it's rational to want to do something about the situation. To remove digging altogether would remove Clams' best and unique feature, so it is not a reasonable option. As Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies have built-in reductions in their distribution methods, I believe it is reasonable to propose reducing dig rewards to half at (about) 1.5 years from the release of Clams, and continue to halve the dig reward every 1.5 years from now on. I'm not a programmer, but I imagine reducing the dig reward could be done by imposing a 50% (and later 75% and so on) fee on transactions from the original distribution outputs that gets paid to a burn address. Assuming the software is ready to go, this can be announced a month or so ahead of the fork to make things fair for everyone, including the large digger.
I also feel that something should be done, if CLAM is to remain something that people want to use. The current massive ongoing dig appears to be worth something like 500k CLAMs, and started when the active supply was something like twice that, and so it will end up adding 50% to the active supply.
Note that although it appears significant, that 500k CLAMs represents only around 3% of the initial distribution. There is another 12 million CLAMs out there still waiting to be dug up. There is no guarantee that the current 500k CLAM dig is the last big dig, or even the biggest one. There are very likely huge numbers of CLAMs waiting to be dug from other old wallets - think of the MtGox wallet, the SilkRoad mixer wallet, various other mixing services and other black market sites, BTC-e, satoshidice, and many others. So while it's possible that we get through this current dig and still have some investors brave enough to hold CLAM throughout, will they stick around the next time it happens, or the time after that?
I'm inclined to support the opinion of dooglus that something needs to be done. If it were to come down to some kind of a vote, the clamspeech part of staking txs could be used. (I say this as someone who stakes.)
Here's another idea to put on the table. Maybe digging could be slowed down in some way. For example, a coin from a block before X (where X is when the initial distribution stopped) can only be spent in a tx that stakes the coin. This would place a limit on the velocity of digging without actually taking away the ability to dig the coin.
With the current difficulty, a single 4.6 CLAM output/claim would be likely to take a great deal of time for a user to "claim". So much time, in fact, that it may not even be economical to do so.
An alternative might be to give undug CLAM additional weight and chance to stake. This would make the process of claiming more likely, but still limit digs overall.
This is, however, probably not fair to existing stakers.
To make it more fair, the block reward could be removed from digging stakes. This would mean that undug CLAMs would not give a 1 CLAM reward when staked.
This, however, would be a change to the money supply/inflation.
An alternative might be to attribute "missed" stakes, due to claiming stakes, to normal stakers either at the next block, or into a pool/window spread out over subsequent stakes.
That would leave us with a situation where unclaimed CLAM have additional weight to stake more quickly, but are still limited based on current difficulty and the block time. When unclaimed CLAM stake, they would not give a reward, but instead add their 1 CLAM reward into a pool. When normal blocks are staked, that pool would be apportioned out.
Not sure how I feel about this idea - interested to hear what dooglus, xploited, and the rest of the gang think.
It is definitely more simple than the idea I outlined yesterday; though without some of the additional advantages.
Will give it some thought.
Everything being discussed is a reaction to the current market situation. IE the price getting dumped. If the digger was instead the stake-er, and JD lost half it staking power, we would be having a different discussion. Or if someone hit a max bet on JD and now had 200K clams to dump on the market, limiting digging isn't going to matter much.
Clams have so far proved to be pretty resilient. We had the LTC digger in the Dec-Jan time frame. Price dropped, but then rebounded. The large investor that decided Clams were not for him. Dumped 30K on the market on the Mar - Apr time. The price dipped a little and then rebounded.
For awhile the digger seemed to be happy with the .0045 - .005 price. Recently there were a series of events that caused the price to crash. A regular player on just-dice had a BIG win. 39K clams. In the weeks before the same guy had a few other bigs hit's and cashed out several thousand clams at market prices. When people saw his win there was a panic that he would dump all 39K on the market and crash the price, so people starting selling out to cut their losses.
Now my theory is the digger is not following Just-dice, or BTC talk. He sees the price start to collapse, so he started unloading as fast as he could, and kept the collapse going. We seem to be leveling out at around .002. This could go either way.
In summary, even if you somehow limit digging, you can't prevent market dumping.
Who takes that kind of loan???
) FFS, he has just destroyed a 10k clam buy order. I have no idea why would any fool set this buy order ATM but that fool s going to lose money by this time tomorrow.