Hashcows hit us. From nearmiss directly:
(12:27:45 AM) Maverickthenoob: as a favor, don't hit catcoin for a few days
(12:27:56 AM) Maverickthenoob: you're causing crazy diff oscilations
(12:31:08 AM) nearmiss: will do, I'll turn it off for min. 3 days, let me know how things look then
(12:31:15 AM) Maverickthenoob: thanks man
(12:31:19 AM) Maverickthenoob: I really appreciate that
Even at this diff should be about 25 Minutes a block, meainging we should be good to go in 9 hours. It's not that bad. Keep mining.
Oh that's good news then. I just hope that Middlecoin will leave us alone for a while as well (though something tells me they won't give a flying shit compared to Hashcows).
There is a simple thing these multipool/middlecoin type services can do to be nice to coins like Catcoin - watch the blockchain and switch into mining several blocks early, so the difficulty adjustment will realistically take into account the new hashrate - or at least anticipate when the low difficulty is about to go away, and switch away from mining the coin several blocks early (so the new retarget does not count their massive hash power in estimating the next difficulty level). But in a way, this defeats the purpose of these "profitability maximizing" pools - they feed on (and feed) the wild oscillations to give miners using them "profits" at the expense of anyone who mines any one coin.
I am not suggesting we do another hard fork to implement a permanent fix (such as my loyalty credit proposal) right now, but it may be a good idea if one of the coin developers felt inspired to play with testing the proposed solution to see if it can be coded and tested within a reasonable timeframe - just to have it available in case the oscillations show signs of get worse and worse without any letup, and having a solution ready may be good preparation.
We should feel embarassed to be asking a coin switching pool to leave us alone as a favor - we are suppose to be running a robust system that follows the "code is law" principle - we are supposed to build robustness and incentives in, so we don't ever have to ask for favors. And these favors may be granted once or twice, by specific coin switching pools, but is probably not a sustainable strategy. Without changing any code, we can implement a system of notifying Catcoin miners to watch the blockchain, and send out alerts to start mining early with email/text notification, which will prevent difficult levels from dropping quite so low, and this may be enough to keep catcoin off the top of profitability charts. Anyone with the resources to be able to write software to watch the blockchain and send out notifications like this?
Etblvu1
