The goal is that, once coins combined, the final value should be between combinethreshold and splitthreshold, so that ultimately they will neither split nor combine, but stay stable and staking.
This is what I understood. I have no actual stakings for above verification; if you see something different, let me know.
the goal of the mechanics in PPC was to gurantee POS competition = difficulty
but still avoid endless split to dust
thats why there is a additional requirement to merge coins
that is not only the size but also the coin age
this means u could even set a lower splittreshhold of lets say 30
and a higher mergetreshhold of lets say 3000
but that merge treshhold get activated also need that the coin pile is older than (that value need to be defined well because ur POS is different from PPC)
it must be a time that when a 30 XMG coin pile not POS in that timeframe u know u have a healthy POS difficulty
auto split/merge mechanic have not only the purpose to remove dust
but also to autoadjust network POS difficulty by increase/decrease competition
(increase/decrease amount of coin pile in network that compete for POS)
u did dig deeper than most people in this mechanic
most coins just made splittreshhold working and this way avoid stake to endless dust
but i think XMG deserve to utilize the full power and have it also as a well adjusted mechanic to guide the POS difficulty in the right direction
a that well adjusted split/merge mechanic have just a few POS coins
including the inventors PPC/NVC DMD and maybe soon XMG
I can neither give a direct connection of the combining / splitting to difficulty thing, nor imagine that would lead to something of significant concern.
What's matter is securing the block chain and to avoid likability of attack to the block chain. This is rather important than anything else.
From this point of view, the original ppc design encourages splittings, and any other PoS coins with similar staking principle should do so too. Of course splitting into dust is not what one would like to see.
So there is a reason that the coin splitting age is set to 30 days too.
IMO, the splittingthreshold and combinethreshold in the general PoS coins could cause potential risks. Imagining that the whole network keep combining coins into big ones; For those who have big stack in staking, they can rather readily make unintentional attacks compared to those who have less coins. The reason is that one who has a number of coins has big coin age too, and can easily mine blocks via PoS. It's analogy to one having huge mining force in PoW mining. You cannot avoid this potential consequence in general PoS design, though it could rarely take place, it could. Unfortunately, splittingthreshold and combinethreshold are not consensused by the network, so any one can make changes to them. These are basically the reasons why I believe they relate to the security concern; the other consequences are really the minors. My suggestion is that coins with the general PoS design should NOT play around splitting/combing too much; it is certainly completely fine if one has the security design in mind.
Fortunately, MAGI have made a change to avoid the consequence that one having a number of coins has big coin age (mining force). As I mentioned in the prior post, I'd revisit the PoS implementation to make it even safer.
