Topic: [ANN] Catcoin - 0.9.1.1 - Old thread. Locked. Please use 0.9.2 thread. - page 9. (Read 131061 times)

Here's a good argument that Bitcoin (and the altcoins even more so) have been programmed to die: http://cryptome.org/2014/05/bitcoin-suicide.pdf

edit: We need to be able to have a discussion about timestamps, both on blocks, and on transactions, and how we'd like to check said timestamps. Denial of the problem does not make it go away.

I have also argued about this way to much, and if anyone would like to discuss timestamps, find me on irc.freenode.net #catoshi-dev.

The blockchain is public record, and all BIGNUM catcoin from address 9Uuwhatever have been **mined**, if you would care to look at public blockchain record. AND pretty much all of those coins have been mined at lower than average difficulty, giving that miner MORE catcoins per megahash than you are getting.

If you like this arrangement, then just frickin say so. Buy my opinion is that address is unfairly taking advantage of you and every other small miner who mines for a few days providing distributed network security and gets frustrated and quits because they get no catcoins.

The nonsense, both from you, and from 9Uuwhatever needs to stop, and we need to get on with a fair return, instead of giving a extra bonus to gigahash switchpools. We can start with the following patch:


What this will do is tell your miners to always create blocks with a gap of at least 2 minutes on the block timestamps. If the miner controlling the 9Uu address adds this patch, it will significantly reduce the difficulty swings.

Pull your head out, Troy.  News flash - people transfer crypto coins.  They do it on a block chain.  The block chain is a ledger.  There are plenty of people that have either mined CAT from the beginning (when the blocks were damn near instant) or have been trading and building up their coins.  That's what the damn coins are FOR.  It's what they do.     You're all lathered up because someone TRANSFERRED (not mined, TRANSFERRED) 1.567 Bitcoin worth of CAT?  Seriously?!

And I have NEVER had a stash of CAT.  I have 100 in my personal wallet, 1100 in my account on Geekhash, and 14 pending blocks on my private pool.  They will be cashed out - either to help fund CAT infrastructure, pay for a programmer to fix the algo, or to be donated to my local cat rescue/adoption shelter.

Using a block time filter is THEFT.  People doing that are THIEVES.  They are CRIMINALS.  The CAT dev team are NOT thieves or criminals and will NOT tolerate anyone that is.

I can't make it any more clear that that.

If you want to be a block Nazi, Troy, or a busybody in everyone's wallet, do it somewhere else.

A dev note on infrastructure:

One of the early strengths of CAT was the enthusiastic community that sprang up, eager to do whatever was necessary to help bring CAT to life.  During those early days, someone set up a seed node, someone else set up a block explorer, someone else hosted wallets, someone else started a Twitter account, someone else Facebook accounts (there were a couple of Facebook accounts...), etc.  It was fun to be part of!

But that community strength became a very serious weakness starting about three months after CAT was launched, because the seed node domain expired three months in and we lost our seed nodes.  Then, after releasing new code, the block explorer and charts fell off the network because the two different groups controlling those pieces didn't respond.  Losing the block explorer almost cost us our Cryptsy listing as they require a working block explorer for their listed coins.

We've had similar challenges since - catcoin.biz, more block explorer hits, no access to other sites, etc.

To fix that - and to finally present a focused, professional appearance - we're continuing to pull all the pieces together.  This will allow easier administration, a consistent look and message, and above all, a 100% guarantee that ALL of the necessary pieces will continue to function.

We're building resilience and redundancy into the mix, and we need to be able to link, adjust, update, and guarantee 24/7 access to every piece of our critical infrastructure.

Please check with us before deploying any servers - you'll probably be wasting your time and money.

Thanks,
Andy

So either I'm on some different blockchain, or you just told me your address is 9Uueyr4T8dmzeZHNhYPjYdZbPpxmE9tUMh and blockparser tells me this:


That's an impressive haul there.

Now maybe I'm misunderstanding you, and you meant 21 blocks since you started mining. Which is what I'd rather believe, but someone got 21 blocks in the last 24 hours, and has gotten 185,700 cat since they last changed their address. And if that address is not you, then that address is basically stealing catcoin *that you could have mined* if we had a 2 or 5 minute block time requirement.

I know all I need to know about PID and control from my last two careers.  I've used PID and other control systems as an aircraft pilot and on a blue-water fishing boat, and have worked between users and engineers during design and acceptance testing for other control systems.  Finally, the guy that wrote our PID is a professional programmer that works daily writing PID controls.

We're done wasting time trying to find ways to talk with you.  Your whale hunting obsession/fetish isn't really that interesting or useful.

Finally, No, I'm not going to share crypto addresses with you.  Crypto is supposed to be nearly anonymous.  Your obsession with convincing people to use the same addresses is counter to that.  And I haven't mined 11 blocks.  I've mined 21 so far.  My two GAW Black Widow are doing 14MH/s each, and my two GAW Fury are crunching just over 3MH/s.  That's all the scrypt mining capability I have and it's 100% on CAT.

And I'm still finding blocks even after you removed your miner from the network.

Here's a quick dev team update.

This project has had two significant challenges from the beginning:  The difficulty adjustment process and the infrastructure (seed nodes, block explorers, web pages, domain registration, etc.).

After almost a year, we finally have rights to catcoin-dev.  We have the ability to edit catcoins.org.  We've established a seed node network and are moving nodes to better servers.  We're building an entire infrastructure we can access and maintain - and allowing the fragmented and inaccessible domains and servers to expire.  (That's not quite accurate - we cannot let anything expire - they're expiring on their own, and the former members of the community that stood them up are not responding to requests to renew them.)  So - the infrastructure is strong, it's under the control of the team, it will NOT be expiring, and we can finally start to do search engine optimization and other basic functions that will allow the marketing effort to resume.

Work continues finding a difficulty adjustment method that will work for CAT in today's ASIC-rich environment regardless of overall hash rate.  We need regular blocks when hash is fast as well as slow.  That's been a serious challenge.  The PID solution rolled out in the last fork was hoped to be a 90% solution (we didn't expect it to be perfect - we were pushing yet another emergency fix at the time).  But we pushed it out when we had some decent network hash rate and were expecting a SERIOUS influx of hash rate after being featured on Oprah's network.  The Oprah thing turned out to be a scam, our hash rate went down instead of up, and the hoped-for 90% PID solution started to gallop badly in the resulting low-hash environment.

Blaksmith is taking what we've learned and is re-writing his PID difficulty adjustment.  At the same time, I'm shopping for a programmer to provide a test CAT package with Dark Gravity Wave 2 or 3, as well as the Phoenixcoin diff algo.  I don't have an ETA for any of these, as Blak's working three jobs, and I'm paying for programming time from my disabled veteran fixed income.  But we WILL get this done and you WILL see the results.  This time we're aiming for a 100% solution - and we have time to do it right.

Bottom line for the community - the ENTIRE community - in spite of the challenges of the past year, and in spite of the limp and missing part of an ear, CAT's still here, still working, and getting stronger every day.

Andy

You're right, Skillface, there's really no point.  It'll never pencil out financially.  I just paid a $360 electric bill - most of that is scrypt and sha miners - and I didn't get anywhere near that back.  But I got plenty of heat and haven't had to run the furnace yet, so that offset ~$100.   

Your greatest contribution at this point, if you'll share them, is your view of crypto and miners.  Would you be willing to buy equipment and mine CAT, knowing that the dev team had code in place that would arbitrarily disregard your work and give the 50 CAT block reward to another miner?

Thanks in advance.
Andy

My amazingly abtuse former friend and former dev team member, your first problem, and the one on which your entire house of cards is built, is that you think that a LEGITIMATE MINER, mining for a profit, during a profitable period is a "problem to be solved" rather than a NORMAL AND EXPECTED FUNCTION OF THE COIN GENERATION PROCESS.

Read that a few times, Hozer.  Let it sink in.  I understand that you're an engineer by training, and that by definition that means you spend a lot of time trying to solve problems.  Your first weakness is that you have to understand how to IDENTIFY A PROBLEM before you set off the solve it.

Your second problem is that in order to try to sell your first, you have to resort to personal attacks to discredit those that are telling you that you're full of shit.

And your final problem, built on the first and second, is a suggestion that 'control theory' is a solution.

Miners don't need to be controlled.  They need to be freed to work and to be paid for their work.  Remember, bucko - WITHOUT MINERS THERE IS NO COIN.  And if you or anyone else deters miners, CAT WILL FAIL.  And frankly, your abuse of the network has ALREADY cost us miners and credibility.  That's why we fired you - the ethics violations and disregard for the processes and rules you helped create were additional problems.

News flash, Hozer and anyone else that looks at the world as he does:  We WANT the coin to be profitable!  We WANT the value to go up!  When the value goes up we WANT miners to come in and mine!  And the contract we have in place says:  "You mine our coin, thus securing our blockchain and validating the transactions, and in exchange we will pay you for blocks you find."  Minimum block times are NOT an option - they are not a "solution" to any valid problem - they are FRAUD and BREACH OF CONTRACT.

Hozer:  No.  It's still NO, it will ALWAYS be NO.   Steal from the miners and go directly to jail.  Do not pass 'go' and do NOT collect $200.

If you can afford the electricity during the high difficulty periods, you might actually make a difference with a GPU.

What I've noticed is that a single ASIC rig/instance of sgminer/cgminer will sometimes go for a very *long* time before finding a block, and just having a video card running along with some big asics gives you a chance that the sgminer/cgminer running your GPU will have a different random number generator seed than the asic (or even a much better cryptographic random number generator period), and you might find a block. This is only my intuition, however, I have no real good data to back it up.

It's not profitable, but neither is running an ASIC system unless you profit-switch for 10 blocks with twice the long-term average hash rate.

I would probably help to try and bump up the hashrate, but these days it's pretty much pointless without ASICs.

My new video card would have been useful back during the first few months but now that Scrypt ASICs exist.. eh. I just don't see the point in mining anymore.

Hozer - I spent a fair bit of time with you whale hunting.  In the end it was a waste of time.  We can prove this thesis simply by looking at CAT over the past four days.

One of our miners was really upset when (s)he couldn't get the same types of returns solo-mining Cat as they got with other coins.  I understand where they were coming from and agree completely.

Additionally, one thing we know about our still broken diff adjust algo is that it works much better with a bit of hash power (as Zerodrama proved a few months back when he put ~60MH/s on the network - it got smooth as silk and almost locked in on regular 10 minute blocks).

We also know that the profit-switchers don't come in until our diff drops below about 20.

So - look at today's chart:  No profit switching, fairly steady, and my 15 MH/s on my private pool has 11 pending blocks in about 24 hours.

This little bit of hash rate is ALL we need to even out folk's valid coin/hash concerns - and it takes us off the switch pool radar as well. **

Where you and I differ on this topic, Hozer, is that I want to fix the galloping by fixing the algo, while you want to fix the galloping by censoring blocks and denying valid miners their payout for blocks found.  I simply cannot go there with you.  It simply does NOT matter which address has how many coins.  That's none of our concern and should be completely outside the focus of the dev team.  Our job is to make it easy and profitable for EVERYONE to mine and use this coin.

** Don't interpret this to mean that I don't think the algo needs work - I hope I've made crystal clear that no one on the dev team is happy with the way this is working.  'Devastated' is closer to the truth and me, Maverick, zero, and Blaksmith have all made that painfully clear in this thread.  But - given our current algo and the current needs of the community, a bit of hash - at least enough to keep the diff above 20 - is a very effective plaster/band aid until we get the new wallet on the streets.  The sooner we get a new wallet distributed and forked, the sooner I can dramatically cut my $300 electric bill...

Litecoin has been getting me a reasonably consistent return, and if I have 0.001% of the hashpower on p2pool, I can get 0.001% of the litecoins. (for example now that I switched back to LTC I am getting something like 0.002 every 3 hours, on average)

I am asking for the catcoin community to come to a consensus that *10%* of the catcoin hashpower, when run steadily, should get roughly 10% of the catcoins mined, and if it doesn't, the wallet is broken, and should be modified and tested (live, if need be), until that criteria is reached, and small miners can get a consistent small share of the total mined coins.

I am not harping on dollar exchange rate profitability, I am harping on *fair returns to miners of all sizes*. Or at least, fair returns to small miners. The big guys can fend for themselves.

What we have now is that 20 to 40% of the proven work in the blockchain from address 9Uueyr4T8dmzeZHNhYPjYdZbPpxmE9tUMh is getting the owner of that address 60% to 80% of the catcoins mined over the last say 3 months, while all of the 'loyal miners' are doing far more of the proven work, and getting far less than their fair-share of mined catcoins.

I'm also generally in favor of Andy's positive long-term outlook. So how long are we going to keep practicing and training by fighting each other before we go out on a whale hunt?

Let's talk coin value for a minute or so.  Hozer and etblvu1 keep harping on either 'lost value' or on "make it profitable so I can afford to mine".

Looking at the coin mining profitability calculators, I don't see a single coin in the ENTIRE ecosystem that is profitable to mine when electricity is figured in.  Some coins spike in for a short time and turn positive, but that's for a very short duration.  After all the time that Bitcoin has been on the streets, even they with their experienced teams and deep programming and marketing base cannot make it profitable to mine BTC.  That's the first problem I see with Eric and Hozer's desire.

The second is that it's illegal in most nations to either fix prices or to control prices of coins - and apparently illegal to promise to fix or control prices.  Spend some time scanning the current GAW incarnation of PayCoin and PayBase for a taste of that.

We can also look at the PayCoin tragedy for an example of the power of marketing and hype.  This coin was 'promised' to be a $20 coin.  Even with millions of dollars of investor support, buying a crypto exchange, setting up an environment to take-on PayPal and credit cards (PayBase) the value of the coin has taken the same curve towards zero that every single other alt-coin has taken after its launch.  Marketing must never stop - expansion of the message of the coin must never stop - but it cannot support a buying frenzy very long.  It's not enough by itself.

What happens to a coin price when there are a lot of ways to spend a coin?  Or in the case of CAT, if the foundation actually happened and we were sending money to support shelters and charities?  People would buy Cat to donate (a better business decision than mining, frankly), the Cat would be transferred to an animal shelter's wallet, they'd convert it to Fiat on Cryptsy or Coinbase, and any rise in coin value from the purchases would be lost when the coins are redeemed.

Same thing with consistent mining - considering the price-lowering effect of introducing more coins into a fairly small environment, more consistent block times are required for expanding adoption of the currency, but will create a downward price pressure, not an upward one.  Maybe that'll change once all our coins are in the wild - we'll have to wait and see.

Finally, the current dev team has taken a long-term view from the very first day.  Not a single one of us have been in 'pump and dump' or 'get rich quick' mode.  It took BTC a full five years to be stable enough to start to be seen as a viable currency for members of the public.  Cat is one year old and she's been through a hell of a lot more than BTC has in their first year.  We won't know for sure what that means until Cat's five, I guess, but it's pretty clear to us that this is a marathon, not a sprint.

If the First Nation view is correct, and regular people walk a smooth path while warriors walk a muddy trail, then I think that Cat's on her way to being a warrior.  That's my long-term outlook for the coin.

Andy

Thanks for writing Eric.  This is NOT the opening of a debate but I will respond.

First, you and I have conflicting view of just about everything we've discussed over the past year.  In addition, you and Hozer have been in lock-step for the past year as well.  Therefore, I'm not at all surprised that the only remotely positive part of your message is that you believe in the coin and she deserves better than she's had.

Market value:  We didn't have any 'market value' when launched, and we've had plenty of challenges to overcome (dropped almost immediately by the original dev team, severe difficulty problems from the first hours after launch, then the expiration of the original dev teams's seed nodes and other infrastructure, then the Oprah scam).  Those didn't destroy any market value, but they certainly killed our multiple attempts to grow.  I've been watching the crypto world for a couple of years now and have yet to see a coin grow in strength.  Most are just holding on.  Hit any alt coin on Cryptsy - the launch hype pushes prices up, then over the course of the year the chart settles down toward zero.  Hype and intense effort can temporarily elevate the prices on exchanges but once the emotion settles the prices settle as well.  Cat's been no different.  This is actually a place that makes me more hopeful about Cat's long-term viability - we've been through hell and we're still here.  We all watched the hype around DOGE - ginormous following, plenty of buzz, sponsoring a race car and an Olympic team - and where are they today?  Merge-mining with litecoin so they can maintain some hash rate and less valuable than CAT.  No - I disagree with your "99%" assertion out of hand as being false and unsupportable.  You're more than welcome to believe what you will, this isn't personal - but the numbers are available for all to see and they do not support your belief.

As to your management suggestion:  You've loved to hate me from the beginning, and have made plenty of hay out of blaming me for anything that bothers you.  Keep in mind - you were already seen as a problem child in the CAT ecosystem before I ever joined the dev team.  Also keep in mind that the current dev team picked up the pieces of Cat after the initial 'pump and dump' hysteria was already fading.  There's no reasonable way that anyone can suggest that either this team or their 'management style' have harmed this project.  On the contrary, we're still alive today - not dead like a number of coins that launched with Cat - because this group jumped in to pick up the pieces and have been fighting to keep this project alive ever since.  We finally got rights to the -dev channel LAST WEEK.  We finally got access to update the project's main website LAST WEEK as well.  There's no sprint here - we've been struggling to keep this project moving since the very beginning.

Kicked out/subversion/terrorism.  You say you perceive that this is 'always happening'.  I'm not surprised that this is your perception.  Truth be told (and this is well documented in the coin's threads) there have been exactly two people that have been seen as disruptive influences in this project.  That disruptive influence label did not come from any member of the dev team - it was coined and applied by a member of the community - and it was directed at you.  To my knowledge, there has been one person tagged as being an active attacker and 'terrorist' - in that they were coding and politically posturing to gain control of the project - and that's Hozer.  I called him on his attacks before I joined the dev team.  There have been exactly two people that demanded that their voices be heard, their political debates tolerated, their repeated attempts to reform the coin in their images.  There have been two people that refused to hear from the community, the original dev team, or the current team, that certain parts of this project are NOT up for debate - and those include the block time, the adherence to the Bitcoin standard for miner reward, and the scrypt algo.  Though you have not been part of the dev team, you were kicked (temporarily both times!) from the dev channel on IRC ONLY because we were working our asses off to push a new wallet and you were STILL wasting our time wanting to debate politics.  Hozer's active attack on the network a few months back was a much less subtle effort that started just after the coin launched and hasn't stopped as of yesterday.  That's two.  The only two people that have worked hard to take this project in a direction that NOBODY but you two want have been kicked.  And since that happened, the peace and progress have been absolutely delightful!

Erratic block timing, etc.  Absolutely.  In hindsight, the initial decision to launch a coin with the original bitcoin diff adjust algo in an environment with relatively massive amounts of hash available was poor.  This team was not part of that decision.  We also didn't have the luxury of time to analyze the ecosystem, devise and test a process that worked perfectly, and then field that solution.  We picked up a failing and stuck coin during a hash hurricane, with no control or awareness of the existing infrastructure or team capabilities, and do the emergency work to keep things moving until we had time to do the 100% solution.  None of the forks to date have had that 100% solution.  We hoped the last one would be fairly close - it performed very well on testnet - but it was released in conjunction with the fallout from the Oprah scam and at a time when our network hash rate fell to almost nothing.  What worked on testnet and has proven to work with 60+ MH/s on the mainnet failed with very low hash rates.  Keep something in mind:  During the work on the current algo, we evaluated a number of possibilities - and we were the first people to identify the exploitability of the KGW algo.  We did NOT jump on that bandwagon like so many other coins and thus did not have to perform another emergency fork to fix that problem.  That's why this next release will be so important - this is the very first time we've had the opportunity to analyze, test, and deploy without being in a crisis.  And we are doing that.

You're welcome to see the team any way you wish.  It's difficult to make things any more transparent, however.  The team - most with real names - are listed in the thread.  Folks that have wanted to talk with us have done so - in IRC, here in PM, via email, and even teamspeak.  Anyone that thinks this is a closed process isn't trying very hard to open the many available doors.  considering your past efforts to dominate the processes, however, I don't expect your position to change.  And that's ok.  It's no longer negatively affecting progress so I think it's best left as it is.

Suggestions, logical or not...   I'll agree that a number of suggestions have been discarded out of hand.  Those have been limited to suggestions that change the core of this coin.  We're staying with scrypt.  We're staying with 10 minute blocks.  We're staying with the standard mining reward system.  And this line in the sand - made well before I was involved in the project - has driven you and hozer nuts from the start and has occupied waaaay too much of our time debating and ultimately ignoring.  Staying with the standard mining reward system means that we will not entertain ANY suggestion that includes censoring blocks, changing time stamps, setting minimum block time requirements, or any process whereby some miners are rewarded differently than others.  That's not 'illogical' or 'political' or even a 'cat fight' worth expanding to make more 'entertaining' - that's a hard-drawn line in the sand that WILL NOT BE CROSSED.  You and hozer have had some excellent ideas.  Why in the WORLD don't you two start your own coin and reward miners the way you want?  Why in the WORLD are either of you still here?  I believe there's only one reason - because you think this project is weak enough for a hostile takeover.  Sorry - ain't gonna happen.

Nothing I've written above is new.  As the history is well documented in the Cat threads, I'll leave this line of discussion  as is and ask that any further need for debate be channeled into reading the threads.

Thanks again for your comments.
Andy

Dear Catcoin Community,

Wanted to Buy - Large amounts of Catcoins. If you have 25,000 or more Catcoins and want out, we can work out some deal which will be better than what you would get trying to dump that kind of volume onto Cryptsy. Please inquire by PM if you have some you are looking to unload.

Thank you,

Etblvu1

I care about the Catcoin project, and have observed that under the current style of management, the coin has lost 99% of its market value. I observe that at any given time, there is someone in the process of getting kicked out with accusation of subversion, terrorism, etc. I observe that the coin has suffered erratic block adjustment behaviors for most of its life, and my numerous contributions of ideas have been dismissed out of hand with what appears to be illogical arguments. The management of the coin currently resembles a dictatorship with lack of transparency with respect to power structure, decision-making process, etc. The coin appears to be treated as if it were the private personal property of a couple of buddies. I believe in the coin and believe it deserves better than that.

Thank you,

Etblvu1

So, either
1) you're the psy-ops dictator of catcoin, and I'm fired and censored
*or*
2) this is a community project open to anyone interested, and you have to put up with me, so we might as well get along, or at least make the fight more entertaining


http://giphy.com/gifs/catfight-HHDd7CtDSIJVu