Current Proof of Stake Difficulty

[crypto_coiner]

Another less popular option is what BitShares does, delegates being chosen by Shareholders

That would embed a mandatory delegation to make your voice count, which defeats the purpose of the blockchain – imho and at first sight.
Absolutely different from plugging into a voting feed.

[Cybnate]

That would embed a mandatory delegation to make your voice count, which defeats the purpose of the blockchain – imho and at first sight.Absolutely different from plugging into a voting feed.

I think multi-sig can be used for this, assuming you allow someone else to also mint your Shares. That might be the price to pay to delegate someone else to vote for you. Such a system would require further thoughts though.

[Sentinelrv]

Alright, all my shares are back online now. Hope that helps.

[crypto_coiner]

How many shares exactly?

[Sentinelrv]

1% is about 8 million.

[crypto_coiner]

Which such a large portion, you should open and start your own voting data feed, imho

[crypto_coiner]

@kschneezy what’s up?

[kschneezy]

I liked your suggestion of @Sentinelrv providing a data feed. I know he keeps up with everything on the forum and more often than not I agree with his opinions

[Sentinelrv]

Unfortunately, I myself rely on a data feed for now. In case you haven’t read my previous replies about it, I’ve been unusually absent from the forums this past year due to an unexpected promotion and job training. I thought things were about to go back to normal in January, but then the lead operator at my job had to go out for surgery for a couple months and I’ve had to take over his job until he comes back, hopefully in March. There’s a lot of responsibility in this position and it means my attention and time are directed elsewhere.

I’ve tried to keep as informed as possible with Nu, but I’m still behind until he comes back. Besides that, I’m not particularly confident in my ability to understand Nu’s liquidity operations in all its finer details like @Nagalim can. Maybe in the future it might be possible if I have more time to dedicate to it, but now is not that time unfortunately.

[Cybnate]

Went down a bit further, but reached the bottom and bouncing back a bit finally.
Now at 0.0001789 (source getinfo in client).

[mhps]

A mint reward inversely proportional to the mint difficulty.

POS already does it. Lower difficulty allows a minter to find more blocks in the same time.

[Nagalim]

Currently we pay a fixed amount of nsr per minute with Nu (not peercoin), give or take. The difficulty adjusts every block to keep that true. Do you agree that with a higher reward given per minute we would have a higher difficulty, given the same marketcap? In that case, wouldn’t it be a good idea to increase the reward when the difficulty goes down? The downside of course being that we would be attracting apathetic voters this way and diluting more when the network is in trouble than when it’s healthy.

[mhps]

In that case, wouldn’t it be a good idea to increase the reward when the difficulty goes down?

It is a good idea and the current system already does it by offering more block to a given minter. Whether the incentive is big enough is questionable. Mintng rate of Peercoin is ~10%.
Maybe we should distribute some dividends to

1. addresses that found blocks in the last 3 months proportional to blocks found
   and some to
   2 addresses that vote to test motions like we had once

[JordanLee]

As Nagalim and mhps have mentioned, while the block reward does remain constant at 40 NSR regardless of changes in difficulty, the average amount of time it takes to mint a block with 10,000 NSR changes proportionately with the difficulty. If the difficulty drops in half, the average amount of time it takes to mint a block will also drop in half, to a minimum of seven days.

This seven day minimum means that the network needs a minimum of 100 million NuShares minting in order to produce blocks at one minute intervals. My quick estimate is that there are currently slightly less than 200 million NuShares minting. The network produces 21 million NuShares from minting per year, so the current protocol permits constant minters to make up to a 21% return on the their NuShares in NuShares if the difficulty fell far enough (to about half of what it is now). At the current difficulty level, minters are getting approximately 12% annual return on their NuShares.

The need for 100 million NuShares to mint in order to keep block intervals at 1 minute should be understood by the technical people in the community because if the network is successful, it is likely that so many NuShares will be burned that the minting quantity will fall below 100 million. There are a couple remedies to this that involve protocol changes. One would be to reduce the quantity of NuShare satoshis required to mint a block. Right now it is 100 million satoshis, so this could be changed to 50 million satoshis, for instance. Another method would be to reduce the 7 day age requirement for minting eligibility.

I hope such a protocol change becomes necessary, but it certainly shouldn’t be a priority right now.

A motion has been passed to reduce the per block minting to 20 if the NuShare supply drops below 500 million, although this has not been placed in the code yet. With NSR burns being paired with NBT sales and reductions in mint rewards paired with drops in NuShare supply, we can expect NuShares to become quite scarce if there is healthy growth in the quantity of NuBits.

[Nagalim]

Wouldn’t reducing the mint rate make the problem worse? I know you didn’t say it was a solution, but not only would it reduce the rate of share creation, it would reduce minter incentive.

[JordanLee]

Wouldn’t reducing the mint rate make the problem worse? I know you didn’t say it was a solution, but not only would it reduce the rate of share creation, it would reduce minter incentive.

Before we can say it would reduce the incentive, we need to be clear about what we are comparing it to. The idea behind the motion that was passed was that if the block reward is 40 at 1 billion (the original expectation for total supply), then it should be 20 at 500 million or 80 at 2 billion. So, 20 at 500 million supply is the same incentive as 40 at 1 billion supply in terms of the degree of dilution.

However, if you are comparing 20 per block at a 500 million total or 40 per block at the same 500 million total, then of course 20 will provide less incentive. If shareholders think that decrease is imprudent given the drop in difficulty, they can pass a motion to nullify the previous passed motion.

The matter isn’t urgent.

[Sentinelrv]

The network produces 21 million NuShares from minting per year, so the current protocol permits constant minters to make up to a 21% return on the their NuShares in NuShares if the difficulty fell far enough (to about half of what it is now).

if the network is successful, it is likely that so many NuShares will be burned that the minting quantity will fall below 100 million.

If the difficulty were to fall that low, wouldn’t all these newly minted NuShares be going to dedicated minters, while non-minters get their shares diluted? I would think more control of the network would end up falling into the hands of people that are contributing through minting and voting, meanwhile non-minters lose control of the network over time through dilution of their NuShares. My point is newly minted shares will be going to people who already mint, versus people who do not mint, so the amount of shares that mint should rise over time I would think.

[Nagalim]

. My point is newly minted shares will be going to people who already mint, versus people who do not mint, so the amount of shares that mint should rise over time I would think.

Dilution shares are fundamentally different from minted shares. One distribution mechanism uses the open market, the other uses incentives for network security. Increasing mint rewards as difficulty lowers is a very good way to insure that minted shares go to those who are protecting the network from attack. This would auto-stabilize the buyback-difficulty singularity by using a feedback loop.

[Cybnate]

Current difficulty reached another disappointing all time low: 0.0016487 (client block 857475)
See also: https://blockexplorer.nu/charts/posdiff.

[cryptog]

Centralization.