I am starting to see a few issues that may be causing the price of Burst to stay low. And I would guess that unless there is a change then it will not go all that much higher. We need changes. I am sure others agree.
1. Price verses cost of miner setup. HDD arent cheap for anything worth while. And the average computer has between 500-1000gb. Which you can mine with. But you can not expect much from mining unless you are lucky. Buying additional HDDs or other media isn't really that cheap. I just recently upgraded to 6.1TB. Yeah my deadlines have improved and I still get coins. But no where in the amount to make back my ROI anytime soon. Seems the difficulty for the little guys will not pay enough to get anyone that has a brain in on Burst that is looking for any kind of profit. Unless they like the concept as I do. If I didn't like the concept I wouldn't be here. I would be playing with another coin.
most basically, if the reward for mining is low, and people are still mining, the reason can be :
- they are planning a 51% attack ( with burst you need a lot more than 51%, but starting at 51% you can disrupt things a bit)
- they believe the price will go up, so getting the mining stuff operational now, will benefit them in the future ( mine and hold )
- they believe that it is good for the coin to have a hard-to-attack blockchain so they mine at a loss, but feel like taking one for the team
So.. if mining right now is not profitable with burst, it basically just show a lot of confidence in the coin, or people wanting to back the coin even if it cost them some money in the short run.
This is just fine, it would be a lot more problematic if mining was profitable and still nobody was mining. That would mean loss of confidence, non-profitability means lots of confidence.
2. Not having an active dev to develop something new is a killer to anyone that has been around the coin game for a while. I know Crowetic has mentioned that Burst in back in development. Unless I am wrong here. As I am from time to time. People that know or think there is no core team will stay away from this coin because they see it has not having a future. Which the way things are right now. Burst does not. As I said as of now. Not saying that it will not. But what happens when all the coins have been mined as a few have mentioned. Receiving transactions fees will not be worth it at the price it is now. What kind of fees can be earned will be another question. We will have to find out. I would assume.
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I don't believe we have our verson of Satoshi Nakamoto, having come back into development. But all the pools, the wallets, the advanced miners, they were coded by ppl who understand the coin, and one of these dudes probably have unoficcially told crowetic they will do some core work. Going forward the coin will likely be a team effort, just like how bitcoin evolved when gavin (from bitcoin) got the control, then created a team of people having access to core.
I agree the coin need some dedication from developers, but we can't really force people to work on the coin unless we pay for it, so we have to see how much effort
come in voluntarily. As BURST is a copy of NXT with minor changes, most of the core work has been done on NXT, and the mining specific stuff is well understood by many of the developers of specialized miners etc.
If you look at the new original post, it mentions several developers who are working with burst, but right now it seems most of the effort is on non-core stuff, as the
burst core has been doing just fine for many months.
3. Empty blocks. I have been watching the blockchain and see a LOAD of emtpy block. With no transactions. This shows that there are times that Burst is not being traded. This is a downfall and has killed hundreds of other currencies. Some may not agree with me on this but you can tell alot from watching amounts in a blockchain. Some people even use this way of thinking to buy shorts or longs as it is a way to guess at what the price may hit using an equation. Some have used this idea for their shorts and longs. You can find a pattern. Know when the heaviest traffic is online and trading. and a load of other things. Just means to me that Burst isnt highly active. I am also talking about the blocks that only have like 100 Burst in them. In my mind it rounds down to 0. and still looks empty. Anyone following me on what I am saying? Pretty much activity is low compared to other coins.
If you use burst as a store of value, or chain to prove ownership of assets, empty blocks is just fine fine, it is just new hashes on top of old hashes, making the data more and more secure and un-tamperable. It all depends on what aspects of BURST the market find most interesting. Maybe BURST is not perfect for buying a mars bar in a vending machine, so what... if burst is perfect for recording ownership of a luxury yatch, or a car, or a company, then maybe perhaps, that is where the value is.. i have no idea, and only time will tell, burst is quite versatile, almost the swiss army knife of crypto currencies, so whatever the users find useful, BURST will provide... but blockchain will of course reflect how it is being used.
4. Mining solo. Cant be done unless you have a massive amount of HDD space. With the current diff you have to be extremely lucky. And if you are. you are awarded 4,801 Burst coins. Which is at current price (17) only 81,617 sats. You would be better off mining BCN or something with your CPU. Unless you are willing to buy $20k or more worth of HDDs it really is not worth it. and even then your ROI increases and who is to tell when that would be recovered.
it's not profitable, but my humble collection of odd disks give me 4 blocks a day usually, and that is okay for me. Back of the napkin calculations tell me that if i reduced my TBs to 15, then i would still more or less average one block a day. And my rigs are far from optimal, i'm running original java miner, HDD's i also need for other stuff, and computers that i just happen to have running 24/7 anyways.
5. Pool mining is great. There only seems to be a handful of pools that are active. I seen one yesterday from Italy that had only like 7 people mining in there. There rules stated all round shares reset after 97 rounds with no blocks found. OK. So these people seem to not be mining anything unless they have something heavy to contribute or get lucky. And yet again they have to split there shares by pool rules. Making hardly anything. I know in mid to short term. Mining period is not worth it. If you had to purchase all you HDD space. Again the ROI figures in and you have to see how long it would take to even get a tiny return. So some of these people are getting only like lets say 1200 coins aday. That only comes out to around 20,400 sats a day. At that rate it would take you ages to earn a single BTC. 4,901.2 days at current rate if they only mined 1,200 coins aday. That is a little over 13 years. Trust me people see this and stay away. I am on Ninja currently with the 6.1TB and I am seeing only around 300-600 coins per day. at the 600 per day that takes me to 26 years to earn a single BTC. That would put me around 60 years old.
Again not worth it for anyone unless they have a large farm or like the concept.
pool mining is a fantastic gamification of the mining process, and for some, it is an easier thing to set up than solo mining. Creators of pool software and runners of BURST pools have my deepest respect. But i don't see why bitladen shoudl go pool mining. It would just be an overhead for him, and it would clutter up the blockchain with transactions. We should be grateful that we have a hash sponsor that ( until now ) has been shown to be benevolent and not abusing his potential power. However, statements in the past are tainting, and i fear that one day bitladen gets bored and try to crash BURST with his majority mining power. Should it happen, we can always start a new BURST from the block before he took control and see where the users go.
6. Setup of the wallet and mining. Some hate it. Absolutely hate it. I have read this many times. And there are guides but they do not go into details as some need. It isn't all that simple for someone who has no idea about Java or how to modify a .bat. There should be GUI that is more user friendly. I know that would give us a better standing with a few out there and may have a huge impact on new Bursters. I am sure there have been at least a few that have just given up because they couldn't get it to work correctly.
not me to judge, but i agree a burst wallet , plotter, and miner should be install and forget. Only user interaction should be where you type in how much % diskspace you want burst to use on the various drives.( or 0 for not mining ). and a dropdown where you could select what pool to use, or go solo. Then the software should figure out the rest. A really cool wallet/miner would even remove plots if disk space became sparse so you never even knew it was there in the first place.
I modified the .bat and .sh files to work in my settings, and it was not something someone without shell / cmd experience could do unattended.
So i agree that effort should be made in that department, but i also see that this is exactly where all the developers are developing. not core, but utilities , pools and wallets - so all is good.
7. Now please don't bash me for this but I have to mention it. As it does have an impact. When I am sitting watching the winners of block on Ninja. I see one name over and over again. Today at one time there were 14 out of 20 blocks that were mined by a single person. I am sure you know who I am talking about. I am not bashing him. Just have to mention that this is an issue for all of the burst community. Unless 1 of 3 things were to happen. 1. He stops solo mining and joins a large pool to move the burst threw the community. 2. He stop mining entirely for a bit to drop the difficulty. 3. He spreads some of his farm out to high end pools. I do not see the price of Burst moving up much higher then it is currently if one of these do not happen. Unless there is a major feature added and people get involved. These coins are suppose to be decentralized. Doesnt work that well when one person is mining over 1/2 the coins issued in a entire day. Not healthy for the coin.
bitladen usually sells his burst as soon as he mine them. This keeps the price down, but reduces his risk. He is the one to decide what is best for him, and either way to do it ( mine and hold, vs mine and sell ) has its own advantages and disadvantages for the miner, and for the community.. but as long as bitladin is mining and selling he is in fact making burst much more distributed than it would otherwise be. All i mine end up in my safe wallet. I'm not distributing at all.... but my hoarding keeps the price up due to no selling pressure from my 16K burst a day on average.
The way it sits right now. Once all the Burst is mined. The coin will die. We need reasons for its use. I know Crowetic mentioned a few things and was wondering why it isn't doing better. Some of the things I mentioned above are some of the reasons. Why it isnt doing well.
when all BURST is mined, block reward from transactions will be like perhaps 10 burst with the current traffic ( likely higher than that, but who knows ). This will mean that the most cost sensitive miners will go away, and the remaining miners will make more or less what they make now, so no big deal for the miners.
The users, however, will have a coin will less security, as it will be easier (cheaper) to take over the blockchain if not much mining is going on. If things does not match up at all, users and miners will probably agree on an increase of the minimum fee, to make mining more profitable.
, is there a chance that anyone have it? I would also like to see the op update the links to the forum. The owner of burstcoin.info should do the same. (Btw i like the new design)
Anyway, here's a calculator: