After reading for the few weeks leading up to the hardfork, as well as the few days after, I've been both impressed and disappointed in the magi community. There are plenty of people that are happy with the growth in magi, and plenty that are simply upset they cant earn any mining. The mining issue has been one that has slowly been reaching a boiling point over the last few months, and was even an issue last time we forked. A lot of people are calling for limits for mining in the protocol, poolside, in the miners, etc. I'd like to take a minute to discuss the issues with each of these approaches and offer my suggestion.
To begin with, we need to understand the potential types of whales we're dealing with.
1 - Botnets
2 - People with large amounts of CPU/CPU power. This could quite simply be someone with a few, very powerful CPU at this point.
3 - People with a private or personal GPU/ASIC miner. Although this is a rumor, this should be considered.
We also need to look at some of the commonly proposed solutions to the hashrate.
1 - limit hashrate poolside
2 - limit hashrate in the protocol
3 - limit hashrate in the miner
I'm aware there are other suggestions as well, they simply dont come to mind as quickly as these and will likely fall under the same ineffective solution as these.
Looking at these issues, the first is easily avoided. Botnets can be configured to create workers for each CPU in the net, or if there is an account limit than a separate account. People with large amounts of CPU power can easily do the same, especially considering if they fall under the few, very powerful CPU category. This would solve the issue of a single miner/worker having a large hashrate, as would be the case for a GPU/ASIC miner, but these are unproven rumors and likely would have minimal impact. It would, however be nice to see.
Moving to limiting hashrate in the protocol. I've seen this suggested and I'm not a technical as many in this thread, however I can already see some issues with this. It will only be a matter of time before someone "cracks" the new update, and when that happens do you think this person will share the code? This will only punish those following the rules more and allow those that abuse the network even more success.
Finally, limiting hashrate in the miner. Same as above, this will just result in other miners without the limit being made, or endless guides on youtube/steemit showing you how to disable the limit.
So what can be done? In my opinion there is no silver bullet, and there is no perfect plan. No matter what the magi network as it stands and is designed will never function perfectly, but we can get closer to the ideal. To begin with, I do believe an updated miner should be released. This miner should use some sort of sweet spot control by default, so the hashrates adapt and change to promote healthy network hashrate. Of course this could be diabled, but that is an extra step that would need to be taken, and would help a good bit. Second, I believe the previously mentioned idea of having the miner suggest if you hashrate is too high/low/just right is good. This could potentially draw miners attention to this and may lead some of them to lower their hash, direct it elsewhere, or simply enable the previously mentioned "sweet spot" mode.
As for pools, simply suggesting on the dashboard whether a users/workers hashrate is too high/low/just right could also help, this would compliment the changes above as well.
The big change I'm suggesting is that we as a community start to seriously suggest and recommend dual mining XMG. I've been experimenting with this recently and I'll be posting some results in the following weeks, but this seems to be a good solution for a number of reasons. For starters, for big miners and botnets this offers the ability to earn more than mining either specific coin on its own. The main benefit for magi, at this point, is then that a majority of their hashrate is moved to another coin, however, some of it does remain. This would be a great point to bring up the idea that magi is supposed to be an "idle power" mine, in that you just use the idle power on you CPU, or in this case leftover from the other coin you're mining. A great example is XMR and XMG, XMR is very cache dependent, and so most of the time one runs out of cache before one runs out of cores. In this example, likely dual mining would take roughly 50-60% of the hashrate from magi, again not perfect, but better than where we are now. I know this wont encourage all of the botnets or large miners to switch, and I know this wont change everything, but I think that all of these things put into action would help to alleviate the strain on the network and small miners.
tl;dr
To help with the issues many are having mining these days I suggest:
1 - Modifying the miners to automatically use a "sweet spot" functionality
2 - modify the miners to suggest whether your hashrate is too high, too low, or just right
3 - draw attention to the fact that magi is design as a "idle power" mine, this can be done on the website, OP, regular posts through here, etc.
4 - suggest and draw attention to the benefits of dual mining XMG and others, such as XMR.
These are just my thoughts and I'd be interested to hear what everyone else thinks. I'm not trying to solve the problem, I'm just trying to come up with ways to help!! I'm sure magi will pull through though
