See page 11 and 13 of link:
http://www.vericoin.info/downloads/VeriCoinPoSTWhitePaper10May2015.pdf
"There was no interest rate cap in v2.0.1"
There we go. So there WAS NO interest cap?!? The chart on page 11 (as well as common sense) goes up to 100%, the Interest numbers by the Staking circle went up to 99%.
BUT
"there was no interest rate cap" in the code means - what? No upper limit? A random number maxed at the specs of the variable integer used in the code?
It is important for someone to confirm this was the issue, so then we know any solution involving capping the interest rate at 10%, or even 100%, will really solve the problem for sure.
Post was based on assumptions that a majority of holders would stake at any given time. If you do the math it actually makes sense. I got the maximum stake reward of 7.5 million SLR. Obviously the chain was rolled back and those coins are not going to be confirmed, merely generated as orphans. If you divide 34 million by 7.5 million you get a lofty 4.53 SLR which would make sense if every one of those 34 million coins were staking at any given time. Placing a cap on this would more or less fix this issue.
Of course I don't care about the orphaned interest payments, the solution Steve implemented to orphan them effectively fixed the wrong stakes everyone got.
But we need to know if there was ANY cap at all. If there was a cap of 100%, then no math can give me the ~12 million SLR I got for the ~700,000 wallet SLRs that got that interest, in which case the problem can NOT be fixed by just reducing the cap to 10%.
If there was no cap at all (as I assumed - like for instance any initial random number with a max depending only on the internal type of the variable used) - let's say interest going up to 32768%...or 256%... then the results we got make sense with that kind of "no cap" - and capping at 10% or even 100% will fix the problem.
BUT if there WAS a cap of 100% as measured by the Interest numbers showing by the Staking circle (those were going up to 99% only) - then that means the cause for the problem has NOT been identified, and capping at 10% will NOT fix the problem when we start staking again.
Or may be someone wants to tell me that the cap was 100% on the 34 million, and if it was only me staking, I would get not 100% calced based on my balance - stake-time - coin age etc., but 100% of those 100% calced on the total in circulation? Which would be 34 million I would get for finding 1 block because I was staking alone. But that would be WRONG MATH all along, and if this is how the algorithm is implemented, then it is wrong, and capping at 10% will still not fix the wrong implementation.
Edit: It's one thing to say "there was no interest rate cap", and quite another to say:
Interest rate (i):
i = t * 34mln / n
where-in interest rate (i) is the product of inflation rate (t) and the total Proof-of-Work initial
SolarCoin supply, divided by average network weight (n).
Inflation rate (t):
t = (17*(log(n/20))/100
Apparently the interest cap would depend on the network weight (network stake weight - is it the same?); What would n be if there was only 1 staker? And if these formulas were implemented correctly, and the interest rate (i) could go above 100%, then why did the "Interest rate" number by the Staking circle show only up to 99%?