Changing the hashing algorithm
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I kinda changed my mind about changing the algo. I think if we do a switch to a new algo which isnt present at the moment, we could come out big of this.
But Ive got some concerns about that:
At the time we switch to a new algo, all hashing power will be rejected, everyone needs to update to a new miner to continue mining
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How would we calculate the new difficulty?
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How long would it take, cause in this switching time, nobody could sent/receive any Feathercoin at that certain point.
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If we stay at the same diff ~200 and not all are switching to our new algo or not fast enough, it would roughly take a good bunch of minutes to solve the first block to proceed transactions again.
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Next Question is, a new algo means a new/different hashingpower - or would it stay the same? If it wouldnt, its needed to recalculate the whole difficulty to transport it to the same level as we left it on the algo switch.
BUT if that can be managed that well, that the transfer is one smooth transition, we gonna rule the #world (jk but yeah that would be awesome)
Just my opinion.
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very valid points, ChekaZ
I think, we are just in the initial phase, where an idea is born. Then there will be a developement, a test and an implementation phase.
Some of your questions can’t answered right now, but will be later.
Regarding the new difficulty calculation,with the new algorithm, that will be implemented with 0.8.6.1 the difficulty adapts much faster to hash rate changes and therefore it should be no problem, even if we would start with a very low hashrate, let’s say 50.
If we assume, that the real hashrate would be ~3Ghash after the change, the difficulty would adapt in 3-4 blocks and we would start with 2blocks mined very fast and then come back to the 2.5 minutes interval again.
The bigger proble I see, is that we may end up with 2 different branches of the blockchain, one with the old version and another one with the new one.
How could a wallet decide,which one to use, when sending ftc?
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@CheckaZ
When the new algo hits everyone would need to stop their miners and start them back up again. We would probably want some miners running the new algo before hand which would generate rejected shares until the change. The difficulty is probably the hardest thing to get right. Some of the large mining pools may not follow us to start with and there will be no multipools switching on to us anymore so our difficulty will need to drop drastically. We could drop our difficulty 10 fold and it might still not be enough! It is probably safer to drop our difficultly too far than have it too high, there may be some fast blocks it will work out the new difficulty quick enough that way, leave the difficulty too high and we may be waiting an hour a block!
Ghostlander’s suggestion on how to change algo would give us a solution that behaves in the same way as the current one. I look forward to seeing a lower diff without attackers toying with it and multipools stripping us,
I would not to consider changing the hashing algorithm without something like ACP to cover the vulnerabilities during that period. Hopefully in the long term this change means that we can disable ACP by default but during the change we need this protection more than ever. An attacker could really run riot while everyone tries switching algo.
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I’m not against ACP and I agree, that we should keep it during the first phase of the new hashing algorithm.
Regarding difficulty, I don’t see a realy big problem here. We just should start with a lower than expected difficulty, so the fist blocks with the new algorithm are found faster than the 2.5 minutes.
I did a quick simulation starting at diff 10 with 3 Ghash and after 12 minutes or 15 blocks we’d reach a block spacing of 1.9 Minutes, after 18 blocks or ~ 19 minutes we would reach the 2.5 minutes target spacing.
The trick is to start on the low side, so the first blocks are found faster than 2.5 minutes.
But I’m definitively talking about future problems. Before we should worry about difficulty, we should do a lot of other things, if we really change the hashing algorithm 8)
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Switch point can be set to UTC rather than block number, so the people know when to switch their miners.
How could a wallet decide,which one to use, when sending ftc?
Not a problem. Old nodes will be disconnected after the switch by protocol version.
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How soon is this possibly going in to effect ? Have stayed mining FTC only since I first started mining the beginning of this year, and am looking forward to the change. The manipulation lately has had me thinking of changing to a different cryto, but I really believe in this community and refuse to give up.
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Glad to hear, that you like the community :)
I think, it’s a bit confusing, so let me try to explain.
Currently feathercoin suffers from large pools jumping in at low difficulties, mining a lot of blocks before the blockchain can react and increase the difficulty. As soon as the difficulty reaches a given level, they move on to the next coin to mine, leaving the other miners at high difficulty with low hashrate with the result, that less blocks are found and the miners have less income.
In addition it takes much time to bring the difficulty down, as the time between blocks it high then and the difficulty is aligned every 126 blocks only.
As soon as the difficulty is down again, the pool come back and so on and so on.
This problem is now and will be addressed in version 0.8.6.1 of the wallet which probably will come in the next weeks.
The other problem -and that is what this thread is about- is, that sooner or later ASICs will be developed to mine scrypt based coins like FTC. Asics provide high hashing power at low power consumption, but are expensive.
The typical result is that only a smaller number of people/groups can affort the invest in ASICs. These people generate high hash rates causing the difficulty to go up, and GPU mining is not provitable anymore.
What is discussed in this thread is the pro and con to change the hashing algorithm used for feathercoin in order to delay the upcome of ASICS as long as possible, as it is the intention of feahtercoin to rely on a distributed infrastructure, consisting of thousands of miners, rather than a realively small group of ASIC owners.
This second problem is a long term problem, as currently there is no proof of a comercially usable ASIC miner for scrypt based coins like feathercoin.
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I think we have a lot of things need to be prepared.
1, Need to develop new cgminer .
2, Need to develop new client software.
3, All mine pool update stratum protocol.
4, A new coin switching scheme.
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Would also be nice to get a cuda miner for those who have deviated to the Nvidia dark side. >:D
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Not confused, just asking a simple question. I was just asking how long to implement a more robust algo like DRK without the bad guy invisible persona… Understand pool hoppers “manipulation” , while leaving us all to work down the difficulty. I am someone who decided to get on the “FTC” boat to help row and not willing to jump over board just yet. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question in great detail.
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Would also be nice to get a cuda miner for those who have deviated to the Nvidia dark side. >:D
My very first ftc mining experience was with cudaminer. I still have that nVidia laying around too.
When it comes to it. I’ll be more than happy to test out the new algo/miner using the card.
I’ll put a rig together and test it till s/he dies. My partner also plans on buying a GTX Titan Black… I’ll test with that also, but I certainly won’t be pushing it though… He’ll kill me if it fries…
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Not confused, just asking a simple question. I was just asking how long to implement a more robust algo like DRK without the bad guy invisible persona… Understand pool hoppers “manipulation” , while leaving us all to work down the difficulty. I am someone who decided to get on the “FTC” boat to help row and not willing to jump over board just yet. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question in great detail.
Darkcoin hasn’t got a “more robust algo”. What they’ve got is a more complicated one. It’s just a more weird version of Sifcoin/Quark. Their only interesting feature is DarkSend which should allow anonymous coin transfers like Zerocoin, but in a different way. DarkSend is based itself on CoinJoin by Greg Maxwell, a BTC core developer. If we can make a service like this implemented, it’s a big thing. Anoncoin and Fedoracoin use hosted centralised mixing services which ain’t truly anonymous and can be exploited.
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Hi everyone ,
We really need POS, The reason is simple, we need money. ::)
First, I give an example. My power cost per month is 2000CNY,about 322USD. If power costs can be reduced by half, I can put in another 1000 to exchange, buy 1000 FTC. This will support the market price.
Second, look bitcoin. 40Phash/s power cost per day is 75 million USD. The entire BTC network is a huge burden. Power cost want a vampire. The investor’s money is being dispersed. This is a tragedy.
Finally, look at yourself FTC Network. We just need 3Ghash /s, it was enough. 30Ghash /s would be a huge waste. Hardware cost and power cost ,Investors will consume a lot of money. But the market price did not get upgrade. ::)
So , We really need 50%POW + 50%POS. For God points, please seriously consider this proposal. We need to invest most of the money exchange, instead of buying cards or Scrypt ASICs.
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Hi everyone ,
We really need POS, The reason is simple, we need money. ::)
First, I give an example. My power cost per month is 2000CNY,about 322USD. If power costs can be reduced by half, I can put in another 1000 to exchange, buy 1000 FTC. This will support the market price.Second, look bitcoin. 40Phash/s power cost per day is 75 million USD. The entire BTC network is a huge burden. Power cost want a vampire. The investor’s money is being dispersed. This is a tragedy.
Finally, look at yourself FTC Network. We just need 3Ghash /s, it was enough. 30Ghash /s would be a huge waste. Hardware cost and power cost ,Investors will consume a lot of money. But the market price did not get upgrade. ::)
So , We really need 50%POW + 50%POS. For God points, please seriously consider this proposal. We need to invest most of the money exchange, instead of buying cards or [background=#ffffff]Scrypt ASICs.[/background]
Lizhi, I agree with you that PoS is a very good thing to have. 50% PoW + 50% PoS is also a good choice. It’s not only about the money. PoS secures the network. It also motivates users to keep coins in local wallets for a small interest rather than using them for pumps & dumps at exchanges which may fail like Mt. Gox recently.
On the other hand, no single coin to this moment has upgraded from pure PoW to PoW + PoS. The original implementation of PoS from PPC doesn’t fit into FTC. It gives PoS blocks a huge trust advantage over PoW blocks (like 1 million trust for a PoW block and 1 trust for a PoW block). PPC also uses a different (modified) block structure. It also follows an infinite (unlimited) coin generation model. FTC has declared 336 million total coin supply and this number has to stay with PoS or not. So, you cannot pull PoS out of PPC and put it into FTC. You need a whole different PoS concept. I have one, but it needs coding work. It can be implemented into PXC and when matures, it can be exported to FTC. Tell me if you’re interested in the PoS development. It isn’t a quick ride. A lot of effort needed.
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Good timing on this discussion. I just got done talking with some of my mining friends about this very thing. My biggest concern with the idea of algo switching is whether or not it will ever end. If I understood correctly, the hope is to have Feathercoin be to Algo X, as Litecoin is to Scrypt. I’m just wondering if this cat/mouse game will end there or if several more switches will have to be made along the way. I would assume that the answer is no (unless FTC has a successful algo pairing), as long as it’s profitable to create mining specific chips. Is it possible to have a coin that is truly ASIC proof that can still be mined by the masses?
The idea of a decentralized currency pretty much dies if the person with the most money can just purchase enough equipment to recentralize it. I don’t think Bitcoin will ever go away, I just think that it’s on its way to being just like everything else â€" controlled by the people with the most money. Take this video for instance. Bitcoin is already well on its way to being far out of the masses reach.
A LOOK INSIDE AMERICA’S LARGEST BITCOIN MINING OPERATION http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5CjldZLXiAU
I’ve invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and money into GPU mining. It’s fun, it’s been heating my house in Alaska all winter (yes, seriously), and best of all, it makes some spare cash to pay on utility bills â€" which are spendy at almost $0.2USD/kWh where I live. I have no problem with buying ASIC’s to mine feathercoin with *if they are available to the masses*. My big question for everyone is this: what are we trying to do? We seemingly face adversity at every corner.
Are we trying to preserve the GPU/CPU mining culture due to readily available off-the-shelf equipment? Are we trying to find an algo where ASIC’s can be easily created and purchased by anyone who wants to invest? Are we just trying to secure our own foothold on an algo like LTC has with Scrypt? It seems to me that no matter which path we choose, at some point, deep pockets can and will recentralize if it’s profitable. Somebody finds a way to produce cheap ASIC’s that are easily available to everyone, so the deep pockets buy ten billion of them.
The fact that GPU mining is so wasteful makes it incredibly unprofitable for people wanting to build a warehouse full of them. This is a good thing and a bad thing of course. My closing comment is this: Algo-switching every time that an ASIC threat hits will eventually get old and turn people off in my opinion. If we can just change the rules at every half-time when things aren’t looking good for our team, people will stop showing up at our games.
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Love to jump into this topic, I think crypto culture really shows our strengths and weaknesses.
Here’s my 2 cents after getting caught up.
1.) This new switch needs to be announced well ahead of time. 2 Weeks min. If the FTC community needs to help with the transition, thats what we do. I’ll set my GPU’s to do whatever is needed to support the transition.
2.) This opportunity must be synergized. The release of the miner, new wallet, and some PR, all need to be geared towards all GPU miners that hit not too long ago. Making a great GUI for the miner, simple settings on the front end, advanced use on the back end. I think this could double the market cap in a week!
I agree that switching and switching Algo would kill a coin. But, I also think of it this way, GPU owners are the customer, and feathercoin is the supplier. What do our customers want and how can we leverage that to bring more widespread FTC adoption.
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Hi , ghostlander. I think we have no choice. PoS development. Let’s go.
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I have been working for months to prove Advanced Averaging, the more I look at this, changing the hashing algorythm is fraught with difficulties and no one has any proof it would work.
Lets get the Anti-multipool fix OUT NOW. That’s what Lizhi and I needs. The multipools are taking the piss and this is discusion is a total irrelevant diversion.
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Wrapper, this conversation can happen. We have our values and they just need to be set in stone. This is my task. Changing algo is not not going to happen for some time yet.
PoS is something that we should have had in the beginning not now. People have bought into Feathercoin on its current inflation model and putting PoS will break it, unless you want to do 0% PoS which long term would simply be avoided. When you generate a PoS block you loose your coins for 520 blocks while it is confirmed. To do this for nothing would just be avoided.
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I have been working for months to prove Advanced Averaging, the more I look at this, changing the hashing algorythm is fraught with difficulties and no one has any proof it would work.
Lets get the Anti-multipool fix OUT NOW. That’s what Lizhi and I needs. The multipools are taking the piss and this is discusion is a total irrelevant diversion.
Let’s not mix two problems here.
We have the current problem of multipools messing with hashrates and difficulty to their advantage.
This can be mitigated by implementing advanced averaging and we should implement that as fast as possible.The other problem is, that the upcoming ASICS will lead to a centralization of hashing power to those miners able to afford the high invest for the ASICS.
The second problem is discussed here and for me it is independent to the first one.
So let’s discuss changing the hashing algorithm while implementing advanced averaging.
That way it’s not a diversion, but part of the evolution of feathercoin.
