BitShares Forum
Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: bytemaster on November 19, 2013, 11:35:20 pm
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ProtoShares has proved to be a very educational experiment in the Crypto Currency realm. It is the first crypto-currency to start out with such a high valuation from the genesis block and as a result has experienced new outcomes that can serve as a learning experience. I would like to take an opportunity to address some of these very real lessons and get feedback on how things can be done in the future.
Most of this post will address the nature of mining. When the value of the mining reward is over 100 times the cost of mining we have learned that the network will be flooded with hash power and as a result block production will accelerate until network latency rather than hash performance determines which blocks get accepted. Network latency in turn masks the real hash power on the network and prevents the network from adjusting the difficulty fast enough to compensate. The ultimate result from this is that blocks will continue to be mined at a rate far faster than the target.
We also learned from this experience that it is critically important to optimize the proof of work as much as possible prior to launch. When we update momentum for BitShares we will spend much more time attempting to optimize the proof-of-work prior to launch rather than letting 3rd parties release optimized miners that fail to include transactions in the network. These optimized miners also contributed to the appearance of a 5x growth in hash power without the ability of the network to rapidly adjust to such a performance increase.
The Role of Mining
Mining is a very controversial subject because it invokes a desire for 'fairness' and 'equal distribution'. People see it as a way to 'fairly' distribute a currency when done properly, and yet no one can define what properly means. In the case of ProtoShares over $2,000,000 dollars has been spent by the community to purchase hash power from providers such as Amazon and Digital Ocean. In exchange for this they have earned almost $10,000,000 worth of ProtoShares. This means of distributing the initial currency highly favors those who are able to use Linux and have access to large data centers like Amazon. It does not help the developers of the currency or to achieve the supposed ideal of 'even distribution to all'.
Some individuals recognized that they couldn't compete with the mass-miners and so they wisely decided to purchase PTS in bulk early on. These bulk purchases benefited the mass-miners and not the creators of the crypto-currency. Many of those involved with mass-mining of ProtoShares were only in it for short-term gain because there were high profits to be made. As a result the financial motivation of mass-miners to defend the integrity of the network was lost and the network suffered from long transfer delays.
While some people may not like the effects of cloud mining, at least it was equal opportunity for anyone who can follow the instructions laid out in the forums. Unfortunately there is another class of attack, the botnet. Botnet operators steal computing power and electricity from other people so they can mine and as a result they can bring thousands of computers to mine for the network. Botnet operators are generally looking to make a profit and therefore have little incentive to see a currency destroyed, but they still manage to make it more difficult for honest individuals to 'fairly' mine shares. There are opportunity costs associated with running a botnet and so botnet operators generally dump the mined shares immediately.
So far I have only addressed mining from the perspective of issuing the currency and as you can see it is fraught with problems. The primary benefit that I can see to such a lottery system is that it encourages people to download the wallet and rapidly deploy a P2P network complete with a viral marketing campaign. This aspect of mining should not be underestimated because it helps the network achieve critical mass. The massive rise in the value of ProtoShares and the resulting gold rush has created a lot of buzz around the community and as a result a lot more people are aware of Invictus Innovations and our future plans for BitShares and Keyhotee.
Taken in the big picture, mining could be replaced with a true lottery and Invictus could have sold lottery tickets to raise capital. Under this model you would still have the buzz without the botnets, though we might have faced legal challenges associated with operating a lottery or illegal gambling operation.
In all the excitement over the issuance of the currency through mining, almost everyone forgets that mining is really just a side-effect of the need to reach a decentralized consensus on the next block. A 100% pre-mined currency still requires mining to get the proper block production rate and security. However, as I have stated before, the 51% attack is only possible for anonymous individuals in small amounts and the risk of getting caught is very high. You only need enough mining power securing the network to stop private criminals from making a profit as mining power will do nothing to stop governments from attacking the network. Governments will use a different approach than mining power because Ripple proves there are other means of reaching consensus that could be employed if someone attempted a 51% denial of service attack.
How to Decentralize Mining
If you want to decentralize transaction validation then mining should not be profitable in bulk. This means that mining rewards need to be enough to cover electricity, but not enough to cover cost of computer capital or profit significantly. People who already own computers could then mine at a slight profit, but anyone who has to rent or buy dedicated mining hardware should be out. Mining also needs to be decentralized and not based in large mining pools where a single bug can result in a large number of blocks not including transactions or a government shutdown could harm the network.
To this end we would like to propose that all wallets mine at 25% effort anytime your computer is plugged in and otherwise idle. It will be like a screen saver. In aggregate this large contingency of solo miners can provide a basic level of security to the network without users having to think about it. Sure some people may download a variation of the wallet that does not perform this service, but most people will recognize that the mining does not affect their overall computing experience. Randomly some people will 'win the lottery' and there will be many winners who are happy when then receive an entire block reward. People buy lottery tickets with much lower odds, and solo mining is no different. In fact, people buying lottery tickets do so at a loss given the odds because the lottery organization keeps 50% of every ticket as profit. If Bitcoin operated in this manner there would be someone winning a $12,000 lottery every 10 minutes and the rush of winning $12,000 all at once is more exciting than the prospect of earning $0.50 per day. All of the gamblers and people who like the idea of 'hope' would mine, but there would be no money for rational people to make from mining.
The challenge is that the value of mining rewards changes constantly and if the price of a currency doubles then all of a sudden something that was unprofitable becomes profitable again. It would be impossible to price-fix the mining reward below the point of profitability in a dynamic environment. So perhaps there is another way to decentralize mining and discourage pools.
The primary reason people join pools is 'instant gratification' and consistent payouts that allow them to cover mining expenses on a month to month basis by dumping some or all of their proceeds on the market. When I suggested switching my pool from 24 hour payouts to 48 hour payouts there was signifcant resistance. Some people didn't trust me, my server, or the price of ProtoShares to remain high enough long enough to profit from their ming. Others wanted the coins so they could sell them as soon as possible to cover Amazon's hosting costs.
Mining pools operate on the assumption that people want instant and consistent payouts and users of the pool rarely like to carry a large balance with the pool operator. Therefore, you can limit the profitability and attractiveness of mining pools by having all new currency that is created vest for a period of 6 months. Anyone who is mining for new currency would have to hold that currency for many months. Few people would want to trust a fly-by-night pool operator to hold their funds for 6 months. Momentary increases in price would not result in a rapid rise in mining power unless the long-term fundamentals changed. A mining pool operator would have to maintain a large balance of working cash to pay out miners in a timely manner and would be unable to support 'mine and dump' operations. Lastly, botnet operators with no faith in the currency wouldn't want to risk a 6-month delay in payout.
Given that the payouts for mining are not 'immediately transferrable' the little guy who wants to 'mine and hold' can solo mine with the same probability of finding a block in 6 months as the money they could get mining in a pool. Only pools with a solid reputation and a large 6 month investment in the currency proportional to their hash power could operate. This means that ypool would have to front almost 8 million dollars to fund their current operation and the result would be far greater decentralization of mining pools.
The 6 month delay would only apply to the issuance of NEW currency. Transaction fees would be available to the miner immediately to compensate them for their service. This would encourage rapid mining and inclusion of transactions and large pools could operate on the basis of including transactions, but not on the basis of issuing currency. New currency issued via dividends would not suffer this delay.
Ultimately this 6 month delay provides a new, simpler, version of proof-of-stake. Only miners with a 6 month time horizon and thus a stake in the future of the currency would mine and no miner could make short term profit by performing long-term harm to the network.
Implications for ProtoShares and BitShares
Because ProtoShares and BitShares are divisible, any supply is sufficient for the currency to operate. When BitShares launches we are considering a change to make it take 6 months until the mining reward for the first block matures and therefore the only way to acquire BitShares will be to purchase them from someone else or to purchase ProtoShares. Those who believe in the long-term viability of BitShares will mine and all of the mine and dump operators will be left on the sidelines. The money supply will be heavily restricted with no real inflation for the first 6 months. There will be stock splits in the form of dividends, but that is not the kind of inflation that transfers wealth from the current holders of BitShares to new holders.
This means that when BitShares is launched, only those with a long-term interest in the shares will mine and any pool operators offering immediate payouts would have to have significant capital invested in BitShares for at least 6 months. Pools will be far more decentralized and you will not have run-away block production.
Feedback Wanted
As you can tell we are working our best to encourage decentralization and correct the problems discovered from the launch of ProtoShares. The ideas proposed above are controversial, but if adopted will make ProtoShares more valuable. I welcome feedback from the community of ProtoShares holders about other benefits or problems that introducing a 6 month vesting period would do for a coin.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
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Just to clear things up, bitshares that are built into the genesis block from protoshares will still be spendable, right? As for everything else, I think the 6 months plan is a great idea, especially for people like me that're just mining in the background on their home computer, and on their laptop when they don't need it for something else. If it becomes big, then I've earned a lot, if it flops, I've lost almost nothing. This is a good plan, I hope everything works out
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Just to clear things up, bitshares that are built into the genesis block from protoshares will still be spendable, right? As for everything else, I think the 6 months plan is a great idea, especially for people like me that're just mining in the background on their home computer, and on their laptop when they don't need it for something else. If it becomes big, then I've earned a lot, if it flops, I've lost almost nothing. This is a good plan, I hope everything works out
Correct. ProtoShares in the genesis block would represent 100% of the BitShare supply available to the market for the first 6 months if we adopted this plan.
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Feedback Wanted
As you can tell we are working our best to encourage decentralization and correct the problems discovered from the launch of ProtoShares. The ideas proposed above are controversial, but if adopted will make ProtoShares more valuable. I welcome feedback from the community of ProtoShares holders about other benefits or problems that introducing a 6 month vesting period would do for a coin.
The two things it fixes that I liked least about the ProtoShares launch:
- It failed to sufficiently benefit the people who believe most in what we are trying to achieve.
- Two million dollars were unproductively burned up in server farms outside our industry. Think of the incredible development bounties that could have been awarded with those resources.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
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There is another added cost the 6 month vesting adds to pools, interest. If a pool operator must borrow funds to pay out immediately they are forgoing all of the interest they could have earned on those funds. This makes the cost of pool mining easily 5% higher even without the fees. As a result pools would have to charge around 10% or more if they want to profit from their operation and they would have to hedge their bets against any fall in the value of the currency.
Overall, pool operators would be highly committed to the future success of the currency.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
But if the number of Bitshares available for trading stays the same for 6 months, then suddenly starts increasing as the blocks mature, won't there be a massive opportunity for people to short the market? Because the demand probably won't increase very much from halfway through month five to halfway through month six, but the supply will, making the value of any individual bitshare drop.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
But if the number of Bitshares available for trading stays the same for 6 months, then suddenly starts increasing as the blocks mature, won't there be a massive opportunity for people to short the market? Because the demand probably won't increase very much from halfway through month five to halfway through month six, but the supply will, making the value of any individual bitshare drop.
The supply in 6 months will only increase at the rate of '1 block per 5 minutes' and so this does nothing to change the inflation rate that would other wise exist with traditional mining other than delay it for 6 months.
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
Convert was a wrong word to use, I didn't mean that, just meant the people who would 'redeem' their protoshares for bitshares will not be 100%. Still, you didn't answer the main question, which is, with the current volume, do you think the prediction market can be maintained?
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I really like the vesting idea. However, my major concern is that with something like BitShares, you want a bigger market at first for a prediction market to work well. If you think the people who hold ProtoShares will be enough to give BitShares the momentum it needs to maintain good markets in basic BitAssets like BitUSD, BitBTC, etc. then I am all for it. If we don't have enough volume for these markets to be efficient, then it will be very hard to convince the others after 6 months that the idea will work with a bigger pool. Just my 2 cents.
There is always ample supply of currency on the markets and transaction fees are available to all miners with the normal 120 block maturity. I don't see anything that would limit the user base.
Not limit the user base, but limit the initial supply of BitAssets. Consider say 1 million BitShares in existence at launch (several people won't convert their ProtoShares to BitShares and use it immediately, right?) It would be hard to predict what % of initial BitShares will be converted to BitAssets, but I am guessing 10% (may be I am off?) so you have 100,000 BitShares out. At today's market rate, that's the equivalent of 1000 BitBTC but then not everyone is going to play the BitBTC market, there are several others. So say 500 BitBTC in the system at launch. Do you think this is enough supply for the prediction market to work well and not skew towards heavy longs/shorts for extended periods? I don't know the answer, just saying it's something you should consider.
There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
Convert was a wrong word to use, I didn't mean that, just meant the people who would 'redeem' their protoshares for bitshares will not be 100%. Still, you didn't answer the main question, which is, with the current volume, do you think the prediction market can be maintained?
Just like Bitcoin can operate with ANY SUPPLY because they are divisible, the value of BitShares will rise to support any amount of trading volume using smaller and smaller units.
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I think you've nailed it here Bytemaster - Most of the cloud miners I deal with have been selling PTS to fund ongoing mining operations, if you force them to not churn onto the market with a 6 month maturity period you chase out anyone who isn't willing to have a long time horizon. I wouldn't buy cloud computing, but I would have my desktop mining in the background.
I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
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I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Keyhotee going to have a system where you get an increase in reputation points for both solving a block in the blockchain of Keyhotee ID's, and for getting close to solving a block? If this is correct, then it might be possible for Bitshares or some other crypto-currency to work like that, where people can earn coins both by solving a block, and by getting a difficulty close to the required difficulty.
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I think you've nailed it here Bytemaster - Most of the cloud miners I deal with have been selling PTS to fund ongoing mining operations, if you force them to not churn onto the market with a 6 month maturity period you chase out anyone who isn't willing to have a long time horizon. I wouldn't buy cloud computing, but I would have my desktop mining in the background.
I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
With 100,000 blocks per year, and a million users, you have a 1 in 10 chance of hitting the jackpot and winning a block worth $10,000 or more (assuming BTS are valuable like Bitcoin). The point is people feel no pain for running the software (Keyhotee) which they will be doing as part of their email client, but they have this chance of getting a bonus equal to 25% the median income.
This system does not prevent pools, it just forces pools to invest in the protocol for 6 months. Anyone with a long-term commitment to the protocol, such as Invictus, could run a very profitable pool by charging high fees to those who want 'instant payouts'. The pool would have to buy mature shares on the market to payout pool miners and then see a profit 6 months later when the blocks mature. This is kind of like investing in a fixed interest CD on the part of the pool operator and the interest is paid from mining fees which I suspect would be near 15% or more. In a network the size of Bitcoin, worth $5 billion dollars and mining $1 billion dollars per year worth of new BTC a pool (ASIC or otherwise) would have to lock up $500 million dollars for 6 months to perform a 51% attack in addition to the cost of the hardware.
This significantly increases the security of the network from 51% attacks by greatly increasing the cost.
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I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Keyhotee going to have a system where you get an increase in reputation points for both solving a block in the blockchain of Keyhotee ID's, and for getting close to solving a block? If this is correct, then it might be possible for Bitshares or some other crypto-currency to work like that, where people can earn coins both by solving a block, and by getting a difficulty close to the required difficulty.
Keyhotee ID has you merge-mine name registration transactions along with the block. This is good for a network with no other incentive for mining, but would slow down payments if you had to spend 8 hours to merge-mine every transaction. A down side to this is that it increases the size of every transaction and thus the block chain.
But I suspect there may be something along these lines that could be employed.
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I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Keyhotee going to have a system where you get an increase in reputation points for both solving a block in the blockchain of Keyhotee ID's, and for getting close to solving a block? If this is correct, then it might be possible for Bitshares or some other crypto-currency to work like that, where people can earn coins both by solving a block, and by getting a difficulty close to the required difficulty.
Keyhotee ID has you merge-mine name registration transactions along with the block. This is good for a network with no other incentive for mining, but would slow down payments if you had to spend 8 hours to merge-mine every transaction. A down side to this is that it increases the size of every transaction and thus the block chain.
But I suspect there may be something along these lines that could be employed.
So what exactly is on the Keyhotee Block chain besides the name registrations?
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I wish there was a way for mining to not be a lottery but rather a process that everyone who participates is rewarded for per their contribution. We do that now, but it's like a game of bingo when it should be more like renting your computer by the hour to the needs of the protocol. Solo mining and distribution that makes people happy are flatly at odds with mass adoption, so while the incentives line up all over this beast here they very much do not - For each new person who I convince to mine makes it that much harder for me to find a block, and past a certain point, say a million solo miners, it seems like an impossibility for everyone to find a block so you limit your potential success.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Keyhotee going to have a system where you get an increase in reputation points for both solving a block in the blockchain of Keyhotee ID's, and for getting close to solving a block? If this is correct, then it might be possible for Bitshares or some other crypto-currency to work like that, where people can earn coins both by solving a block, and by getting a difficulty close to the required difficulty.
Keyhotee ID has you merge-mine name registration transactions along with the block. This is good for a network with no other incentive for mining, but would slow down payments if you had to spend 8 hours to merge-mine every transaction. A down side to this is that it increases the size of every transaction and thus the block chain.
But I suspect there may be something along these lines that could be employed.
So what exactly is on the Keyhotee Block chain besides the name registrations?
Keyhotee ID only has name registrations and was designed to support 1 billion users with a little bandwidth and storage requirements as possible. I want everyone to have the Keyhotee ID blockchain locally so they can lookup names in an anonymous and secure manner without having to trust a 3rd party. You can still have light-weight clients, but they would reveal the name lookups to snoops.
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What if the invested period was varied. Not sure how hard this would be to program in, but say, every block's reward would have one of six maturity dates from one to six months. Kind of like a CD. That way there would be capital interest in the market right away, but long term investors, too.
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What if the invested period was varied. Not sure how hard this would be to program in, but say, every block's reward would have one of six maturity dates from one to six months. Kind of like a CD. That way there would be capital interest in the market right away, but long term investors, too.
You could have a 'random maturity date' based upon the hash of the block found such that the average maturity date is 6 months. This would have almost no effect on pools who's average maturity date would be 6 months, but individuals solo-mining may get lucky and have a 1 day or week maturity.
This would keep the mining loto effect for solo-miners without enabling pools!
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What if the invested period was varied. Not sure how hard this would be to program in, but say, every block's reward would have one of six maturity dates from one to six months. Kind of like a CD. That way there would be capital interest in the market right away, but long term investors, too.
You could have a 'random maturity date' based upon the hash of the block found such that the average maturity date is 6 months. This would have almost no effect on pools who's average maturity date would be 6 months, but individuals solo-mining may get lucky and have a 1 day or week maturity.
This would keep the mining loto effect for solo-miners without enabling pools!
Since you're aiming for an average time of 6 months, there would be some blocks that take even longer, but if you really believe in the long term value of Bitshares it'll be worth it to wait even a few more months
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I realize what you are trying to achieve with the 6 month maturity, but that really feels like a long time. Being able to make transactions in 90 days vs. 180 days seems more realistic. I just think people will lose interest if they are not able to utilize the fruits of their mining labor in a more timely manner. I do want to reduce the dependency of pools and initially was drawn to PTS when I heard about it on the podcast, a system with reputation and DACs, I was hooked. Felt like finding BTC back in 2011 all over again. When I mined for 3 days solo, it was very disappointing to receive zero (I know QQ right?) and then it immediately evolved into pools, or having to be a member of one to see any rewards. So yeah, that needs to be fixed if you are trying to not have the gaming of the system, botnets, etc. Maybe there could be a vesting period vs. maturity? If you need to spend earlier you take the penalty, but after X amount of time and you're 100%. I just feel quarterly would work better then bi-annually. Keep up the great work, I have a good feeling about this.
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1. Initial difficulty and difficulty adjustment
Would you consider a dynamic difficulty adjustment? Means the difficulty will adjust block by block instead of every 2016 or 4032 blocks. It needs limiting the adjustment range, but I saw it is working well in some of the altcoins. Considering 5 mins block interval is relatively long, dynamic adjustment will be more flexible. And you can have a much higher initial difficulty to prevent what happened to Protoshares, then let the network adjust itself and not worrying hash power too low.
2. Block mature in 6 months
It is good to prevent the cloud server, because people have to hold the bitshares for 6 months before they sell it.
But it is not effective to block pools. Pool can change the payout to p2pool, just like what 54.238.185.113 is doing now, let the rewards mature locally, instead of store in the pool. Something need to be done to block p2pool/immediate payment if you decide so.
3. Solo mining lottery
It is easy to say that the rewards is same base on math. But after 4 years of Bitcoin, everyone is used to pool mining. I would say 90% of miners would prefer 0.5 stable payment everyday instead of a chance of hitting a block every 3 months. The difficulty and hash power is changing significantly time to time, even myself want to be paid for what I am contributing to the network right now. It is small amount everyday, but I know my miner is working.
Is it possible to build an embedded p2pool inside the bitshares client with a fully optimized miner inside? The entire network working as one pool.
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I realize what you are trying to achieve with the 6 month maturity, but that really feels like a long time. Being able to make transactions in 90 days vs. 180 days seems more realistic. I just think people will lose interest if they are not able to utilize the fruits of their mining labor in a more timely manner. I do want to reduce the dependency of pools and initially was drawn to PTS when I heard about it on the podcast, a system with reputation and DACs, I was hooked. Felt like finding BTC back in 2011 all over again. When I mined for 3 days solo, it was very disappointing to receive zero (I know QQ right?) and then it immediately evolved into pools, or having to be a member of one to see any rewards. So yeah, that needs to be fixed if you are trying to not have the gaming of the system, botnets, etc. Maybe there could be a vesting period vs. maturity? If you need to spend earlier you take the penalty, but after X amount of time and you're 100%. I just feel quarterly would work better then bi-annually. Keep up the great work, I have a good feeling about this.
Yet another great idea! If the Share Bond has a face value of 60 BTS but matures in 6 months in a linear manner, then in 1 month you could get 10 BTS (the other 50 BTS are paid as dividends) and in 3 months you would have 30 BTS... at the 6 month mark you get your full 60 BTS. This keeps the shares liquid and makes holding them very valuable, but gives users the opportunity to cash out early for a penalty.
So I think we can combine them all. Random maturity date, linear early-redemption penalty.
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In economic old speak you want to raise the cost if pools and use that " energy" to subsidize individual miners .
Interesting .
What about the technicals , and how do you propose to enforce this in a open source environment .
On the Bitshare side I understand the hard coded 6 month system , but , oh wait , I think I understand .
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I realize what you are trying to achieve with the 6 month maturity, but that really feels like a long time. Being able to make transactions in 90 days vs. 180 days seems more realistic. I just think people will lose interest if they are not able to utilize the fruits of their mining labor in a more timely manner. I do want to reduce the dependency of pools and initially was drawn to PTS when I heard about it on the podcast, a system with reputation and DACs, I was hooked. Felt like finding BTC back in 2011 all over again. When I mined for 3 days solo, it was very disappointing to receive zero (I know QQ right?) and then it immediately evolved into pools, or having to be a member of one to see any rewards. So yeah, that needs to be fixed if you are trying to not have the gaming of the system, botnets, etc. Maybe there could be a vesting period vs. maturity? If you need to spend earlier you take the penalty, but after X amount of time and you're 100%. I just feel quarterly would work better then bi-annually. Keep up the great work, I have a good feeling about this.
Yet another great idea! If the Share Bond has a face value of 60 BTS but matures in 6 months in a linear manner, then in 1 month you could get 10 BTS (the other 50 BTS are paid as dividends) and in 3 months you would have 30 BTS... at the 6 month mark you get your full 60 BTS. This keeps the shares liquid and makes holding them very valuable, but gives users the opportunity to cash out early for a penalty.
So I think we can combine them all. Random maturity date, linear early-redemption penalty.
+1
An idea like that is so good it could have been mine. Lol
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1. Initial difficulty and difficulty adjustment
Would you consider a dynamic difficulty adjustment? Means the difficulty will adjust block by block instead of every 2016 or 4032 blocks. It needs limiting the adjustment range, but I saw it is working well in some of the altcoins. Considering 5 mins block interval is relatively long, dynamic adjustment will be more flexible. And you can have a much higher initial difficulty to prevent what happened to Protoshares, then let the network adjust itself and not worrying hash power too low.
Yes, I already have dynamic difficulty adjustment in place based upon a continuous moving window.
2. Block mature in 6 months
It is good to prevent the cloud server, because people have to hold the bitshares for 6 months before they sell it.
But it is not effective to block pools. Pool can change the payout to p2pool, just like what 54.238.185.113 is doing now, let the rewards mature locally, instead of store in the pool. Something need to be done to block p2pool/immediate payment if you decide so.
This is easily prevented by requiring a single payout address for each block.
3. Solo mining lottery
It is easy to say that the rewards is same base on math. But after 4 years of Bitcoin, everyone is used to pool mining. I would say 90% of miners would prefer 0.5 stable payment everyday instead of a chance of hitting a block every 3 months. The difficulty and hash power is changing significantly time to time, even myself want to be paid for what I am contributing to the network right now. It is small amount everyday, but I know my miner is working.
The goal is that people shouldn't think about 'mining for a profit' and it is something that just happens automatically by downloading the default client. Mining is a speciality and we want regular users to not even realize their client is doing it so they run a full node.
Mining pools will still exist, they will just have much higher costs because they have to finance 6 months worth of mining.
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In economic old speak you want to raise the cost if pools and use that " energy" to subsidize individual miners .
Interesting .
What about the technicals , and how do you propose to enforce this in a open source environment .
On the Bitshare side I understand the hard coded 6 month system , but , oh wait , I think I understand .
Yes, that is exactly what is going on in economic speak :)
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In any system , if a managing entity has to or consensus intends to provide direction , it is always best from a policy setting to do this though phased incentives .
On the " phased incentive" rule book , you could look at banning something as a failure .
So you start at a failure if you are proposing to ban anything from a policy point of view .
Then you phase incentives , and the better and more phased , the better and more effective your policy .
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In any system , if a managing entity has to or consensus intends to provide direction , it is always best from a policy setting to do this though phased incentives .
On the " phased incentive" rule book , you could look at banning something as a failure .
So you start at a failure if you are proposing to ban anything from a policy point of view .
Then you phase incentives , and the better and more phased , the better and more effective your policy .
A solid insight, it avoids economic discontinuities and gives the market more room to adjust to changing conditions.
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If i had to rate this as policy , its pretty good , especially if the user has the option to incrementally cash out with a penalty .
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As I just braised this topic , so im clear
The only change to the PoW mechanisim will be in this " timing" factor ?
Effectivly of course there would be much recompiling of the miners and individuals running multiple instances , but where im not clear is around this idea of a " background run " client .
Perhaps I will read the topic ha ha .
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As I just braised this topic , so im clear
The only change to the PoW mechanisim will be in this " timing" factor ?
Effectivly of course there would be much recompiling of the miners and individuals running multiple instances , but where im not clear is around this idea of a " background run " client .
Perhaps I will read the topic ha ha .
If the user is running Keyhotee as their Email client and there is a passive, low-priority thread that is always mining they will not really care, but in aggregate it will represent a significant amount of hash power that is fully decentralized. Make sure the client is aware of battery powered devices and otherwise respect the user and it is win-win. The software is free, but costs a couple dollars per month in electric costs that few will consider or care about.
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What about 51% attacks? With the 6 month rule the overall hashing power will go down quite a lot compared to now. This makes it a lot easier for a single individual to pull off a successful attack.
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What about 51% attacks? With the 6 month rule the overall hashing power will go down quite a lot compared to now. This makes it a lot easier for a single individual to pull off a successful attack.
It actually makes it harder because they could not finance the attack with the block rewards. For example, suppose someone wanted to do a 51% attack today. They could spend 100K / day on Amazon, but wouldn't be able to maintain the attack unless they had access to 100K * 180 days worth of capital.
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What about 51% attacks? With the 6 month rule the overall hashing power will go down quite a lot compared to now. This makes it a lot easier for a single individual to pull off a successful attack.
It actually makes it harder because they could not finance the attack with the block rewards. For example, suppose someone wanted to do a 51% attack today. They could spend 100K / day on Amazon, but wouldn't be able to maintain the attack unless they had access to 100K * 180 days worth of capital.
You assume that the attacker wants to earn money directly via PTS/BitShares. What if botnets from a different altcoin team up to attack your coin in hope that it will make their altcoin look better? There are some people on this planet that control gigantic amounts of resources nearly for free. Check Feathercoin for example, it was attacked multiple times successfully even though at the time it was very popular and there were many legitimate people mining it.
I am not saying that this is very likely to happen, but it is definitively a possibility that has to be considered.
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Ok im clear on that now , but if the mining client is just a modified version of a miner set to follow these rules, thats fine , I understand the attempt to distribute , and its novel.
But lets say ok a base of users take this up, now we have a% of distributed mining power .
I will calculate that this be a " passive" free matket % on top of the then dedicated miners .
Which will recompile and release , with the adjusted time settings .
This passive mining power could help against attack but .
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What about 51% attacks? With the 6 month rule the overall hashing power will go down quite a lot compared to now. This makes it a lot easier for a single individual to pull off a successful attack.
It actually makes it harder because they could not finance the attack with the block rewards. For example, suppose someone wanted to do a 51% attack today. They could spend 100K / day on Amazon, but wouldn't be able to maintain the attack unless they had access to 100K * 180 days worth of capital.
You assume that the attacker wants to earn money directly via PTS/BitShares. What if botnets from a different altcoin team up to attack your coin in hope that it will make their altcoin look better? There are some people on this planet that control gigantic amounts of resources nearly for free. Check Feathercoin for example, it was attacked multiple times successfully even though at the time it was very popular and there were many legitimate people mining it.
I am not saying that this is very likely to happen, but it is definitively a possibility that has to be considered.
Use checkpoints ?
No one cares about them that whole fake " centralization" narrative was pushed by the people that hate them because they protect the blockchain .
Number one confidence killers are issues in relation to issuance .
Id rather mine a checkpointed cryptocurrency than not .
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These rules would be enforced by all clients as part of the blockchain. It would require a hard-fork of ProtoShares to introduce here.
The passive miners will merely make sure that X% of the hash power is entirely decentralized and as the number of users grows X% will become quite large and greatly reduce the profit potential for the specialized miners because the X% will mine even at a loss (because it is automatic lottery).
So if 10% of hash power is mining below cost, it reduces the average margin for those attempting to mine for-profit. With a couple million users all mining automatically and at below cost mining will become entirely decentralized.
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What about 51% attacks? With the 6 month rule the overall hashing power will go down quite a lot compared to now. This makes it a lot easier for a single individual to pull off a successful attack.
It actually makes it harder because they could not finance the attack with the block rewards. For example, suppose someone wanted to do a 51% attack today. They could spend 100K / day on Amazon, but wouldn't be able to maintain the attack unless they had access to 100K * 180 days worth of capital.
You assume that the attacker wants to earn money directly via PTS/BitShares. What if botnets from a different altcoin team up to attack your coin in hope that it will make their altcoin look better? There are some people on this planet that control gigantic amounts of resources nearly for free. Check Feathercoin for example, it was attacked multiple times successfully even though at the time it was very popular and there were many legitimate people mining it.
I am not saying that this is very likely to happen, but it is definitively a possibility that has to be considered.
I think that your conjecture that this vesting system would result in less hash power in the network is mistaken. It just means that the only hash power will be hash-power interested in long-term success. The expected future value of a crypto-currency will still encourage miners and if there is confidence that the mining is more decentralized and 'automatic' with millions of 'solo miners' then I suspect the equation changes.
The key is to make sure there are millions of solo miners which in aggregate represent significantly more hash power than opportunistic miners with no interest in the currency except to mine and dump. It is a hybrid proof-of-stake mining system in a new form.
Even if the attacker has alternative revenue streams, cutting off the most direct revenue stream still helps change the profitability of such an attack.
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In the Netcoin thread I came up with a lottery system for crowd funding where people could pre-order their coins with the potential to win more. But this would limit it to people who have the most money and couldn't be considered as fair.
Dacoinminster utilized a crowd funding model which rewarded early adopters willing to trust him. This was flawed too because it promotes trust in a trustless system and that has a long term potential to result in abuse if too many people use that method there will be scams.
I think with mining the solution we discussed for Netcoin would be to have a Proof of Work which randomly changes at a certain time each day. Meaning at one time of the day it's optimized for the CPU, at another time of day it's optimized for the GPU, at another it's optimized for ram, and at another time of day it's adding something done only by human beings (like some sorta puzzle has to be solved every 15 minutes).
I think it has to be very profitable though. The reason is if it's not profitable enough then people will not be able to upgrade and the hash rate wont go up fast enough to prevent a 51% attack. I think botnets wont be profitable if the algorithm randomly changes. It would essentially set things up so different groups of people have their turn for heavy profits each day so that no group can dominate completely.
GPU miners would get their turn when the algorithm switches to scrypt and they wont know when that will happen. Other times it will be SHA256. And another time something CPU based. As long as the miners are kept surprised and cannot plan in advance then it's a random lottery of optimization. The goal should be to get them all mining and waiting for the change to happen and have none of them know who it will favor. This puts everyone on a somewhat even playing field.
This could probably be decentralized randomness too. But it shouldn't start out random. It should start out predictable and become increasingly unpredictable over time. When people don't know what to expect then they have to pay more attention to it. The trigger for a particular different hashing algorithm to be used could come from an external source event to make it truly random.
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Although this creates an unfair advantage, we must understand that the core protocol is one cpu one vote. There is very little we can do to get around that. Although the benefit is that it promotes rapid adoption of a coin, which is good far all. Here is the simple solution:
Make the coin confirmation time 35-37 days. Hosting providers are billed on a monthly cycle. So if someone launches 1,000 cloud servers, and the end of the month they have no idea what the trade rate is and will have to foot the bill. This is an extreme disadvantage for cloud miners, as they don't know if they will break even or come out in the red. Gives for a more even coin launch and is the easiest to implement.
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Although this creates an unfair advantage, we must understand that the core protocol is one cpu one vote. There is very little we can do to get around that. Although the benefit is that it promotes rapid adoption of a coin, which is good far all. Here is the simple solution:
Make the coin confirmation time 35-37 days. Hosting providers are billed on a monthly cycle. So if someone launches 1,000 cloud servers, and the end of the month they have no idea what the trade rate is and will have to foot the bill. This is an extreme disadvantage for cloud miners, as they don't know if they will break even or come out in the red. Gives for a more even coin launch and is the easiest to implement.
Your simple solution is effectively what this whole thread is about... random vesting period between 1 day and 1 year averaging 6 months makes it only profitable to mine if you are willing to take a long-term perspective on the coin and thus eliminates those who are trying to profit on short-term price changes or crowd out little guys. Large mining operations would have to commit capital to the operation proportional to their mining effort for 6 months.
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Although this creates an unfair advantage, we must understand that the core protocol is one cpu one vote. There is very little we can do to get around that. Although the benefit is that it promotes rapid adoption of a coin, which is good far all. Here is the simple solution:
Make the coin confirmation time 35-37 days. Hosting providers are billed on a monthly cycle. So if someone launches 1,000 cloud servers, and the end of the month they have no idea what the trade rate is and will have to foot the bill. This is an extreme disadvantage for cloud miners, as they don't know if they will break even or come out in the red. Gives for a more even coin launch and is the easiest to implement.
A disadvantage to one competitor provides an advantage to another. Now you've given an advantage to botnets. This is why I say the algorithm should change on the fly so that people running a botnet will not know how long the algorithm they use will work and botnets cannot easily change or adapt. Cloud servers can change and adapt really easily and would have the advantage over botnets however the cloud operators would not know what model CPU is favored. I'm saying there should be a basket of hashing algorithms which favor different CPUs and settings and this should change continuously and randomly.
And it should also do the same for GPUs. Sometimes it will favor certain GPU types and not others, sometimes it will be SHA256 or it will be Scrypt or perhaps some exotic new algorithm. If we make the hashing algorithm something which can b modular and randomly chosen from a list then you can confuse miners by not allowing them to optimize their settings because they wont know what will come next. It should be an anti-optimization strategy through random algorithm selection.
Although this creates an unfair advantage, we must understand that the core protocol is one cpu one vote. There is very little we can do to get around that. Although the benefit is that it promotes rapid adoption of a coin, which is good far all. Here is the simple solution:
Make the coin confirmation time 35-37 days. Hosting providers are billed on a monthly cycle. So if someone launches 1,000 cloud servers, and the end of the month they have no idea what the trade rate is and will have to foot the bill. This is an extreme disadvantage for cloud miners, as they don't know if they will break even or come out in the red. Gives for a more even coin launch and is the easiest to implement.
Your simple solution is effectively what this whole thread is about... random vesting period between 1 day and 1 year averaging 6 months makes it only profitable to mine if you are willing to take a long-term perspective on the coin and thus eliminates those who are trying to profit on short-term price changes or crowd out little guys. Large mining operations would have to commit capital to the operation proportional to their mining effort for 6 months.
I think random vesting period is a good idea, similar to what we had for Netcoin. Add to it a random algorithm selection and you have something which would work. I understand protoshares is proof of momentum and should stay that. But I think newer DACs should experiment with different algorithms and my suggestion is a random hashing algorithm series with an unknown order combined with random vesting periods. This way neither the cloud miners or the botnet can benefit.
A botnet isn't going to know what hardware the next hashing algorithm will be optimized for and most importantly they wont know how long that hashing algorithm will be in operation before the next switch. So basically I'm saying just as difficulty changes, the entire hashing algorithm should change too and that in the beginning it should be predictable what algorithm is coming next, but later on it should become random so no one will know and this means someone could end up mining on their cellphones because it's optimized for ARM processors for that day or week.
I'm not sure how to pull it off but you want all the unoptimized miners to still mine too.
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin_Proof-of-Work_Hashing_Function
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I don't know that a mining lottery will provide enough excitement. With a regular lottery, the excitement is anticipation before the draw, and then an intense 30 seconds while the numbers are drawn. Users will tire of a process that draws 25% of their computing power and provides no benefits.
I've had very few takers for my optimized solo miner which essentially provides the same lottery effect.
Users want to see a steady increase in their fortune, I suggest working with that rather than against it. What we need is an easy to use pool miner (Press a button in the GUI) and a selection of pools to choose from (open source pool software), and rapid payouts - users should see their balances ticking up after a few blocks . . 15 minutes or so. All of these things have been achieved already in other coins - I recommend looking at infinitecoin for a good example, although it could be even better. We get these things right, we'll see a rapid adoption by unsophisticated users without capital costs, and drive the dedicated miners out of business.
(http://i.imgur.com/k3B9IK8.png)
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With BitShares people will already see a steady growth in their stash from dividends.
I honestly couldn't care about a well-behaved process that uses 25% of my CPU when IDLE with a low priority setting and 99% of users wouldn't even know how to monitor their CPU usage and wouldn't look at it unless something else was slowing their computer down. Having an option to 'turn it off' would allow those who it really bothers to turn it off.
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I don't know that a mining lottery will provide enough excitement. With a regular lottery, the excitement is anticipation before the draw, and then an intense 30 seconds while the numbers are drawn. Users will tire of a process that draws 25% of their computing power and provides no benefits.
I've had very few takers for my optimized solo miner which essentially provides the same lottery effect.
Users want to see a steady increase in their fortune, I suggest working with that rather than against it. What we need is an easy to use pool miner (Press a button in the GUI) and a selection of pools to choose from (open source pool software), and rapid payouts - users should see their balances ticking up after a few blocks . . 15 minutes or so. All of these things have been achieved already in other coins - I recommend looking at infinitecoin for a good example, although it could be even better. We get these things right, we'll see a rapid adoption by unsophisticated users without capital costs, and drive the dedicated miners out of business.
Frequent rewards of different sizes are necessary to get people to adopt a new behavior pattern. People prefer frequent rewards. The chance to win very large rewards is important too. Seriously study the Netcoin proposals because many of these ideas have been discussed in detail. We came up with some solutions on the Netcoin thread which are included on the portal http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin:Community_Portal
It even includes an idea similar to DACs called the Netcoin Community-Oriented Decentralized Social Organization Supported by Blockchain which I proposed. It was supposed to be based on Colored Coin and it was before there was a Mastercoin or before I had heard about Bitshares.
The lottery system for Netcoin was set up so people who crowd funded it by buying the coins in advance would get a ticket. Then they would get the coins they paid for but it wouldn't be all at once but over a period of time and this delay was to make them into long term supporters who would work hard to make these coins as valuable as possible. Basically it was a similar goal to what protoshares is trying to do.
I will see if I can help contribute some new ideas to this problem or perhaps see if I can come up with my own DAC which takes full advantage of a bunch of new ideas. I think the main concepts useful for solving this problem are diversity and unpredictability. When you combine both to rewards and proof of work then you get closer to the solution.
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I don't know that a mining lottery will provide enough excitement. With a regular lottery, the excitement is anticipation before the draw, and then an intense 30 seconds while the numbers are drawn. Users will tire of a process that draws 25% of their computing power and provides no benefits.
I've had very few takers for my optimized solo miner which essentially provides the same lottery effect.
Users want to see a steady increase in their fortune, I suggest working with that rather than against it. What we need is an easy to use pool miner (Press a button in the GUI) and a selection of pools to choose from (open source pool software), and rapid payouts - users should see their balances ticking up after a few blocks . . 15 minutes or so. All of these things have been achieved already in other coins - I recommend looking at infinitecoin for a good example, although it could be even better. We get these things right, we'll see a rapid adoption by unsophisticated users without capital costs, and drive the dedicated miners out of business.
Frequent rewards of different sizes are necessary to get people to adopt a new behavior pattern. People prefer frequent rewards. The chance to win very large rewards is important too. Seriously study the Netcoin proposals because many of these ideas have been discussed in detail. We came up with some solutions on the Netcoin thread which are included on the portal http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin:Community_Portal
It even includes an idea similar to DACs called the Netcoin Community-Oriented Decentralized Social Organization Supported by Blockchain which I proposed. It was supposed to be based on Colored Coin and it was before there was a Mastercoin or before I had heard about Bitshares.
The lottery system for Netcoin was set up so people who crowd funded it by buying the coins in advance would get a ticket. Then they would get the coins they paid for but it wouldn't be all at once but over a period of time and this delay was to make them into long term supporters who would work hard to make these coins as valuable as possible. Basically it was a similar goal to what protoshares is trying to do.
I will see if I can help contribute some new ideas to this problem or perhaps see if I can come up with my own DAC which takes full advantage of a bunch of new ideas. I think the main concepts useful for solving this problem are diversity and unpredictability. When you combine both to rewards and proof of work then you get closer to the solution.
Maybe a hybrid pool/solo miner with a slider allowing users to adjust between 10% to 90% solo/pool.
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With BitShares people will already see a steady growth in their stash from dividends.
That's great, but we want to get people started, and they'll start at 0.
I honestly couldn't care about a well-behaved process that uses 25% of my CPU when IDLE with a low priority setting and 99% of users wouldn't even know how to monitor their CPU usage and wouldn't look at it unless something else was slowing their computer down. Having an option to 'turn it off' would allow those who it really bothers to turn it off.
That's fine - I'm saying get them keyed into a pool so they are seeing immediate rewards. Add in luckybit's idea of unpredictable and variable rewards, and it'll start to get compelling.
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I agree, an integrated pool is fine and Invictus will spend significant time to make sure BitShares comes with a highly reliable pool at launch with an open protocol to allow other pools to compete.
So a default miner that does mining in the background unless the user chooses to kick it up a to a higher setting and the default client that always does at least 50% solo mining to prevent against centralization. Professionals can use stand alone miners that are 100% pool based, but of course would have to find a pool willing to finance their mining for 6 months.
Overall this gives a mix of steady income, random bonus, easy to use, and automatic security.
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1. The simple idea mentioned earlier having a "penalty" for early withdraw is a very clean cut approach. Restrict any block payout to > 30 days and with an increasing rate up to a full maturity 90 days out. If this were the case, could any forfeited amount from early withdraw be added to the next block reward?
2. GUI miner is a must for non technical. If available, we could all convince a handful of friends to run the node. User selectable 25/50/75/100%, do not punish us that build powerful rigs and want them doing something productive while were not working.
3. Really need to find out if GPU mining provides any reasonable hash gain over cpu. It may prove to NOT cut out the casual miner who has an opencl capable cpgpu.
4. A clear cut tx fee structure should be implemented. New comers may not grasp the fee per kb relationship.
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If this were the case, could any forfeited amount from early withdraw be added to the next block reward?
It would be paid as dividends.
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Professionals can use stand alone miners that are 100% pool based, but of course would have to find a pool willing to finance their mining for 6 months.
I don't know about this - I think a pool could pre-sell the blocks they find for Bitcoin - so someone would have to finance it, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be the pool operator or miners. You might find a very small number of sophisticated individuals financing the pools with BTC, and the pools paying the miners in BTC, so you'd have reduced distribution rather than wider distribution.
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Professionals can use stand alone miners that are 100% pool based, but of course would have to find a pool willing to finance their mining for 6 months.
I don't know about this - I think a pool could pre-sell the blocks they find for Bitcoin - so someone would have to finance it, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be the pool operator or miners. You might find a very small number of sophisticated individuals financing the pools with BTC, and the pools paying the miners in BTC, so you'd have reduced distribution rather than wider distribution.
Financing comes with a cost to offset risk and will be based upon the expected value in 6 months. It also comes with the price of trust which would centralize pools into trusted hands.
Bottom line: a pool that is selling future production will act in the best interest of the coin or they will not be able to sell their future production. A pool selling future production will have to do so at a discount and thus the fees on the pool will be higher. Who is willing to trust a pool with 6 months worth of mining rewards?
The point is to increase the COST of pool mining with instant payouts vs solo mining with delayed payouts. It will limit mining power to the demand for 6 month futures rather than the immediate demand. In something as risky and volatile as a new crypto currency you can expect a HEAFTY discount for 6 month futures.
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Most of these problems disappear once a market has had a chance to develop and multiple competitors enter the picture and compete for marketshare. The key is to protect the currency in the early phase while it is being deployed.
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most of this is good to the ears, but these modifications are to the miner not the blk data, as a result, one could recompile the source to enable more heavier usage.
Another thing is, most of us miners are small guys who need tradable volumes not only to pay electricity but to fund the purchase of more hardware. The 6 month idea is perfect against bots for the greater part bar the following
1) You have killed interest from the average miner, they would rather mine something that will pay them within a few days, speculative mining died in the altcoin spring. Faith is not a strong part of the average small guy. mine and cash OUT is the motto.
2) once a person owns a server from home, they wont need massive investments if the term is 6 months because only a few miners will connect. You could probably pull it of using a 2Mb connection.
3) you have only cut out LONG TERM use of bots and instances, on the loose someone can just take a small portion of their profits from Proto, buy instances for a solid month or two and sic them on the currency. it would cost them a little over 2 BTC and if that currency follows the proto trend, they would stand to make tens of thousands.
4) effective removal of bots would entail long term + extremely high difficulty, which leaves you with the guys who work with computers. A guy in a school/company could schedule the process for every night of those six months and rake in a ton of them. to prevent that, you would need a very high dificulty that delibates performance to the point that it would be noticeable. This however still strikes at the hearts and minds of small miners.
Yours is a novel idea, but i don't think the world is ready for it yet.
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a pool that is selling future production will act in the best interest of the coin
I think you might be considering rash measures to deal with a problem that might prove to be short-term, and better dealt with in other ways. How does Bitcoin deal with this? I assume by waiting for pools to act in their rational self-interest. Maybe consider a soft fork requiring more than 1 transaction per block to encourage ypool to update their userbase. Even knowing you're considering a measure like that should encourage them to put their skates on.
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This would be in the block chain, not the miners. Coin generation outputs would not be spendable as a valid transaction and no code modifications could change the rules without a hard fork.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed. Think of paying an employee in stock options that must VEST. You do not want to hire employees that leave, you want committed long-term employees who expect the options to go up in value. This builds a very loyal base which will benefit by seeing the price rise over 6 months, rather than a disloyal base that just gets a free-handout while providing little value.
Sure, many people who currently mine will stop mining and make room for new miners who have a long-term outlook. Transfer coins from profiteers to supporters and THAT is the goal.
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a pool that is selling future production will act in the best interest of the coin
I think you might be considering rash measures to deal with a problem that might prove to be short-term, and better dealt with in other ways. How does Bitcoin deal with this? I assume by waiting for pools to act in their rational self-interest. Maybe consider a soft fork requiring more than 1 transaction per block to encourage ypool to update their userbase. Even knowing you're considering a measure like that should encourage them to put their skates on.
I am not forking ProtoShares... this would be for BitShares launch.
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Therefore, you can limit the profitability and attractiveness of mining pools by having all new currency that is created vest for a period of 6 months.
Basically nobody is going to use this currency.
That's it.
If there are indeed good ideas in it, it's going to be copied by an alt without arbitrary and ridiculous restrictions.
The people who mine in large amounts are just more valuable. They're either more interested, more knowledgeable, have more money, or all of it. These are the people you want invested in an idea to make it happen.
They're better for the currency.
It's the same in real life. It's better to have an experienced investor with contacts rather than thousands of micro shareholders.
Do you really believe that forcibly distributing all of capital productive to everyone in the world would result in a better economic outcome?
These bulk purchases benefited the mass-miners and not the creators of the crypto-currency.
Don't let excessive greed kill your ideas prematurely, because THAT'S the true issue, isn't it? It's better to have 1% of a currency worth 0.01BTC/PTS rather than 50% of a currency worth 0.000001BTC/PTS (or BTS).
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I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed.
This would be good if it were possible - I think you'll just see a futures market.
A better approach is to concentrate on making it super easy for many people to mine small amounts - amounts small enough that they're not rushing for the exits. I think you want mass adoption across millions of desktop pc to make the business of mining impossible. Concentrate on easy-to-use pool mining clients.
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This would be in the block chain, not the miners. Coin generation outputs would not be spendable as a valid transaction and no code modifications could change the rules without a hard fork.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed. Think of paying an employee in stock options that must VEST. You do not want to hire employees that leave, you want committed long-term employees who expect the options to go up in value. This builds a very loyal base which will benefit by seeing the price rise over 6 months, rather than a disloyal base that just gets a free-handout while providing little value.
Sure, many people who currently mine will stop mining and make room for new miners who have a long-term outlook. Transfer coins from profiteers to supporters and THAT is the goal.
Okay, a combination of a random incubation/maturation period for the coins along with random amounts. Variable ratio schedule of reinforcement is the best way to produce that effect. Basically a lot of hidden surprise bonuses that no one even knows about, easter eggs, surprise bonuses which the DAC creator announces to keep people interested. So yeah a build in lottery I think is the best way to do it and every miner should get a ticket depending on how much hash rate they dedicate.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed.
This would be good if it were possible - I think you'll just see a futures market.
A better approach is to concentrate on making it super easy for many people to mine small amounts - amounts small enough that they're not rushing for the exits. I think you want mass adoption across millions of desktop pc to make the business of mining impossible. Concentrate on easy-to-use pool mining clients.
Make it fun. Make it a game.
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Therefore, you can limit the profitability and attractiveness of mining pools by having all new currency that is created vest for a period of 6 months.
Basically nobody is going to use this currency.
That's it.
If there are indeed good ideas in it, it's going to be copied by an alt without arbitrary and ridiculous restrictions.
The people who mine in large amounts are just more valuable. They're either more interested, more knowledgeable, have more money, or all of it. These are the people you want invested in an idea to make it happen.
They're better for the currency.
It's the same in real life. It's better to have an experienced investor with contacts rather than thousands of micro shareholders.
Do you really believe that forcibly distributing all of capital productive to everyone in the world would result in a better economic outcome?
These bulk purchases benefited the mass-miners and not the creators of the crypto-currency.
Don't let excessive greed kill your ideas prematurely, because THAT'S the true issue, isn't it? It's better to have 1% of a currency worth 0.01BTC/PTS rather than 50% of a currency worth 0.000001BTC/PTS (or BTS).
The problem is you still view this as a currency and not as shares in a decentralized for-profit corporation. Corporations want dependable, consistent miners and don't want to want to pay all of their profits to employees in it for a short-term paycheck.
These 'restrictions' are no more arbitrary than a company including a vesting period for an employee being paid with stock. In fact, you almost never see a company pay in stock without a vesting period. Miners are employees and you want their interests to align with that of the company.
It is clear that existing incentive models reward large pools that are harming the network and are giving free money to 'miners' with no interest in the currency other than 'today'. What good is it to have a miner that immediately sells, pockets some USD or BTC and then has no other cares? Mining is not an end to itself.
The value of BitShares is NOT as a currency, but by the services it renders. I suspect that anyone who has a vested interest in the currency would choose the one with my 'arbitrary' vesting periods rather than one that gives away the company stock to disinterested parties and results in immediate inflation.
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This would be in the block chain, not the miners. Coin generation outputs would not be spendable as a valid transaction and no code modifications could change the rules without a hard fork.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed. Think of paying an employee in stock options that must VEST. You do not want to hire employees that leave, you want committed long-term employees who expect the options to go up in value. This builds a very loyal base which will benefit by seeing the price rise over 6 months, rather than a disloyal base that just gets a free-handout while providing little value.
Sure, many people who currently mine will stop mining and make room for new miners who have a long-term outlook. Transfer coins from profiteers to supporters and THAT is the goal.
mass adoption is what we want, and this encourages mass exodus.
Mining and dumping is bad yes, but it's what we do to keep afloat financially, understand that most people that do this arent rich, only the rich can afford to do long term investments that have no guarantee. worse off when they know there are other coins that can keep the lights on. I understand where you are coming from but you need to rethink this in my opinion.
hahaha, i'm afraid in miners there is no loyalty :P they are only loyal to what pays, as you have witnessed the hash swings based on the figures from Coinchoose and Coinwarz.
there are few such real supporters in comparison with profiteers, most are in it for the profit, some it's a hobby and a minority actually believe in it. i'm in the first and last group, and i can tell you that the six month wait won't fly with me and my ilk. most would find a bitcoin to spare, hire a months' worth of instances and that's it, just fire and forget. If not, they'll go mine something that gives them the money to spare and just do the above.
keep in mind you are saying that someone that joins in later will have to wait 6 months, so if i join in six months after everyone else, i'll be a year behind the first miners, no way people would go for that , with the way people are bitter about bitcoin already?
hehehe, cheeky but i gotta ask...just how do you intend to include mining limits on BLK data?? including stand alone miners?
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Making things random is meaningless when large numbers are applied as they all average out in the end. Though, I suspect that it could increase solo miners who want to 'gamble' on hitting it big. I rather like this extra dynamic because people are not rational and it would make solo-mining like Satoshi dice.... you mine at an average loss because if you get lucky you 'hit the jackpot'.
So, if the mining reward system is such that on average people earn 50 BTC per block... but there is a random chance that they could earn 5000 BTC in a single block where the odds do not favor them people would still do it just because the reward is so great. There are consolation prizes in the form of many rewards under 50 BTC per block to keep people interested... but it is the big jackpot that would have everyone solo-mining rather than pool mining.
It would make pool-hopping a major problem as a lucky pool would would suddenly find a bunch of of people flooding to their pool. This could actually be a game changer for pools which would have to adapt new algorithms to ensure fairness of rewards.
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Miners are employees and you want their interests to align with that of the company.
Miners are service providers - think of them more like contractors. Often miners and investors are the same thing . . . which leads coin creators to think they need a lot of miners. This is flawed reasoning - what you want is investors. Where miners and investors are different people, increase interest from investors, not miners.
It is clear that existing incentive models reward large pools that are harming the network and are giving free money to 'miners' with no interest in the currency other than 'today'. What good is it to have a miner that immediately sells, pockets some USD or BTC and then has no other cares? Mining is not an end to itself.
Distribution is the value - if the mining is profitable the miner sells immediately, you loose that value. The only value you get then is transaction processing. Sometimes not even that ;)
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You don't have employees, you have investors. Companies can force limitations on employers because there's a discrepancy in power between them. It's obviously not the case here.
What good is it to have a miner that immediately sells, pockets some USD or BTC and then has no other cares? Mining is not an end to itself.
That's not true, most people only sell to cover some multiple of expenses.
What you really said is that pts price was way too high at the beginning. Now the cat is out of the bag because more than 1/3 of pts was mined.
The proper fixes to this are better (faster) difficulty adjustments and a much longer generation period. This way, miners are incentivized to think long term. Simple.
Let the market care of it, not heavy-handed restrictions, these are not going to work well.
The value of BitShares is NOT as a currency, but by the services it renders.
A currency is valuable because it renders services - a "store of value" service, a "transaction mechanism" service, etc. There's no fundamental difference.
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Making things random is meaningless when large numbers are applied as they all average out in the end. Though, I suspect that it could increase solo miners who want to 'gamble' on hitting it big. I rather like this extra dynamic because people are not rational and it would make solo-mining like Satoshi dice.... you mine at an average loss because if you get lucky you 'hit the jackpot'.
I think if you were able to limit the pool sizes somehow, and had very variable rewards, you could make it quite interesting in the short term. Perhaps block reward could be based on by how much the block hash beats the difficulty.
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This would be in the block chain, not the miners. Coin generation outputs would not be spendable as a valid transaction and no code modifications could change the rules without a hard fork.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed. Think of paying an employee in stock options that must VEST. You do not want to hire employees that leave, you want committed long-term employees who expect the options to go up in value. This builds a very loyal base which will benefit by seeing the price rise over 6 months, rather than a disloyal base that just gets a free-handout while providing little value.
Sure, many people who currently mine will stop mining and make room for new miners who have a long-term outlook. Transfer coins from profiteers to supporters and THAT is the goal.
mass adoption is what we want, and this encourages mass exodus.
Mining and dumping is bad yes, but it's what we do to keep afloat financially, understand that most people that do this arent rich, only the rich can afford to do long term investments that have no guarantee. worse off when they know there are other coins that can keep the lights on. I understand where you are coming from but you need to rethink this in my opinion.
hahaha, i'm afraid in miners there is no loyalty :P they are only loyal to what pays, as you have witnessed the hash swings based on the figures from Coinchoose and Coinwarz.
there are few such real supporters in comparison with profiteers, most are in it for the profit, some it's a hobby and a minority actually believe in it. i'm in the first and last group, and i can tell you that the six month wait won't fly with me and my ilk. most would find a bitcoin to spare, hire a months' worth of instances and that's it, just fire and forget. If not, they'll go mine something that gives them the money to spare and just do the above.
keep in mind you are saying that someone that joins in later will have to wait 6 months, so if i join in six months after everyone else, i'll be a year behind the first miners, no way people would go for that , with the way people are bitter about bitcoin already?
Ok, so you leave the coin... and that is FINE BY ME because you do not appreciate the future value. Why should anyone who cares about BitShares give a hoot about people looking for a short-term payout? Obviously you will return to the coin when you have a use for it and realize you could have made more money by holding than by selling. The option for a quick payout for reduced reward is still there.
The underlying assumption here is that without the 'miners' a coin has no value or no security. I contend, that loyal miners will provide more than enough security especially if the DAC is providing USEFUL UTILITY and is not just a speculative play like all other alts.
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Making things random is meaningless when large numbers are applied as they all average out in the end. Though, I suspect that it could increase solo miners who want to 'gamble' on hitting it big. I rather like this extra dynamic because people are not rational and it would make solo-mining like Satoshi dice.... you mine at an average loss because if you get lucky you 'hit the jackpot'.
I think if you were able to limit the pool sizes somehow, and had very variable rewards, you could make it quite interesting in the short term. Perhaps block reward could be based on by how much the block hash beats the difficulty.
That is a great measure, I was thinking how many bits collided with their coinbase address (their loto ticket) so they could play their 'lucky address' :)
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The underlying assumption here is that without the 'miners' a coin has no value or no security. I contend, that loyal miners will provide more than enough security especially if the DAC is providing USEFUL UTILITY and is not just a speculative play like all other alts.
Miners are service providers - you want to pay them not too little they don't perform the service, and not too much that they over deliver blocks. This is what difficulty adjustment is for and I think the next adjustment might bring it into line a bit better. For BitShares the improved difficulty adjustment algo should take care of overpaying miners.
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That is a great measure, I was thinking how many bits collided with their coinbase address (their loto ticket) so they could play their 'lucky address' :)
That's a neat idea too - they could use vanitygen to generate lucky addresses.
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You don't have employees, you have investors. Companies can force limitations on employers because there's a discrepancy in power between them. It's obviously not the case here.
What good is it to have a miner that immediately sells, pockets some USD or BTC and then has no other cares? Mining is not an end to itself.
That's not true, most people only sell to cover some multiple of expenses.
What you really said is that pts price was way too high at the beginning. Now the cat is out of the bag because more than 1/3 of pts was mined.
The proper fixes to this are better (faster) difficulty adjustments and a much longer generation period. This way, miners are incentivized to think long term. Simple.
Let the market care of it, not heavy-handed restrictions, these are not going to work well.
The value of BitShares is NOT as a currency, but by the services it renders.
A currency is valuable because it renders services - a "store of value" service, a "transaction mechanism" service, etc. There's no fundamental difference.
There is a huge difference from the perspective of the corporation and shareholders. As a shareholder in a corporation provided value I want to minimize dilution of my shares. I want to maximize dividends and I want to maximize the value of the shares.
If a company like Apple started giving away 10% of their market cap in a lottery every year they would gain some marketing buzz but it would come at great cost to the company. The shareholders would not be happy and the value of the stock would fall.
If a company like Apple couldn't retain employees their stock would fall.
Fast difficulty adjustments are planned and will make sure currency is created at the proper rate, but still fails to incentivize decentralized mining outside of pools.
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The underlying assumption here is that without the 'miners' a coin has no value or no security. I contend, that loyal miners will provide more than enough security especially if the DAC is providing USEFUL UTILITY and is not just a speculative play like all other alts.
Miners are service providers - you want to pay them not too little they don't perform the service, and not too much that they over deliver blocks. This is what difficulty adjustment is for and I think the next adjustment might bring it into line a bit better. For BitShares the improved difficulty adjustment algo should take care of overpaying miners.
Yes, this is all true. So it is just a question over how much they are paid and wether it is in cash or vesting options. Each attacks a different kind of employee.
For example, Invictus would mine like crazy for 6 month vesting options and so would anyone else with a long-term outlook. While the stock is vesting these individuals have financial motivation to spread the word and advertise the service. Their rate of return on their mining effort depends upon the degree to which they are able to facilitate growth in the company. These employees now play a dual role of security AND marketing.
When you have random vesting periods you still gain the 'quick prizes' for new comers and with mining rewards setup like a lottery with a BIG WINNER you generate far more mining interest from solo miners than from pools.
This is why companies that do surveys offer $1000 prizes rather than paying $1 per survey. Most people will not take a survey for $1 but they might for a chance at $1000 even if the chance of winning the prize was 1 in 1 million.
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This would be in the block chain, not the miners. Coin generation outputs would not be spendable as a valid transaction and no code modifications could change the rules without a hard fork.
I want to eliminate the MINE AND DUMP strategy, mining should only benefit those who are committed. Think of paying an employee in stock options that must VEST. You do not want to hire employees that leave, you want committed long-term employees who expect the options to go up in value. This builds a very loyal base which will benefit by seeing the price rise over 6 months, rather than a disloyal base that just gets a free-handout while providing little value.
Sure, many people who currently mine will stop mining and make room for new miners who have a long-term outlook. Transfer coins from profiteers to supporters and THAT is the goal.
mass adoption is what we want, and this encourages mass exodus.
Mining and dumping is bad yes, but it's what we do to keep afloat financially, understand that most people that do this arent rich, only the rich can afford to do long term investments that have no guarantee. worse off when they know there are other coins that can keep the lights on. I understand where you are coming from but you need to rethink this in my opinion.
hahaha, i'm afraid in miners there is no loyalty :P they are only loyal to what pays, as you have witnessed the hash swings based on the figures from Coinchoose and Coinwarz.
there are few such real supporters in comparison with profiteers, most are in it for the profit, some it's a hobby and a minority actually believe in it. i'm in the first and last group, and i can tell you that the six month wait won't fly with me and my ilk. most would find a bitcoin to spare, hire a months' worth of instances and that's it, just fire and forget. If not, they'll go mine something that gives them the money to spare and just do the above.
keep in mind you are saying that someone that joins in later will have to wait 6 months, so if i join in six months after everyone else, i'll be a year behind the first miners, no way people would go for that , with the way people are bitter about bitcoin already?
Ok, so you leave the coin... and that is FINE BY ME because you do not appreciate the future value. Why should anyone who cares about BitShares give a hoot about people looking for a short-term payout? Obviously you will return to the coin when you have a use for it and realize you could have made more money by holding than by selling. The option for a quick payout for reduced reward is still there.
The underlying assumption here is that without the 'miners' a coin has no value or no security. I contend, that loyal miners will provide more than enough security especially if the DAC is providing USEFUL UTILITY and is not just a speculative play like all other alts.
DAC...great idea, but look at where this whole mining thing comes from...BTC, why do people mine alts? speculation and easy road to btc. i'm just saying if you want real adoption, make it adoptable.
i think focus should be on perfecting Proto shares in the next chain by learning, making the algo more costly for instances, adjusting the block times and difficulty algos. a fully functional multi-pool getwork miner etc etc. diving into these radical ideas would meet heavy resistance and leave you with a barely populated forum and a snail's pace blockchain. once people move away, so does value.
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For example, Invictus would mine like crazy for 6 month vesting options and so would anyone else with a long-term outlook.
No, I think the market would still put a price on the value of PTS in 6 months times and Invictus might as well outsource their mining to someone who specializes in it. As could any investor. You can't force large miners to be large investors or vice versa.
This is why companies that do surveys offer $1000 prizes rather than paying $1 per survey. Most people will not take a survey for $1 but they might for a chance at $1000 even if the chance of winning the prize was 1 in 1 million.
Actually I've worked in this very area and both approaches are used.
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i think focus should be on perfecting Proto shares in the next chain by learning, making the algo more costly for instances, adjusting the block times and difficulty algos. a fully functional multi-pool getwork miner etc etc. diving into these radical ideas would meet heavy resistance and leave you with a barely populated forum and a snail's pace blockchain. once people move away, so does value.
The purpose of ProtoShares was to learn. We will probably launch a few more chains to learn more. Obviously we don't want to screw up BitShares :)
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Having a very random block award with background mining might suffer a limitation that people would switch over to mining a more instantly profitable coin. One idea might be to add random pauses to the default mining rewards - just even for a few hours at a time every day (and variably so). This would make it very much more expensive for VPS instances which are often on hourly rates. Changing the algorithm randomly so that server hardware initially selected becomes much less efficient (eg by adding a transient GPU element) might add another obstacle for VPS. I'd be careful about immediately making the mining rewards far less frequent as it would be less likely for the coin to gain wider acceptance.
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Having a very random block award with background mining might suffer a limitation that people would switch over to mining a more instantly profitable coin. One idea might be to add random pauses to the default mining rewards - just even for a few hours at a time every day (and variably so). This would make it very much more expensive for VPS instances which are often on hourly rates. Changing the algorithm randomly so that server hardware initially selected becomes much less efficient (eg by adding a transient GPU element) might add another obstacle for VPS. I'd be careful about immediately making the mining rewards far less frequent as it would be less likely for the coin to gain wider acceptance.
I posted a new Alternative DAC proposal for a PowerBall, DAC which is designed to test the theory that a large mining reward with disproportional odds to reward would cause many miners to 'solo mine' rather than pool-mine. It is an entire DAC dedicated to the idea and I suspect it would be an interesting experiment.
http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=915.msg9251#msg9251
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I agree, an integrated pool is fine and Invictus will spend significant time to make sure BitShares comes with a highly reliable pool at launch with an open protocol to allow other pools to compete.
So a default miner that does mining in the background unless the user chooses to kick it up a to a higher setting and the default client that always does at least 50% solo mining to prevent against centralization. Professionals can use stand alone miners that are 100% pool based, but of course would have to find a pool willing to finance their mining for 6 months.
Overall this gives a mix of steady income, random bonus, easy to use, and automatic security.
I was going to mention this as it was my next thought after loggin off before .
Of course it wouldnt be long before there would appear a "keyotee" pool it would probably be driven by people wanting to hit the " mine button" and see something no matter how small, in return .
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Having a very random block award with background mining might suffer a limitation that people would switch over to mining a more instantly profitable coin. One idea might be to add random pauses to the default mining rewards - just even for a few hours at a time every day (and variably so). This would make it very much more expensive for VPS instances which are often on hourly rates. Changing the algorithm randomly so that server hardware initially selected becomes much less efficient (eg by adding a transient GPU element) might add another obstacle for VPS. I'd be careful about immediately making the mining rewards far less frequent as it would be less likely for the coin to gain wider acceptance.
I posted a new Alternative DAC proposal for a PowerBall, DAC which is designed to test the theory that a large mining reward with disproportional odds to reward would cause many miners to 'solo mine' rather than pool-mine. It is an entire DAC dedicated to the idea and I suspect it would be an interesting experiment.
http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=915.msg9251#msg9251
Actually ages ago it was thrown around the bitcointalk about what to do with fees , we were saying wouldnt it be good if some fees were added up and completely randomly given to some random address , in a block .
Of course there lots of paramaters , but that was the idea .
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You don't have employees, you have investors. Companies can force limitations on employers because there's a discrepancy in power between them. It's obviously not the case here.
A miner is both an employee and an investor. These are not the rules of wall street.
The computer is the employee and the system administrator is the potential investor.
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I honestly couldn't care about a well-behaved process that uses 25% of my CPU when IDLE with a low priority setting and 99% of users wouldn't even know how to monitor their CPU usage and wouldn't look at it unless something else was slowing their computer down. Having an option to 'turn it off' would allow those who it really bothers to turn it off.
This may be true for you but it is not neccesarily true for everyone. Just make it a toggle easy to find in the keyhotee client and you'll solve your problem. There were very similar experiments where websites would utilize the CPU of their visitors computers at about 20% to mine instead of showing ads. People did NOT like it. And I agree with the others who think a more desirable reward especially for people with a long term perspective would be a really easy to use, distributed pool miner combined with the long vesting period.
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I doubt any public pool would work with 6 month mature time BUT release a getwork (or whatever protocol you like) miner that works with the wallet at release everyone can be his own private pool, not creating hundreds of connections since every wallet opens up 6-9
Just one wallet, as many miner as you like and off you go - i mean, do you really trust a pool to be around in 6 month? They can even run for just a few month and get away with a wallet full of unmatured block, wait up another 6, party on.
I really like the lottery idea and everything, the hashrate will be the same, either if everyone is mining solo or some pools provide it, it's maybe not as "fair" as pool mining but still, i really really like the concept.
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I do like the idea of the lottery to decentralize mining, I just think it'll be very hard to figure out exactly how to tune the lottery so that cloud mining and botnets aren't attracted, but the individual user is. After all, there are people who spend insane amounts of money on the lottery just for the chance of winning, so there may still be individuals that are willing to spend money on cloud mining even if it turns out to be unprofitable.
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I doubt any public pool would work with 6 month mature time BUT release a getwork (or whatever protocol you like) miner that works with the wallet at release everyone can be his own private pool, not creating hundreds of connections since every wallet opens up 6-9
Just one wallet, as many miner as you like and off you go - i mean, do you really trust a pool to be around in 6 month? They can even run for just a few month and get away with a wallet full of unmatured block, wait up another 6, party on.
I really like the lottery idea and everything, the hashrate will be the same, either if everyone is mining solo or some pools provide it, it's maybe not as "fair" as pool mining but still, i really really like the concept.
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I do like the idea of the lottery to decentralized, I just think it'll be very hard to figure out exactly how to tune the lottery so that cloud mining and botnets aren't attracted, but the individual user is. After all, there are people who spend insane amounts of money on the lottery just for the chance of winning, so there may still be individuals that are willing to spend money on cloud mining even if it turns out to be unprofitable.
You don't try to stop everyone, you just try to increase the number of solo miners. Under bitcoin and even ProtoShares the number of solo miners is essentially 0. However, if you change the economics of solo-mining perhaps an additional 5% of the hash power might be applied to solo-mining. Chances are that this extra hash power wouldn't be sourced from prior pool miners, but could be entirely new hash power added by people who don't care about $30 per month, but like the 'hope' of winning a million dollar jackpot.
1) Make mining more expensive by extending the time from expense to reward.
2) Make mining less predictable by having random mining amounts and vesting periods
3) Make solo mining appeal to irrational individuals looking to purchase 'hope'
If the lottery jackpot keeps growing on average then the incentive for solo-mining by those looking for 'hope' will increase over time.
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I would like to start by saying I am completely for the 6 month set vesting time, it would allow for all the aspects you listed earlier (and reduce the ability for cloud miners and botnets) but I have a few concerns about the other ideas you had recently mentioned:
I personally do not see the reason why Bitshare needs a random vesting period? It would allow more botnet/cloud miners to recoup their losses if they mine enough and it would make it more frustrating for regular miners. Most of the miners are smarter than the average "powerball player" and are not interested in a .000001% chance for any payout. I'd MUCH MUCH MUCH rather have less randomness than absolutely needed, all these random vesting periods and block amounts would frustrate me and ultimately cause a lot less people to mine this altogether. The powerball idea also poses problems in my mind as to if a few people win the few giant coin prizes, the bulk of the coins will ultimately end up in the hands of a few people. Bitshares are your main project so I hope you won't try too many different concepts than needed that could possibly jeopardize the integrity of the project as a whole.
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The power-ball prizes would have to limited to 1% of the money supply and have a limited withdraw rate. If you take a lump-sum payout you only get 10%, but if you payout over 24 months you can get the whole thing.
On a network like Bitcoin, it would be a $50 million dollar jackpot which would drive a lot of people to attempt to win it and thus 'hold' bitcoin and mine it. There is obviously a chicken and the egg problem as the prizes would be small unless enough people caught on. But with a network like BitShares, such a bounty is easily a potential.
I agree that there is a segment of the population that demands predictability. This segment will probably mine in pools which would eliminate most variance and is unlikely to solo-mine. So randomness should not change things for the pool miner.
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The power-ball prizes would have to limited to 1% of the money supply and have a limited withdraw rate. If you take a lump-sum payout you only get 10%, but if you payout over 24 months you can get the whole thing.
On a network like Bitcoin, it would be a $50 million dollar jackpot which would drive a lot of people to attempt to win it and thus 'hold' bitcoin and mine it. There is obviously a chicken and the egg problem as the prizes would be small unless enough people caught on. But with a network like BitShares, such a bounty is easily a potential.
I agree that there is a segment of the population that demands predictability. This segment will probably mine in pools which would eliminate most variance and is unlikely to solo-mine. So randomness should not change things for the pool miner.
Technically how would the user be able to choose between a lump-sum payout and a payout over 24 months?
As far as the 6 months, I think that is way too much time. People will lose interest in the coin. Do you even remember 6 months ago in Bitcoin history?
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The power-ball prizes would have to limited to 1% of the money supply and have a limited withdraw rate. If you take a lump-sum payout you only get 10%, but if you payout over 24 months you can get the whole thing.
On a network like Bitcoin, it would be a $50 million dollar jackpot which would drive a lot of people to attempt to win it and thus 'hold' bitcoin and mine it. There is obviously a chicken and the egg problem as the prizes would be small unless enough people caught on. But with a network like BitShares, such a bounty is easily a potential.
I agree that there is a segment of the population that demands predictability. This segment will probably mine in pools which would eliminate most variance and is unlikely to solo-mine. So randomness should not change things for the pool miner.
Technically how would the user be able to choose between a lump-sum payout and a payout over 24 months?
As far as the 6 months, I think that is way too much time. People will lose interest in the coin. Do you even remember 6 months ago in Bitcoin history?
Which would cause people to lose interest faster... selling something right after they mine it and then having the difficulty go up and thus they have nothing left... or holding something that is rising in value? They know they have it and that it is worth something and will follow it for months so they can cash it out.
Those who want instant payout can have it at a price that rewards those who have a long-term interest in the coin.
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As far as the 6 months, I think that is way too much time. People will lose interest in the coin. Do you even remember 6 months ago in Bitcoin history?
I remember 6 months ago waiting for a specific company to deliver ASIC product. :'( I really hope the algorithm going forward fixes that.
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The power-ball prizes would have to limited to 1% of the money supply and have a limited withdraw rate. If you take a lump-sum payout you only get 10%, but if you payout over 24 months you can get the whole thing.
On a network like Bitcoin, it would be a $50 million dollar jackpot which would drive a lot of people to attempt to win it and thus 'hold' bitcoin and mine it. There is obviously a chicken and the egg problem as the prizes would be small unless enough people caught on. But with a network like BitShares, such a bounty is easily a potential.
I agree that there is a segment of the population that demands predictability. This segment will probably mine in pools which would eliminate most variance and is unlikely to solo-mine. So randomness should not change things for the pool miner.
Well then I don't necessarily see the whole point in using a randomized "lottery-style" reward mechanism. Like you said, people can still join pools to the same effect as before, but so can cloud miners and botnets.
What purpose does using this lottery reward system solve in terms of evening out the mining rewards when a botnet or cloud miner still has a significant advantage in gaining just as much as they did when protoshares were released (if not more if their luck is better)?
In my opinion this mechanism will provide Bitshares with the exact opposite effect than the one you want.
Releasing these grand prizes will most likely cause frustration further in solo miners that don't pool as they'll constantly see these "powerballs" floating right towards these giant botnets, cloud miners, and over-sized pools. In this scenario I also believe people want predictability more than you think and I can easily see an incredibly oversized pool with over 50% of the hashing power popping up.
- As always, not criticizing, just voicing concerns.
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
It may be too late to be a big ProtoShares lottery winner but it's not too late to be a wily ProtoShares investor.
Many opportunities for ProtoShareholders are inbound like planes at a busy airport, no matter how you wind up acquiring them.
:)
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With a 6 month vesting period I think you will substantially reduce the size of your potential investor base. Many people can go make the same or more money elsewhere in much less time.
With a 6 month vesting I might be interested in owning 100 shares. If that vesting occurs in 30 days I would be interested in owning alot more shares, maybe 100x. If the vesting is instant (like PTS), then I want as many as I can get my hands on.
People get excited when they think they can make money quickly. Making money 6 months from now is not nearly as exciting.
If you do decide to do a long or variable vesting period I'd strongly suggest testing it first.
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With a 6 month vesting period I think you will substantially reduce the size of your potential investor base. Many people can go make the same or more money elsewhere in much less time.
With a 6 month vesting I might be interested in owning 100 shares. If that vesting occurs in 30 days I would be interested in owning alot more shares, maybe 100x. If the vesting is instant (like PTS), then I want as many as I can get my hands on.
People get excited when they think they can make money quickly. Making money 6 months from now is not nearly as exciting.
If you do decide to do a long or variable vesting period I'd strongly suggest testing it first.
Your statement says you would like to 'own'... but the reality is you would OWN it even with the vesting.... the difference is you would not be able to SPEND IT and if you are SPENDING it you wouldn't actually own 100x now would you? You would like to MINE 100x and wouldn't everyone like a free lunch :).
I think that mining will still happen by those with a long-term perspective and they will secure the network. BTS will be scarce and only available to those who have PTS in the first 6 months. This means that you should mine PTS now and have your instant vesting.
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I have identified a very simple and elegant algorithm for encouraging solo-mining without drastic changes to the block-chain.
Given a traditional blockchain, finding a block hash at difficulty D pays reward R and this will produce the expected currency supply at a predictable rate provided D is adjusted according to available hash power.
For high values of D the probability of a user finding a block is perceived as 0 and the reward when found is still R so solo miners stop mining.
Given a high value of D, 2*D has no effect on the user's perception of probability as being 0 despite a clear 2x increase in the expected time to finding a block. 2*Never = Never.
So what happens if you allow the user to select their target difficulty provided it is higher than D?
If the user opts to mine a 2*D then to get a statistically equal reward rate the payout should be 2*R. Now for most users 2*R is still not worth solo-mining when the perception is that the probability of finding the block is 0.
However, if the user opts to mine at 10000*D and the payout is now 9000*R then all of a sudden the perception of the user is that the reward has gone up by a factor of 9000 while the probability of finding it remains effectively 0. It is entirely irrational, but it is the same rationale that motivates people to play the lottery despite all reason. Many people simply believe they are 'lucky' or that God will honor their prayers and grant them a lucky hash.
Lets assign a variable to the luck factor, L
So you allow solo-miners to pick their luck factor L... if they opt for the miracle odds where L = 20,000,000 they could get a block reward equal to the entire market cap (0.9*R*L) of the coin when they win, but if they loose they get a micropayment equal to R/L.
So long as the minimal value for L above 1000 then solo miners can play the lottery. Imagine how many people would solo-mine bitcoin on a CPU if you told them that if they 'win' they could receive 25,000 BTC = $15 million dollars? Rational people with money wouldn't bother, but poor people in search of hope would leave the computer running without thinking about electricity costs (considered 0) just for the *chance* at a 15 million dollar payout. Give them the ability for a $50 million payout by increasing L to 3000 and many people will jump on that as well.
Does this extra hash power actually impact the security of the network? It would increase the number of 'full nodes' and serious loto-players would probably buy ASICs just to increase their chances even if the ASIC would never pay for itself mining on a traditional pool. The result of such a system would be to decentralize ASICs and in aggregate those playing the lottery at a loss will reduce the margins of those attempting to centralize hash power through economy of scale. This changes the economics of mining from rich centralized players to poor decentralized gamblers in search of hope.
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I think the vesting period is a brilliant idea to keep only interested investors.
However I cannot see why you would like to ruin hopes of profit for everybody by using a lottery system. Building on people's irrationality rather than rationality is a terrible choice in my opinion. This will unnecessarily decrease the attractiveness of Bitshares for rational people who are not already convinced, and I don't think many people like to think of themselves as irrational. As you have written yourself in the OP, miners who use only commodity hardware already have an edge over mass miners since they do not have an investment to recover, so I don't know why you go to such lengths.
I agree that Bitshares distribution should not reward the richest, but I think the problem can only correct itself. If there is profit to be made by cloud mining, then people will invest more into VPS, eventually lowering the profits until no one can get a ROI on hiring a VPS (provided the difficulty adjusts fast enough). But then there will still be profit to be made by single PC miners, who do not need any ROI, and they will be able to push VPS users out of the game, as the number of flesh and bones investors grows and the power shifts from mass miners to single PC miners.
If you want to restrict mining to home computers, consider involving a GPU in the proof of work. I had an idea like this: keep sealing the blocks with a CPU-only PoW, but also require some GPU-only work in the body of the block. If you are willing to surrender a little bit of decentralization, you could even make the GPU work something scientifically useful, like in Curecoin: you could make the reward of the block proportional to the points earned in a distributed computing project like Folding@Home (with a cap and an adaptive exchange rate). Such scientific programs also run on CPU but much slower, so this penalizes cloud instances. ASIC are out of the question for such evolving applications. This leaves botnets: I don't think it would be very easy for a botnet operator to make a GPU scream without drawing some attention, but this is only supposition. The issue is that the point tally depends on a central authority. This could be alleviated by including other research programs. This also poses the question of how points are checked: each node of the network will need to check the points to validate the reward and the block, which will cause massive traffic on the websites of the scientific projects, and will look like a DDoS.
About decentralization, I think a giant, built-in P2Pool system could be the way to go. I am not too sure how it scales though. Pool difficulty must be high enough to avoid network spam, which means it would still be kind of a lottery system, but with lower variance. As far as I am concerned, if I am sure to get a reward at least once every 1-3 months, it could be acceptable.
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While some people may not like the effects of cloud mining, at least it was equal opportunity for anyone who can follow the instructions laid out in the forums. Unfortunately there is another class of attack, the botnet. Botnet operators steal computing power and electricity from other people so they can mine and as a result they can bring thousands of computers to mine for the network. Botnet operators are generally looking to make a profit and therefore have little incentive to see a currency destroyed, but they still manage to make it more difficult for honest individuals to 'fairly' mine shares. There are opportunity costs associated with running a botnet and so botnet operators generally dump the mined shares immediately.
Still there could be botnets interested even if the reward is going to happen 6 months later.
For avoiding this, I have an idea that you can consider:
Most botnets are Windows infected machines. So release your miners only for Linux, and make sure that porting to Windows is difficult. Of course, the clients are available for Windows too, but with no mining capability. For those using Windows machines, they could install easily an Ubuntu virtual machine in their Virtual Box.
This alone should stop botnets for some time, and would reduce the number of them in the long term, but also will encourage that supporters of your project are technically knowing what they are doing, so at the end this would stop both botnets and noobs who come only for the money.
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While some people may not like the effects of cloud mining, at least it was equal opportunity for anyone who can follow the instructions laid out in the forums. Unfortunately there is another class of attack, the botnet. Botnet operators steal computing power and electricity from other people so they can mine and as a result they can bring thousands of computers to mine for the network. Botnet operators are generally looking to make a profit and therefore have little incentive to see a currency destroyed, but they still manage to make it more difficult for honest individuals to 'fairly' mine shares. There are opportunity costs associated with running a botnet and so botnet operators generally dump the mined shares immediately.
Still there could be botnets interested even if the reward is going to happen 6 months later.
For avoiding this, I have an idea that you can consider:
Most botnets are Windows infected machines. So release your miners only for Linux, and make sure that porting to Windows is difficult. Of course, the clients are available for Windows too, but with no mining capability. For those using Windows machines, they could install easily an Ubuntu virtual machine in their Virtual Box.
This alone should stop botnets for some time, and would reduce the number of them in the long term, but also will encourage that supporters of your project are technically knowing what they are doing, so at the end this would stop both botnets and noobs who come only for the money.
First off, I don't believe discriminating against miners who are less technologically-apt is a healthy choice to spread the idea of Bitshares. Second, your idea would work to the extreme benefit of cloud miners as they use cheap linux boxes for mass mining. You can't protect against all the forms of mass mining but at best you can mitigate it, and that's what the idea of vesting period is attempting to do.
Lastly,
and noobs who come only for the money.
We are investors in this currency, most people are here to see a return on their investment.
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Ok, so a better choice:
Why don't you just put the entire bitshares to crowdfunding (except the part already asiggned to protoshares) and disable mining completely (the only rewards are in the fees/dividends)?
I would be glad to put $2000 of my own money into the project this way, but I wouldn't if I have to compete with botnets and cloud minning.
Everyday that passes convinces me that mining is not fare, you just can't compete with malicious hackers that use botnets, specially for CPU mining. These people are going to make themselves rich at the cost of your project and your supporters.
And I don't believe they can't wait 6 months to cash their robbery. They can perfectly.
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Okay I know this is a taboo but...
Keep bitshares wallet closed source or release it a few months in. That way no one can create their own pools and miners then point vps and botnets at it right away. Give regular users a chance to get some in the first few months. I'm willing to trust you guys with that. Change the mPoW algo so that the old miners cannot be used. Make it more memory intensive so that you'll need 8gb ram for 4 threads or something along those lines.
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
It may be too late to be a big ProtoShares lottery winner but it's not too late to be a wily ProtoShares investor.
Many opportunities for ProtoShareholders are inbound like planes at a busy airport, no matter how you wind up acquiring them.
:)
You're missing the point - I want to mine and be a part of something. I'm not looking for a random investment, I want to build something up as a part of a community. If you have to reside to buying shares to be a part of something that's only a few weeks old then something is wrong.
If I would have bought bitcoins two weeks ago and sold them today I would have had a massive profit, but I'm not into speculation. I want something more.
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
I feel like requiring a centrally issued signature to mine goes against the purpose of a decentralized currency. You should keep it open to the public, and keep entry barriers low for people that want to solo-mine. The difficult part is to make entry barriers high for people who want to cloud-mine
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
I feel like requiring a centrally issued signature to mine goes against the purpose of a decentralized currency. You should keep it open to the public, and keep entry barriers low for people that want to solo-mine. The difficult part is to make entry barriers high for people who want to cloud-mine
It is only temporal for 6 months, just to enable precisely more decentralization, so more "normal" people can obtain his/her share without being busted by other users that steal CPU power from others (botnets).
There could be an unconditional free license to allow mining some blocks, some paid licenses to mine big amount of blocks, and after the 6 months no license is required anymore.
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BitShares will have a mining component to them no matter what. My plan is to making mining a little more exciting for some people which will encourage solo-mining without having any impact at all on regular pool miners who like regular predictable payouts.
With lottery mining 'dial your own odds' lottery system, any 'business man' would stick to the default mining behavior. However, consumers looking to purchase 'hope' while supporting a 'good cause' can set their mining mode to "I'm feeling Lucky" and if they are "Lucky" the could end up with a multi-million dollar win. If they never win it is no skin of their back.
So I deal with pool miners by forcing new miners to hold for many months. This makes them long-term vesting employees with financial incentive to promote the coin they just mined over many months.
Most of the BitShares will be issued as 'stock splits' rather than as inflation paid to miners anyway.
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
It may be too late to be a big ProtoShares lottery winner but it's not too late to be a wily ProtoShares investor.
Many opportunities for ProtoShareholders are inbound like planes at a busy airport, no matter how you wind up acquiring them.
:)
You're missing the point - I want to mine and be a part of something. I'm not looking for a random investment, I want to build something up as a part of a community. If you have to reside to buying shares to be a part of something that's only a few weeks old then something is wrong.
If I would have bought bitcoins two weeks ago and sold them today I would have had a massive profit, but I'm not into speculation. I want something more.
Fair enough. We didn't expect it to be such an explosive start and had designed it to take 2 years. I guess there is such a thing as too much publicity with all our conference announcements, website posts, articles and newsletters in the months leading up to this first event! But as you can see from this forum, there is a lot of work being done to improve things with a variety of ways to participate:
- Traditional mining of each new DAC as a member of third-party pools with long term vesting interest in the DAC.
- Better calibration of initial difficulty and much more dynamic difficulty adjustment.
- Solo mining in the background of your PC incentivized with a "dial your own odds" lottery ranging from steady paycheck to life-changing long-shots.
- Investing in ProtoShares for genesis block stakes in all our future DACs.
- Some future DACs may experiment with other ways (e.g. crowd sourcing of pre-mined shares, signed mining permits, etc.).
- Plus there will be bounties for everything from graphics arts to software components, employment opportunities and even coming Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to do contracted work.
- And just look at all the entrepreneurs that don't wait for us to get involved. They are starting all kinds of businesses using this forum as a launch point.
We will continue to sponsor research and release DACs that experiment with better and better ways to serve their stakeholders.
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How does one require the miner to hold for 6 months?
The found block takes that long too mature?
So miners that do wish to sell -- won't just sell that wallet?
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How does one require the miner to hold for 6 months?
The found block takes that long too mature?
So miners that do wish to sell -- won't just sell that wallet?
Thats a very manual process.
I think it might be more likely a pool would sell all their production to one buyer, the buyer would pay the pool with Bitcoin and their Bitshares wallet would be the pools payout until the agreed upon amount or contract duration passes, at which point the next allocation of time is sold to the highest bidder.
The point isn't to create a perfect system, but to shift the incentives so that it doesnt make sense to mine unless you believe strongly it will have a lot of value in half a years time.
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So miners that do wish to sell -- won't just sell that wallet?
You can sell the wallet or privkey, but no one will believe you won't keep a copy of those and transfer out the fund later when they mature.
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So miners that do wish to sell -- won't just sell that wallet?
You can sell the wallet or privkey, but no one will believe you won't keep a copy of those and transfer out the fund later when they mature.
a new form of escrow could fix that.
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There are a lot of things the market will do to shift resources around. The one thing the market cannot do though is make those newly mined shares mature faster than 6 months. As a result the demand for mining power will be limited to those willing to risk 6 months of carrying costs.
Someone who doesn't want to mine directly can 'hire it out' to a pool, the pool employees will be paid immediately, but the true miner is the person who ends up holding until maturity. The profits from mining in a pool will therefore be discounted by the time-value of money.
This creates a new class of owner... those committed to holding the currency for 6 months. This means that the difficulty would be a good proxy for the long-term interest in the currency rather than short-term pump and dump mining.
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There are a lot of things the market will do to shift resources around. The one thing the market cannot do though is make those newly mined shares mature faster than 6 months. As a result the demand for mining power will be limited to those willing to risk 6 months of carrying costs.
Someone who doesn't want to mine directly can 'hire it out' to a pool, the pool employees will be paid immediately, but the true miner is the person who ends up holding until maturity. The profits from mining in a pool will therefore be discounted by the time-value of money.
This creates a new class of owner... those committed to holding the currency for 6 months. This means that the difficulty would be a good proxy for the long-term interest in the currency rather than short-term pump and dump mining.
This actually sounds a lot like a bond. In exchange for some CPU time, you get a certain number of Bitshares that will mature in 6 months, so you have to trust that those bitshares will actually be worth something, or that the bitshares DAC will still be a functioning corporation, in 6 months
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
It may be too late to be a big ProtoShares lottery winner but it's not too late to be a wily ProtoShares investor.
Many opportunities for ProtoShareholders are inbound like planes at a busy airport, no matter how you wind up acquiring them.
:)
You're missing the point - I want to mine and be a part of something. I'm not looking for a random investment, I want to build something up as a part of a community. If you have to reside to buying shares to be a part of something that's only a few weeks old then something is wrong.
If I would have bought bitcoins two weeks ago and sold them today I would have had a massive profit, but I'm not into speculation. I want something more.
Fair enough. We didn't expect it to be such an explosive start and had designed it to take 2 years. I guess there is such a thing as too much publicity with all our conference announcements, website posts, articles and newsletters in the months leading up to this first event! But as you can see from this forum, there is a lot of work being done to improve things with a variety of ways to participate:
The difference between mining and buying shares is what I want to point out, and in this case, I would rather have had a full premine and buying shares directly from you than from the very miners that ruined everyone else's chance to mine.
If i had 500 shares, even if they were worth 0.000001BTC, I would do everything i could to help (Graphics-Coding-Etc) without any payment and I know there are thousands of people like me. Right now, since I really believe in ProtoShares, the best thing for me would be if the value went down to almost nothing so I could stack up.
Don't worry though, I talk about ProtoShares a lot :) Just want to make sure you really understand why I'm frustrated. Not because I wanted to win the lottery, but because I wanted to contribute and be a part of the beginning and future of ProtoShares. And BTW, it's really cool that PTS gained this much attention in the flood of altcoins out there :)
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I think this is a great idea - I read up on ProtoShares right after it went live and i just liked the whole concept of CPU mining and DAC's, but i quickly realized i was too late to the game by just a few days. I looked forward to being an early adopter, but in this case early adopters were the ones who began mining the first 24 hours.
And as other have said, it's not the botnets that will support ProtoShares in the long run, it's a dedicated user base.
It may be too late to be a big ProtoShares lottery winner but it's not too late to be a wily ProtoShares investor.
Many opportunities for ProtoShareholders are inbound like planes at a busy airport, no matter how you wind up acquiring them.
:)
You're missing the point - I want to mine and be a part of something. I'm not looking for a random investment, I want to build something up as a part of a community. If you have to reside to buying shares to be a part of something that's only a few weeks old then something is wrong.
If I would have bought bitcoins two weeks ago and sold them today I would have had a massive profit, but I'm not into speculation. I want something more.
Fair enough. We didn't expect it to be such an explosive start and had designed it to take 2 years. I guess there is such a thing as too much publicity with all our conference announcements, website posts, articles and newsletters in the months leading up to this first event! But as you can see from this forum, there is a lot of work being done to improve things with a variety of ways to participate:
The difference between mining and buying shares is what I want to point out, and in this case, I would rather have had a full premine and buying shares directly from you than from the very miners that ruined everyone else's chance to mine.
If i had 500 shares, even if they were worth 0.000001BTC, I would do everything i could to help (Graphics-Coding-Etc) without any payment and I know there are thousands of people like me. Right now, since I really believe in ProtoShares, the best thing for me would be if the value went down to almost nothing so I could stack up.
Don't worry though, I talk about ProtoShares a lot :) Just want to make sure you really understand why I'm frustrated. Not because I wanted to win the lottery, but because I wanted to contribute and be a part of the beginning and future of ProtoShares. And BTW, it's really cool that PTS gained this much attention in the flood of altcoins out there :)
This is so true... I'm in the same situation as you.
But yet bytemaster comes and says again that we should play the lottery...
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
I also had this idea on my way driving to work this morning. It's great to have so many people thinking about it. ;D I don't have it fully fleshed out either, but I think we can all agree that we don't want it centralized. There needs to be some method of Mining Contracts or Mining DAC's that utilize Keyhotee ID's. Something that tied mining availability, the right to work, to a reward system. This along with difficulty keeps it from spinning out of control. I'll post more as I think of it, just brainstorming for now.
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Hmmm. Just had a little idea this evening. What if you used Coin Age and Proof-of-Stake? I dunno if this would choke-hold the economy or stabilize it. So one of the things we want to prevent is someone launching a botnet and mining large amounts of coins to dump. Perhaps you might have to use some processing power to keep ahold of your coins. So after you mine them you also have to proportional renew through Proof-of-Stake or they are worth less.
So if I launched a huge botnet on the first day, I would get a whole bunch of coins. But after that I would now have to maintain 10-20% of the processing power, to retain 100% of that coin value. This is in contrast to someone who is solo mining would just have a background process that renews their coins. This would also discourage pools. They already get overloaded with requests, but now they also have to have a proportional number of computers to maintain the balance that they mined.
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Hmmm. Just had a little idea this evening. What if you used Coin Age and Proof-of-Stake? I dunno if this would choke-hold the economy or stabilize it. So one of the things we want to prevent is someone launching a botnet and mining large amounts of coins to dump. Perhaps you might have to use some processing power to keep ahold of your coins. So after you mine them you also have to proportional renew through Proof-of-Stake or they are worth less.
So if I launched a huge botnet on the first day, I would get a whole bunch of coins. But after that I would now have to maintain 10-20% of the processing power, to retain 100% of that coin value. This is in contrast to someone who is solo mining would just have a background process that renews their coins. This would also discourage pools. They already get overloaded with requests, but now they also have to have a proportional number of computers to maintain the balance that they mined.
And perhaps to protect fungibility we only care about this for the first month or two after the coin has been mined.
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
I also had this idea on my way driving to work this morning. It's great to have so many people thinking about it. ;D I don't have it fully fleshed out either, but I think we can all agree that we don't want it centralized. There needs to be some method of Mining Contracts or Mining DAC's that utilize Keyhotee ID's. Something that tied mining availability, the right to work, to a reward system. This along with difficulty keeps it from spinning out of control. I'll post more as I think of it, just brainstorming for now.
Yeah very nice. Please keep us informed of your thinkings.
But it should be bytemaster the one who oversight this.
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Hmmm. Just had a little idea this evening. What if you used Coin Age and Proof-of-Stake? I dunno if this would choke-hold the economy or stabilize it. So one of the things we want to prevent is someone launching a botnet and mining large amounts of coins to dump. Perhaps you might have to use some processing power to keep ahold of your coins. So after you mine them you also have to proportional renew through Proof-of-Stake or they are worth less.
So if I launched a huge botnet on the first day, I would get a whole bunch of coins. But after that I would now have to maintain 10-20% of the processing power, to retain 100% of that coin value. This is in contrast to someone who is solo mining would just have a background process that renews their coins. This would also discourage pools. They already get overloaded with requests, but now they also have to have a proportional number of computers to maintain the balance that they mined.
And perhaps to protect fungibility we only care about this for the first month or two after the coin has been mined.
Great ideas everyone. I think simple is best. The effect of post-mining is the same as increasing the difficulty after the first block and it will add no security or other benefit to the network. It may be useful for other purposes though.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk (http://tapatalk.com/m?id=1)
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Yeah very nice. Please keep us informed of your thinkings.
But it should be bytemaster the one who oversight this.
Of course, just brainstorming. I want to see this work. 8)
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Hmmm. Just had a little idea this evening. What if you used Coin Age and Proof-of-Stake? I dunno if this would choke-hold the economy or stabilize it. So one of the things we want to prevent is someone launching a botnet and mining large amounts of coins to dump. Perhaps you might have to use some processing power to keep ahold of your coins. So after you mine them you also have to proportional renew through Proof-of-Stake or they are worth less.
So if I launched a huge botnet on the first day, I would get a whole bunch of coins. But after that I would now have to maintain 10-20% of the processing power, to retain 100% of that coin value. This is in contrast to someone who is solo mining would just have a background process that renews their coins. This would also discourage pools. They already get overloaded with requests, but now they also have to have a proportional number of computers to maintain the balance that they mined.
And perhaps to protect fungibility we only care about this for the first month or two after the coin has been mined.
Great ideas everyone. I think simple is best. The effect of post-mining is the same as increasing the difficulty after the first block and it will add no security or other benefit to the network. It may be useful for other purposes though.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk (http://tapatalk.com/m?id=1)
Yet the difficulty is still relatively low, so even with the increased difficultly you can still roll that into your margins for day-zero through day-two mining. Added benefits is that nearly everyone will be running a fully node(but there might be some logistical problems with that), which does add large security benefits.
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I like the Idea of 6 month block maturing. Though I think 3 month would be also sufficient...
Only problem I see, this would not keep botnets from mining, but I think I may have a solution for that, though not sure if it will work.
Could we prevent botnets from running if we would implement a captcha in the client? So that every time you start mining you have to solve a captcha...I guess that would stop botnets :)
What do you think about that?
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I like the Idea of 6 month block maturing. Though I think 3 month would be also sufficient...
Only problem I see, this would not keep botnets from mining, but I think I may have a solution for that, though not sure if it will work.
Could we prevent botnets from running if we would implement a captcha in the client? So that every time you start mining you have to solve a captcha...I guess that would stop botnets :)
What do you think about that?
Humans cannot be in the loop because it is all open source and has to be validated by a machine.
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I like the Idea of 6 month block maturing. Though I think 3 month would be also sufficient...
Only problem I see, this would not keep botnets from mining, but I think I may have a solution for that, though not sure if it will work.
Could we prevent botnets from running if we would implement a captcha in the client? So that every time you start mining you have to solve a captcha...I guess that would stop botnets :)
What do you think about that?
Also implementing that in to an efficient linux miner would be rather difficult :P and time again has shown, where there's a will there's a way, especially with the ability/price of modern captcha solvers like DBC. I like Bytemaster's approach of trying to make this as simple as possible while trying to make it harder for mass miners.
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Ey! This gave me a better idea! :)
Why don't you use signed mining?
I mean: to be a miner, you must be aproved by Invictus and recive a key to be able to mine, and any client which tries to mine without being signed cannot find a block. You can also impose limits on the amount one miner can mine.
Then, after the 6 months period, you just release a new version which removes the signing requirement.
You can even sell a license to mine, but please make it cheap.
I don't exactly know how this could be implemented, but I'm sure you can think ways.
I feel like requiring a centrally issued signature to mine goes against the purpose of a decentralized currency. You should keep it open to the public, and keep entry barriers low for people that want to solo-mine. The difficult part is to make entry barriers high for people who want to cloud-mine
It is only temporal for 6 months, just to enable precisely more decentralization, so more "normal" people can obtain his/her share without being busted by other users that steal CPU power from others (botnets).
There could be an unconditional free license to allow mining some blocks, some paid licenses to mine big amount of blocks, and after the 6 months no license is required anymore.
Can we have a rating system to quantify the levels of decentralization in a solution? With the goal of providing maximum opportunity to "normal" users?
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I like the Idea of 6 month block maturing. Though I think 3 month would be also sufficient...
Only problem I see, this would not keep botnets from mining, but I think I may have a solution for that, though not sure if it will work.
Could we prevent botnets from running if we would implement a captcha in the client? So that every time you start mining you have to solve a captcha...I guess that would stop botnets :)
What do you think about that?
That is the idea I was thinking about. That is what I suggest for handling the botnets. The captcha should appear at random intervals so no one knows when and the kind of captcha should change. Actually my version would be puzzles which only a human can solve but yes this is a solution.
Additionally once verified to be operated by a user the user should get some sorta verification points so that the captcha shows up less frequently. This means if you successfully solve 10 captchas in a row then you will get 1 week without any.
And the captchas should appear at random so no one can know and schedule for it. You can only use your points to automagically bypass the captchas.
Maybe something like this? http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/gamers-to-help-create-bot-proof-captcha-616655
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(http://bitcoinexaminer.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mining-rig-extraordinaire-the-Trenton-BPX6806-mod.jpg)
random proof of human punishes guys like this. Not so good an idea.
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(http://bitcoinexaminer.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mining-rig-extraordinaire-the-Trenton-BPX6806-mod.jpg)
random proof of human punishes guys like this. Not so good an idea.
:o I've only seen this picture in my dreams before
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I have more computers than that in my basement right now :)
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Bro do you even mine?
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Dear bytemaster (and of course everyone else)
before i start arguing: Thanks for all the work you already did. You are doing a great job! :)
If I read your arguments correctly you want (among other things) to accomplish the following:
a) decentralize the mining
b) decrease the amount of big cloud miners
But I don't see how including/shifting to a lottery really changes things.
Wouldn't then people want that botnet - which plays the lottery for them - even more?
A process that runs 'in the background and just takes 25% cpu time" sound like the perfect thing to hide in office/library/everyone’s computers.
At the end it comes down to probability. I get it, you are arguing with psychology.
And I think you are right to a certain degree, but still a lot of people do the math and have that botnet that plays the lottery for them anyway.
Another point you make is that people won't trust the pool operator to pay out the jackpot. Why shouldn't they? Setting up the pool is a lot of work. To run away with the first 10K that come at you sounds like a bad idea if you can take n% of the next m lottery wins. In summary I think this makes it even worse. People will still use pools. But just the big one(s), that everyone trusts. So this may even prevent further decentralization.
My argument is that you don't have to change that much to accomplish your goals. You haven't had it so bad in the first place. The original miner kind of sucked for cloud mining. I did some benchmarks: Virtualization layers (like kvm for example) slowed things down by almost 50%. I blame that on the high memory requirements in the original wallet-miner. Before you say: virtualization slows everything down: The effect was not reproduceable with (solo)mining primecoin and VirtIO/VT worked on that machine:). I kind of liked the effect, as I thought it was on purpose :). But my sample data wasn't large enough to prove this effect for different hardware and software virtualization layers. But it may be a hint towards punishing large scale cloud mining. The later miners did not show this behavior btw: The virtualized miners now perfom on par with the non virtualized machines.
In summary I think the lottery idea is a step in the wrong direction because it does not encourage decentralization.
People already form lottery/pool syndicates to play the lottery! Why shouldn't they do that when mining? Isn't that what pools are about already?
The main reason that people switched from solo-mining to pools is not only the instant gratification but also the immense performance increase
the pool clients offered. If there would have been an optimized solo-minier at start, some people would still be solo-mining.
To prevent this pool-oligopoly situation we saw in the beginning, an open-source pool server would be really helpful.
People wouldn't have the need to use the big-pool(s) with high fees if they could use their own one with zero fees.
Another point that we should consider is that the image a lottery system reflects may be harmful considering that people shall use BTS for serious stuff.
(No offence to lottery-site operators btw :)
tl;dr
In a nutshell I argue that the following (some of it has already been proposed in this thread) will do a better job to accomplish a) and b) than implementing a lottery.
- continuous difficulty adjustment (e.g. similar to primecoin)
- PoW has to rely (even more) on high memory bandwidth to penalize cloud miners.
- Pools and pool software should be available at start
- open source pools should be available, so that people can operate them easily.
- Optimize the miners before release.
Yes, that does not prevent botnets from happening but neither does the lottery.
I hope you find that helpful. Thanks for your hard work!
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tl;dr
In a nutshell I argue that the following (some of it has already been proposed in this thread) will do a better job to accomplish a) and b) than implementing a lottery.
- continuous difficulty adjustment (e.g. similar to primecoin)
- PoW has to rely (even more) on high memory bandwidth to penalize cloud miners.
- Pools and pool software should be available at start
- open source pools should be available, so that people can operate them easily.
- Optimize the miners before release.
Yes, that does not prevent botnets from happening but neither does the lottery.
I hope you find that helpful. Thanks for your hard work!
That's an excellent summary of the lessons that should be taken from ProtoShares.
In my opinion a vesting period will achieve nothing and perhaps be detrimental, a lottery may generate a little excitement but it won't help fundamentals (probably won't hurt either).
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A lottery is not just lower Odds, it is 50% lower payout per hash. Pools are all about optimizing the payout per hash and any pool that decided to use loto-mining would end up donating 50% of their hash power to the network.
People will always be able to install 'malware' on library computers, but it would be far more profitable if they installed traditional miners rather than loto-miners.
Remember, the goal of loto-mining is to make it less profitable and therefore irrational to engage in. However, all such gambling is irrational and people do it for hope anyway. Every single Loto-Miner reduces the margins available to the traditional miners and if enough people decide to 'play' then mining will continue even though it is no longer a profitable business!
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I think you're fighting the tide on this one Bytemaster, the type of people you want to incentivize and compensate for paying attention are the ones who see the potential and want to be invested in the idea as they help bring it to fruition through their personal actions. The problem that pools solve is the difficulty of knowing if your work (computer mining) is going to give you a payout because as the popularity of a coin increases (in this case very quickly) the choice to mine by yourself starts looking like a stupid thing to do.
Yes, there are calculators that say you'll find a block every 8 days but that's a lot of faith to put into a fast moving currency and sometimes the odds don't go in your favor and the difficulty moves past you. The point of Mining is to equitably distribute tokens that individuals imbue with value through their interest and want to further build the project.
So the solution is to figure out how to let people join a global pool, operated by the issuing company who can collect a very minimal %, and pay people equitably for their contribution. Then it truly is a fire and forget sort of operation, and as the operator you can determine if you want to allow cloud miners or if they should be off in their own pool using miners they create themselves.
Solve the pool problem by catering to the need that demands Pools be popular.
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A lottery is not just lower Odds, it is 50% lower payout per hash. Pools are all about optimizing the payout per hash and any pool that decided to use loto-mining would end up donating 50% of their hash power to the network.
People will always be able to install 'malware' on library computers, but it would be far more profitable if they installed traditional miners rather than loto-miners.
Remember, the goal of loto-mining is to make it less profitable and therefore irrational to engage in. However, all such gambling is irrational and people do it for hope anyway. Every single Loto-Miner reduces the margins available to the traditional miners and if enough people decide to 'play' then mining will continue even though it is no longer a profitable business!
I'd go more for the partial hashes we talked about. That seems like a more simplistic route, and then incorporating lotto later once you are sure that works(maybe I just like the idea of partials better, still working on the same incentive principle here). Lets be clear we want to eliminate pools(centralization), and go for a solo mining that everyone can agree on. Like you discussed there are bottleneck issues with making a decentralized pool, but this kinda solves to an extent.
Then again trying to shoot down that same idea, seems like solo miners would only want to connect to other solo mining peers. Would partial matches flood the network as we try to establish them in the next block? Now you also have the problem of collisions as well. If node 1 and node 2 submit the same partial hash who decides who gets the reward. A pool will give you a REJECT, but how does the network say REJECT also?
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A lottery is not just lower Odds, it is 50% lower payout per hash. Pools are all about optimizing the payout per hash and any pool that decided to use loto-mining would end up donating 50% of their hash power to the network.
People will always be able to install 'malware' on library computers, but it would be far more profitable if they installed traditional miners rather than loto-miners.
Remember, the goal of loto-mining is to make it less profitable and therefore irrational to engage in. However, all such gambling is irrational and people do it for hope anyway. Every single Loto-Miner reduces the margins available to the traditional miners and if enough people decide to 'play' then mining will continue even though it is no longer a profitable business!
I'd go more for the partial hashes we talked about. That seems like a more simplistic route, and then incorporating lotto later once you are sure that works(maybe I just like the idea of partials better, still working on the same incentive principle here). Lets be clear we want to eliminate pools(centralization), and go for a solo mining that everyone can agree on. Like you discussed there are bottleneck issues with making a decentralized pool, but this kinda solves to an extent.
Then again trying to shoot down that same idea, seems like solo miners would only want to connect to other solo mining peers. Would partial matches flood the network as we try to establish them in the next block? Now you also have the problem of collisions as well. If node 1 and node 2 submit the same partial hash who decides who gets the reward. A pool will give you a REJECT, but how does the network say REJECT also?
While it is possible to offer rewards for including partial hashes, each partial hash would add at least 200 bytes to the block which means that if we designed the system to support 100 partial hashes then we would be using 20KB of every block for these partial hashes. Assuming difficulty got to the point where the expected time to find a result is 10 years, then the expected time to find a partial hash would be 5 weeks and the reward would be 1/100 of a normal block. All things considered I do not think the partial hash solution scales.
You can use a decentralized pool, but these pools suffer from latency issues in their own right or everyone would have migrated to a P2P Pool for bitcoin mining in the name of decentralization and lower fees.
My goal is not to eliminate pools, but to motivate solo mining and add a new dynamic to the coin experience that adds value without removing any value. If people like it then they use it and everyone else just ignores it.
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I think that open source pool software that is easy to install and operate may be the best way to decentralize pools. But pools still suffer from the network effect, the larger the pool the lower the fees (scale) and the lower the variance (higher quality).
Then there is the whole business model of optimized pool miners...
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I think you're fighting the tide on this one Bytemaster, the type of people you want to incentivize and compensate for paying attention are the ones who see the potential and want to be invested in the idea as they help bring it to fruition through their personal actions. The problem that pools solve is the difficulty of knowing if your work (computer mining) is going to give you a payout because as the popularity of a coin increases (in this case very quickly) the choice to mine by yourself starts looking like a stupid thing to do.
Yes, there are calculators that say you'll find a block every 8 days but that's a lot of faith to put into a fast moving currency and sometimes the odds don't go in your favor and the difficulty moves past you. The point of Mining is to equitably distribute tokens that individuals imbue with value through their interest and want to further build the project.
So the solution is to figure out how to let people join a global pool, operated by the issuing company who can collect a very minimal %, and pay people equitably for their contribution. Then it truly is a fire and forget sort of operation, and as the operator you can determine if you want to allow cloud miners or if they should be off in their own pool using miners they create themselves.
Solve the pool problem by catering to the need that demands Pools be popular.
The point of mining is to facilitate consensus and make it expensive to counterfeit. If you have a global pool operated by the issuing company then the issuing company could be taken down and kill the DAC.
I have no problem with cloud operators per-say, I want to maximize the value of the DAC and that means maximize the value of the shares. To maximize the value of the shares you would to maximize their utility and appeal and use them to motivate others to improve their value. I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
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I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
I agree, are people seeking a cheap thrill the type you are trying to reach with an equitable distribution. Are all bodies and participants equally valuable? I don't think they are, and just as you're not trying to appeal to your own type personality with this lotto mentality, I don't think it will appeal to the types of people whom you actually want. You want people who are smart and can evangelize the product without falling back on the "It'll make you rich" argument.
I liked the long term vesting idea a lot more, and I like the idea of long term predictable payouts being one end of the spectrum and low odds high payout being the other end, but allowing the balance to be selected by the individual. If you believe in the project and want to work towards a long term development goal with it, you would very much prefer the slow but reliable payout because it means you are guaranteed to have a stake in what you are working towards as opposed to the lotto "Maybe I get a lot, maybe I get nothing" approach. With that approach you are only invested if you are lucky. You don't want people maybe being supporters, you want evangelists who know they are invested.
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I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
I agree, are people seeking a cheap thrill the type you are trying to reach with an equitable distribution. Are all bodies and participants equally valuable? I don't think they are, and just as you're not trying to appeal to your own type personality with this lotto mentality, I don't think it will appeal to the types of people whom you actually want. You want people who are smart and can evangelize the product without falling back on the "It'll make you rich" argument.
I liked the long term vesting idea a lot more, and I like the idea of long term predictable payouts being one end of the spectrum and low odds high payout being the other end, but allowing the balance to be selected by the individual. If you believe in the project and want to work towards a long term development goal with it, you would very much prefer the slow but reliable payout because it means you are guaranteed to have a stake in what you are working towards as opposed to the lotto "Maybe I get a lot, maybe I get nothing" approach. With that approach you are only invested if you are lucky. You don't want people maybe being supporters, you want evangelists who know they are invested.
Since it's possible to test both hypotheses at the same time, why not? If the goal is to motivate a lot of people to let us use their computer's wasted CPU cycles to get a wider distribution of nodes, what difference does it make why they decide to contribute their excess computing resources? Why not even build miners into screen savers, routers, and toasters? Toaster owners don't need to even know their's a crypto currency involved as long as there's some benefit to owning one. :)
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I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
I agree, are people seeking a cheap thrill the type you are trying to reach with an equitable distribution. Are all bodies and participants equally valuable? I don't think they are, and just as you're not trying to appeal to your own type personality with this lotto mentality, I don't think it will appeal to the types of people whom you actually want. You want people who are smart and can evangelize the product without falling back on the "It'll make you rich" argument.
I liked the long term vesting idea a lot more, and I like the idea of long term predictable payouts being one end of the spectrum and low odds high payout being the other end, but allowing the balance to be selected by the individual. If you believe in the project and want to work towards a long term development goal with it, you would very much prefer the slow but reliable payout because it means you are guaranteed to have a stake in what you are working towards as opposed to the lotto "Maybe I get a lot, maybe I get nothing" approach. With that approach you are only invested if you are lucky. You don't want people maybe being supporters, you want evangelists who know they are invested.
+1
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A lottery is not just lower Odds, it is 50% lower payout per hash. Pools are all about optimizing the payout per hash and any pool that decided to use loto-mining would end up donating 50% of their hash power to the network.
People will always be able to install 'malware' on library computers, but it would be far more profitable if they installed traditional miners rather than loto-miners.
Remember, the goal of loto-mining is to make it less profitable and therefore irrational to engage in. However, all such gambling is irrational and people do it for hope anyway. Every single Loto-Miner reduces the margins available to the traditional miners and if enough people decide to 'play' then mining will continue even though it is no longer a profitable business!
I'd go more for the partial hashes we talked about. That seems like a more simplistic route, and then incorporating lotto later once you are sure that works(maybe I just like the idea of partials better, still working on the same incentive principle here). Lets be clear we want to eliminate pools(centralization), and go for a solo mining that everyone can agree on. Like you discussed there are bottleneck issues with making a decentralized pool, but this kinda solves to an extent.
Then again trying to shoot down that same idea, seems like solo miners would only want to connect to other solo mining peers. Would partial matches flood the network as we try to establish them in the next block? Now you also have the problem of collisions as well. If node 1 and node 2 submit the same partial hash who decides who gets the reward. A pool will give you a REJECT, but how does the network say REJECT also?
While it is possible to offer rewards for including partial hashes, each partial hash would add at least 200 bytes to the block which means that if we designed the system to support 100 partial hashes then we would be using 20KB of every block for these partial hashes. Assuming difficulty got to the point where the expected time to find a result is 10 years, then the expected time to find a partial hash would be 5 weeks and the reward would be 1/100 of a normal block. All things considered I do not think the partial hash solution scales.
You can use a decentralized pool, but these pools suffer from latency issues in their own right or everyone would have migrated to a P2P Pool for bitcoin mining in the name of decentralization and lower fees.
My goal is not to eliminate pools, but to motivate solo mining and add a new dynamic to the coin experience that adds value without removing any value. If people like it then they use it and everyone else just ignores it.
I hope someone does find a more decentralized solution to pools though, but that might be a way off for the reasons you just mentioned. I am glad that we are trying out some new ideas to get people to solo mine. I think it might take a few of these to find the golden egg perhaps.
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I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
I agree, are people seeking a cheap thrill the type you are trying to reach with an equitable distribution. Are all bodies and participants equally valuable? I don't think they are, and just as you're not trying to appeal to your own type personality with this lotto mentality, I don't think it will appeal to the types of people whom you actually want. You want people who are smart and can evangelize the product without falling back on the "It'll make you rich" argument.
I liked the long term vesting idea a lot more, and I like the idea of long term predictable payouts being one end of the spectrum and low odds high payout being the other end, but allowing the balance to be selected by the individual. If you believe in the project and want to work towards a long term development goal with it, you would very much prefer the slow but reliable payout because it means you are guaranteed to have a stake in what you are working towards as opposed to the lotto "Maybe I get a lot, maybe I get nothing" approach. With that approach you are only invested if you are lucky. You don't want people maybe being supporters, you want evangelists who know they are invested.
+1
+1000
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I think Lucky Mining adds a cheap thrill for certain people that helps decentralize mining while vesting requires miners or the people that hire the miners to think long-term and thus reduce the short-term volatility of hash power.
I agree, are people seeking a cheap thrill the type you are trying to reach with an equitable distribution. Are all bodies and participants equally valuable? I don't think they are, and just as you're not trying to appeal to your own type personality with this lotto mentality, I don't think it will appeal to the types of people whom you actually want. You want people who are smart and can evangelize the product without falling back on the "It'll make you rich" argument.
I liked the long term vesting idea a lot more, and I like the idea of long term predictable payouts being one end of the spectrum and low odds high payout being the other end, but allowing the balance to be selected by the individual. If you believe in the project and want to work towards a long term development goal with it, you would very much prefer the slow but reliable payout because it means you are guaranteed to have a stake in what you are working towards as opposed to the lotto "Maybe I get a lot, maybe I get nothing" approach. With that approach you are only invested if you are lucky. You don't want people maybe being supporters, you want evangelists who know they are invested.
+1
+1000
Those who are mining in the Lotto are unlikely to ever win anything, and yet they are securing the network and adding to decentralization.
So this is my appeal to the rational: LuckyShares is as decentralized as we can make it and we have pushed down the margins on mining to the point that the value produced by a mining pool is below the cost of electricity consumed. As a result, we can confidently state that LuckyShares has more hash security relative to its value than any other crypto-currency. Those who seek to mine in a pool, or mine solo (without lottery odds) do so 'at cost' and thus mining becomes a means to anonymously purchase the currency on a subscription basis and not a profit-center for large farms.
So without taking any value from from the currency, LuckyMining is able to increase security and enhance decentralization both of which should add value to the currency.
Remember this isn't an either-or... we can have both.
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If luckyshares were a currency, decentralization would be important but here I do not think it is.
It is more important to make sure the shares find their way into the hands of those who will most and best evangelize the DAC, so you actually don't want a 100% "fair" distribution. You want a distribution that rewards people who are likely to work for the system.
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If luckyshares were a currency, decentralization would be important but here I do not think it is.
It is more important to make sure the shares find their way into the hands of those who will most and best evangelize the DAC, so you actually don't want a 100% "fair" distribution. You want a distribution that rewards people who are likely to work for the system.
Actually, it isn't about distribution at all. A DAC wants to distribute as few shares as possible while maximizing the value it receives for the shares it does distribute. So the value a DAC receives for distributing its shares include:
1) Validation and Securing of its Transaction Log
2) Marketing, Promotion, and Advertising
3) Incentivize investment in the ecosystem.
4) Avoiding control of any one individual.
5) Growing the community of interested individuals.
Fairness is only relevant from a marketing perspective. If you want what I believe is 'fair', then Invictus should have sold 100% of all shares and then paid to secure the network on our own. Despite being the most 'fair', it is not the best marketing and would not achieve other goals. These 5 principles must be balanced and maximized by the design.
So Lucky Mining:
Adds Marketing / Promotion / Advertising
Adds more Validation nodes and Hash Security at a fraction of the cost.
Lowers margins on Centralized Hashing Operations and thus decentralizes control
Grows the community of interested individuals from those just looking for a predictable ROI to those interested in hope.
It comes at the cost that some people may not consider it 'fair'. The point is Lucky Mining actually results in Less Issuance of new currency and thus lower inflation and higher security. Therefore, it makes the coin more valuable to all shareholders.
Something like LukcyShares would be dubious to operate as a centralized service so decentralization is VERY important.
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Final argument:
Few large miners -> low hashpower -> possibility of 51% attack even with large ec2 cloud (what about botnet?).
Even with protoshares, my ~200 g2.2xlarge ec2 instances at times (like 18th November) generated about 2%-3% of network's hashpower (calculated using bot on irc). The cost was about $27/hour (which includes vat), it would be ~$22 for someone not from EU. So ~$550 was enough for me to reverse even a confirmed transaction - time long enough to deposit a few thousand pts at btc38 and sell them for bitcoins. A complicated operation to be profitable (after all, a currency just got destroyed, so you have to cash out fast), but doable I think. I also rely on spot prices which is inaccurate with larger scaling (but not that much).
Also, it's was probably more profitable then to not attack the network.
Suppose you succeed and decrease hashpower by significant amount (compared to protoshares)... what now? Someone could try controling the network for fun, spending only $100.
The cost is similar now...
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Final argument:
Few large miners -> low hashpower -> possibility of 51% attack even with large ec2 cloud (what about botnet?).
Even with protoshares, my ~200 g2.2xlarge ec2 instances at times (like 18th November) generated about 2%-3% of network's hashpower (calculated using bot on irc). The cost was about $27/hour (which includes vat), it would be ~$22 for someone not from EU. So ~$550 was enough for me to reverse even a confirmed transaction - time long enough to deposit a few thousand pts at btc38 and sell them for bitcoins. A complicated operation to be profitable (after all, a currency just got destroyed, so you have to cash out fast), but doable I think. I also rely on spot prices which is inaccurate with larger scaling (but not that much).
Also, it's was probably more profitable then to not attack the network.
Suppose you succeed and decrease hashpower by significant amount (compared to protoshares)... what now? Someone could try controling the network for fun, spending only $100.
The cost is similar now...
My goal isn't to decrease hash power, but to increase it. I increase it by bringing in more people who are mining at a cost greater than the PTS they are receiving. Every other crypto-currency has miners that are mining below the cost of what they mine. Therefore, with lucky mining, the network will have more security for the same block reward than any other network.
The vesting period does not reduce the number of miners, it just changes the mining equation from 'current price' to 'future price'. The result will be steady, long-term mining, that does not fluctuate with short-term price movements.
Lastly, by incorporating coinage destroyed into the required difficulty calculation the most you could achieve through your attempted attack is to double spend your own PTS because extended DOS attack would not be possible because those including transactions that destroy coinage would have half the difficulty.
Right now a 51% attack on the network would cost about $30,000 per day.
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most you could achieve through your attempted attack is to double spend your own PTS
The "most"? Two-three double spends with 10k pts are going to net upwards of $100k, if someone at the exchange doesn't stop depositing manually... it's enough to destroy the coin by destroying confidence. I think btc38 standing bids can support such volume. They would definitely delist pts after such incident.
In the most optimistic (for the attacker) case, you could wipe all bids using just a few thousand pts by a dozen large double spends. I think btc38 only waits for one confirmation which makes it easier. Tight operation, the way heists are supposed to be :)
Right now a 51% attack on the network would cost about $30,000 per day.
So even by your calculation, it's only $1250 per hour, long enough for anything.
Even that is a cloud price, not-that-optimized gpu miner for 7970 gets 530cpm, which takes about 200W - $0.02 per hour in some places. Suddenly the number gets much smaller...
The vesting period does not reduce the number of miners
Because you say so... all restrictions are going to reduce the number of miners.
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most you could achieve through your attempted attack is to double spend your own PTS
The "most"? Two-three double spends with 10k pts is going to net upwards of $100k, if someone at the exchange doesn't stop depositing manually... it's enough to destroy the coin by destroying confidence. I think btc38 standing bids can support such volume. They would definitely delist pts after such incident.
Right now a 51% attack on the network would cost about $30,000 per day.
So even by your calculation, it's only $1250 per hour, long enough for anything.
The vesting period does not reduce the number of miners
Because you say so... all restrictions are going to reduce the number of miners.
10K PTS is $80,000 and any exchange worth it's salt would have KYC in place for that kind of volume. As a result your attack would fail because you would get caught.
If I were running an exchange I would calculate the cost of a 51% attack and factor that into my withdraw limits. I would limit the withdraw rate to half the cost of a 51% attack. With this simple precaution combined with KYC and vesting it would make it very difficult to pull of such an attack. This leaves you with attempting to scam people on the forums.
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10K PTS is $80,000 and any exchange worth it's salt would have KYC in place for that kind of volume. As a result your attack would fail because you would get caught.
I wasn't there, but didn't someone dump like 200k pts in the first few days on btc38? I definitely read it on irc. If you don't care about the only serious PTS exchange, well.
10k PTS is perhaps $80k if you sell it one time :)
If I were running an exchange I would calculate the cost of a 51% attack and factor that into my withdraw limits. I would limit the withdraw rate to half the cost of a 51% attack. With this simple precaution combined with KYC and vesting it would make it very difficult to pull of such an attack.
We live in this reality, not in your dreamland. The reality is that without btc38 pts is worth basically nothing. There're no security of any kind there. What would happen is they would delist pts immediately and that would be the end of pts.
Another minor problem is that it's impossible to know the cost of a 51% attack. For a botnet operator it can be zero if he has no idea how to use his zombies differently at the moment. For a coin to be secure it should be very hard to amass a botnet with enough power.
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We live in this reality, not in your dreamland. The reality is that without btc38 pts is worth basically nothing. There're no security of any kind there. What would happen is they would delist pts immediately and that would be the end of pts.
If you think the value of PTS is contingent on btc38 then you don't get it. The value of PTS is based upon the future value of the DAC ideas that Invictus is developing. BTC38 makes PTS liquid, but does not give them their value.
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Another minor problem is that it's impossible to know the cost of a 51% attack. For a botnet operator it can be zero if he has no idea how to use his zombies differently at the moment. For a coin to be secure it should be very hard to amass a botnet with enough power.
The cost of a 51% attack is in the opportunity cost for the Botnet operator. Botnet operators are seeking profit and mining and dumping legitimately is more profitable than mining to support a double spend that would crash the currency. They would be killing the golden goose that is laying the PTS eggs for them to sell on BTC38.
Anyone seeking a profit can make more mining and selling than by a 51% attack.
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The value of PTS is based upon the future value of the DAC ideas that Invictus is developing.
The current value of PTS equals its price. That's what the price is.
You can only hope that PTS's value will rise because of other DACs.
Anyone seeking a profit can make more mining and selling than by a 51% attack.
This may be true today. This won't be true in March. Or whenever the block reward is going to be like 1 PTS.
Profitable mining ends *very* fast. That's the way you designed this coin.
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The value of PTS is based upon the future value of the DAC ideas that Invictus is developing.
The current value of PTS equals its price. That's what the price is.
You can only hope that PTS's value will rise because of other DACs.
Anyone seeking a profit can make more mining and selling than by a 51% attack.
This may be true today. This won't be true in March. Or whenever the block reward is going to be like 1 PTS.
Profitable mining ends *very* fast. That's the way you designed this coin.
Value drives price, price doesn't drive value. Today's price factors in all risks / rewards.
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The value of PTS is based upon the future value of the DAC ideas that Invictus is developing.
The current value of PTS equals its price. That's what the price is.
You can only hope that PTS's value will rise because of other DACs.
Anyone seeking a profit can make more mining and selling than by a 51% attack.
This may be true today. This won't be true in March. Or whenever the block reward is going to be like 1 PTS.
Profitable mining ends *very* fast. That's the way you designed this coin.
Value drives price, price doesn't drive value. Today's price factors in all risks / rewards.
i think we need ideas to prop up value/price regardless
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Value drives price, price doesn't drive value. Today's price factors in all risks / rewards.
Todays price factors in all risk reward as they are understood by the market participants making decisions based on their personal factoring. I would argue that means that unlike a normal cryptocurrency, the market is only as informed as you (the company doing the backing) make it. You can control information, hide bad news, promote good news that will probably have an inordinately large impact on the price of the currency because the entire value depends on Invictus honoring the social contract.
So yes, and no. When you put your entire corporate R&D, workflow etc. on Trello then the price will be informed by the fundamentals but so long as the only way the community gets data is via an official conduit (Bytemaster or Stan), you're the chokepoint for information on the future value of the currency.
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Value drives price, price doesn't drive value. Today's price factors in all risks / rewards.
Todays price factors in all risk reward as they are understood by the market participants making decisions based on their personal factoring. I would argue that means that unlike a normal cryptocurrency, the market is only as informed as you (the company doing the backing) make it. You can control information, hide bad news, promote good news that will probably have an inordinately large impact on the price of the currency because the entire value depends on Invictus honoring the social contract.
So yes, and no. When you put your entire corporate R&D, workflow etc. on Trello then the price will be informed by the fundamentals but so long as the only way the community gets data is via an official conduit (Bytemaster or Stan), you're the chokepoint for information on the future value of the currency.
The entire process is being developed in the open on Github. Ideas we have are being published here.
You are right, the market is information constrained and right now the price reflects the lack of understanding and information. Which means that as the market learns more and we deliver more the price will go up. Obviously it takes time and energy to get ideas out there.
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There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
Hi, Daniel! Quick question: will Bitshares value be awarded to the same Protoshares address or through a Bitshares address? If the latter, how could one (assuming one has PTS accumulated) claim the 1:1 value? Thanks!
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There is no 'conversion' between ProtoShares and BitShares... everyone will immediately have BOTH ProtoShares and BitShares. Your BitShares are kind of a 'dividend payment' on your ProtoShares :). Therefore, there is no cost or conversion to create BitShares from ProtoShares and in fact your ProtoShares will remain valuable for future DACs.
Hi, Daniel! Quick question: will Bitshares value be awarded to the same Protoshares address or through a Bitshares address? If the latter, how could one (assuming one has PTS accumulated) claim the 1:1 value? Thanks!
I can answer this one for you, Daniel had mentioned earlier that you will be able to import your PTS wallet with your BTS wallet and receive one bitshare for every protoshare you hold while still maintaining all your Protoshares. So basically if you had 100 Protoshares when bitshares are released, you'd import your wallet and you'd now have 100 Protoshares and 100 Bitshares.
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Thank you your clearing that out, Pocket Sand! :D
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Thank you your clearing that out, Pocket Sand! :D
Not a problem man
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I have come up with a new approach using proof-of-stake that could make mining as we know it irrelevant.
Please read this thread: http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1138.0
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I have come up with a new approach using proof-of-stake that could make mining as we know it irrelevant.
Please read this thread: http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1138.0
I just came across this thread today and let me tell you that I believe that there are a large number of us that have invested in the long term potential of crypto equities. That being said, I think that you should go ahead with introducing a 6 month vesting period.
Those of us like myself that see the true potential of crypto equities will do just about anything to get our hands on more Protoshares, Bitshares etc. I am willing to mine for 6 months without any instant gratification. You should move forward with a 6 month vesting period for Bitshares. I think that will be most fair to those of us that actually FUND the progression of this technology. A person that is in it for the long term will obtain Angelshares or donate Protoshares for the continued development and implementation of something like Kehotee ID.
By the way if we obtain Protoshares after the release of Bitshares are we still able to get Bitshares just by getting more Protoshares?
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I have come up with a new approach using proof-of-stake that could make mining as we know it irrelevant.
Please read this thread: http://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1138.0
I just came across this thread today and let me tell you that I believe that there are a large number of us that have invested in the long term potential of crypto equities. That being said, I think that you should go ahead with introducing a 6 month vesting period.
Those of us like myself that see the true potential of crypto equities will do just about anything to get our hands on more Protoshares, Bitshares etc. I am willing to mine for 6 months without any instant gratification. You should move forward with a 6 month vesting period for Bitshares. I think that will be most fair to those of us that actually FUND the progression of this technology. A person that is in it for the long term will obtain Angelshares or donate Protoshares for the continued development and implementation of something like Kehotee ID.
By the way if we obtain Protoshares after the release of Bitshares are we still able to get Bitshares just by getting more Protoshares?
Since writing this we have opted to move to Ripple Style Consensus combined with Proof of Stake. There will be no need to mine BitShares.
The only way to get BitShares is to either make donations to the Angel addresses or to buy PTS prior to the genesis block. Afterward you have to buy BitShares from someone who has them.
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I know this might be off topic or whatever but Master, have you considered telling infowars/prison planet more about this. They do advertising for bitcoins and I think your amazing concepts and morals would prove true to the informed community. I really appreciate all the work you do, keep it up. This could be the engine you guys need. Everyone will want keyhotee because it is practical in todays world(assuming all goes well)
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I know this might be off topic or whatever but Master, have you considered telling infowars/prison planet more about this. They do advertising for bitcoins and I think your amazing concepts and morals would prove true to the informed community. I really appreciate all the work you do, keep it up. This could be the engine you guys need. Everyone will want keyhotee because it is practical in todays world(assuming all goes well)
Once we have a stable client out there I believe that would be a good audience to target. Right now we are in early development phases, though with the advent of Angel Shares and the new bounty system things could be speeding up quite a bit.