As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?
In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.
http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.htmlIn just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.
With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.
What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.
I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.
Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?
All crypto coins have an early adopter benefit, bitcoin is no exception.
My point is that the decrease in block reward payout greatly exaggerates this effect in Primecoin. Once GPU mining comes out the per block reward will decrease significantly, which means that those mining in a few months will never be able to mine the # of XPM that individuals were able to in the first weeks, no matter how much H/W they add. With bitcoin you may need a lot more H/W now to mine coins with ASIC difficulty, but roughly the same number of coins per day are released.
With Bitcoin, today 3600 bitcoins are released every day while 7200 bitcoins were released per day in the first 4 year period.
With Primecoin, in the first weeks over 100K coins were mined per day. Soon with GPUs most likely only 100s of coins will be able to be mined per day. That is very unbalanced.
Not sure if I agree with you on the magnitutde and rapidity of this change. First you are assuming there will be a GPU miner which is several orders of magnitude faster than CPU miners. I do not think this will be true. I think primecoins are not as GPU friendly versus CPUs as bitcoins and litecoins are.
Also, the block reward is calculated as 999/difficulty
2At the current difficult of 9 that is a block reward of about 12.3.
Even if difficulty goes up to 12 with GPU miners (and I think it will be much more gradual than that), then the block reward would become about 7.
Even in the far future, if difficulty ever reaches 20, then the block reward will be 2.5 and I think that would be decades in the future.
I think the difficulty increases will become more gradual with maybe a small blip up with GPU miners. If GPU miners are 100X more efficient, well then you may be proven correct. However, my guess is they are more likely to be "only" 2 to 3 times more efficient than CPUs. Hell, maybe they won't be any more efficient as the type of calculations required to mine primecoins really is more suited to CPU designs than GPUs which were created to calculate polygons.