Etblvu1
Ladies and gentlemen of CAT, since this passive-aggressive post was pointed directly at me, I will take a few minutes to respond and clear the air.
I started mining coins in very early December. I stumbled on CAT Christmas afternoon and read every post in this thread to that point. I was amazed at the community that had risen around this coin! As a cat person in a family of cat people, as a computer geek, and as a huge fan of local currency and distributed progress, I thought and still feel that this coin and this community can do more and become more than any pump and dump clone coin, or than many of the more established coins that are basically just coins.
I also noticed another thing in these posts: That there were some here that didn't seem to be working to strengthen the coin and the community but were rather working, intentionally or not, in ways that were fracturing the community. I didn't know who to trust as I was new, and hadn't yet done my own research into the various characters active here, so I didn't say anything or take the time to even join the forum. I instead, kept reading, but only after I turned all of my mining equipment at the coin.
Now that I've had an opportunity to be a bit more involved, talk to some of you here, in PMs, and especially in IRC, I feel more confident about outlining where we are and where we're headed:
We all know that CAT is basically a clone of LTC with BTC parameters - it's BTC with scrypt. We're also well aware that the 'founder' didn't quite finish his baby before she was born, and then he got pulled back into 'the real world' after a robbery and new job. Unfortunately, that's left some of us to pick up the dev pieces - and we've had to do it quickly because the environment - mining power, pools, hopping pools - is very different today than it was years ago when BTC was released. The assumptions used to tune the way the difficulty responds to sudden changes in hash rate are not up to the task. We learned this very quickly when the first hits from a switching pool pushed our difficulty into the stratosphere and almost brought CAT to a halt. Some brave souls dug into the code, made a quick change to get things moving again, made wallets, coordinated with pools and exchanges, and we had a hard fork. This was emergency surgery - it wasn't designed or tested to be a 100% fix or to be the one and only code change - it was designed only to stop an emergency. It did that perfectly! That we're all still here is proof of that!
We are working on what should be a final fork - a long-term fix to the difficulty 'stuckness' that we're in. The good news is that we have four options, two are coded, two are under test on our new testnet and when we finish simulating a 'hopper attack' we'll present the results. Yes, at this point, no news is good news here.
The bad news from the 'back room' is that one of the four proposals would essentially gut the coin and reprogram it in ways not intended for CAT or LTC or BTC. It would change the entire character of the coin in ways that have never been tested in the real world. What's worse is that the gent that passionately believes in his plan believes that miners are bad, that hoppers are evil creatures, and that the only way to keep CAT alive is to implement FIAT-like manipulation that would make the FED proud. This gent has proven to not understand how the coin was designed, or why crypto exists in the market to begin with.
To the point of etblvu1's post: I am the person that finally asked him to leave the dev channel last night. I did so because me, hozer, blaksmith, and zerodrama were trying to compile more wallets so we can finish testing a code change on the testnet. Unfortunately, etblvu chose to continue to pull all of us off track because he's still trying to sell his proposal to gut the coin. After wasting most of the four hours I had available, I asked him to either help with the dev efforts or leave. I wasn't the only one asking... I have no 'kick' or 'ban' authority on the IRC channel, so all I could do was to press 'ignore' - and I did that only so that we could use the available time for cat, not to massage someone's ego or get into off-topic debates on 'arbitrage'. Yes, etblvue1 writes well and makes some cool graphs - and he's almost got a machine on the testnet. Unfortunately, the signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's not helping us move forward.
That's the tech and that's the soap opera.
Back to the fix: As I've outlined already, other scrypt coins have launched between BTC and CAT (man, that's an understatement!). I've not looked at all of them yet, but the six I have examined have all needed forks to tune the difficulty code - every one. Some are on fork FIVE. What we've been doing is learning from those experiences - finding the difficulty adjustments that WORK so that CAT's 2nd fork (one we knew from the start that she needed) would be the last. There is nothing knee-jerk about this work!
Some things about me that maybe 1 or 2 of you will care about: I'm not a politician and I don't have a poker face. I don't enjoy drama or soap operas. I'm retired military and prefer to cut through the crap and just plain get the job done. I've learned the hard way that bad data is worse than no data - so I don't spin or lie and won't work with anyone that does. I have found some people that I can trust in the community that are also working their butts off to fix the CAT. They are active in the dev channel in between their work and family illness schedules. They are: Maverickthenoob, hozer, skillface, zerodrama, raistlinthewiz, upd, and ThePeePs.
The three fixes we're testing are simply adjustments to the way the difficulty responds to dramatic changes in hash rates. Diff must be allowed to move up and down in response to the number of miners servicing our CAT. The problem - and the ONLY problem with the structure - is that the original code was tweaked for a much, much slower network - a much slower-changing mining base. That's it! Every fix we're working on WILL be better than today - of that we're certain. We're testing not so we can be sure we can improve the coin, but so that we can select the solution that works best. Frankly, we could implement any of the three and have maybe a 60% chance of being done. We're working to get that into the 90% range.
We're putting our time, money, and miners into CAT and are working to get past this one last hurdle. The work's almost done and we look forward to giving you the rest of the details once we've proven that the code works. We expect this to be the absolute last time we will have to slog through a period of 'too high difficulty' and we really look forward to announcing to all of you that we're finished!
Thanks everyone.
Andy
Ada the QC cat approves.