Topic: A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin" - page 5. (Read 5011 times)

Just had an idea: If the pascal triangle is used anyway it could be used to derive a sort of "soft difficulty" where it is possible to mine at several difficulties at once and the reward for the blocks would be proportional to how near the row is to the top of the pyramid. Also the block reward would adjust more quickly for low difficulty mining and slower for high difficulty mining.
So that would solve the instant transaction problem as well as pooled mining. The only shortcoming it cannot solve on it's own is the lost coins problem.

You still get a two-year mining head start on the person that discovers digital currencies in 2015. This also doesn't take away anybody's Bitcoins, which is likely to always be the dominant Satoshi-based coin. However, this gives you a coin that doesn't have that mystery element of "who has the 4 million difficulty<1,000 bitcoins?"

The idea has been around.

What you'd have to do is make mining a sigmoid function. That way the block reward would follow a probability distribution curve.
So the bock reward would be low, although not zero at the beginning, high during the median period and again low at the end. One way to do that with discrete values is to calculate a long row of the pascal triangle and make consecutive block reward follow that row.

It's an interesting concept, and trying it out shouldn't be that hard. The thing is however it solves neither the lost coins problem nor the need for pooled mining.

So early adapters that helped make the coin successful were rewarded. Sounds fair to me.


So your incentive to start mining is that you get the same reward as someone who comes along later, after the coin is successful?

Your design isn't fair. It's anti early adapter.

You would be able to download the client, synchronize with the blockchain, generate addresses, put your "Faircoin" (example name only) address into your pool setup, add other's addresses to your address book, etc. Coins can only start being mined after the hashrate is high though, making them hard to get from the very first "earning" block.

It may take weeks or months for enough pools to adopt it and start hashing enough to "turn on" the coin generation. That's the point - lots of time for everyone who is interested to get involved, adopt and implement software, no unfair "rush". The miners of the first pool to find a 50 Faircoin block then have them all, until the next block 10 minutes later. A typical one-rig miner might get 0.5 faircoins a day, so they start rare, encouraging immediate value and even speculation.

600 MHash/s rig at perhaps 1,100,000 first-coins block difficulty = .549 coins/day

How can I use Faircoin without coins?

Why? Bitcoin isn't fair; unknown early adopters (not you) mined with little competition for the first half of it's existence. They can crash the currency value if they want or cash out for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Deflation: A 10,000 BTC pizza is now a 10,000 BTC Mercedes. Other alternate coins have had launch problems: selfish premining, monopolizing landrush on low difficulty launch, easy denial attacks.

How do we launch a new currency that otherwise is identical to Bitcoin? Delayed mining!:
-The first N blocks have no reward,
-The genesis difficulty is high (~100,000 vs Bitcoin's current 3.3M),
-Insertion of full coinbase block reward into generated block only becomes valid if the previous difficulty period was > 1 million
-"pre-launch" blocks may either have only this 0 generate value, or optionally a maximum testing value of 0.01 if deemed necessary.

Design:
Except for these fair bootstrap rules and putting it on a different P2P network with different addresses, it IS Bitcoin, and stays a minimal patch against the current Bitcoin client. This gives a long period for setup and adoption, as at least the hashrate of 2-3 large pools is required before anybody starts earning coins (plus you get around 2 weeks warning of the block that begins coin launch) The currency must be protected with hashrate before any coin generation, discouraging attack or exploitation by a single entity.

Outcome:
-A long period for adoption, the hashrate must first scale near the size of Namecoin's current merge mining to be "launched".
-Installed base of client software, users with addresses, and miners possible before any coins exist.
-Merged mining this Faircoin is a no-cost bonus to pools and miners, now your pool pays Faircoins too.
-Currency starts rare, and continues to be rare. Miner earnings likely to be similar to Bitcoin earning rate (depending on pool merged mining adoption) due to high difficulty threshold.

Use: Will it be worth anything? Namecoin is worth 1/100 of Bitcoin, and it has little current use and a sub-par command-line-only client. This starts hard to mine and also is almost "forced" on everyone by the necessity to merge mine, so it is widely distributed from the first reward block.

Tell me (besides it being another alt-currency) why this is bad. The only flaw is that it might not "launch" due to pools never putting enough merge mining hashrate towards it.