A little tip for anybody else claiming for the first time, don't claim from a service like Ledger or Armory. For privacy reasons they redirect all of your that wasn't spend through to another public address, which means you end up paying 50% more than you would have to normally. This wouldn't be too much of a difference normally, but if you're claiming you're running high fees as well, so it's a bit much.
I had a thought about the claiming mechanism, in regards to future proofing against miners. Right now the system can be exploited by miners because they get to choose the tx order, and haircomb always gives comb to the first wallet in order, right? What if, instead of giving haircomb to the very first wallet, it gave it to a pseudo random wallet on the block. The first thing I thought of was doing something like taking the time that the block was found, i.e. 15:24:30, and looking at the minutes and seconds of the block to get a % value, based on how close it is to the next 10 minute increment. In this case the value would be 45%, looking at 24:30. Then, you'd look at the transaction outputs in the block, and find the unseen segwit address that was located closest to the 45% mark. So for example, in a block that had 1,624 transactions, the marked transaction would be tx #731 (round up from 1624*0.45=730.8 ). Then check the transactions beside that one, #730 and #732, and so on, until you hit an unseen segwit.
The problem with this is that a miner could technically write a script to rearrange the order of the transactions in the block every second. So instead of referencing the time that the current block was mined, what about referencing the time that the NEXT block is found? So if I tried to claim block 660000, I wouldn't actually know if I had been successful until block 660001 was mined, and that time could be referenced to determine the lotto winner on the previous block. This poses two obvious problems though; chance of claim and hard forking.
Right now, in the early stages of haircomb, people can actually try to claim via TX fee value. If this method was introduced, it'd be much more difficult to claim, even if you were purposefully attempting to. However, when haircomb gets more widely accepted, and people are through in claim attempts every time they perform a BTC transaction, you see more consistent claiming as a whole community.
The other worry is that it'd require a hardfork to implement. It's pretty early in haircomb's life, which would make it easier to do, however I dunno if it's something Natasha would want.
Any thoughts on this claiming methodology? Any problems with it I overlooked?
miners will be side mining comb some day if this becomes successful.
it seems like there is several stages, first stage anyone can claim. second stage mostly batched txs of exchanges will include and they will be predominant claims. third stage miners will add the comb tx to their btc block reward and side mining comb while mining btc.
this has always been the idea that eventually miners will most likely start mining. (adding the comb reward for themselves)
by then comb has to have already be valuable.
this helps miners because in the event that in the future their btc rewards are very small, comb rewards might be bigger then the btc reward. (if comb actually gets adoption) this can help miners incentivize and keep securing btc.
another good point is because claiming comb or sending comb burns btc. it creates a deflation on btc and rising the value of btc slowly too.
but yeah if you look at previous discussions, i think we all pretty much assumed that if comb becomes more adopted. miners will eventually claim the reward for themselves. if that ever happens that would mean comb has become successful enough for them to even care about it.
i dont think changing the rules is needed. natasha thought this through initially most likely and knew that someday if this takes off miners will be claiming.
thats why claiming now can actually be a good idea, cost/reward ratio. worst case u burn a bit of satoshi and make the remaining satoshis that much more valuable. best case that comb takes off and it was an asymetrical bet.