Topic: [ANN] [888] [SCRYPT] OctoCoin ◦ The Power of Eight ◦ Don't Blink - page 130. (Read 297728 times)

+1 for setting block reward to 188.

And thanks dev team for looking in to the issue.

I personally also vote for a standard block reward of 188 !

The randomness was fun, but is supposed to be also 188 block reward in the end, and for know it is spoiled by the one who exploit the mechanism.

For all who in octo theme!
We must vote more active on mintpal!!!
I make minimum 5-6 votes every day, but i see how some outsiders become higher then octo, and it is really sad...
Please be more active, it's our interest to give this coin future!

As of this post, we are approaching block 62,400; the bonus blocks do not end until block 94,255. The largest pool is FusionHash and over the past 7 days, blocks have averaged 135 coins/block. While 5016 blocks were found in 96% of the expected time... that 4% obviously does not make up the difference as the block rewards should average out to roughly 188 coins/block.

The issue isn't exactly an exploit as much as it is an unavoidable situation - Dogecoin dealt with the same issue where farms would hit it as soon as a larger block reward was detected and bounce off when a below average block was detected. As a result, standard pools were getting a disproportionate percentage of smaller blocks. The question of whether or not this is an efficient strategy for them is irrelevant - whether they are losing shares or not, consistent miners are not getting the return they expect and that's more important to us than cheaters not actually getting the benefits they think they are. Of course the more hash power we have steadily mining 888 in dedicated pools/etc the better but this is definitely an issue we need to address right away. The Dogecoin developers have approached this a certain way but obviously the random rewards play a bigger role in their coin than in OctoCoin - the bonus blocks are set to end in just over a month.

We did not foresee this being an issue until OctoCoin was trading on a larger exchange. Unfortunately, there are enough people out there that recognize the potential OctoCoin has and are taking advantage of the bonus blocks for the long game.

We had a discussion this afternoon and came to the conclusion that we will absolutely need to fork at some point to resolve this - we don't want to go through another 32,000 blocks with sub-par returns and as much as we hate to fork, it is the right play here. This is where we turn to the community to get some feedback on preferences:

We could make adjustments to the randomization strategy that, as somebody suggested previously, would incorporate the time stamps of randomly selected previous blocks based on a sliding formula and additional factors in determining the value of the block. While we are confident this would make it quite difficult to exploit the random bonus blocks the way it's being done now, we cannot guarantee it won't happen again. We considered implementing a central-server just through the bonus block phase which would crunch the numbers in a way that would make it impossible to exploit, but ultimately agreed this was both unorthodox and overkill.

Another option is that we could just ditch the bonus blocks and change the block rewards to a static 188 coins/block. Most OctoCoin miners are consistently mining OctoCoin anyway so at this point that means a bigger ROI. Another advantage is that right out of the gates it means a more stable hash rate, fewer orphans, and less all-around BS. This is my personal choice but, during today's meeting, one of the guys expressed concerns that this changes the basic specifications of OctoCoin and might upset people. In my opinion, the only people this would upset are the people exploiting the bonus blocks but I understand where he is coming from.

So go ahead and post your feedback here over the next 24 hours or so - we are planning on releasing the new client within 72 hours (it will also contain a handful of tweaks and fixes in addition to the bonus block adjustments). There are approximately 980 OctoCoin blocks/day so assuming we release the new client in 72 hours, we would be somewhere around block #65,360. If we set the fork to occur at block #68,888 that would give us 3 1/2 - 4 days after the client is released to ensure everybody is updated. Obviously the main concerns would be the various smaller exchanges 888 is trading on, all of the pools, etc.

So this is the plan we've come up with and we would love some feedback from the community to help assist us in choosing the best way to proceed. If anybody is adamantly opposed to anything here, please speak up and explain why. Most of us are somewhat new to the crypto world and, despite learning more and more every day, our extensive software development background doesn't necessarily mean OctoCoin itself cannot continue to be improved. The ultimate strength of OctoCoin will come from our products and services but it's important that the coin, community and distribution remain as solid as they possibly can be to ensure the OctoCoin economy moves smoothly from our vision into reality.

Once again, we really appreciate the patience and support of this community - we are proud to have all of you in the OctoCoin family. There is some truly awesome stuff to come but, for now, we just need to ensure a strong foundation.

I've kinda sorta been keeping my eye on it as well, but it's definitely reassuring to know that people have been comparing earnings vs FH and that my pool is on the right track. I really haven't been able to do the research here, but what MEGAman was saying makes some sense. I've thought some on actually putting some elbow grease in and setting up a multipool of my own, but I've kinda abandoned that idea, multipools just seem to rub everyone the wrong way, too much work, lots of risk, etc. But, nonetheless, I'm glad there's nothing wrong with the pool. When the bonus blocks are gone, maybe there won't be so much to worry about.

Anyway, I'd like to announce that, tentatively, within 2 days time, I'm going to have another game up and running for 888. If I have the time to make the final touches I'll try to have it ready by tomorrow. I'm going to keep the premise of the game a surprise until it's ready, but I will say that it has an invest system, so that has potential to make people some extra coin, if it becomes popular. I'll want to test everything out pretty thoroughly before I'd encourage heavy investing and betting but so far I'm pretty confident it's going to be good!

I haven't decided if I'm going to keep the grid game running or not, that depends on if people want to play

I was hoping to get more work done this weekend but I've been feeling pretty awful the past couple of days. It seems like since we've moved that I just cannot get anything done, like being in this house is somehow counterproductive. I did get the pool's software up to date early this morning, lots of improvements to MPOS, haven't done much of a test drive yet. Please PM me if anything funny happens. See you guys soon

PS. kskwerl, you're welcome to bring some of your asics to Fedaykin's Pool, spread the love :b

I just jumped on fusion hash with 83MH with my asics, network hash is 339 and the pool hash is 340

Since OctoCoin calculates the randomness based on the solution to the previous block, it isn't calculated until a block is solved, right? The only possibility here is that the multipool script waits around for an 888 reward block to pop up and switches all of the miners over to Octo. If, once the block is found, the next block is only 88 coins the multipool could jump out of Octo. This clearly isn't a good thing long-term but the Octo devs suggested this was the reason they weren't pushing to get Octo on a big exchange until after the bonus blocks were done. Another bonus is that with 88 second block times, it would surely limit the return for multipools. Depending on how many shares they lose jumping all of the miners to and from OctoCoin they might actually be hurting their returns. So while this method would surely net them more 888 reward blocks than average, they might not be getting that great of a return. Quite often the 888 block is probably found before all of the miners on the multipools even get a chance to submit their shares meaning a lot of stale shares would be lost. Coin calculators aren't great because the difficulty is all over the place and usually sticks on higher difficulties for longer than lower difficulties. Also, looking at those linked addresses, I see a lot of 888 blocks recently but if you scroll down it seems to pretty much average out? Most multipools don't really think things through that well. Also, regarding the difficulty adjustment, OctoCoin's formula seems to work pretty well. It doesn't punish consistent miners as bad as KGW does because it limits the fluctuation. I hope they don't change it.

@Stonerboy it seems more likely because every addresses listed above bank every octocoin they mined. Multipool should redistribute their "finding"

Or maybe this are just Multipool Owners scamming the miners by simply letting the Bonusblocks beeing sorted out to their own adress.
I just remember once finding like 4 Bonusblocks in a row on Edrics pool...
But i'll keep an eye on it from now on. 

Hi All,

After Edric post, I want to check my earning again and found some strange thing 

I'm running a modest 1800 KH/s rig (3xHD7950)
Based on CoinTweak.com calculation I'm supposed to earn around 1400 888/day (calculated with a 188 mid block reward value)

here is my earning from Edric's Pool for 3 consecutive full day :
906,7025276 888/day
744,3882611 888/day
865,0497542 888/day

way above the supposed earning calculated on CoinTweak ...

So I switch to FusionHash to see if the pool was the problem. After 1 fullDay my earning is :

795 888/day

Approximately the same result (variation is due to the luck of finding a 888 block)

So the problem does not come from the Pool. So it should come from the calculation from CoinTweak.
But the 188 mid block reward value should be good : 1 of 8 block found should be reward by 888 instead of 88 -> (7*88 + 1*888)/8 = 188
Maybe we are very unlucky and miss almost all of the 888 block, but who get them ??

I check the block explorer and find some strange thing :

a lot of 888 block seems to be found by addresses that found almost exclusively 888 block   
Example :

block 61701 http://explorer.octocoin.org/block/d31066c93a9221fa763a39dc251b0c4b0bd35819a204aeb0f6a98a7a45c81528
found by http://explorer.octocoin.org/address/8Zg5y7CrfCCioQxvFB84GwZ4HhTiAwLDNK

block 61712 http://explorer.octocoin.org/block/fd8ef3cad80fac802c278bd903a7fb7348d807b9cf9d7c286f6ecbc60a394d98
found by http://explorer.octocoin.org/address/8bkYH4PhnZmBG8e5apecnUteQC9o5chgtE

block 61714  http://explorer.octocoin.org/block/323af936e56dd8a6898d1081039ebdf09fd06550201318924790f4a37e979560
found by http://explorer.octocoin.org/address/8Wz3jZrnBESnPY1fcZnGH486MQnhnfhXCB

Am I missing something ? I not very familiar with the block explorer, so maybe i'm doing something wrong ?
Or is this very strange ?

Welcome welcome!

For me, this is one of the most sincere bitcoin threads and altcoins. No to so many people with unquestionable motives and FUD spreading etc. Just people mining their thing.

 

I moved out of altcoins for the most part back in November, and haven't really been watching the altcoin market since then. Which I suppose is odd as I Moderate @ Cryptsy. But I pointed a couple rigs at 888 a few weeks back and am very happy I did. While I have no idea what cloud based services the dev team is working on, I have a feeling this coin could be a very well kept secret. Been a while since I was excited to see what a coin does once the major exchanges pick it up. I have traded BTC exclusively since last year, so this should be a lot of fun. Glad to be in on the ride

Really nice idea!

Thanks guys, I'm fine with 888 for now.
As I promised that I will have paid forward part of what you guys gave me last week, and it looks like we are just shy of 100, not bad

I will see what else i can come up with to spread word of Octo

i trust in power of 888

Most excellent! I'm glad you guys are making some progress and hope you're not running into too much trouble or opposition. As always, I'm excited for what the future holds in store for us OctoCoin fans! I know you guys are working on some kind of big gaming platform for Octo, and the last thing I want to do is step on anyone's toes or get in the way, but there's a couple of games I still have coming up as well, mostly for fun and maybe a little profit, but nothing to rival ya'lls Macau casino plans! I don't think anyone's played the grid game in weeks though, lol.

I've been so busy I have barely had time to read my emails or respond to PM's, I'm a little ashamed. But, new house (to us, at least, lol, it needs lots of work still), fixed my mom's car so they can go to Austin this weekend, found a dog, and a whole bunch of other things happened, except for 2. I still haven't shaved my beard, and I still haven't gotten laid, probably because I haven't shaved my beard. The good news is, I finally have a whole weekend of keyboard time in front of me, so it's time to -actually- get some stuff done and address a few issues. ***Any wallet bugs/issues mentioned in this post are of little/no consequence to the general end user and are not meant to spread FUD, only promote development*** had to throw that in, I mention some problem with something and I get PM's "edric stahp! FUD is bad, everyone run away! STAHP"

I'm going to go ahead and make this post my weekly/biweekly/whenever update, so the next couple of paragraphs are meant for the Octo devs. I know you guys are aware of issues, but I'm going to share my experiences, just in case there's something that's been missed or if it helps to pinpoint anything...
I'm pretty sure you saw my last few messages pertaining to the payout issues my pool was having with the updated wallet, would you be so kind as to pass that information along (if you haven't already)? If needed, at some point I can get something set up to do some more testing on different types of pool-related payout situations to help ensure we've squashed any more gremlins. I'm going to go ahead and try to reiterate the problems I've experienced with the updated wallet (and hopefully explain it clearly enough to understand). I hope I'm not annoying you guys, just want to help

The weirdest issue was it giving an error when manually sending out some small amounts (for the "weekly" giveaway), even when those amounts were outside of what was supposed to be "locked for users" (gave an error, failed to send specified amount but still subtracted the amount from the pool's liquid assets upon -each- attempt, subsequent attempt still gave an error but sent the transaction and did not return TXID). The perplexing thing was that even the failed transactions still counted off the pool's liquid balance, including the one that gave the same error, but sent out anyway (me persistently trying to send it), now the pool's amount "locked for users" exceeds our actual balance (showing a negative amount in liquid assets) which I'm trying to whittle down by donating my earnings directly to the pool, the value is always different depending on how much unconfirmed we have, MPOS has a couple of different options for accounting for actual and unconfirmed/immature balances but there's still something going on with that. It's possible that MPOS has some slight problem itself so it's just compounding the problem. With the older wallet, the pool still runs and processes payouts without the "locked for users" problem shutting off the payout cron. It has kept me up late a few nights pondering it, though, because I had 10k more than what was locked, and was only sending 2 payments of 1444 so aside from it deducting from the balance on every attempt with an error, it should have processed the transaction without error in the first place.

Ironically, since the update was meant to help out with people experiencing stuck transactions, I had never experienced it until using the new wallet, but did indeed get a stuck transaction. I sent what I had left in my personal wallet to the pool to help pad the negative liquid asset problem that I caused by repeatedly attempting to send those giveaway transactions I mentioned earlier. The incoming transaction was stuck, and one of the outgoing giveaway transactions was stuck for a bit too. When I switched back to the older version wallet, a rescan did the trick. Maybe through all of this, somehow, I made things worse or somehow caused problems with the "locked" coins in the wallet. I've never actually sat down and manually tested out coin locking features so my understanding of it is foggy, at best. It seems, though, that across the versions of the wallet that it handles locked coins differently.

God, it's so hard to make sense of in my own head let alone explain it clearly, lol. So we've established I suck at detailed explanations. When in doubt, just ramble and hope everyone understands.

As a pool operator my #1 priority is to every aspect of customer service, most importantly that everyone is getting every satoshi their hardware should (more on this later in this post!), but I'm also a borderline-OCD hacker and enthusiast so my drive to fix, tweak, customize, and do any good I can is pretty damn powerful and I feel a strong commitment to the things I'm involved in, particularly to Octo and MPOS.

The wall of text continues...
A (potential) matter has been brought to my attention by a user at my pool. He didn't mention anything in this thread because he didn't want to embarrass or badmouth me or anything, which is definitely thoughtful, but I feel that being transparent and honest is something that you guys, the community, really appreciates, so I think it's best to bring it up here as a matter of record and get everyone's input. Anyway, I was asked to look into his earnings because it didn't seem to match up to his figures or expectations. I've done a good bit of investigation into that today, and while everything checks out just fine, I'm left with some questions so I'm reaching out to you guys for a bit of help. The user that contacted me is running a 1.5mh miner his earnings seemed too low to him. I covered the first bases by making sure nothing got lost, no transactions were stuck or anything like that, no problems there. I've done a good deal of comparison in the last few hours between earnings/day estimations reported by my pool and from the earnings calculator at http://cointweak.com, but am still left with some questions because of the semi-dynamic block rewards of Octo. To start off, in the "block reward" box, on the Octo mining calc at cointweak, the default value is 188, which I'm assuming is to help account for superblocks. What are everyone's thoughts as to the accuracy of the results provided by that? My pool's earnings estimation page gives you an estimation of coins/day, based off your hashrate, but only calculates it by the base block value specified in the pool's configuration (88), and doesn't factor in superblocks. In my conversations with my concerned user, I cited an example where I checked the pool's earnings estimation and it was showing 1200 coins/day, and checked back again a while later and it was halved, at only 600~/day (same hashrate, can't remember exactly but was 1.5mh-ish, don't remember difficulties at the time). He didn't quite agree that slight diff changes would have such a large impact on earnings, and I agree that's a little extreme, but coupled with bad luck getting superblocks I'm pretty well certain that's the deal. Anyway, the point of all this is that I'm not leaving anything to chance and want to make 100% certain that everyone gets the full value of their hashrates. I'd also like to get the pool to where it's providing a more accurate earnings estimate for everyone as well. I know most of you guys have busy lives and horny wives, but if you have a spare minute or two could you take note of your hashrates, diff, earnings/day estimation (MPOS - Statistics > Pool) vs your actual earnings? Even without the superblocks, diff goes up and down so quick it's probably impossible to get an accurate estimation, but the most helpful information would be actual 24h earnings per your hashrate, from any pool. I'd like to be able to compare people's earnings from other pools, just to be safe, and to put some minds at ease (mainly my concerned user, and my own). Like I said, I'm pretty certain rapid diff changes and bad superblock luck is throwing everything off, but I have to be sure.

That brings me back to what I was looking at on cointweak, the default value of 188 in the block reward box. I'm admittedly not the best mathematician but it stands to reason that it's impossible for any value in that box to give a reliably accurate result, when mining a superblock is left to chance (and the faster pool), but is it better than just using base values for estimations then being happy when you get bonus superblock coins??? If so I believe I can plug that value into the pool in such a manner as to base payout estimations off of it, without screwing up -actual- earnings. To be honest, I'd never really thought much about how the semi-dynamic rewards would mess up estimates. The important thing is just to make sure everyone's getting the proper credit.

Gotta give a shout out to shellbunner, the toughest general in the Octo Army! The rig is working pretty awesome, I can get it up to 2MH~, 3/4 of the cards work, gonna try to fix the other. The back of the PCB's are covered with thousands of teeny components, little resistors I think, lots chipped off one, possibly it still hashes even though it doesn't display. I don't have steady enough hands but my buddy Andy claims he could "solder the d!@k back on an ant", so I might let him have a crack at it lol. Right now got the others mining Octos, donating 99% back into the pool to fix the liquid balance bug and build up a buffer so it doesn't keep happening, though in the next day or so I'm going to divert some hashes to testing if earnings are what they should be across some other pools, I'm a traitor to myself! Once I can funnel some more coin into the pool's wallet I'm going to start doing the giveaways again. The glitch I had during the last giveaway set us back pretty far, ate up several weeks worth of collecting .8% fee, so once I offset that, there'll be weekly winners again!

Ok guys, my fingers are getting tired, I've been typing this on and off for about 5 hours or something. I let time creep up on me and now it's too late to buy beer

Pool hashrates have gone up and down quite a bit since we first opened up, but I think we're at an all time low right now. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that the downward slide in hashrate is a sort of "snowball effect". Hashrate goes down, we get less superblocks, user says "hey, I don't think this pool is paying me enough" and they switch, so hashrate goes down, we get less superblocks, and so on. I'm a fairly smart guy but that actually just now occurred to me, right before I hit post so I had to slide this in somewhere XD  We'll survive the dark times, and one day those superblocks will be gone (don't remember when). I haven't figured out yet what causes an upward trend in our hashrate, maybe it's just a random decision to mine at my pool? Or when shellbunner connects a 150MH rental rig to my pool, then everyone sees, "oh yea Fedaykin's pool is where the love is!" Bring it on! lol


As always, thanks everyone, I appreciate all of you and all your support! If anyone is able to throw some numbers at me and answer some of my above questions, that'd be awesome. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any issues, questions, or concerns either, always happy to help.

nice promo @thenotfatguy!   

Octo 4 Life