Difficulty and price
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Does anyone have an idea what has caused today’s difficulty spike, despite a sudden price drop ( FTC / BTC )?
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The difficulty is a measure of the amount of miners. There are a few big pools, called multipools, these switch miners between different coins. If a big pool switches or two switch at once the difficulty increases to compensate. Otherwise the next block would come too early.
There is no direct connection between mining and the fiat price, although miners do sell coins, they tend to be constant trickle not sudden dumps which could cause a price drop.
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@wrapper
There’s no direct connection between the difficulty and price, but they’re obviously closely correlated. Big pools wouldn’t switch to ftc if it was deemed as unprofitable, whence my question :panda_face: -
There can’t logically be a close correlation, if they are not closely connected in some way.
The reason the pools “switch their hash rate” around various coins, that cause the difficulty to change, is not based on the price. At least not for the short duration, 15 to 30min, switches in difficulty you are referring to in the question.
I know that some pools switch “on difficulty”, that was one reason FTC implemented eHRC in the first place.
A large pool can drive up the difficulty (because it has the hash of all it’s miners), they then leave that coin and switch to another coin, driving up the difficulty again and leaving the previous coin with high difficulty and low hash.
This means that the next blocks are late.
Both Kimoto Gravity Well and eHRC for FTC are algorythms that start to bring the difficulty down to compensate for the lack of miners, and retain the block production time.
Also, it is the miners in a multipool who choose the coins to mine, the pool just decides when to switch, or how to distribute the mining. So again, whist miners will decide on a coins viability and which coins to mine, they don’t decide when to switch coins.
You can imagine why pool owners would ignore the effect on the block times … miners are paid the “normal rate” of exchange for their coins, by burst mining and driving up the difficulty the pool owner can mine each coin at lowest difficulties, and are effectively getting their coins cheaper …
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@wrapper Yea, that makes sense :P However I believe that we can agree that during previous 2 months when ftc price went up high, it was within the most profitable coins, therefore many people mined it, which increased the difficulty. Correlation is a measure of similarity between things, average difficulty and price charts are similar enough for such a conclusion. Yesterday it was just weird that I mined 1/2 of coins I usually mine on daily basis, in spite of price drop, so it made me wonder who’d mine an unprofitable coin, hence increasing the difficulty. I guess these pools with autoswitching explain it, I just didn’t know it was that critical.
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There are various reasons (for the overall mining level variations / trend), the main one recently seems to have been the halvening. The longer term upward trend is (at least some what) due to the long term success of maintaining a mineable / useable FTC block chain, with some cross over as GPU mining becomes more “establishment” via etherium.
https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/feathercoin-difficulty-chart
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Just been reading the interesting news that BCC have had to change the difficulty algorythm.
In a way, similar to eHRC they are taking a short term average time, then making two mistakes. They are using temporal information, which is admitted to be faulty, secondly a massively damped and one way response. Thirdly they don’t seem to be recalculating every block. Other coins have proved this possible, even with the over complicated Kimoto Gravity well, eHRC has the same or fewer look-ups and calculations, so is even more possible, with no effect on power consumption.
Conclusion
There are a bunch of (BCC) blocks that have not been mined yet, but even if they were instantly mined, we would have 6 difficulty adjustments on blocks 478577 to 478582. This will reduce difficulty 20% each so we will have blocks that are 0.8⁶ ~ 0.262 as hard to mine. That is, miners will need to put in about 1/4 the work to mine a block.
This may explain why there was a 13 hour gap between blocks 478570 and 478571. Miners may simply have wanted the chain to be easier to mine!
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e
BCC Difficulty
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin cash-confirmationtime.html -
For anyone who wishes to marvel at Bitcoins average block time of 9:23secs in 2016. The fact that it is shorter than the aimed for 10mins shows the high level of manipulation of the hash rate by “big pools/players”.
This is also confirmed by the short 1 second block times, indicative of high hash rates over difficulty. The amount of short duration blocks, would show more details, particularly in any sort of (statistically unlikely) run and linking that to addresses from pools may show the biggest culprits …
https://www.jessclark.com/average-amount-of-time-between-blocks-mined/
Block Times 1 year up to october 2016
The average time to mine a block was 563 seconds or 9:23. The longest time was 1:17:36 and the shortest was less than a second.
Because the average time to mine was less than 10 minutes, the difficulty was increased starting at block 431424 to 241,227,200,229.99
The Code
The code is posted on GitHub if you wish to apply it to other coins, or is interested in contributing.
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I am newbe trying to learn. My first reaction is to say mining is ridiculous, and comes off as a ponzy scheme–not good for average consumer of other goods and services.
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@alowberg said in Difficulty and price:
I am newbe trying to learn. My first reaction is to say mining is ridiculous, and comes off as a ponzy scheme–not good for average consumer of other goods and services.
lol then do more research on what mining is.
is mining gold also a ponzy scheme in your eyes ?
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@AcidD
That is a very good question, but gold is a real substance. I would like to by software that would allow me to build my own currency for my own community of customers, but I do not see there is any such software like that available yet??
But I want a currency that has its value based on real substance, like Americas old gold standard, or like Sadex cryptocurrency which I think is perfect. -
perhaps my presents here will help take feathercoin in a new direction where they build a software so people like me can use to create my own currency for my business. None exists yet, but that should change and I hope feathercoin is the community that does it.
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@alowberg said in Difficulty and price:
@AcidD
That is a very good question, but gold is a real substance. I would like to by software that would allow me to build my own currency for my own community of customers, but I do not see there is any such software like that available yet??
But I want a currency that has its value based on real substance, like Americas old gold standard, or like Sadex cryptocurrency which I think is perfect.Can you remind me when was the last time you were able to purchase anything with Gold ?
America dropped the gold standard before I was born…
The country effectively abandoned the gold standard in 1933, and completely severed the link between the dollar and gold in 1971 -
You should read the white paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto. It explains it a lot and will help you understand the concept of Digital Gold.
I will however reference this one bit…
“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.”
-----Scalability and transaction rate
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@AcidD
yes, that is so, but it is about consumer confidence. Now if I were to tell my customers I am going to implement a fiat cryptocurrency rather than basing it on the actual value of your and my real goods and services, which do you think they would chose, and I want my cryptocurrency to be a real incentive to do business with me. just trying to think of the best form of cryptocurrency for my business that is all, and it has already been invented (Sardex) , I just do not know how to get it. I just think feathercoin needs to take a look at it and perhaps incorporate some of its features and make them available to people like me, people who will never use bitcoin and any such thing like it. -
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wrapper, I make traditional style wood products with some modern innovations. But the bigger plan is to start a real trading post where I can use my products as currency like old time. I will trade in fiat cash also. But one of the main features is, I want to establish real trade routes, also like old time. But the one piece that I have not put together yet is form or currency that all my trade partners can agree on and use. I am thinking a crypto currency is the answer. There is a lot more to it, but this is the jist.
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wrapper, Sardex is a crypto currency
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Sardex, interesting but not a crypto currency. It is a complementary currency / mutual credit system.
To understand how Sardex works, you have to abandon much of what you may think you know about money. There is no bank that prints Sardex notes; no algorithm that generates Sardex digital coins. Instead, it functions as a system of mutual credit: each firm begins at zero, earning the digital currency — equivalent to but non-exchangeable with the euro — as it offers goods or services to others in the network.
https://www.ft.com/content/cf875d9a-5be6-11e5-a28b-50226830d644
I believe this type of application can be developed, like “Hull coin” (forking FTC or Bitcoin) and running as a private network.
In order to facilitate such a development and make it secure, there would need to “Private Mining methods” and “Private Pools”. P2pool could already by modified, but private mining might be achieved with coded ASICs or a new Algorythm run on GPUs.
The advantage of using a (already existing) coin like Feathercoin would be, a low cost maintenance system that would be viable in the long term, security by strength of miners and it already has it’s own algorythm.
The disadvantage is (the development cost of your own system) would be spent on FTC, so you wouldn’t have as much influence on specific requirements.
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@wrapper
Thanks wrapper, I have a lot to learn, but what I bring to the table is no bias. I like the concept of Sardex, i just think some elements of feather could complement it nicely, and I still think whoever comes up with software so brick and mortar, like myself, can buy to start my own currency would be a run a way hit. The soft ware would need fields that one could customize, like what is the name you ones currency, monthly doos to use the the currency, things like that. Someone needs to figure out how to make domestic private currency digital. With out looking it up, I think Massachusetts has one called Bircshire or something like that. Anyway I am here to learn, and tell people what sounds good to me and what does not. I don’t like mining so I never got involved with bitcoin and that may be the same reason most people do not get involved with it. It is fun for tech savy people, but they are having a hard time selling it to people who actually want to use cyber currency.
