Topic: Bitmark - page 157. (Read 622213 times)

Tolerance, people will do what they like, including trade via spread sheet in a forum, and add it to exchanges. We are not actively seeking any of these things, yet they will come.

If we can keep focussed on our plans, instead of worrying about hash rates and prices, we stand a chance of doing what we plan to do.

The problem you mentioned is one, and another one is that people can just run hundreds of workers since the power output would be minimal. Even if they had to rent hundreds of IPs.

As to the issue with exchanges. Perhaps we can make a polite request that Bitmark is not added to any exchange before the community decides it's time. That's certainly no guarantee but something in writing like that just might dissuade an exchange from ninja listing Bitmark for fear of bad publicity.

I feel the 'earned value' part of Bitmark is important and one of if not the core value of the currency. And while coinsolidation has certainly done more than enough work to warrant some value on mined Bitmarks, I still really like the idea of us going in to the project with a zero value currency that will earn its value over time. Impossible as it might be to stop the market from valuing something, the intention should be there.

Yes, new alt coins can merge mine bitmark to strengthen the network further

I hope the network will earn it's hash power, as with every other element of the project.

Request
If anybody plans to have a bitmark node running on a server, and knows the fixed ip in advance, can you let me know so I can add it to the seed list before release.

Thank you.

Can't we mitigate this with merged mining?

I think shortly after launch an exchange will add the coin. Smaller exchanges stand to gain a lot by adding new coins because it creates an influx of new users, who may stick around to trade other coins.

Has anybody considered a time based rewards system, where your reward is based on the amount of time you spend mining? Rewards are capped at 24 hours/7 days. So all miners who mine 24/7 receive the same reward regardless of hash rate.

The problem I see here, is there are no incentives for larger hashrates to join the network, which potentially hurts security.

Thank you.


That is my thinking also, we can try to limit the risks of particular actions, but we cannot stop or prevent them. Somebody may add and remove 1GH, dump 10k bitmarks, permanently add 1GH, buy 10k bitmarks..

The more we focus on natural growth in every aspect the project, the harder each of these actions will be.

If there are any additional steps we can take, let us discuss them as a community and see if they work.

I feel most solutions are to these potential problems are social.

For now, nobody can mine or dump. Soon people can mine but have no where to dump, later there may be some value, and some dumping may happen. We can frame any future dumping as distribution, and early adopters taking some reward. Only if we are successful in earning value.

I hope those that add a small amount to the project over a long period of time will be rewarded most. Miners included.

It might just be unavoidable no matter what it is done. But I'd hope that any of that happening has little to no effect on the long term health of Bitmark.

I don't really see how this prevents miners from dumping their coins at the onset.

What stops major hash power from mining at low difficulty, then jumping off when it goes up? Nothing except that they have to wait 720 confirms to get their coins. But when they do that the difficulty goes back down in a day. They mine another coin for that time and when bitmark difficulty drops they hit it again. Accumulating low difficulty coins would be fairly simple, just tedious because they need to switch the miners every difficulty spike.

Especially considering the chosen PoW is scrypt. There will be some big hash numbers out there now that scrypt asic companies are delivering regularly. Its just a matter of waiting for a place/time to sell the coins.

Yeah, in a way the IPM can act as sort of a defense fund for the coin as well. We already knew that the hashing it provides adds general network security and such. But it can also prevent or mitigate the specific issue of having a someone or some group drive the difficulty up much too high.

A new coin minus greed = satoshis original plan. Good work and the best of luck

I have just realized that the IPM proposal addresses this issue.

As the investors would also be indirectly mining and providing a percentage of the network power. Any such drop off in hashing would be partially mitigated by the percentage of power provided by the investors. As it is variable, calculated daily to be 35%(tbc) of the needed power, not a limited resource like that of the core miners.

This would strengthen the overall value of the coin and it's security, whilst removing the difficulty volatility issue for long term miners.

Since the IPM is always open, people could invest as a vote of confidence and rescue the situation for miners and users, whilst earning btm, and while supporting continued development.

Miners, investors, and developers all working together with their respected assets.

 

In another thread, somebody has commented:

This leads me to the question: if the core miners "believe in the coin and hold it", why would 5 days for a retarget be a big issue?
I hope we never see such a thing and want to avoid it too, but the question is valid.


Finding blocks is a random event, due to this randomness a sampling over a longer time period will be more accurate than one over a shorter time period. KGW and DS both show this to be true. Blocks are supposed to be found evenly on average, not one every x minutes. Your examples show the rationale on why I chose not to use either of these for Bitmark. Thank you.

This is similar to a 51% attack, where a bad actor can acquire more hashing power than the network collectively. Only a strong distributed network of hash power can achieve this. In the future I am less concerned as Bitmark is configured to encourage hash power distribution.

In the immediate future, the short term, all we can try to do is disincentive this from happening. The block reward maturity being longer than the difficulty change combined with no inflated value.

If there are any other social or technical things we can do to mitigate the risk of this over the first few months, they would be good to know.

We could always increase the block reward maturity further, to be 2 days, or even 7. That would ensure only those who "believe in the coin and hold it" would mine, but may be detrimental on the crashes. Hoarding will occur, there will be big sells in the future, we do not want to drive away miners when this happens, as that would cause a death spiral.

Balance is hard to achieve.

^^This.


When you're talking a block at a time, no, 5x longer (10 minutes instead of 2) is not a big deal. But, when you consider that the difficulty won't retarget for 720 blocks, you're looking at 5 days instead of 1. That is a significant difference.


Those who do this kind of thing don't care if they look bad.


My history with multipools:
I tend to be sensitive on the hash-rape issue, because I've been mining CasinoCoin off and on Since December, and it has been a huge issue for us. (edit:) And keep in mind, most of this is before scrypt asics were even available to the public.

http://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/casinocoin-network-hashrate-chart

Original coin - Scrypt algo, with 30 second blocks and 720 block retarget:


After implementing Kimoto Gravity Well:

Even with DigiShield:

Nice catch!

I am also glad it was raised again.

To start there isn't really a need for coins to be moving around other than testing.

Yet we can take some comfort in the fact that a block time even 5x higher than the target 2 minutes is still only 10 minutes, which is reasonable and works for bitcoin, 10x higher is 20 minutes, it is not insufferable.

The network will re-adjust. Those responsible will look bad.


A fine point

Well it will be interesting to see what happens. That's for sure.

If someone ends up accumulating a large amount of Bitmark from mining then they now have incentive to see Bitmark succeed. So maybe that will draw in some new supporters who can help out.

1) Miningpool.co - great! EDIT: (that's a sincere Great! - looked a little sarcastic on reading back!)

2) MineP.it - https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/minepit-298616

I have PMd and emailed the dev at MineP.it - hopefully he will respond.

Whilst you have set out very reasonably the issues of MINE DUMP, and I agree that there will be no value, there is a general trend for miners to jump on a new coin launch just because it may have some value and they want to 'get in on it'... just be aware that your worthy ethics and philosophy are not widespread in the profit hungry shark / whale infested waters that make up the crypto sea...

Oh, yeah. I think I remember this happening a while ago to a SHA256 altcoin when ASICs were first released around a year ago. It was so bad that the time between blocks basically crippled the network.

In that case I think it was a personal vendetta being taken out on the developer or something. (I think it was Lukejr who did the attack, but I'm not 100% sure)

In our case I think(and hope) that something like that is pretty unlikely to happen to us. But it's good that cryptozim brought it up because things like that are definitely something to keep in mind.

If this happens, blocks are mined faster until the difficulty increases, if the hashing power is then removed the chain runs slower for a while until another 720 blocks have passed. If the hashing power isn't removed then the chain is just getting stronger.

However, Bitmark is setup so that non of the coins minted are mature until 720 blocks later, after the difficulty has changed again, so somebody who did this wouldn't get the coins for quite some time.

More importantly, the coins and chain has no value, it doesn't matter if it runs slow for a while, nobody has any need to be transferring valueless coins unless they are testing the code. There is no exchange, and even when there is nobody can mine coins today and dump them today, they have to wait another day yet before they can be spent, then wait for them to transfer. If they "rape" the coin, it could be two days before they get the coins to spend, by which time the price could have dropped considerably due to their own actions.

Thus we try to avoid this, and by the time it is of a concern and Bitmarks have any value, we should have a reasonable network hash rate and stable chain such that impact from a multipool or private entity with lots of hash power is mitigated.

So far I know miningpool.co has intentions of adding support on release.
I can speak to MineP.it, or you can, or bring him here


Considering the coin has a decent starting difficulty, zero value, no exchanges, potentially no pools, and doesn't expect to have any value or exchanges for a long time, do you think these things are still a concern?

My own original rationale was that Bitmark is crafted in such a way that the usual MINE DUMP can not happen, since there is no value, and so no concern.
edit: The next post covers this in more detail.

The first release serves one purpose, to allow early adopters and those contributing to the project to slowly get the network going and prove it is in fact stable and good code, whilst we work on the important things which give value to the coin, once they are happening then we may reasonably expect a natural rise in hashing power, and perhaps some value.

Remember, the first release is just a rebranded bitcoin, fully tested, converted to scrypt, and with a different block chain configuration. That itself has no real value other than as a code base for some other projects to use.