As a temporary solution to fight the continuous dumpfests currently choking the market I'll reduce block reward to 50k coins per block (static) effective after block 63500 has been reached.
This will allow for some time to consider next steps regarding either PoS or planned out static rewards. Opinions on the issue are welcome.
The code and wallet updates will be pushed in a few hours.
The reason why PND is dumped in the market is that it is profitable to do so with current hashing rate and difficulty level. If you reduce the block reward to 50k, then the hashing rate will reduce accordingly, it will be dumped again. It is in vicious cycle. You may not be able to increase the price by reducing the reward. Dodge is an example. The reward halved, the price was the same as difficulty halved.
Too low hashing rate will make the PND network vulnerable due to very low hashing rate. With 250k reward, the hashing rate is 100MH/s, If you reduce it to 50k, the hash rate could be 20MH/s. It is very dangerous.
So I would suggest keeping the current reward halving schedule. That was known from the beginning and we mine PND because of that.
Making it fixed reward is a good idea. But please give us long warning time.
You may also change it to scrypt-N. But that is too similar to PANDA. I think the future of PND is in scrypt-N. SpainCoin has been changed smoothly to scrypt-N. This could be done on block 100k or later, giving us long enough warning.
The depressing of the price is due to little use of PND.
ScryptN is definitely not the future, because it's counter is basically just "put upgradable RAM in the ASICs", AND there have already been multiple reports if it burning out GPUs.
The future is X11, which has neither of these issues, is ASIC resistant, has much lower heat, power consumption and wear/tear on the GPUs.
X11+DGW is the perfect combo to keep a coin healthy, away from multipools, huge farms and heavy dumpers.
If it starts being a real problem, a CGA-style reward can be implemented, while the total block reward is divided by the current difficulty (example: 500000/20=25000), thus discouraging the network from getting too big and keeping the farms/multipools out.
The future for PND is PoS, its biggest problem are not rewards or attacks, its the missing buy support. Also I truely believe, that the time of PoW-coins is over, its just too easy to exploit them with multipools - and there will always be a multipool as soon as some PoW is just profitable, no matter how. Scrypt-N might stop some dumpings for a short time but on a longer perspective, coins need to become PoS to stop multipool raping and dumping it.
The issue with PoS is the fact that not only centralizes power (the people who have more get more), but it doesn't allow new players to enter the market in an easy way, since the only way is to buy the coins from another holder, so it's definitely not a solution, long or short term.
Thats why there is a multipool that allows to mine PND even with PoS.
PoW has certain flaws, and not only the shitcoin flow exposes them.
1. PoW network security depends on hashpower: A pool with 51% can crash the whole coin. Not possible with PoS
2. Power consuming: people with low or no energy cost profit over these in countries where power costs alot. Bitcoin mining industry already moves to spots where energy is cheap due to hydroelectric supply or similar. Decentralisation is spoiled. Also a waste of energy generally just to keep the blockchain alife.
3. Pump and Dump: People with much power can and will dump the coin at peaks and use the profit to manipulate market. The earlier you are in, the more power you have. That renders alot of coins to the whim of a few whales. Blackcoin exposes the whales: Everytime when the pool is not buying, and thats often still while in beta, the price dumps.