Quote from: BldSwtTrs on April 21, 2014, 01:45:37 pm

I have asked the following question at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/maidsafe-development/1jrH-Qqqb2w :

    In the whitepaper it's unclear how the difficulty of generating safecoins will increase over time.

    There is no mechanism provided. And if they aren't any basically the cost of generating safecoin will decrease with Moore law (so will do the price...).

And this is David Irvine's answer:

It's controlled by the mining algorithm that's exponential. There is also a space that the hash of a mining attempt must fit into, this is 2^32 and gets exponentially (^2) more difficult with each mining success.

Many factors will influence this, number of users, Builders, Farmers etc. It is not time based and all calculations are mute wrt time. The premise is that as more use of the network happens, it must be valued. As this is the case Farmers are incentivised to Farm and builders build. This value should increase the value of safecoin and related uses of it (perhaps even buying resources as we go along).

  this is so disturbing that I am glad they IPOd on mastercoin

Would the MAS have relationships with the medical industry to transact the payments of claims? Or would the MAS simply pay the shareholder the relevant amount and not deal with any third parities?

Quote from: bytemaster on March 18, 2014, 09:19:59 pm

Quote

You are at risk of losing your valuable Coin-Days for no return.

What if the block rewards were simply distributed to all transaction-makers included in the block, in proportion to the CDD, with some minimum in order to provide a return?  (Say 10 or 30 days)  So if I save up my coins, waiting to make a transaction / block, at least I know I will get some return on the transaction even if I happen to not mine a block.  People who are trading constantly don't get to keep the transaction fees, they go to the actual miner of the block.

This is what dividends do.. they transfer fees to all holders.   Think of lost opportunity to 'mine' as part of your transaction fee.   Making transactions isn't 'free' for the network.  In fact, when you make a transaction you want to to help secure the network so you shouldn't be 'paid' for making a transaction.

Wait, I'm confused.  I thought that this whole mining thing was being promoted as the method by which the dividends were earned/paid.  But now I go back and read in the OP: "these fees must be split between miners and shareholders as dividends".  So people can earn dividends (still through burned transaction fees, right?) aside from this mining reward.  Got it.

I now have far fewer reservations about this whole thing.  I thought that this was going to be the only way to earn interest/dividends/PoS/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.  But if it's just one of a couple of ways, I have no problem with it, and I think it's a good idea to encourage mining.

I still think that the "ad-hoc pool" thing is a cool idea, though.  So the transaction fees would be split 3 ways: A) Dividends to all shareholders (burned); B) Miner; C) Returned to transaction-makers with significant CDD included in the block and who were therefore plausibly vying to mine the block.  Maybe they only get their own transaction fees back; the rest of the fees are split between (A) and (B), while the folks in (C) at least didn't lose any coins by trying to mine and destroying their Coin-Days.

It would be an interesting this for price discovery (prices different in different countries). But the prices of these things are usually fixed by the manufacturer, right?
What does 1 hector of land on Mars go for these days?