Topic: [ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin" - page 279. (Read 1151252 times)

Don't over-complicate the solution and don't be overly idealistic.
Not directed at any particular idea, and not meant to be rude, but keep it in mind as a mantra.

I have seen many devs, coins, and communities make this mistake time and time again.
The simplest and fastest implemented ideas that actually make a big difference are the best ones.

I'm happy to see so much discussion about the current "digger situation" - even though I don't see much in the way of consensus forming...


Can you say more about how the fee-per-block would be decided upon in the absence of a dynamic block size?

You've talked in the past about the fee being set by the market based on supply and demand which I understood to be based on recent block sizes. How does that work in this simplified proposal?

I'm unclear as to whether the fee-per-block would be required by new consensus rules, or be more like bitcoin fees, where miners set whatever fees they like.


I don't think I understood this point.

The suppliers are the stakers, and the cost is incurred by anyone running a full node.

But anyone running a full node can stake if they choose to, and would be helping the network if they did.

So who is incurring the cost of storing unspent outputs without also supplying the service of securing the network, except for those who choose not to contribute to securing the network for whatever reasons?

Or is your argument that the costs are shared equally between all stakers, but the fees are shared in proportion to staker balance? Because that's just how PoS works. Already the cost of running a staking node is independent of the number of coins being staked whereas the rewards for doing so are proportional to the number of coins being staked.


Indeed. I have been selling some of my CLAMs on the way down. It is clear that the digger has many more CLAMs to dig, and we have no reason to believe that he won't keep dumping them, and so it seems rational to sell high and buy back lower once the dumping is over.


It already is. CLAM operates on consensus, not as a dictatorship. Creative couldn't force through an unpopular change even if she wanted to. The community would refuse to switch to the net version. The same goes for JD. JD currently has a majority of the staking CLAMs, but if it tried to force through an unpopular change I'm sure it would soon find itself being the sole staker on an irrelevant side fork.

The question of whether everyone automatically has the right to advertise their service in this thread's OP is separate from the running of the CLAM network itself. This is Creative's thread. If you don't like it, make your own.


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?


The network rules have changed a few times in the past already. "Proof-of-working-stake" itself wasn't part of the original rules. Initially staking rewards were based on the age of the output that staked, meaning there was no incentive to stake your coins 24/7 - you could check in once a month, claim your stakes, then turn the wallet off again without incurring much if any penalty. There was also a staking lottery adding after launch, where the staking reward was pseudo-randomly assigned, ranging from 0.1 to 1000 CLAMs, and later the lottery was turned off. So there is no "sanctity of the network" in that sense. The rules have been changed before and can be changed again, so long as there is consensus to do so.

I don't see any real difference between changing the rules to say "your 4.6 CLAM dig is only worth 2.3 CLAM now because we had a halving last week" and changing them to say "your 4.6 CLAM dig is only worth 2.3 CLAM now because of blockchain storage fees". In either case the guy digging his CLAMs only gets half as many, and he presumably doesn't care why.

Yes, but only because when the 10 CLAM output stakes you whole 10 (actually, 11 after staking) CLAM wallet is tied up for 8 hours while the newly staked output matures.

If your wallet was split into two 5's, when one of them stakes, the other one isn't frozen, only half your value is locked up waiting 8 hours to mature.

Noted, I will turn on coin control and check.
Are you saying that 2 unspent outputs of 5 clams each stake better than 1 unspent output of 10 clams?

It doesn't matter whether you use one address or many. What matters is the size of each unspent output in your wallet.

If you send 10 CLAMs to the same address 5 times, you don't end up with a single 50 CLAM output at that address. You end up with 5 outputs each worth 10 CLAMs. Those 5 outputs will stake just as well as if you had sent them to 5 different addresses.

Turn on coin control in your CLAM client settings and it will let you look at your unspent outputs.

If you plan on building a CLAM service you'd better warm up to the Kings and Queens of CLAM or "they" will blackball your legit service if they don't agree with your private business plan.

I would not recommend people to build on CLAM at this point until some major changes happen. (Speaking from experience)

I am new to clams and I have to agree that their should be more uses for clams other than bet on just-dice. The wallet is not a huge problem since the blockchain is only 700M. The bootstrap made the download fairly easy and fast.

I do not view the whale digger to be a problem- its supply and demand.

The rise in clams initial value was probably due to early adopters not wanting to sell any coins.  To me, it would be better for a coin to not rise or fall too much because both causes problems.  When I see rise in price of clams without any new uses for clams, I usually think the problem is there is not enough coin supply to meet new user demand. So it encourages a hoarding feedback loop with no actual value behind it.  Falling has an opposite feedback loop.  The whale digger can be viewed as both helping to distribute clam supply cheaply to new users, and a destroyer of the coin value to older users.

I bought clams for many reasons- mostly to support the idea of POWS. I probably will hold and buy some more on the way down as long as I view coin as secure and following its original goals.  As long as the whale follows the rules they should be allowed to do anything they want. Nothing is wrong with this. Since there is not a lot of uses for clams atm, it makes sense to me why the whale digger would want to sell.  The short term view would be to sell your clams into btc or fiat and wait for prices to stablize.  If you do not like the Whale digger, the best attack on the whalers would be to provide new uses for clams.  A light weight android client for example would be great way to make clams more usable/  tradable.

Given:

-that the large digger is bleeding buy support dry and dropping the market price more and more, and will continue to do so at a steady pace using a script for possibly a year at current pace
-JD, its owner and community of investors and gamblers (plus a few other gambling sites) are supermajority stakeholders in the Clam network, and care about the value of Clams

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.

 The counter-argument to this is that changing the network rules now would somehow violate the sanctity of the network. That opinion, in my own opinion, is unnecessary fundamentalism. Software and cryptocurrency networks can evolve, and I believe the supermajority of Clam stakeholders do not share that fundamentalist position.

I've created a poll to see if people would like to elect the SUPERCLAM captain.

Please drop by and vote.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12721665

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9772191

can someone post a link for the bootstap please?

I'll control it if no one else wants to.

I believe that The Great Clam should be a council instead of a single entity.

Can we have elections on who controls the Superclam account?  (Please come on over and vote if you would like to have a vote: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12721665)

I think CLAM would have a much brighter experience if we had different people in the proper positions of power.

CreativeClam would you consider making your own Bitcointalk account in order to make post on your opinion rather than on the OP shared account?

It doesn’t look like an option to me, merely an anodyne observation drawn from an idly unsupported analogy.

But no, you're not the only one with concerns. I share your concerns (perhaps not as keenly, I admit) but am reluctant to simply pitch up to such a meandering discussion. Speculation on the motivations or future actions of the digger is condemned to remain exactly that, speculation. The model provides no useful predictive component.

Of considerably more use would be some glimmering of understanding of the collective and individual perceptions formed by those who are directly or indirectly affected by the change. The fact that upwards of 2500 altcoins have been launched to little significant effect suggests to me that the phenomenon doesn’t have a core explanation rooted in either economics or cryptography and I've found that discussions which fail to acknowledge this factor are inevitably doomed to peter out without establishing anything useful.

Out of sheer bloody-mindedness (or perhaps a slightly wider perspective, or perhaps even the fact that I grok TANSTAAFL), I maintain my CLAMS locally in a running node. It’s not that I mistrust dooglus, far from it, but even he admits that bulking up on JD might not be all that good for CLAMS’ long-term health as a cryptocurrency and I can’t gainsay his argument. In consequence, I heartily welcome the recent initiatives to improve CLAMS overall UX.

Each launched altcoin has the capacity to become a separate collective intelligence. Some starting conditions might appear to be more favourable than others but it’s way too early to be making those kind of calls on a phenomenon that we can barely characterise, let alone understand. fwiw, my take on it is that it’s an unfortunate instance of stigmergy arising from the imprint left by the import of contaminating aspects of Bitcoin’s irredeemably flawed distribution. Unfortunately, it seems to be an inherent contamination for any “proof-of-chain” approach that piggybacks on Bitcoin’s distribution.

I’m more interested in the perception of CLAMS’ brand values and how they’re interpreted in relation to the current context. The JD-herd mentality suggests that the intention behind CLAMS distribution has faltered; from the nether regions, it seems as we’re only just now seeing serious attempts to promote the advanced features of CLAMS that make it a worthwhile currency to use rather than hodl. Had that effort been instigated earlier, JD would likely be playing less of a role in the coin’s economics and users would be holding different perceptions of CLAMS attractiveness, perceptions less likely to be disrupted by manipulations of the exchange fiat conversion rate.


Cheers

Graham

I read that staking 10 to 50 clams is a good number to start. I also read that splitting balance into different address may increase chance to stake. I now have 10 clams in one address, I can buy some more to increase my chance, do I send my new clams to a same or new address or should I split them into many address holding 5 each?

Well look as the price drops if people want to play or invest on JD (or if other CLAM services develop) and don't already have CLAMs, then not only will they need to spend less BTC to absorb the dumper's CLAMs, but they will have to buy more CLAMs to do what they wanted to do in the first place (say invest 10 BTC in JD bankroll). I agree an equilibrium will be reached.

I also think there may be more to the dumping than just the digger. Nearly all alts being in the shitter over the past month for example.

Removing claims is certainly arbitrary, no argument there. I question whether doing the same thing by dressing it up in fancy economic terms is really any different.

Also, I don't understand how this addressed what I said above. In my first comment I said you could pull numbers out of the air but there was no reason to think that would actually improve an externality, especially when it doesn't even address the structure of the externality (much less its magnitude).

I will bet all my CLAMs (currently zero) that btcxpress is behind this digging/dumping.

I will bet all my DOGE (currently zero) that btcxpress will claim to be behind it, even if he is not.