Multi-pools are parasitic. They are an attack on a coin, plain and simple.
Your coin is defenseless from these attackers.
Could somebody elaborate on the risks that multipools bring? The price of the coin rises, it becomes more valuable to mine, all multipools start mining the coin, the markets are overflowed with coins? Is that it?
Multipools come along and massively increase the hashrate of a coin, start instamining blocks and then immediately dump them onto the exchanges. They keep doing this until the difficultly retargets at which point they switch to a different coin leaving the original coin with a ridiculously high difficulty and a lower price so there is absolutely no incentive to mine it anymore. The original miners are then left with a woefully low hashrate vs the current difficulty meaning that blocks take forever to find and transactions start taking far too long. And when the diff finally gets back to normal there's absolutely nothing to stop the multipools coming back and doing it all over again.
There's a reason why practically every coin nowadays has KGW as standard.
Even KGW doesn't protect you. KGW sounds great in theory but it needs to be tweaked quite a bit. Dano is currently working on a unique algorithm to increase our defense against the multi pools.
Yeah this is all spot on. Sorry I am slammed @ work this week but a 4day weekend coming up means extra time to work on kittehcoin. Basically KGW doesn't always work. Even when it does there are ways (and the MPs may have figured them out) to manipulate KGW so you get a low diff even with MP level mining power suddenly introduced. In any case we are working on a better solution that still involves block-by-block diff adjustments, even looking into if its possible to adjust difficulty on the fly within a block.
Appreciate everyone who has posted the corrective information regarding adaptive-N, your comments about it being a hyped piece of coin marketing are spot on. It may have benefits in a year or two, but not now, not until scrypt asics are getting more widely produced. Even then it can be easily added to kittehcoin. We want to introduce more valuable innovations- that will bring new buyers as well as crypto enthusiasts who can see through things like adaptive-N scrypt hype.
Added Cryptsy to OP! Noticed it needs a proper scrubbing will update it after work tomorrow.
Will be posting more detailed replies tomorrow evening; sorry for the brevity!