root of age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_sqrt_mature510)

Total blocks: 389
JD would stake: 310 -- 79.6915167095%
Not JD would stake: 79 -- 20.3084832905%
Not JD would get orphaned: 13 -- 3.34190231362%

(4) Linear:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_linear_mature510)

Total blocks: 732
JD would stake: 594 -- 81.1475409836%
Not JD would stake: 138 -- 18.8524590164%
Not JD would get orphaned: 31 -- 4.2349726776%

(5) Square of age:

clamsim.sim(1500,clamsim.coinage_square_mature510)

Total blocks: 779
JD would stake: 633 -- 81.2580231065%
Not JD would stake: 146 -- 18.7419768935%
Not JD would get orphaned: 33 -- 4.23620025674%

If someone wants, I'll run one or two of these (or some other coinage algorithm) overnight to get better numbers.

[dooglus]

There was a minor problem, it is solved now.

Nice.

My other problem is that I don't see a way of verifying my dice rolls without doing a lot of work.

Do you really change two seeds every roll? And if so, do I have to make a note of the hash and change my client seed before every single roll to make sure the game is fair? That doesn't seem like something anyone is going to bother with.

Take a look at how Just-Dice does it - players only need to make a note of a single server seed hash because the same server seed is used for every roll until they ask for it to be changed. Using a similar scheme on your site would make it practical for players to really check out the game's provable fairness.