Topic: Bitmark - page 64. (Read 622228 times)

Yes, this is a good idea and we should try to get some more frequent updates going on the thread here.

It would be nice to get weekly/monthly updates here. This is the first place people look for information about coins, and not everyone is aware that there are lots of discussions about development going on in slack.

Haha, Yeah - that would be nice.

The increase in focused development, weekly tangible goals being accomplished...it all helps the communities perspective on our project.

It would be ironic if the price rise was due to the proposed algo switching and the price rise itself actually made the switch unnecessary.

if increase in price continues with the buy ups that are happening network may correct itself beforehand, or at least network speed increase to get five blocks a day ...

My opinion is that the algo should be implemented as soon as possible. Say what you want about supply and demand, demand vs price, and Marking not being implemented, but part of the reason that people aren't interested in Bitmark is because it takes a full day (sometimes two) just to complete a transaction.

The talks about mining and algo are always centered around coin supply, but ignore the fact that minting coins is a side effect of mining. The purpose of mining is to secure the network and facilitate transactions. But, because there is no incentive for mining with the current diff, that part is failing.

There is rough consensus between those actively involved in Bitmark that:

1: Any decision on whether to implement this should come after Marking is Ready for Market.
2: Feedback on the proposal should be collated, and reviewed at our Sunday meetings.
3: Discussion should not detract from our key focus, which is marking.

Thanks,

I do not wish to preclude the slow supply when demand is low, I have always valued it.

The block maturity would remain at 720 blocks, going through two diff changes rather than one.
The diff could still change +/4x over 720 block periods.
The proposed change is nothing to do with miner profitability, it's entirely to enable the network and market to find an equilibrium that is fair in the future.

We currently have two difficulties, 500 and 2000
this corresponds to 17.5 GH/s and 70 GH/s network speeds
which corresponds to roughly 4.35 BTC to 17.5 BTC per day production cost
which corresponds to roughly 30k satoshi to 120k satoshi market price if everything is sold
take in to account miners holding some, and you get 43k to 175k satoshi market price.

Our current status is:
that if the market price is above 43k on low difficulty, the difficulty will rise back up 4x and effectively stop the supply
or if the  market price is below 43k on low difficulty, the supply will start again at 14,400 btm created per day.

Now, what has happened, and will happen again, is that price will go above 43k in high diff period (due to constrained supply), and force the 4x rise in difficulty back up, and stall the supply again.

The only way we can break this cycle without changing the constraints of the diff algo, is for one of the following to happen:

1. keep the market below 43k satoshi during high and low difficulty, then provide enough market liquidity to buy 10k+ BTM per day
... this would require about 15 BTC volume daily minimum and 4BTC of that purely to swallow new coins. The market price and diff would likely both keep dropping until high demand nudged it up a little bit.

2. get the market to be stable at about 175k satoshi, which would require daily volume of about 70 BTC, and about 17 BTC purely to buy newly mined coins. Again the market price and diff would likely both keep dropping until high demand nudged it up a little bit.

Due to the cycle, neither of these will happen under any circumstance, during the high diff period and given rarity, it only takes a small amount of BTC orders in that full time (now 3 months) to push the market price in to the 43-175k range.  Look at the market you'll see it now, this rise has ensured we're about to enter a high diff straight after the low diff.

Why does the high diff happen? Mining profitability calculators, when low diff occurs mining cost will be about 30k satoshi, market price will be about 60k, so miners will see "200% profitability" and jump on network with 100GH/s upwards, pushing the diff back up to 2000 within hours.

So what does the proposed change do?
The proposed change allows the difficulty to change half way through a cycle, by half the max amount. Diff 1000. Practically this means that mining profitability calculators will show 80-120% profitability after 360 low diff blocks. This should have the effect of some network jumping miners switching off, and bring us to a difficulty of about 1500 for 360 blocks.

When diff hits about 1500, we'll enter a new slow production phase, which won't be quite as extreme or quite as long, maybe 1 month with 10-20 blocks per day, followed by a low diff at 750.
If that subsequent low diff at 750 equates to a product cost below market price we'll hit high diff again and slow supply, if not diff will lower further to meet the market. The same pattern as now but more constrained, and with the opportunity to find equilibrium.

Supply and demand will not be changed by this, nor will mining profitability, if marking isn't out we'll have a high diff and low supply, if it is out we'll have a medium diff and started supply.

More likely is that it will allow this extreme high low cycle to reign itself in over say 6 months to equilibrium, with supply gently increasing as demand grows, and knock on of network slowly becoming more usable for transactions as that demand raises.  Which is what we want, and what is currently precluded by our extreme cycle.

He said

I dont see how this cant help, but yeah duh its too soon.

Hey Mark - Thanks for the Update...

I would like to thank all those who collaborated on zmark. As for the proposed changes: Personally, I feel that changes at this point are premature. I understand that currently, the BTM network is not exactly healthy. However, it is doing its job, the network is slow because demand is lacking. My conclusion is that we are addressing a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In this case, the root cause is the low demand (which has produced low supply - "a good thing IMO").

“Why” is demand low -> Because our project has not fully developed & launched a RFM “Ready for Market” product (i.e: Marking / MarkThis).



That being said, going from 4x to 2x is not that bad…if the only outcome is equilibrium.

Let’s see what the community has so say though.

We have implemented the new Difficulty Algorithm Configuration on a pfennig clone called ZMark, and tested it.

The target for success was to have ZMark change difficulty to 0.018331695 at block 13680 and 0.03666338676 at block 14040

at block 13680, diff = 0.01833169, it worked: http://explorer.zmark.org:3030/block/dbb9553d686bec42bd0c1c7af42a01ca27f4ee34c6006139fb04d476d336b805
at block 14040, diff = 0.03666339, it worked: http://explorer.zmark.org:3030/block/7ed46ccad7ade4474d0205eba9e68755aa1c8428d3a146381db105d68ecabdc4

Test Passed, we can now move to implementing this in bitmark.

If you object to us making this change, please state why publicly so we can discuss.

All proposals for changing difficulty algorithm fall in to one of the two following categories:

1. Lower Production Cost to keep a fast chain. (Fast Difficulty Retarget, KGW, DGW)
+ Blocks are found faster.
- Blocks cost less to find, so chain is weaker.
- Constant / surplus supply
- Coins cost less to produce, market prices reduce.

2. Lower Production Cost and Block Reward relative to each other.
+ Blocks are found faster.
- Blocks cost less to find, so chain is weaker.
- Transaction require more confirmations to be safe, nullifying the effects. 6 confirmations in 1 hour vs 60 confirmations in 1 hour = 1 hour of waiting.
- Exploitable by setting extremely high difficulty, making mining exponentially more unprofitable.

This led us to the conclusion, that we cannot change the difficulty algorithm.

So we looked at what else can be changed, which left 2 variables: how often the difficulty changes, and how much it can change by.

Please be assured that the new algorithm is simply the old algorithm with it's upper and lower bounds constrained a little, and with an interim difficulty change.  It is the least change we can make, and should serve to dampen the extreme effects we've seen. It does not change any of the fundamental properties of the currency, and it does not incur any of the negative effects listed above.

The current configuration allows Bitmark to change difficulty by +/- 4x over 720 blocks, with 1 difficulty change. With those extreme bounds always being hit.
The new configuration would allow Bitmark to change difficulty by +/- 2x over 360 blocks. This still equates to bounds of +/- 4x per 720 blocks, it just adds an extra change in the middle, reducing the likelihood of those extreme bounds being hit, and increasing the likelihood of equilibrium being found.


Sooner rather than later.

The change would not come in to effect until 360 blocks after the difficulty next changes (to low diff). To get to that magic block where the difficulty "corrected" we'd need miners to incur the cost of mining blocks which were expensive to mine (about 200 of them), the reward would be 360 blocks which were very cheap to mine, followed by the cycle broken.


We're not proposing to change Bitmark's difficulty algorithm, we're proposing to place some tolerable boundaries on it's fluctuation and giving it a chance to find equilibrium.

Brilliant!! Not.  Nobody said anything about changing the total supply of the coin.  Also no miners = no supply = dead coin.  Thanks for the input. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Leave algo as is, keep the same as btc and ltc limited coin supply is better.

The only moaners is miners.

Any time frame on the proposed algo change?  Surely before the next diff change or it will be next year (at this rate) until you get another chance!

some development. nice.

We have implemented an alternative difficulty algorithm on a test coin named zmark.

The new algo changes difficulty twice as frequently, and reduces the maximum change from 4x to 2x.  This should serve to dampen the effects of the low/high difficulty cycle, allowing the network and market to find equilibrium quicker, thereby keeping supply limited to some degree when demand is low, but without letting the network get too slow.

Historically Bitmark difficulty swings between ~500 and ~2000, +/- 4x, whilst the ideal difficulty is usually around 1000 for a performant network based on average market price through a difficulty cycle.  The proposed change would mean the difficulty would change 500 -> 1000 -> 2000, and the network effect should be that the diff will hover around where it should be with +/- 50% variance, never reaching the extreme 500 and 2000 swing.

Once we have the results of testing, and if they are positive, we will discuss the tradeoff here and vote as a community as to whether to change it or not.

i don't need them right now so it's no problem - i already have 4/6 hell yeah !!!  so probably i should receive them by tomorrow^^

http://bitmark.co:3000/ says 46554 just came an hour ago, so that sounds about right. We're working on some things to help fix the issue, but the slow blocks give us advantage of supply being more or less halted while demand is low. It would be easy to just hard fork to fix it, but then we would be flooded with supply in the short term. So better to wait it out for now while things continue to develop.

Ah-ha....and I thought I was having sync issues with my shiny new BTM wallet.
Just to check: what is the last processed block that you guys are seeing?
I'm on 46553, which was 10 hours ago.