[ANN] AEON: Scalable, private, mobile-friendly cryptocurrency

[exciter0]

Unfortunately, most POW encourages the centralization of hashes so this is not a trivial problem to solve.
I don't have any ideas here.

While miners may not care for the long term prospect of the coin, I think pools need to do more than just ask people to move their hashes.
To achieve the same goal for a higher earning, pools can increase their fees to, say 10%, 15%, 20% temporarily. I think most in the community will understand this action.  To win a majority of the blocks, you don't need 100% of the network hash power.

There are many more innovations to be implemented for this coin, I hope miners are not so short sighted that they kill this coin before the features can be added.
 

Beside miners, pool operators also have the responsibility to ensure the well being of the coin. If no measure are taken to prevent more than 50% hash,  it will undermine all the great features and the legitimacy of this coin.

What's your suggestion? Sincere question. I have some plans in the works but new ideas are always welcome especially if they can be implemented immediately.

Ultimately it comes down to how much the community members care about it, and it seems many don't. They just want to mine on one big pool and probably dump right away (I'm guessing here, of course, that if they wanted to hold longer term they'd care more about the legitimacy and such and not just mine on one big pool.)

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[smooth]

Unfortunately, most POW encourages the centralization of hashes so this is not a trivial problem to solve.
I don't have any ideas here.

The interesting thing is there is not really anything about PoW's centralization pressure at work with this coin now, as far as I can tell.

As someone else pointed out, you an solo mine on one computer and get blocks every single day (and even getting blocks less often than that would still be fine for a small miner, and perhaps preferable to getting dust from a pool). There are virtually no orphans since we switched to four minutes, which was kind of the point, and I'm happy to say it worked. (I see maybe one per day on my nodes.) For that matter, Mooo's pool isn't even on the greatest connection, so if orphans were an issue, his pool wouldn't be a good choice anyway. But they're not.

If you look in the pool blocks on Arux's pool, plenty of blocks there, even with the current low hash rate, and again no orphans. So no reason not to use it if you don't want to solo mine, or are using GPUs and don't want to set up your own pool, can't afford the resources for a full node, etc.

What this tells me is that a large part of observed centralization of mining (speaking in general here, not just this coin) is something other than rational economic behavior. It is habit? Laziness? Brand loyalty? Comfort with that approach? I'm not even sure.

While miners may not care for the long term prospect of the coin, I think pools need to do more than just ask people to move their hashes. To achieve the same goal for a higher earning, pools can increase their fees to, say 10%, 15%, 20% temporarily. I think most in the community will understand this action.  To win a majority of the blocks, you don't need 100% of the network hash power.

We're on same page. I support this, and stay tuned.

[GingerAle]

Unfortunately, most POW encourages the centralization of hashes so this is not a trivial problem to solve.
I don't have any ideas here.

The interesting thing is there is not really anything about PoW's centralization pressure at work with this coin now, as far as I can tell.

As someone else pointed out, you an solo mine on one computer and get blocks every single day (and even getting blocks less often than that would still be fine for a small miner, and perhaps preferable to getting dust from a pool). There are virtually no orphans since we switched to four minutes, which was kind of the point, and I'm happy to say it worked. (I see maybe one per day on my nodes.) For that matter, Mooo's pool isn't even on the greatest connection, so if orphans were an issue, his pool wouldn't be a good choice anyway. But they're not.

If you look in the pool blocks on Arux's pool, plenty of blocks there, even with the current low hash rate, and again no orphans. So no reason not to use it if you don't want to solo mine, or are using GPUs and don't want to set up your own pool, can't afford the resources for a full node, etc.

What this tells me is that a large part of observed centralization of mining (speaking in general here, not just this coin) is something other than rational economic behavior. It is habit? Laziness? Brand loyalty? Comfort with that approach? I'm not even sure.

While miners may not care for the long term prospect of the coin, I think pools need to do more than just ask people to move their hashes. To achieve the same goal for a higher earning, pools can increase their fees to, say 10%, 15%, 20% temporarily. I think most in the community will understand this action.  To win a majority of the blocks, you don't need 100% of the network hash power.

We're on same page. I support this, and stay tuned.

Naw, I mentioned this in the IRC maelstrom that happened today. pool culture is just ubiquitous. I think its primarily because of ease of use and abject laziness.

Honestly, I don't know whats going to fix it, but I think its the number one problem in cryptocurrency right now. And yah know what, I'm gonna get myself another beer before I go on this diatribe. Because i feel it'll actually be appreciated here. There's been some response in the monero thread regarding this component, but not enough to really satisfy my tinglies.

I'm really hoping you have something slick up your sleeve smooth. I mean, what could be the strategy? I mean one of the primary problems is the fact that a malicous miner could spawn multiple instances of the mining function, and assuming this miner could always just hide themselves behind layers of abstraction...... I guess its just one of those things that I assumed was too difficult to solve, and hence it hasn't been solved by now. Because anyone who follows anything about fucking cryptocurrencies knows that decentralization is what gives it value. The lack of the ability of a single power to execute exclusive control is THE value of this technology. Otherwise you just end up in the same game to brinksmanship that exists now. Trustlessness comes from this decentralized architecture. You lose the decentralized architecture, you lose the trustlessness.

Of course, the alternative is that smart mining actually takes hold. But again, the problem could be pooling, because if Verisign decides to take on Monero payments, they're terminals could all well be pooled.

It's a fascinating problem - how do you actually isolate the fact that an individual is commiting resources as opposed to an orchestrated group of individuals? What is so unique about a given effort that can be parsed on the backend ( the protocol)?

Well, suffice it to say that the beer hasn't helped. If anything, its obvious things are more turbulent. Regardless, its still there. This feeling that it is actually possible. You can't do what spreadcoin did because even with spreadcoin trusted members were able to share their work.

Unless there was a way to prove that a hash hadn't been created by an alternative key. But then, one could simply share a key.

So, i solve the block, I provide the solution to you, but the blockchain doesn't accept the solution because it knows that somehow I created it, and you didn't.

Which is just cryptography, is it not? Keeping information contained?

wait a minute.... this is just an extrapolation of a ring signature I think. Except the one holding the key that is true is the blockchain. Is that a thing?

Ok i give up. I'll just wait for this solution of yours.

[smooth]

Ok i give up. I'll just wait for this solution of yours.

Hey I don't want to set expectations unrealistically high. I don't have a magic bullet to "fix mining", just something to hopefully keep the problem at bay here for a while.

I like some of the ideas from spreadcoin but there are major problems with it too. It comes down to, given what you call "pool culture" (and I like the term), still being able to pool if you can trust the pool. That means the biggest and most trusted pools will probably be the most used, potentially making the problem even worse.

Thanks for the diatribe. It is appreciated here.

[MoneroMooo]

This is advance notice that in a bit more than 24 hours, my pool will switch to a variable fee system:

When the pool hash rate grows past 50%, the fee will start growing as 1% extra fee for every 5% of the network hash rate. So base fee being 2%, 60% of hash rate will cause the fee to jump to 4%. 100% hash rate will bump it to 12%. Both the pool fee and the donation get scaled the same. When the pool hash rate goes back down, the fee automatically goes back down with it. The above formula is not set in stone, I may need to tweak it depending on how it goes.

[smooth]

This is advance notice that in a bit more than 24 hours, my pool will switch to a variable fee system:

When the pool hash rate grows past 50%, the fee will start growing as 1% extra fee for every 5% of the network hash rate. So base fee being 2%, 60% of hash rate will cause the fee to jump to 4%. 100% hash rate will bump it to 12%. Both the pool fee and the donation get scaled the same. When the pool hash rate goes back down, the fee automatically goes back down with it. The above formula is not set in stone, I may need to tweak it depending on how it goes.

Wonderful!

One thing to be careful about in implementing this is the disparity between the methods of measuring the pool hash rate (measured by counting shares over some time window unknown to me) and network hash rate (measured by difficulty, which is a trailing function of blocks over 720 blocks or about 2 days). This can produce very peculiar results such a one pool appearing to have >100% of the hash rate.

I updated the pool listing in OP

[myagui]

Note: this is one such time where the conditions are producing a poor instant estimation of nethash. Right now, if one only reads the stats on Moo's pool, one will think that it has 100% of the nethash, at about 150KH/s. In fact, there are 70KH/s at Arux pool at the moment as well, so the hashrate distribution right now is not particularly terrible.

[smooth]

Note: this is one such time where the conditions are producing a poor instant estimation of nethash. Right now, if one only reads the stats on Moo's pool, one will think that it has 100% of the nethash, at about 150KH/s. In fact, there are 70KH/s at Arux pool at the moment as well, so the hashrate distribution right now is not particularly terrible.

Yes minergate has about 40 KH/s as well. And I'm sure there are a bunch of solo miners out there too. I know there are people using the --donate option since the donation fund gets some blocks, although it is fairly small (which is fine, every little bit helps!).

BTW, I think a better estimate of pool share would be the fraction of blocks mined by the pool over some recent time period, say 1-2 days.

[MoneroMooo]

Took a few hours of work, but it's done. Not used to Javascript.

My pool now estimates its share of the total hash (currently about 60%), and displays the effective fee (currently same as base). The hash rate estimation is done from the recent blocks found, so should not lag behind difficulty as it currently does.

I'll put that on github when it's switched on tomorrow and confirmed to be working well.

[smooth]

We got a generous 400 AEON donation within the last day or so.

Plus there is a nice amount of --donate mining going on, and the seed nodes continue to solo mine for the project donation address full time.

Thank you to all the donators and project supporters!

balance: 439488.953356883378, unlocked balance: 439450.640130779667
Previously spent: 19000 (bounties)

[MoneroMooo]

The variable fee system is now in place. Current pool share is 50 of the last 60 blocks, but slow blocks mean that some large miner has recently (temporarily ?) stopped mining.

[Hix]

The variable fee system is now in place. Current pool share is 50 of the last 60 blocks, but slow blocks mean that some large miner has recently (temporarily ?) stopped mining.

hmm... pool hashrate less that 50% of net hashrate, why Pool Fee is 8.67% ?

[MoneroMooo]

The variable fee system is now in place. Current pool share is 50 of the last 60 blocks, but slow blocks mean that some large miner has recently (temporarily ?) stopped mining.

hmm... pool hashrate less that 50% of net hashrate, why Pool Fee is 8.67% ?

 Estimated pool share: 78.3%

This estimation uses the actual blocks found. The pool found 47 of the last 60 blocks. As a few people mentioned above, the "network hash rate" is an approximation that can lag until the difficulty algorithm overcomes its inherent inertia.

[myagui]

Mooo: I figure it would make most sense for miners on your pool, if the nethash estimate was derived from the same input data that you are using for the fee calculation. This would allow your miners to make more sense of the dynamic fee at any particular time.

In other words: switch to a nethash estimation based on the time that it took to find the last 60 blocks (as that is the sample size for the dynamic fee calculation). The only downside I'm seeing is that you'd no longer display the same estimated nethash as the other pools, though your estimation would perhaps be the more accurate one.

Cheers!

[smooth]

If you look right above the fee display it shows the estimate of net share that is used for the calculation. That is calculated based on the most recent 60 blocks and MoneroMooo said he's going make that more clear in the status display.

[myagui]

Awesome, thanks Smooth & Mooo.
I'm happy either way as I'm still at it solo style, pool stats worry me not 
Heck, I'll be solo'ing even if block-finds get spaced by many days for me, as the point is also to run a contributing node.

[MoneroMooo]

Done. The estimated pool share now has an extra "X/Y blocks" as an explanation.

Pool's now at 66%, going down from the earlier 80%.

[GingerAle]

Done. The estimated pool share now has an extra "X/Y blocks" as an explanation.

Pool's now at 66%, going down from the earlier 80%.

excellent work!

So, as smooth pointed out, even if spread's countermeasure functions properly, pools can still form - there is just a level of trust involved.. So I'm working with the theory that spread can be exploited by the vectors described in the whitepaper. http://www.spreadcoin.info/downloads/SpreadCoin-WhitePaper.pdf

Unfortunately, this could spiral in the opposite direction of what is intended - a small number of very large pools. Based on the nature of trust, we could see how new pools would have a hard time forming, and miners would actually need references to join a pool, so there'd be a tighter collusion, to whatever ends. Ultimately, it introduces a large human factor into the network architecture.

However, though, an interesting aspect to explore might be why mining has evolved the way it has, especially in altcoins, and especially in intentionally asic-resistant coins like cryptonight based ones. Pooling came into existence in bitcoin to "level the playing field", if I have my history right, of those with advanced hardware. Unintentionally, this brought with it an increased ease to participate in the network (no need to run a node, or for that matter, set up asic hardware to interface with a node).

One can look back at Monero's history and see that there was specific effort in the first months to develop a pool. Ostensibly, this was done to encourage participation in the network, even though at that time it was easy to run a node (the memory requirements hadn't ballooned). So, one can surmise that in order for the general cryptocurrency community to support a coin network, pools are expected. And the way this ecosystem has evolved is that a coin network has to find a way to thrive in this community in order to potentially breakout. The skill set is here to secure the network. Hence, pools are maintained to entice community members.

Thus, pool culture might be difficult to defeat, as Wolf has pointed out, and might very well be necessary for network health during a coin's growing pains. Now, the countermeasure offered via smart-mining requires adoption, so its chicken and egg.

But ultimately, pooling, in its most simple form, isn't detrimental to the network, its the way in which the pooling is performed. I.e., forming a cooperative is functionally equivalent to independently mining - however, the conventional pool setup is not a cooperative, due to the single node to which shares are submitted.

hrmm, kinda got rambly and my thought train seems to have jumped the track. damn.

[myagui]

hrmm, kinda got rambly and my thought train seems to have jumped the track. damn.

Following your (criss-crossy) line of thought, here's another ramble on pools and miners:   

I think that pools are a necessary evil. The smallest of miners, would be practically impeded of participating on the mining network, if there were no pools, and given sufficient nethash that their average time to find a block would be leaning towards infinity (exaggerated, yes). 

On the other hand, pool concentration, and the lack of a technical necessity for running a node (for the majority of participants), present us with a very common dilemma:
nodes are too few, and they lack any substantial form of incentive.

I think this problem was indeed neatly approached by Spreadcoin, in that it attempted to prevent pool formation entirely. I think it failed at the original goal, but the fact that it resulted in a modified trust model (note the existing private pool for Spread) is quite interesting.
I'm not sure the same existed for Spread as I am not sufficiently familiar with it, but with Ziftrcoin, I know that there is an incentive to solo-mine, built on some of the same principles that Spread initiated, and by providing knowledge over the current transaction pool, solo-miners can claim a higher reward in their block finds (5% IIRC).

I think it is this latter approach that deserves some further thought. If we could work out a way to incentivize solo mining, and at the same time encourage more full nodes to exist, we'd see a much healthier network (as well as more secure, relatively speaking ofc).

I do believe that a 5% reward boost is too small of an incentive to pursue this approach sensibly, and would suggest something as high as 20%. My rationale is that: technically, solo-miners are usually at a disadvantage, because part of their mining resources are implicitly tied up with the business of running a full node (hence, some potential hashrate performance is lost). Additionally, external miners will usually perform best, seeing as they run code that is systematically being optimized for that function alone, and are less concerned with wide cross-platform support and code portability (compared to a full node).

Personally, I run a full node and I'm happy solo mining, even though I get a performance drop when compared to pool mining. Thanks to Smooth's recent updates, the performance drop is rather tiny (in the region of 5% or so), though my motivation is not so much an economical one, as it is of participating with a full node and contributing towards a healthy network.

Most miners are economically motivated, period. I think it would be nice to leverage on that motivation, and drive some of these miners towards a more meaningful contribution to the network (solo-mining, full node incentives). This ramble is just my collection of past ideas on this matter, and food for thought as much brighter minds are around   

[MoneroMooo]

One roadblock to solo mining seems like it should not be one: the memory/disk requirements of a full node. It sems to be that, in order to mine, you need just the latest N blocks (enough for the block template, and a few more to handle reorgs). Also the tx pool. But most of the DB, you don't need if your goal is just to mine. So making a "mining node" mode may make being a solo miner less painful.

Edit: pool hash now down to 60%, and fee down to 4% (from ~80% and ~9% this morning).