What is this Graph For?This graph was put together to help form a consensus among Catcoin supporters, about the nature of the problem we are facing, often described as difficulty level oscillations. The graph intentionally omits directly showing the difficulty levels, because it's actually not that important - and instead focuses on factors people actually care about - i.e., what is the actual rate at which coins are being produced, and who are receiving the coins that are being produced? To create this graph, I collected about seven days of data from chatchain.info - covering roughly January 7 through January 14. Anyone can verify the graph as presented matches up with the information that's available there.
Notes to Help Understand Graph1. Y-Axis as Coin Production Rate. Just like with Bitcoin, the Catcoin specifications call for an average of 10 minutes between production of blocks. This means there should be an average of 5 coins produced per minute. The Y-Axis represents coins produced per minute, and the lowest notch is labeled with emphasis on "5 Coins / Minute" to show this is the normal coin production rate. This is where we should be.
2. X-Axis as Time. The X-Axis is simply time. Big labels mark off midnight that starts off each day, and little notches mark off 3 hour increments (3am, 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, and 9pm). The data is accurate to the pixel level - the widths show how long each "difficulty level" era lasted. Note that the faster the rate of coin production, the less time the era occupies. Correspondingly, if the rate of coin production slows to a crawl, the "difficulty level" era stretches on for sometimes days.
3. Area as Proportional to Reward. The rectangular areas you see (green, blue, and red) are fair representations of the actual number of coins produced / distributed / not produced. This did not become clear to me until producing the graph, and it is counterintuitive, but the spikes in production rate (represented in green, which also shows how many coins coin hoppers took away), is actually a much smaller number of coins, than the amount of coin production subsequently suppressed (the red zones). In effect, we are seeing "insults" to the coin once in a while, which causes an hour or two of unrealistically fast coin production rates; and this is followed by "overcorrection" to produce coins at a snail's pace.
4. Coin Hoppers are Green. I gave them green, like grass hoppers. Basically, when the rate of coin production is very fast, everyone who mines the coin can expect to obtain more coins for a given amount of hashing effort. So the coin is very popular to mine, but only for a very brief time.
5. Loyal, Consistent Miners are Blue. When coin production is high, loyal, consistent miners see their yield rise, and they actually collectively see approximately the 5 coins per minute production rate they expect should always be happening. But the lion's share of the coins produced, goes to coin hoppers (green).
6. Missed Production. When the rate of coin production gets very slow, we start seeing numbers like only 1-2 coins being produced per minute, and even less. This is very bad for the coin retaining consistent, loyal miners, because they see very few coins for the large amount of effort put in. Ideally, we see little or no missed production (represented in Red).
7. Actual Coin Production Rate. The black line represents the actual coin production rate. If you have a hard time seeing it (it is pretty thin), just trace a line along where the green and blue blocks are, ignoring the red. This represents roughly how many coins are being produced per minute, at each point in time, during the 7 days covered.
Please feel free to post any questions about the information presented, and I will endeavor to do my best to clarify anything that is confusing in the graph. I hope this will spark some discussion and help bring fellow Catcoin supporters closer to a consensus about the nature of the difficulties we are seeing, and how we might go about solving it.
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