It comes from shorts who borrowed the BitAsset into existence and it comes from transaction fees on that asset.

Quote from: sparkles on November 28, 2014, 05:49:56 pm

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This will be the LAST block produced on December 14th UTC.   I will not ask any exchanges to honor the snapshot and will ask everyone who wants to participate in it to remove it from the exchanges.  In fact I will go so far as to declare that the exchanges OWN the snapshot of funds deposited in them as an incentive for them to list Sparkle and to reward them for supporting the BitShares ecosystem.

I think you should be more considerate of users who are still having connecting and syncing issues with their wallets and have no choice but to keep their funds in exchanges till the next stable release.

What connecting and syncing issues?

Found the problem and it has nothing to do with their hash power.   It has to do with some greedy miner who doesn't care to help fix the code but only to attack the code by exploiting it.

When I updated the code to only adjust the difficulty every 20 blocks, it started only CHECKING the difficulty every 20 blocks. 

I am preparing a new release that should fix that issue, it will simply hard fork off of this chain.

The fix has been checked in for everyone compiling from source.  The mac binaries are coming soon.

There are 40 connections to the test network. 

The difficulty adjustments appear to be much better now as we are averaging 3 per minute. 

There is about a 5% orphan rate. 

Quote from: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 11:59:30 pm

My personal opinion is that you should never vote in a system that is rigged/unprovable on the principle that your "vote" may or may not actually be counted but your participation is certainly counted on to give the result legitimacy.

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I respect this position, but I think it's flawed.  The issue is the implication that higher participation can somehow give the result legitimacy or moral weight.

I would argue that it can't, and thus that voting is an amoral act of self expression.  Certainly a very limited form of self expression, and one that's frequently taken out of context by those claiming it grants them extra moral rights, but the fact that others misquote you and take your words out of context is not an evil act on your part.

A vote is an expression of an opinion and is amoral.

An election is the aggregation of everyones opinion which is then used to justify some action, usually government coercion of some kind.

The legitimacy of the aggregation of everyones opinion depends upon the number of people who contributed their opinion to the aggregate.

The corruption of societies ability to assess the aggregate opinion results in abusive immoral power derived from fraud.   Fraud is immoral.

Participating in a system designed to facilitate corruption means you are not actually casting a vote, you are supporting a fraud.  Your opinion cannot be provably expressed, but as byte master said, your participation can.

An opinion that supports coercion when publicly expressed by voting ends up enabling coercion and is not a passive act.   If no one voted then no one could claim they had public consensus on the use of coercion.  If you have ability to file an active protest vote against coercion then that would be the most moral thing to do.    In this case you can simultaneously reject the system and help project public consensus that voting is not a means by which coercion can be justified. 

So I agree with Bytemaster that voting in any system that allows your voice to be stolen and reprojected is irresponsible toward your fellow citizen and gives your power away to someone without your consent.    Expressing your opinion in a system such as VOTE will allow you to be responsible for standing up for what is right.   

So it really comes down to an assumption on the part of those who say you should vote in the current system.  That assumption is that the current system actually works as intended.  If the entire premise of your product is that the current system does not work as intended then the only logically consistent conclusion is to be pro-active in your stance that the current system should be shunned entirely and that is the RESPONSIBLE thing for a voter to do.   It is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE.

The purpose of voting is to make your voice and opinion known to all.   Bad things happen when good people don't speak out and silently consent to the evil.  So it is imperative for your own safety and wellbeing to publicly express your opinion in an honest voting system such as VOTE.    So the argument for VOTE is that you need to let your voice be heard and stop letting your voice be stolen and manipulated.

So everyone that says you have a moral obligation to vote may be right in principle, but that principle only applies when voting has integrity.  What they are really saying is that you have a moral obligation to contribute to the aggregation of public opinion.    This is what VOTE gives you.
 

I agree this is a bad idea.

It is quite clear that my difficulty adjustment was naive and that I will have to do something about that.   Based upon the current difficulty the network appears hung.

I am looking at a new approach to mining that will make Sparkle very resistant to mining pool centralization by requiring the private key of the account that will receive the mining rewards to be part of the mining process.   I will replace the "miner address" field with a "signature" field and remove the nonce.   To mine you must produce a signature of the block header such the the hash of the header + signature is less than some threshold.    The only option is to sign over and over again because if you change anything in the block then the signature will not match the proper key. 

The benefit of a mining pool resistant proof of work is that if and when ASICs are produced they will be performing ECC operations for signing transactions. 

New proposed mining algorithm:

SignedHeader = MinerPrivateKey.sign( SHA256( header ) )
HashSignedHeader = SHA256( SignedHeader )
PublicKeyCheck = ECC_RECOVER_PUBLIC_KEY( SignedHeader.Signature, HashSignedHeader )
HASH = SHA256( PublicKeyCheck )

What are the properties of this set of operations?
1) To produce a block you must have access to the MinerPrivateKey.  This eliminates mining.
2) To produce a block you must perform a ECC Signature
3) To produce a block you must perform a ECC Key Recovery which is the CPU bottleneck on transaction processing.

Given these steps it should result in ECC Key Recovery ASICs being produced which if done properly will help accelerate transaction processing and validation.   Assuming this is implemented on a GPU it will help all crypto's to validate transactions faster. 

The impact of not having mining pools means miners must handle the variability in finding blocks.  This will change the incentive structure significantly.  Having faster block times will help increase the number of winners.

So it has been really bugging me that Sparkle lacks the nice predictable block times that DPOS provides so I set out to design a better approach to proof of work.

Imagine if you will that miners don't create a block at the same time that they find a hash.  Imagine instead that every time a miner produces a hash they get put in a queue to sign a block.   Now imagine this queue is processed every 10 seconds just like DPOS.   It would be like a buffered video stream.

If the queue length is less than X blocks difficulty decreases, if it is more than X blocks difficulty increases. 

So now you end up with two "chains" the proof of work chain to determine the signers and the transaction chain that executes every 10 seconds exactly.  The proof of work chain would have to reference the head of the transaction chain and thus support and confirm the transaction history.   

The issue becomes what new attacks can be executed:

1) a bad miner (who is anonymous) could easily sign many different blocks when their turn shows up.
2) a bad miner would know in advance when they have a run of blocks
3) what would a good "confirmation time" be? 

We can mitigate the first attack by having their mining reward vest for X blocks and allow any crypto graphic proof to the contrary to deny their pay.

Just a wild idea   Perhaps too complex and untested and Sparkle should simply stick with what is known.