I did read something similar on Reddit (with a 2 month time frame). But if miners dumping this coin is really true, that's bad news. Isn't there a difficulty adjustment to prevent this from happening?
However, I believe it would be against the ethos of DigiByte not to keep at least one algorithm open for ‘conventional hardware’. This is commonly accepted as the most decentralised part of a network!
In truth, I think it is just a fair place for common folk to get involved in the mining process and really support the project. Most GPU miners will be mining in a pool and this kind of centralises their efforts. A high proportion of solo miners would be the most decentralised our network could be.
If a DigiByte algorithm could be mined only with solo machines, with a power cap of say 2 top spec GPUs. I think we would really be on the way to reinforcing ‘the most decentralised’ network claim.
Maybe there could even be ways of weighting this new algo against the rest of the network, increasing its luck so that it started to take more than 20% as the number of participants increased, for example.
The rewards are going to be few and far between but much bigger when they come and this seriously would be ‘Hardcore DigiByter’ territory, I’m thinking.
The professional mining race will continue within the remaining ASIC algorithms and eventually assuming equipment becomes better distributed within the community, overall security of DigiByte could be seriously increased by the efficiency of these machines mining on our network.
Instead of the overall network running away in power consumption, the competing ASIC miners become more self regulating but are ultimately kept in check by the size of the GPU participation.
It’s all a bit sketchy perhaps but I’m flying by the seat of my pants here!
The hashrate capped solo mining only (the power cap should have this result anyway) idea is interesting. One problem I see is that with that many individual miners the time in between blocks found by each individual miner might become too long quickly which contradicts the goal of having more participants. Maybe introduce some kind of mini-block which would be nothing more than a mineable, perhaps at a tenth of the real difficulty, transaction with a reward attached to it to reward providing hashrate to the network more regularly. At the same time this could provide the reward bonus of this more decentralized algo.
Of course I'm also just brainstorming here, but with more inputs this could turn out as a viable concept. :-)
It is something to think about and discuss for sure, the forward thinking developers of DigiByte are bound to pick up on possibilities if they have not already considered them.
The other thing about this new Baikal X10 miner, is that it supposedly has 2 new algorithms that will be added to 5 it is listed as mining.
Obviously, DigiByte developers will want to know exactly what they are before forking DGB!
Having probably spent too much time in and around this space, it wouldn't surprise me at all if new ASIC miners continued 'DigiByte Classic' on this path regardless of what DigiByte developers and new foundation decide anyway....interesting times again!
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