HunterMinerCrafter, your pull request is not available, error 404.
Odd, I'm not sure why that would be. I've closed that pullreq and opened a new one (#9) with an improved patch, but now github is telling me:
One of our mostly harmless robots seems to think you are not a human.
Because of that, it's hidden your profile from the public. If you really are human, please contact support to have your profile reinstated.
We promise we won't require DNA proof of your humanity.
Cute. I've contacted support, but I'm not sure if you can see my new pull req in the mean time. You might also be able to see the source patch itself at
https://github.com/HunterMinerCrafter/motocoin/commit/e1775b573ee4ca0cd83710375a06da7ee6aed30aThis also fixes another (extremely) unlikely corner case problem that I found. The final calculated frames had a rather obscure off-by-one bug. In the (astronomically unlikely) case that an entire lookback period was filled with blocks with the absolute minimum framecount solutions, the targettime would be set to be one frame below that absolute minimum, and the chain would stall. You can prove this to yourself pretty easily in a testnet by commenting the "bnNew += 1;" in the patch and moving the coin finish coordinates to something like (0, -700000000) and just let your biker fall straight onto the coin, with no inputs, for every block in the adjustment interval. (Which I have patched to be 10 blocks on testnet, for now.) You'll find that your chain quickly stalls in a state where the best you can hope to do within TargetTime is free-fall to one frame away from the coin. With the patch adding one to the target time frame count at the end, you will find that you will always hit the coin with 0.004 seconds to spare. (It is unlikely that this would ever become relevant under normal circumstances, but I figure it is a trivial and low risk change so we might as well go ahead and account for it.)
I am still not entirely happy with this improved retarget, and still agree with DeepCryptoAnalyst that we ultimately need to change the formula to something "more traditional" as we've discussed, but for the immediate term I want to get back to finalizing the second patch to introduce proper difficulty scaling.
Anyway, I think that Motocoin should be relaunched, probably under different name and without premine.
I don't see any good reason for a relaunch. A hard fork is enough negative press for a coin, I don't know of a relaunched coin that has really thrived after.
I got a lot of complains (mostly in PM) about premine
The premine is sort of "what is done is done" for me, water under bridges. Most-or-all (!?!?) of those coins were obviously sold into the market panic crash and redistributed at what I consider a very discounted price, in any case. I don't think it would be wise to screw over a broad set of stakeholders because a few people are complaining privately. If people are really concerned about premined holdings let's all discuss it publicly, in context, and the network participants can decide for themselves what to do when the fork time comes!
and now it is mined only by a small number of botowners (1, 2 or how many of them are there).
Aside from myself, I am communicating with two other bot operators. There is certainly at least a fourth operator who has not disclosed themselves. I suspect that there are at least 5 or 6 total. While there are also still the occasional hand-mined blocks, it is uncommon.
However, everyone has certainly had the opportunity by now to bring their own bots online if they wanted to. Even the most amateurish developers could have had a useful bot together by now, considering that there is very little competition on the "AI involved" itself, so far. Anyone without the skillset could have hired even the cheapest developers to build a bot for them by now, there has been plenty of time. Block chains reward participation by design.... if you're unhappy with the distribution of rewards just participate more. Participate smarter, not harder. Participate early and participate often. Ask not what your participation can do for you, but what you can do for your participation. A participation saved is a.... ok, I'll stop now.
Even if current issues with bots will be fixed people will still be able to mine only a very small portion of what botowners mined.
So, what you're saying is basically that early speculative hashers who were willing to make a larger initial investment in time, effort, money, electricity, their wives' sanity, and other such resources will, in the end, see a larger return? Problem? Those of us who leveraged more will have profited more, this is an unavoidable consequence of any market and is not at all unique to the crypto space, let alone motocoin.
From what I understand of them, this is precisely how crypto-currencies are expected to function, and will tend toward failure otherwise. I think this is a pretty well understood property of cryptovaluation, by now.
The three of us bot operators who are in contact seem to undeniably comprise the majority hashing strength, and we also all seem to agree on the direction to be taken, which is not a relaunch. Since block-chains operate on the premise that the majority of hashing strength decides outcomes, this would imply that a relaunch is not what is going to happen. Anyone is welcome to spin up a new fork of moto code with a new genesis block, but this would be a new, derived alt and not a relaunch. The MOTO chain proper will persist, unless a
real reason for it not to is brought forth.
With new coin there will be no need for hurry to make fix as soon as possible, instead it can be thoroughly designed and tested before launch. You can lead this new project.
I'm all for a new and better coin, particularly if it has a game that I would personally be more interested in actually playing (dungeon crawler!) and I'd love to get involved (in any capacity, really!) in such coins in the future (let's talk!).... but I really fail to see any argument for killing MOTO. This coin is a good coin, and there is no reason to write it off due to struggles that any coin has, coupled with some unique growing pains that arose out of the fact that this is the first real 3.0 crypto. If anything I see the fact that the coin hasn't totally failed on it's own, despite these problems, as a very very very good sign and take it as reason to not explicitly kill the coin. (If it still manages to fall over on it's own, that is a different story, but I think that if this were going to happen it would have by now!)
The crux of the matter is that on any network like this we will not only have but will *need* bots. The root problem, it seems, is that we are forced into a trade-off between either having an insecure network or accepting/embracing (and being forced to "balance against") bot activity. I have now had two players independently tell me that they are skilled enough at MOTO that before the bots they could basically 51% attack "by hand" during certain times of the day simply because of their high level of skill and low competition during those times. It is somewhat to be expected that a pure skill based coin would be vulnerable since some "savant" player, well coordinated team, etc, could come along and dominate tx selection putting the chain at risk. If these rare, brilliantly gifted folk don't have some "automated competition" then if one of them also happens to be a bit unscrupulous or perhaps downright evil the whole network could come crashing down by their hand.
As I've repeated many times now, both here in the thread and in PMs, the
humans and bots must coexist and there is simply no other option that works, pragmatically. If the bots win out entirely, everyone basically loses. If the humans win out entirely, everyone basically loses.
Don't you just love game theory?
