Joe and I spent some time yesterday reviewing the difficulty adjustment code and came to the same conclusion. Even though retargets are done every block, the adjustment uses an exponential moving towards the target difficulty over a period of time. The target timespan for re-adjustment is very short - 30 minutes, whereas many other coins have a target re-adjustment timespan of several days or more. The effect of this is that when there is a huge influx of mining capacity (as was the case in the minutes after launch) the difficulty changes to account for them very quickly. This means that people hoping to get an advantage with low difficulty will not be able to, making this extremely fair. This, combined with the reward being directly proportional to difficulty, means that mining profitability will remain fairly constant from launch onwards. It doesn't matter whether you have a laptop or a farm of 100 machines, your average reward will stay the same with time, regardless of the network hash. It is about as fair as a PoW distribution can possibly be**
** the caveat to this is that the reward : difficulty ratio must be high enough to both ensure that coins are minted at the expected rate, AND that the reward is in line with the supply of the old coin that it is being swapped. IMO the reward is currently too low to fulfill this. I think the reward needs to be much higher in order to have the PoW period over within a few months as the developer was hoping and right now the daily minting of 5-10k is disproportionate to the 1.25 million coins set aside for the swap.
Paul,
I like the way re-target of timespan is setup because many coins out there are targeted for mining during low difficulty, coming into them looking to 'game' the profits then exit. So this is absolutely fair, and fair means price wise, everyone is gaining no matter if they are 'buying' or 'selling'.. While there is value in the sense that there is great opportunities of traditions available here with magi. I think the way this is setup is an ideal solution down the road as more miners come on board.
Yep fair point, I hadn't even considered that the current setup prevents "gaming" of low difficulty periods. That said, I stand by my other suggestion that it could be increased a little to 90-120 minutes so that the block-to-block fluctuations are smoothed a little. That's still a small window of opportunity for miners to realise diff is low, get in and game it. Because this is a CPU coin it's not like people have big farms just sat there idle waiting to mine profitably. The reality is that people would rent per-hour VPS's when it is profitable to mine. This just wouldn't be worth the time or effort if you know the profit window will be fully closed in less than 2 hours. IDK this is just my opinion. I'm not the dev here and I'm also not mining this because I don't have spare machines at home and the (very very large) number of machines I do have access to for mining cost me 1c / corehour, and that's too expensive for me to mine at the current price/reward
yeah, gaming / cheating is a big deal... happens everywhere so its not just crypto. As more new miners come into the industry, some will try to play by the rules and some will try to game it. That is just how life works. This is what i think the gaming logic is a good leg to stand on with this coin.
I presume as more people down the road here about magi's algo and look over its mining opportunities plus join in to help earn more coins, this will help its long term growth.
