Topic: A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin" - page 4. (Read 5011 times)

You could just 'inflate away' the gains of early adopters.

To do this just make the block reward a function of difficulty.

(e.g. block reward = difficulty / exp (time in years * -0.3).

The expectation here is that difficulty halves about every two years due to Moore's Law. With this system you get the same USD from mining regardless of when you begin hoarding coins.

It doesn't matter when you adopt. Money printing prevents the price from rising.

A problem is that the price will fall after a decline in usage. To solve this you can charge a mandatory 0.1% txn fee on all sent inputs and destroy the txn fees.
Thus if you print too much, then you solve that by printing almost nothing and mopping up excess currency.

With both of these rules, price should be very stable over time. There is no longer any motivation to use the currency as an investment.

[Note: I am not advocating this coin. There is no motive for initial adoption. Fair or not, it would never get off the ground.]

It might be a good idea to do the following, however:

(e.g. block reward = difficulty^0.5 / exp (time in years * -0.3).

This would spread out the early adoption process over a longer time span. The early adopters still get bigger rewards, but the contrast is not as dramatic. More rewards are shared with later adopters.
This avoids the psychological problem: early adopters rich, would-be adopters poor -> would-be adopters have sour grapes -> would-be adopters reject bitcoin due to 'unfairness'

The coins of course have persistent inflation, but that is implicit in the idea of not rewarding early adopters heavily.
 

I never know this, just checked this groupcoin, seems it is not working at the moment. It's biggest problem is that a mechanism to pay the core developer with half mined coin endlessly, and use a strange whitelist to achieve this

Actually from pure economy point of view, 50BTC/Block forever provide better chance for late commers at the early years of coin genertion, but after 10 years it still becomes insignificant for the total coin supply. While BTC is more aggresive in reducing the coin supply, makes it highly speculative

deepceleron
It is not gpu- resistant, so miners with ASICs will earn much more money than owners of GPU.

Those silly, dishonorable martians!!

Now you sound like the Martians, Brits, Canucks, the Galactic United Nations and so on...

They argued from the start that money issued by people who have no intention of "honouring" it probably would not work well in the long run.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html seems to be indicating their suggestions might have merit...

-MarkM-

@markm

Bitcoin already is fringe, Litecoin almost far-out fringe and everything else more in the realm totally-whack-another-universe fringe. You won't find the attitude, call it "Bitcoinism", that is the believe that Bitcoin will somehow take over a major part of the worlds economy anywhere outside Bitcointalk.

The sooner people realize that the better since the way to economical independence doesn't goes over cannibalism by self-perpetuating "early adoption" but over resilience and the acquiring  of resources which make a self-sustaining society possible. Bitcoin used to have that potential but has attracted the wrong participants who only want to get wealthy at the expense of others instead of working together on a purpose.

There are many coins that have been around a long time, so that anyone who wanted some has had plenty of time to mine some.

Many of them are even merged-mine-able, so anyone wanting some has had plenty of time to get them almost free.

There are even some that various pools have given out too, just in case the ones pool users have been encouraged to also mine haven't been getting distributed among enough people yet.

Some have even been mined almost exclusively with CPUs, somehow managing not to attract GPU miners; they have thus been able to continue chugging along slowly but steadily, with various website visitors CPU-mining them and stuff like that.

Are you aware that bitcoin can only be the parent chain of a merge, it cannot be a child chain? Thus that coins like Terracoin, beingsimple clones of bitcoin, cannot be merged mined alongside bitcoin?

Let us remember too that mining is not the only method of distributing coins. Merged mined coins are almost free, so giving them away to players of online games is a very affordable way of distributing them; a more-interactive version of a faucet in a way.

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I don't think it makes much sense to complain about early adopters having a big advantage when that advantage is being forced upon them against their will by the hordes of miners who refuse to pick them up almost free.

Really what is going on is vast numbers of people are trying very hard to be late adopters, and I don't think that really gives them good grounds for complaining about early adopters. Many are basically against adoption entirely, early or late.

With bitcoin we only have a century or so before the early adopter phase is over and everyone has to settle for transaction fees. With GRouPcoin centuries from now people will still be getting a full 50 coins per block and the coins mined in the first few decades will possibly have spread out due to miners who have more than one beneficiary in their wills.

Most altcoins are so incredibly dirt-cheap right now that quite likely who holds huge numbers of them could change massively within the next order of magniture increase in price and they will still be dirt cheap then too. People seem so determined to always "miss the boat" that quite likely another order of magnitude increase will be needed to actually get even the 'non-conscientious objector" deliberately-late people to consider adopting them. People seem to want to wait until at least a hundredfolk increase in price has happened before considering getting involved, and also seem so fond of complaining that it is as if the whole point of that waiting is so they have something to complain about.

It should be recognised though that what they are really complaining about is their own idiotic stubborn-ness, their own determination to wait until the the train leaves the station before running after it screaming how unfair it is that it left without them.

A great variety of opporunities have been provided, many of them as optional extras even, not requiring diverting mining power away from "the mainstream" in order to mine them. Some of them are never going to stop minting coins, but maybe that just encourages people to wait even longer, to be even more late.

If you set up a coin that people mine for the first two to five years without minting, why even bother mining it at all until two to five years from now? If you don't mine it at all for a few years the deliberately-late masses will still wait until a few years after it does "launch" just so they can kick themselves (while crying/screaming at others) for missing the boat yet again.

Fill up your merged mining as much as is currently feasible first before going on about the unfairness of being denied fellow miners, being left a tiny, maybe even "fringe" community while people wait a few years building up more and more "oh you are so unfair not to have forced me against my will kicking and screaming to mine your coin" ammunition by sitting back still day after day after day, week after week after week failing to set up p2pool and merged-mine...

-MarkM-

I think this is an excellent idea. But it only delays the early adopter issue. A coin that would allow an equal distribution for adopters in the first x years, or maybe until a first 100.000 users are established would IMO have grate chance for being successful. But the how to enable this, is a problem.

I think this is an interesting idea, and though I won't attempt to predict the viability of it, I would like to see it happen.

Alternatives to Bitcoin are not a bad thing.  Bad alternatives are a bad thing, but I'd call this one a neutral alternative.  It has good intentions, it is just a matter of experimenting with the idea and see if it actually works in practice/

The most important aspect for success would be getting enough pool operators onboard.

Well, I have as an argument the relative success of litecoin which is a significant step away from the merged mining aspect.

I concur with the assessment that forking the bitcoin software is a wrong way to apporach alternate cryptocurrencies in general. I am not that interested in another bitcoin fork, if anything it should start from scratch. This is the only way real innovation can take place.

With Bitcoin, if I find it four years later, I get punished with half the reward and a difficulty 3.3 million times higher too...unfair x 6M?

What kind of approach to currency distribution might you suggest to make a coin fair for even late adopters?

I think the best one can aim for is as wide as possible adoption at introduction. Anyone mining now on a new alt-coin that demands network acceptance is likely to get some "newcoin" in their purse through merge mining. The mining of coins seems to find equilibrium where generation power costs approach the cost of just buying the coins, and if we have that at introduction along with relative scarcity, then the value should track money supply and not lead to the anti-late-adopter hyper-deflation that distracts from use as a currency.



Several alt-coins have died from their old unmaintained completely forked client becoming obsolete, maintained only by one profit-seeker. Many ideas (constantly adapting difficulty, faster blocks, transaction message passing, different hashing, new rewards, etc) may find consensus as the ideal for a re-imagined Bitcoin v2.0, but would only succeed if they continue with the level of development that Bitcoin's client currently has, and would still require a launch technique that would be resilient against abuse from the 24THash/s of existing miners. Being able to patch the Electrum client or your web wallet software with just a few rules for "neucoin" instead of requiring a completely new (old-code) client may be more successful, unless several key Bitcoin developers or others with their skill level pledge support to the philosophy (and maintenance) of a complete alt-fork running alongside Bitcoin.

The problem with merged mining is it restricts innovation and the experiential nature of cryptocurrencies. That is ok for something like namecoin where the economic aspect isn't that important and you are mainly concerned with security. And with the advent of Keccack there is even less reason to do it.

The main shortcomings bitcoin has cannot be solved with merged mining since from the technical aspect nothing can be changed except the contents of a block.

That doesn't seem fair.

The advent of merged-mining gives a zero-cost (except for the work of setting it up) ability to support and harden a second crypto-currency with mining. Any successful future coin must, in my opinion, be adopted through merged mining support. Your PPS pool may be merge-mining and not even be telling you.

As an example of merged-mining success, over 1/3 of all Bitcoin hashing is also currently mining Namecoins. However, this is not notable to most miners, due to Namecoin's difficulty of use (due to a sub-par client), it's predictable failure in it's primary purpose (an alternate DNS system), and it's low perceived value per-hash relative to Bitcoin (adding less than 1% to a miner's income after exchange).

Namecoin faltered primarily due to it's introduction before the advent of merge-mining. One had to choose to only mine one blockchain at a time. When Namecoin became more profitable than Bitcoin, everyone jumped on it, mining a two-week difficulty period in just a few days and multiplying the difficulty by four. After the new difficulty was set, making it unprofitable again, miners quit, paralyzing the transfer of money. The currency has been burdened by this since, and the value stays low due to the abundance of no-use-but-to-sell coin.

The introduction of a new coin that has a reward turn-on threshold like I describe above may have a similar "jump on and mine the shit out of it" contingent like the above posters, however setting the "turn-on" threshold required to over 1/4 of Bitcoin's present hashrate means that it cannot make a massive jump - every remaining pool turning on merge mining at once would be the max increase possible, and in reality even a doubling of hashrate at reward start is possibly more than can be expected. The perception of a profitable 2016 block rush may actually encourage and cement the wide and permanent adoption of such a new currency. The new currency won't be left behind to languish like Namecoin was, as there is no advantage to discontinue merge-mining of such a new blockchain once it is implemented, unless it completely falls into disuse. The only obstacle is getting it initially added "for free" and hashed by optimistic pools, which was my only concern expressed in the first post (however the pools that add it first are going to be ready for it's rewards first and attract the miners).

A reward ramp-up period may actually be counter productive. One of the caveats would be low perceived initial income, causing lackluster enthusiasm that may be insurmountable, but another consideration would be the difficulty pools may have in calculating and distributing payments with an inconsistent or unpredictable reward (plus the further departure from mainline code).

Ideology. This is not debatable.
At least not in a rational way.


You realize that difficulty would compensate so that there still would be a early adopter benefit? At least with my model.. It just wouldn't be as steep.

Ok. Send me a PM when the first (N -10) blocks have been mined 

Oh this idea has been proposed in the past. It is not a good one though because tying coin reward directly with difficulty means that as computing hardware gets better, people make more coins. It is a very big disincentive to use the currency when inflation is a factor of computing power. That is why with the Encoin and Decrits proposals I've made, mining is separate from network security and is based around a per-user approach rather than the lottery approach of bitcoin.


I think he stated it somewhat clearly:


This is a significant detriment to business and trade.

I think you still have failed to describe why the early adopters of Bitcoin making it rich is a bad thing. They made money, got motivated to make more money, got the word out, built services, etc....

The idea of waiting until a certain point before giving miners coins just creates and incentive for people to NOT mine the coin until it reaches some theoretical point. Because of course- our power is limited so why give it over to a coin were we get nothing back for it? And why wouldn't just EVERYONE wait to mine hoping someone else will spend all the time/energy and then you can jump in and reap the rewards?

No point in making something anti-early adopter unless you plan on doing and the early adopter work yourself.

I don't think that would matter if the coin would be inflationary anyway the block reward could remain fixed for all practical purposes. At some point there would be an equilibrium where the number of lost coins is as high as the newly generated coins. Geistgeld used such a model iirc.

If a non-inflationary model is desired there could also be a "storage fee" which would have to be tuned for a Nash-equilibrium with the transaction fees. This way lost coins would eventually be mined back into the pool. This would also limit the hoarding problem and would prevent a deflationary spiral even with a fixed supply. I also think a cryptocurrency could have two representations at the same time: "Coins" where there is a fixed supply and "Cash" where there is an inflationary supply. The limits are only rounding errors.. The only thing which would need to be hard coded, everything else could be voted on by the poof of work mechanism.

Another (not-at-all-recommended) wild idea completely different from anything I've seen put out there yet - an inflationary coin, where the number of satoshis mined in a block = block difficulty, with no limit to number of coins that will exist. This lets the currency base grow with the adoption rate (measured by mining), however a divergent series as naively implemented as this could quickly "inflation" the value to zero over time.

Probably a good median is a permanent 50 BTC reward (to counter "lost coin" and also address the "fees must replace reward" problem), but that doesn't address this fair launch of a new coin, which is my primary focus here.