Quote from: lfm on August 19, 2010, 10:40:05 AM

Quote from: FreeMoney on August 19, 2010, 12:24:30 AM

Just to reduce the variance so that you can get 1BTC/day instead of 50 every 7 weeks. If there was an easy and secure way I guess I'd be a little interested.

Do the arithmetic. 1BTC / day for 7 weeks = 49 BTC. This whole thing is set up for people who would rather have 49 BTC than 50!
I wonder who is pocketing the extra 1BTC.

Why would somebody have to be pocketing the extra BTC?

Quote from: vess on August 18, 2010, 07:40:26 PM

I was wondering today about how to get a pool of mining together: that is, users who wish to could all go in together on mining the next block. The actual block signer signs over the block to the group. Splitting could happen any number of ways.

I don't know how you would assign a "fairness" metric to a pool like this, although I like the idea in principle.

How about this as a metric for determining participation in such a pool: Computers in a "sub-net" (aka "the pool") would submit "candidate" blocks that would have about 1/10th (or some other faction) of the difficulty of the main Bitcoins target hash as a sort of "proof of work" that they are at least trying to find good candidates for the newly generated block. Those who submit candidate blocks would get some of the coins of whatever block is generated eventually by the pool. Network bandwidth would be limited to the sub-net of the pool itself, except for awarding the good-faith efforts as a transaction and any potential new blocks actually generated.

I do see some sort of "cheating" as a possibility with this scheme, where some computer that would generate a hash that meets the overall network fitness test would simply create that new block without submitting it to the "pool", but submit inferior blocks to try and collect coins from "suckers" who are submitting blocks to the pool for the greater good. In other words, your "sub-net" is only as good as the least honest person in that pool. There could be protocols set up to automatically kick people from the pool if they are sucking up too many coins and not contributing (aka "cheating"), but that seems to me as an overly complicated process that can only get worse over time if you open these "pools" to everybody.

What I agree with is that people would rather see something going into their wallets on a semi-regular basis (even 0.01 bitcoins every few minutes or hours) rather than having one huge lump show up every other month. They want to see cash flow and it appeals to human greed too. I don't know of an easy way to accomplish that sort of task other than a massive redesign of Bitcoins to encourage more frequently generated coin blocks or the pool method as suggested here. Presuming that Bitcoins grows another 100x larger in terms of its user base, it certainly could be the case where a typical user would only generate one block per year or even less frequently. It is a problem that might get even worse over time.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily saying that the current coin generation system is bad, other than the frequency of receiving generated coins is not the best feature of Bitcoins.