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new hash rate record


podizzle
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Hmm... not really sure what the pure needs of the coin are, with regards to network hash rate. I'm sure the maths are simple for someone less tired and distracted with other work than I am at the moment.  The network hash rate has to do with moving coins around in transactions, as well as ultimately releasing the normal inflation rate into the wild.

 

The thing is, if only one CPU was mining the coin, the difficulty would go extremely low so that this one miner got blocks roughly every minute. It would be something like a diff of 0.00001 or whatever.  So technically, if I'm thinking of this correctly, you only really "need" a single miner running constantly to get all the coins for the network and to move the transactions through.

 

The diff increases/decreases in a manner as to constrain the flow of new coins every day.  The higher the hash rate before the next adjustment period (every 60 blocks, there's an adjustment), the faster transactions flow during that time. However, after the diff goes up, things slow back down to closer to the 1-minute mark again anyway.  (Then, typically, a bunch of miners fall off as they think it's too hard to mine at the new higher difficulty, which then slows the network down a bunch with transactions slowing to a potential crawl until the difficulty drops considerably to match the lower network hash rate.)

 

...I feel like I'm talking in circles.  I don't have time to edit this post better, so I hope it's making sense.

 

There's really no doubt that all this stuff is a big waste of energy -- crypto-mining in general.  The biggest issue is to make sure there are enough distributed nodes mining/hashing to protect the network from some big whale coming along and finding most of the blocks and performing a malicious "51% attack" on the coin.  With that in mind, the more network hash there is, to some degree, the more secure the network potentially is.

 

...again, I think that's roughly coming out correct.  I'll wait to see if anyone rebukes my points here to come in and clarify better. :P  I hope I'm making at least some sense.

 

The idea of using all this power for something more valuable to the world society is a bit of a Holy Grail at the moment. There have been some efforts, but currently they're not showing too much fruit, from last I checked.  CureCoin was one of them, but my research on the subject is stale.

 

I'd personally LOVE to push all my hashing power at something like protein folding or such.  It's just that there's also the greedy side of things where protein folding (et. al) don't make money for me, and I'm not in a position to be very altruistic at the moment.. unfortunately.

 

 

Wow, thanks for the explanation..    its very clear..  :)  and I get it..  So, we are all just really wasting energy so as to compete against each other for a limited flow of coins by the increase in difficulties.

 

I understand the whale 51% attack part, but isn't it true that if the algo is kept at using just a CPU based, the whale has a much harder time to gather the power. since there are more CPU in the open then there are GPU, FPGA and ASCII. Thus, the power is really in the hands of the public and not just some whale who manage to set up some big farms and using FPGA and ASCII are easier for whales as they have the $$$ and there are a limited number of people who will be getting a FPGA or ASCII just for mining.

 

 

As to finding a meaning for the extra computation power as a mean of flow control, really, I do see a great potential to that, its there, especially so when mincoin is now considering to move away from scrypt, so why not look for a soul too. primecoin is a great example, it does prime numbers, only does it using CPU (not to sure how is the GPU development going.) It has a soul - prime numbers. and its a cryptocurrency at the same time. I understand the greed part, of wanting profit, so why not integrate both? example we used, protein folding, thus everytime it finds a protein structure match, it is a block, instead of using difficulty as a flow control, why not flow control the block payout per time range. thus if more blocks/protein match, the lesser the coin payout. Thus per minute, only 2 coins, so if within that minute there are 100 blocks found, it will give out 0.02 coins per block/protein find. in the next minute, only 10blocks found, it will give out 0.2 coins per block. Non of the extra computation power will go to waste as increasing loops in the UN-needed calculations.

 

I am sure there are many many more technical and non technical details that need to look into, but hope mincoin can be moving towards the holy grail. A commodity coin with a soul.  => it makes money at the same time has a worthy cause too.

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Protein folding, SETI, etc can all be done without taking away your hashing power if you use your CPU.  Depending on what you're trying to "solve" or "help with", GPUs may be more effective than CPUs, but this is not always the case, and there are plenty of scientists that would love if everyone would lend them even 10% of their CPU power.  I use Berkley's BOINC for several projects, and it utilizes my CPU, which is a 3rd gen i7 overclocked to 4.8, so I'm still giving a little back to science lol.

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It fluctuates quite a lot, which is the understatement of the week.  For a while there, MNC price was low enough that it didn't really pop up to the top of the mining profitability charts very often, which led to a lot of steady miners who were making a good return on low difficulties.  The hash rate was lower, but seemed really consistent with some dedicated miners.

 

Lately though, the major spikes in difficulty brought about by the big switching pools have hurt MNC mining in general once the price dropped a bit along with all/most of the alts as people got Bitcoin Frenzy recently.

 

There can still be some steady mining, but as the price goes up, the switching pools and profitability charts will always ensure there's going to be a massive diff spike and subsequent drop in mining activity.  (I'm trying hard here not to bash the switching pools, but I sure don't like their effect on coins.)

 

The best defense against the massive fluctuations is to keep steady hashrate on the coin.  This can be hard for many miners when other coins show up as higher immediate profitability.  If you're a miner with a longer-term look at things, MNC mining is always a good thing, IMO. :)

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