Quote from: dnelsonfl on November 04, 2013, 04:39:29 AM

Quote from: akumaburn on November 04, 2013, 02:48:05 AM

Please refer to the 51% defense documentation in reference to your first question: http://gldcoin.com/documents/GoldCoin_0.7_51percent_defense_october_11_2013.pdf

OK So I read the documentation you referred to. As you pointed out, it is very skimpy on details. The block chain explorer indicates we are currently at block 102,067. So we are past block 100,000 and only rule #1 applies (no clauses). No miner may produce more than 5 blocks every 10 minutes. It's interesting. The lost coins I do agree were probably a result of either the wallet.dat not being backed up or the miner being on the wrong block chains. However, seeing and having experienced all or nearly all the mined blocks being rejected, there's no way that can be normal or even expected behavior. The documentation would make me think I should have cleared at least 5 blocks every ten minutes minimum.

I understand it's experimental, and to tell the truth, that's part of what makes all of this mining so darn fun. However, hearing the new system described as more of a lottery was a poor choice of words. Lotteries have only a handful of winners and a whole ton of losers. Nobody wants to be a loser, and I wonder if any serious miner with an eye on his or her bottom line would be interested in sticking with mining a lottery. They'd be more interested in guaranteed results. Perhaps it would appeal to a few gamblers and speculators.

All that being said, I am impressed by your attempts to invent new ways of tackling the 51% problem. I hope you are able to work out the kinks and make the network stable. In the mean time, I'm going to mine some other coins while I keep an eye on the thread and perhaps once stable give it another go. So please keep us updated on the progress.

-David

The difficulty update should address that.. what I believe is happening is that some parts of the network have high enough hashpower to get the next block out the fastest to the point of mining 5 blocks before anyone else even has a chance to. This is possible because of the broken difficulty code which allows valid blocks to be mined without much effort otherwise there would be time for you to mine your own block in between.

With regards to your comments about it being a lottery, keep in mind that all mining(even on bitcoin/litecoin etc) is essentially a lottery... you're betting on your ticket being the one that the chain announces/accepts,
there could be n number other tickets out there each with different numbers but only one of them gets announced and accepted. That said, the new difficulty algorithm will give you a far higher chance of winning than the current one which essentially gives higher hash-rate/lower latency portions of the network all the advantage.

I've just finished coding the new difficulty algorithm and it should help greatly.

I want be sure it works first though so I will be going over it step by step prior to release/announcement.