FTC Diff Change
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How are we feeling about the speed of the Diff changes when the Diff needs to go down (ie…now). Too fast, too slow, just right???
I am happy this will be a quicker adjustment down in Diff than before. However, the cycles we are going through with diff changes and miner influx worry me a little. If the diff change down takes too long more miners will leave and get on another coin and return once it drops a few days later. To me perfect difficulty adjustments seem like a calculus problem that if properly coded could adjust difficulty to match the network hash rate instantly if desired.
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Of course i would like it to go down quicker so i can grab more coins but then that would also mean it went up quicker when they all came back. Rough with the smooth.
The miners that jump to the most profitable coin are only thinking short term. I’ve not sold a single ftc other than a few swing trades when the volatility went up to grab some more coins (please dont flame me).
I’m thinking in ~6 months the diff will be MUCH higher than now and we’ll look back on these low diff days and reminisce at the number of coins we could grab in a day.
Patience my friend. ;)
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erk has a very valid point. It goes up too quick and down too slow atm, and 10 minute block times are no better than Bitcoin which is where we are at. Combine this with 100 confirmations, and you’ve got a coin that’s useful on some days, and sucks on others.
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I agree with erk and Kevlar: It goes up too quick and down too slow. We sould find a amount of block more fair: so we mine almost the same amount of time whatsoever is the difficulty.
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zerodrama has mentioned working on solutions for this. Good development takes time.
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Lets wait and see what happens after the next diff change, remember this is very early stages in the coins life, and there is going to be a bit of testing / trial and error before the formula is just right.
We are very lucky, the developers of feathercoin arn’t going around saying “Go suck eggs, this is the way its going to be”. They are constantly watching and listening to this forum and they will take action if its needed.
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[quote name=“DaMooMoo” post=“13901” timestamp=“1371082465”]
Lets wait and see what happens after the next diff change, remember this is very early stages in the coins life, and there is going to be a bit of testing / trial and error before the formula is just right.We are very lucky, the developers of feathercoin arn’t going around saying “Go suck eggs, this is the way its going to be”. They are constantly watching and listening to this forum and they will take action if its needed.
[/quote]Bushstar has reached out to a number of developers for feedback. I can you tell you this, we’re not looking at a patch job for FTC. There’s quite a few interesting ideas on the table, please keep the feedback flowing with an understanding he’s watching and evaluating.
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What about making the difficulty re-adjust every 10 blocks to a maximum of 41.4/50.4=0.82%?
EDIT: What we need is a base of miners who don’t care about current difficulty, making the difficulty change every 25 minutes might have a stabilizing effect.
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[quote name=“erk” post=“13945” timestamp=“1371090447”]
Too fast, Teracoin does it every 30 blocks and it annoys miners. You need hours not minutes for the profitability charts to do their thing. If you changed diff every 10 blocks chances are a miner would not have found a coin in that time, and be switching, eventually they would just ignore your coin.
[/quote]Good points, however I would argue that long “come-down” times are more detrimental than what you describe. If a bunch of power comes onto/leaves the network and it responds faster then at least current miners can see that some progress is being made all the time. How it is now is just a merry-go-round of miners jumping on at 94 and leaving at 133.
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slow diff change makes in and out as they make big diff change, faster diff change should be a lot more modulate effect.
at each 10 block should possibly do ~0.5% so would now do 133.07 to 132.4, next 131.8 , etc so over 500 block you should have a 25% adjust at 504 you can have a 20% more adjustment. but this 504 adjustement should mostly not been triggered as the 10 block should help get the coin in a stable place where we are not the most profitable for long time but also not in the non profitable for long time. yes at 115% BTC sometimes your [b][i]the[/i][/b] coins, but that should not be very long usually 115% in in the top 3 and I think it’s where we would stabilise right now with around 100-110 diff and 2.5-3Gh. that would be pretty good giving what we want 2.5 min confirmations steady.
steady is alot better for the coin especially if you are in the profitable part of the chart. BTC 100, LTC 107 FTC 115 for now(yes we need a prime for been a new coin). this would make attack constantly more difficult. now we are vulnerable. but the profitability also have a second aspect the price.
the 504 corection would take care of correcting things if needed, but the slow one would be ajusting nearly constantly so correction should not be needed often. actually we over correct as we jump to each side of the sweet spot (and probably some would be happy to brig us far of the soft spot.)
yes a fast change in diff should be less drastic. a big change in short term can be exploit to put us in high diff by adding hash power. it’s why i put a 0.5% and keep the 504 just lowered it to be overall the same. yes 10 block would sometimes go the wrong way for luck and bad luck, but overall they will help significantly to stabilize the diff with a minor effect but frequently.
note 10 can be 14 or else just not over 30 and the change can be calculate according to last 10 or a 20-30 block trend moving average.
time manipulation can have effect that are not desirable as the >100 block in the same minutes would put diff higher but would only be 5% so should have been ok. any other possible problem should be check.
a slow change alone can be used, but making it too aggressive can cause diff resonnance or making it not enough would make retarget not efficient. i think the effect over 504 block should not go over 45% in any case that is already a bit drastic
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its not diff ajustment problem, main ftc problem is lack of a sufficient standing miners
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The high block time is a problem as it leaves us vulnerable to attack. However, the current high difficulty was due to a special circumstance; as the difficulty had fallen down to 45 as a byproduct of the attack.
170 blocks left till retarget, after which I expect a few oscillations before it stabilises. I hope FTC profitability stays slightly above LTC to keep the auto-pools away and bring in the smaller miners.
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[quote name=“Magic8Ball” post=“14076” timestamp=“1371122029”]
The high block time is a problem as it leaves us vulnerable to attack. However, the current high difficulty was due to a special circumstance; as the difficulty had fallen down to 45 as a byproduct of the attack.170 blocks left till retarget, after which I expect a few oscillations before it stabilises. I hope FTC profitability stays slightly above LTC to keep the auto-pools away and bring in the smaller miners.
[/quote]Autopools saved us. Autopools have the smaller miners. The big guns come from rogue pools.
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[quote name=“vasp” post=“14067” timestamp=“1371121278”]
its not diff ajustment problem, main ftc problem is lack of a sufficient standing miners
[/quote]We would still face the problem of the profit miners. Litecoin has a large base hash power so are less effected by these guys. Ideally we would want a technical solution in place to make sure that we hit the block target time most of the time. We have a solution in place that is better for us than the default Litecoin adjust but in the long run we would want to look for the best difficulty adjust out there and move to it. The move we made was a safe one from my perspective as it did not deviate too much from the original design. Terracoin were trying different solutions on the fly and some of them proved more troublesome than before.
There will be opportunities down the road to further evolve what we currently have but there will be no changes to difficulty anytime soon. I am working on ways to handle attacks like we experienced in the future.
By the way, when our difficulty goes down Litecoin’s goes up.
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I agree that if we want commerce to move to the coin, they need that 2.5 minute confirmation (even less!).
So, long wait is too long.That the coin is young should not be an excuse, the network should re-adjust faster. In fact, are there real negative? As a miner I am ok with fast re-adjust as I believe in mid to long term value.
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We should encourage building our core mining base even more in order to minimize the effect of hash power volatility. I stand by Bush and JustABit and agree that we should not rush into any changes. Our core mining base has grown significantly over the last two weeks. If it continues to grow, even at a much slower pace, then the effect of the coin switching pools will have less impact.
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[quote name=“robep00” post=“14093” timestamp=“1371125212”]
I agree that if we want commerce to move to the coin, they need that 2.5 minute confirmation (even less!).
So, long wait is too long.That the coin is young should not be an excuse, the network should re-adjust faster. In fact, are there real negative? As a miner I am ok with fast re-adjust as I believe in mid to long term value.
[/quote]Fast-readjust means that your mining has different value from hour to hour. Like your sandwich going rotten and then turning into filet mignon before your eyes.
Your mining is only worth something if people can depend on prices and supply not changing wildly. If they can’t they won’t buy.
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Everyone’s pushing out ideas on adjusting the diff rate to get quicker confirms. Well, what is the acceptable network hashrate for a 2 month old coin? Is the problem that we want a min 1GH rate regularly and that we are not getting that?
Also, as a smaller miner I actually make more on smaller pools or when the network hashrate is down, diff up, because I can actually mine. Once the 10MH+ guys show up the smaller miners make about 40% less with smaller pools not being able to find blocks because the 700MH pools are soaking them up. Of course this is by design but it encourages centralization of pools.
my 0.000002 FTC
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Why don’t you come up with some sort of longevity or loyalty program for the miners? People switch because money matters, but if you setup a bonus program for say, 1FTC bonus for every 1mhash per day you bring to the table (or something else of value to compensate for those losing money by NOT switching) on all the major pools?
Would that not help? the network is crashing again and waiting for it to go down 40% only to sky rocket again (because it will be worth 0.02 more than some other coin)
I am still “donating” at give me ftc because I like you guys, except zerodrama, he acts like a drama queen.
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[quote name=“randomdef” post=“14297” timestamp=“1371152074”]
Why don’t you come up with some sort of longevity or loyalty program for the miners? People switch because money matters, but if you setup a bonus program for say, 1FTC bonus for every 1mhash per day you bring to the table (or something else of value to compensate for those losing money by NOT switching) on all the major pools?Would that not help? the network is crashing again and waiting for it to go down 40% only to sky rocket again (because it will be worth 0.02 more than some other coin)
I am still “donating” at give me ftc because I like you guys, except zerodrama, he acts like a drama queen.
[/quote]1. Longevity program - I’ve been looking into that recently, we’re on the same page. If you have a few ideas, please shoot them my way
2 Donating - We appreciate your help with mining
3. Zerodrama - Please no personal attacks
4. Before anyone responds to the Zero comment - Don’t
