This Difficulty Retarget Problem
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leotian, that is an interesting idea that I believe would be better suited for a new coin. It would be a lot to implement and test which would be best tried out in a coin dedicated to it. One of the first issues that springs to mined is the reliability of the network time with is a median of peer nodes.
[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“1866” timestamp=“1368114457”]
What we can do instead of shortening the retarget, which as with CHNcoin (60 seconds wtf?), will only make the bounce rate faster and drive away long term creative people, is actually EXTEND the retarget time when it comes back down and SHORTEN it when it goes back up.
[/quote]Do you mean overall number of blocks till the difficulty retarget or target block time?
If it is the block target time then it is already the difficulty that makes it easier and harder to mine. You can adjust the time taken to mine blocks by adjusting the difficulty alone. If it is blocks till the next retarget then what happens if the difficulty always goes up like Bitcoin?
[quote author=d2 link=topic=305.msg1863#msg1863 date=1368113790]
I do like the 504 retarget idea since everything else is 4x as fast but also would recommend an adjustment to the diff change amount during re-target proposed by nutnut:[quote author=Nutnut link=topic=305.msg1851#msg1851 date=1368112073]
Or slow down the adjust so it’s only half or even a quarter of the full retarget?
[/quote]Re-targeting to hit the exact 2.5 minute block time is what causes such massive spikes and drops in the first place. If you were to speed up the re-target to every 504 blocks but only allow 10-20% dif +/- it would be a relatively quick re-target and moving in small increments would get you to your goal block time in a reasonable time-frame.
[/quote]This idea seems very sensible to me as a four fold change, four times more frequently would cause trouble and potentially be abused by large mining groups. A block adjust of 504 blocks but with quarter of the adjustment makes difficulty changes more fine grained but with less drastic swings. It will still retain the same overall potential but be more dynamic and I believe safe.
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Something I never thought I’d see: Royal Coin has 480 block retargets (vs 504) and 3 minutes confimations (vs 2.5).
It is producing blocks and getting hit by orphans faster than anyone can download the constantly extending chain.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199839.0
Do not lower the block retarget. The controlled difficulty increase +/- 10 sounds like a plan. I have a few other ideas.
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[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“1678” timestamp=“1368069897”]
Quick retargeting makes it pointless to invest in new mining hardware in the first place. The price isn’t going to react fast enough.
[/quote]Not exactly. TRC had a problem with difficulty rising and falling too fast since retargeting occurs every 30 blocks, so they introduced averaging window of 720 blocks. Now there are several difficulty jumps a day which is quite acceptable. It makes TRC somewhat more ASIC resistant than other sha-256 coins. There may be other ways though.
The network lost about 90% of hashpower by this moment which results in 19 days to retarget at deliriously low difficulty of 30. I guess the situation will get even worse over time, so it’s better to figure out something until the network explodes with hashpower again.
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[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“1971” timestamp=“1368136002”]
Something I never thought I’d see: Royal Coin has 480 block retargets (vs 504) and 3 minutes confimations (vs 2.5).It is producing blocks and getting hit by orphans faster than anyone can download the constantly extending chain.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199839.0
Do not lower the block retarget. The controlled difficulty increase +/- 10 sounds like a plan. I have a few other ideas.
[/quote]
ohrly?Yes, it will be a much worse scenario for FTC when the difficulty becomes 20 in the next few weeks, I’m pretty sure we will see 5 Ghash/s on the network within 24 hours of the difficulty change, just for them to mine for a day and then hop back off to Litecoin/Novacoin/etc.
If the retarget is lower, then many of those miners will constantly be “missing the next bus” smoothing out day-to-day hashrates.
I’ll admit- I’m mining RoyalCoin at the moment…but not for long. I own over 1100 FTC and plan on converting the rest of my LTC to FTC… I’ll be back on this network in the next 2 weeks to help out with network hashrate regardless of profitability.
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There’s miners on litecoin who get 56Mhs or more. They won’t miss a thing. The only people missing anything will be the peasants.
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The solution that the Devs implement MUST hinder hop-on hop-off strategies.
Or else the coin will become a trampolin.
I think that maybeone or more of the following could solve this:
1)Increasing/Decreasing difficulty x% when hashrate drops y% (Retarget works as usual 2016 blocks)
2)Automatically increasing reward for higher difficulty / decreasing reward for lower difficulty -
[quote name=“sumantso” post=“2022” timestamp=“1368168640”]
Its a shame that all those who stick through the high difficulty phase can’t reap the reward when the difficulty falls.If we are changing the difficulty scheme with a hard fork, I would say do it quickly. The reason being that it will save the diffculty crashing after the next retarget.
PS: Bushstar, it was great to see you pointing out the good support that FeatherCoin has on the Trollbox. I am trying my part in keeping the spirit up but you can’t save idiots from selling at 0.0017.
[/quote]TBH the way the coin is at the minute, I can understand people selling all the way down to the very bottom, as they will more than likely be able to buy back in much lower when the next diff-change+dump occurs…Like you say the ones who stick through the high difficulty will be the ones who won’t really reap a reward, because as soon as the difficulty drops and the hashrate increases, those big rigs will be able to mine in 2-3 hours what has taken most of us 2-3+ weeks to acquire. :-\
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I think if we are going to fork, it needs to be done now.
The hashrate has dropped to practically nil which exposes us to the 51% attack and the re-target time is just getting further away. The further away it gets the more people abandon it. Me may never hit the re-target. At present there are very few people on the network (as can be seen with the amount of time it takes to get confirmations) and the number is falling as it becomes less profitable to mine and/or trade.
The price is falling rapidly as people are loosing faith and there seems to be growing calls on the trollbox for the altcoins (ftc & cnc) to removed from BTC-e.
I say we take the opportunity to fork now whilst there are very few people mining and trading the coins from their wallets. It wont go down well but it will only get worse in time.
EDIT: Thinking about it, a fork would show that we are proactively supporting and maintaining ftc rather than leaving it to rot. People like things that are actively developed.
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Is it possible to hire peoples to mining FTC for a week to short the re-target time?
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[quote name=“elvis09” post=“2092” timestamp=“1368178333”]
Is it possible to hire peoples to mining FTC for a week to short the re-target time?
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You mean, pay the big miners, to mine and make even MORE money?
I think that’s quite a bad idea to be honest. x: -
Not big miner, just for small miner by paying FTC
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Does someone have a website where we can see the live network kh/s or mh/s?
stats.feathercoin.com has the average over the last xx blocks. -
[quote name=“elvis09” post=“2095” timestamp=“1368178796”]
Not big miner, just for small miner by paying FTC
[/quote]
But you can’t provide an incentive for one and not the other. Doing so would stir up a fair amount of problems within the community and give other communities and haters a nice wedge of incentive to poke fun with. -
To get miners back on board the difficulty MUST drop. I know because i’m a miner with 15MH/s and a huge electric bill and hardware costs. As much as i want to help FTC, by mining it now i’ll be throwing away $1000s per month.
In a few hours LTC diff will fly up 25% so all the miners (me included) will be looking for the next most profitable coin which will likely be cnc (ftc’s direct competitor as far as i can tell) but possibly trc or ppc or… Of course this means that there will be renewed interest in CNC and other alts. Then the LTC diff will drop again, rinse and repeat. Basically no-one will be interested in ftc. Every time i click the stats page we add a day to the re-target and the hash rate drops. we’ll never get there!
Honestly, we need to act quickly me thinks. Pref before the LTC diff increase.
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[quote name=“Nutnut” post=“2113” timestamp=“1368182060”]
To get miners back on board the difficulty MUST drop. I know because i’m a miner with 15MH/s and a huge electric bill and hardware costs. As much as i want to help FTC, by mining it now i’ll be throwing away $1000s per month.In a few hours LTC diff will fly up 25% so all the miners (me included) will be looking for the next most profitable coin which will likely be cnc (ftc’s direct competitor as far as i can tell) but possibly trc or ppc or… Of course this means that there will be renewed interest in CNC and other alts. Then the LTC diff will drop again, rinse and repeat. Basically no-one will be interested in ftc. Every time i click the stats page we add a day to the re-target and the hash rate drops. we’ll never get there!
Honestly, we need to act quickly me thinks. Pref before the LTC diff increase.
[/quote]Even so, with 15mH/s you could make a big difference even if it meant 1 month at break even (obviously not loss) - But hey I do understand you not wanting to, it’s only logical if you are in it to profit short term.
I do agree something needs to be done pronto, as even sending Feathercoin and waiting for 1 confirm is now taking longer than sending BTC and waiting for 6. :o -
If we went for a 504 difficulty adjust we need to work out how much the difficulty will be adjusted. We do not want the overall effect to be drastically different, we want to end up with a more fine grained difficulty adjust. I have made a couple of rough tables below comparing the difficulty value when it goes up.
Normal difficulty adjust
0…2016 Block count
4 …16 Difficulty going up 400%504 difficulty adjust
0…504…1008…1512…2016 Block Count
4…5.6…7.84…10.96…15.36 Difficulty going up by 140%
4…6…9…13.5…20.25 Difficulty going up by 150%
4…8…16…32…64 Difficulty going up by 200%
4…16…64…256…1024 Difficulty going up by 400% -
I have to confess i’m not entirely sure how the whole fork thing works (and i’m no coder) but, if we do fork, what are we suggesting? Resetting the difficulty manually or just changing the re-target block?
Can we have a variable re-target block based on hash rate? plucking a figure from the air say 126 blocks per GH/s working on a 150% diff change? or am i talking drivel?
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[quote name=“UKMark” post=“2128” timestamp=“1368185055”]
[quote author=Nutnut link=topic=305.msg2113#msg2113 date=1368182060]
To get miners back on board the difficulty MUST drop. I know because i’m a miner with 15MH/s and a huge electric bill and hardware costs. As much as i want to help FTC, by mining it now i’ll be throwing away $1000s per month.In a few hours LTC diff will fly up 25% so all the miners (me included) will be looking for the next most profitable coin which will likely be cnc (ftc’s direct competitor as far as i can tell) but possibly trc or ppc or… Of course this means that there will be renewed interest in CNC and other alts. Then the LTC diff will drop again, rinse and repeat. Basically no-one will be interested in ftc. Every time i click the stats page we add a day to the re-target and the hash rate drops. we’ll never get there!
Honestly, we need to act quickly me thinks. Pref before the LTC diff increase.
[/quote]Even so, with 15mH/s you could make a big difference even if it meant 1 month at break even (obviously not loss) - But hey I do understand you not wanting to, it’s only logical if you are in it to profit short term.
I do agree something needs to be done pronto, as even sending Feathercoin and waiting for 1 confirm is now taking longer than sending BTC and waiting for 6. :o
[/quote]I agree but it’s the people with 15Mh/sec hash power that caused the problems in the first place, I’m gonna lose some dollars on electricity, yeah because all miners like you left us to clean up this mess.
Short term indeed
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We need to address the Retarget Problem [b]now[/b].
This is no religion, this is the market. Users will not mine Feathercoin because they [i]believe[/i] in it - they will mine it because it’s profitable.
[b]So we have to get difficulty down ASAP!
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Additionally (long term) we either have to build up an infrastructure of shops, sites, services, etc. that accept Feathercoin. -
[quote name=“Radacoin” post=“2144” timestamp=“1368189976”]
We need to address the Retarget Problem [b]now[/b].This is no religion, this is the market. Users will not mine Feathercoin because they [i]believe[/i] in it - they will mine it because it’s profitable.
[b]So we have to get difficulty down ASAP!
[/b]
Additionally (long term) we either have to build up an infrastructure of shops, sites, services, etc. that accept Feathercoin.
[/quote]Well some of us believe in it, otherwise I would be mining LTC or CNC right now, but agree we need services, and the total-hashrate needs to go tenfold for this to be workable, because at the minute even sending FTC is taking forever.
