Author Topic: Decentralizing Mining - The future of BitShares Mining  (Read 56351 times)

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Offline bahamapascal

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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?

Offline super3

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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. 


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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.

Offline CryptoN8

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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)

Offline bytemaster


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. 


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Offline liberman

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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.

Offline super3

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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. 

Offline super3

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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.

Offline CryptoN8

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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.

Offline liberman

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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...

Offline ThisNinja

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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 :)
PTS: PdQyuTvUmaLrotvjunydGbThQpPvb7Npjg

Offline phoenix

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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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Offline bytemaster

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.

For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline barwizi

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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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Offline Amazon

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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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Offline Lighthouse

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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. 
Before you say the price of PTS is too high, take a look at theThe Reason.  Protoshares are an entirely new type of Cryptocurrency, one that pays to hold.