I suggest that we rent miners to push through 1800 blocks and take them off before the difficulty change.
Would it not be more cost-effective to simply buy CatCoin on the exchanges, pushing the price up, therefore pushing the profitability up, thereby encouraging miners to jump back in?
I haven't looked closely at the depth of the market, but it looks like 5 to 10 BTC would buy up most of the CatCoin available under 0.0008 BTC.
Agreed, it would be much cheaper to simply buy more CatCoins. People who say they support Catcoins but have had to switch to mining other coins out of economic consideration, should consider buying Catcoins with the earnings from mining other coins, as an alternative means to support Catcoin. This should have a similar effect as if they mined Catcoins outright, by raising prices, and attracting more miners.
I did the math on in effect renting miners (you can accomplish the same thing by offering to subsidize miners with a subsidy large enough per block mined, to bring profitability in line with other coins) - suppose you pay 50 CATs per block found. Then you would have to pay out about 50,000 CATs over the next 1000 blocks or so. That is horrendously expensive. Now, the same 50,000 CATs is roughly 35 BTC at .0007 CATs/BTC. Hypothetically, if you put a buy order for 25,000 CATs at .0014 (for the same 35 BTC), you'd instantly double the profitability for the coin for the forseeable future.
Both of these are unsustainable propositions. These are just manipulation strategies at best, especially the buying coins method. Yes, the first method could raise the hashrate which would lead to shorter blocktimes which would resolve this current crisis temporarily, but how long do you think you can ask people to mine at a loss before it is unsustainable?
The second method is completely impossible. If the hash rate is very low still and you attempt to place a huge buy order to raise the prices people will flood to sell. That buy wall will be vaporized before miners even realize it has become profitable to mine again. Whoever ultimately did that will be bagholding a huge amount of CAT which will almost immediately drop back down again and the hash rate will not get better.
The ONLY way to fix this is to fix the difficulty retarget settings itself.