Current issues / my concerns about Metaverse1-) Consensus / Orphans / Block chain securityGiven the low hash rate at the moment some big miners/pools are dropping nodes, creating longer chains and submit replacing these blocks some 8-10 minutes after a block is mined. Sometimes they do replace 10 blocks at a time, ignoring any transactions and/or confirmations inside these blocks. This is at the moment only used as a mining advantage and they are not messing with transactions but it also mean they can if they want to.
Thanks to the orphans created this way network wide orphan rate on metaverse is over 10% some days. A developer of metaverse I helped to test the issue with (on slack) acknowledged the issue, but that was almost 15 days ago, with no-one addressing or fixing the issue.
Conclusion:
So security of the blockchain is not a priority for metaverse (apparently)
2- Difficulty algorithm / re-targeting / deposit freezing timesI posted following on slack on 20th of November (only 8 days ago)
are you going to fix the difficulty algorithm in next wallet release? the block time is increasing about 1 second every month.
average block time between blocks: 727042 - 729042 (todays block up until now) was 33.7005 seconds
average block time was 31 seconds in the beginning of october
this keeps lowering mining rewards and pushes "lock" periods further away.
1.7 seconds is a huge deal if you think there are about 3000 blocks every day. (3000 x 1.7 = 5100 seconds = 85 minutes per day!)
response in a a private message from metaverse was
Hello, Kali. The network fixing version will be released soon(probably next week), while for the difficulty algorithm, it'll be fixed in the next big version wallet, which assumes taking 3 months.
So freezing times you see in the wallet is increasing by 85 minutes every day, and mining income is decreasing accordingly.
Today I checked the block times again (you can also go to explorer and verify these times)
Since midday until this post today:
Block : 749300 28/11/2017 13:42:50
Block : 749776 28/11/2017 18:19:47
Average block time 34.9 seconds,
That is 1.2 seconds increase per block in just 10 days!People already (rightly) complain about freeze times are being way off the promised times. If block times keep increasing at this rate, current 1 year freezes will not unfreeze in less than 4 years.
Conclusion:
Miners, (indirectly hashrate, and security of the network) or investors freezing their coins are not a priority for metaverse