Ok guys I've been reading the comments I missed recently, although some of them are pretty long
(I might be writting one my self right now) but overall it was intereseting and there are some great ideas. (I will take this opportunity to apology in advance for the langage massacre that's going to happen in the few next paragraphs
)
Edit : Please take a few minutes to read the whole post I tried to synthetise as much as I could, if you can't you can jump to the different conclusion and Summuries per each paragragh and I apology for the lenghtSo without further due, here is my take on some of the points mentioned
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The loyalty system, although it's a good idea, but I believe it won't work simply because it creat more hassle to miners, that would want to join or that are mining but when the difficulty rise beyond a certain level (that they are losing money on electricity and hardware rather than making some) will just leave, not to mention that there is already the pools PPLNS penalty.
But the idea is good, so I suggest if this idea to be implemented, we should take it the other way, instead of punishing people that leaves you reward people that stay mining, this can be implemented pool side, lets people who mine for a week without non stop (a small intereption is acceptable should get a reward of extra cats depending on the hashrate, not this has to be discussed with pool owner and concensus should be made it) lets just take the example from commerce, this would be like the fidelity card for a supermarket, the more thing you buy from that supermarket the more reward you get. but again might be too much hasle for pool owners so overall, I think the idea is good, but in terms if feasability and implementation it is not.
so tl,dr Good Idea in theory but not going to work from a practical point of view (coding and implementation)
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Stoping services like multipools, middlecoin and such from joining the party when the difficulty is low, this won't work, we are in a free market, if we try to prevent others from joining and we start to ban and make barriers for others business then the whole point of cryptocurrencies is denied here.
tl,dr not going to work and it's counter productiveSo what's the solution:
well lets analyse the problem first : the problem is
PROFITABILITY and volatility (although the ladder is not a problem right now as the prices are pretty stable and coin seems to be pretty steady) and this is what makes people swing from coin to coin.
So how can you make the coin profitable so people wants to mine and keep mining it ?Lets define the profitibility of the coin so we can understand, profitability would be :
Mined coins per time unite (hour/day/week whatever) x price of the coin - expensise, this can be translated to a relation between Price of the coin and difficulty we can find a relation to a K factor between
Minedcoins per time x price and
price / difficultySo to increase profitability there are theroritically a couple possible combination one of these is enough to increase profitability: increase the amount of coins per block, increase price of coin, reduce difficulty, reduce the block time (which will results in more coins).
In practice, increasing the amount of coins per block or block time, will make the coin lose credibility and value so it's not feasable, as for coin price, we can do something about by making the coin more desirable trough advertising, giveaway, the coin being adopted by more services, but this again will be limited and the coin will always follow the offer and demand and market in general, but again we should keep working on this but it's a long term work and not going to solve the current problem. so we are left with difficulty. Difficulty follows the Hashrate, a good profitabilty difficulty is around 30sh (at current price) and that's what's we are getting with our current hashrate, now the problem as mentioned before is when other pools joins in when difficulty is low, and make it rise to the moon and leave, the first fork reduced the difficulty retarget which make the retarget faster and solved a part of the issue, but it didn't solve at all the issue of difficulty swing.
So tl,dr in practice we should focus on advertising the coin and getting more services to enhance the coin ecosystem and increase it value, but this a long term work, in short term we should focus on difficulty especially solving the problem of the difficulty swingSo how to solve the problem of difficulty swing ?I think the part of the solution was mentioned before, which is to reduce the amount of difficulty jumps, I think the current maximum factor is 4x but going from 30 to 80 is still huge and without reaching that limite, so I think that the paramater that should be modified, is that factor, and make it something like
1.5 or something like that (to be discussed of course we can do the math it's not that hard to find an ideal number), but not only for difficulty increase, it should be for the decrease aswell, because it's the sudden decrease that makes other pools join in, so with a factor like that the difficulty will reach a level where it will become steady.
So to resume everything, we should keep working on enhancing the coin with a
long term plan, which would be building a strong advertising plan, also pushing the coin to as much services as possible, another important part is getting media recognition (I tried to writte a wikipedia page but there are no "good" references that I could use) this can be easly done, by tiping webmagazines and techsites and stuff like that, just make sure you writte something that may get their attention and make them writte a whole artical about it.
Short term would be fixing the coin parameters to solve the issues we are having with the Difficulty (difficulty swing) , And the most obvious solution for me is to reduce the maximum change factor from x4 to something more realistic (if it is possible code wise but I think it is)
Regards,