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Either way, we will still process Benjamins payments, whether it forks or not
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At current network hashrates BEN will be stuck with 30 minute confirmations for the next 42 days. As the days go on, unless BEN's exchange prices go up dramatically, this will increase to 60 minutes or longer, as more miners bail due to the extremely low profitability of this coin. It will be months before the diff adjusts again and gets us back down to "normal" 10-minute block times.
24,257 < current block
24,256 * 100 BEN per block =
2,425,600 Benjamins in total float. ...ALSO, is the block explorer still being DDOSed?
2,425,600 BEN * .0000114 BTC = 27.65 btc total market cap or roughly 13k USD --damn cheap for a functioning 1776 free non premined blockchain awaiting its first fork (with a strapped dev no less).
BUT
80 hours per block + diff adjust in 1952 blocks = 6,506 days or 20 years. Hehe, Bens will be super rare between now and 2034 I guess. As rare as 1776 spirit.
Well, these are the days that try men's souls. I say some whale can buy all $13k worth of Ben and hold them and never sell. Or, some great visionary could bring in say 60 new miners who each buy a 350 USD biterupter = 2TH online, pushing the blockchain. THAT is what will get the TX times up. Well, assuming Ben is held captive by evil forces for the full 20 years I mean.
It is kinda good to have a slow blockchain, its called security, also to require lots of confirmations is a good thing, a solid TX history. Sure you could write non secure code over it like Gox TX API but that's defeating the purpose. So, I think there is reason to mine even at these absurd difficulties. It is called: long term vision.
Yes, having merchants wait a week for their money is an issue, and sure, paysha knows it'll have to be an escrow function for at least some small portion of time, therefore, if Paysha can simply own say 500k Bens (uhm, 5000 dollars?) then they would plenty of Ben's to put into merchant's wallets while the blocktimes are slow. But yes you will need to enlist POS merchants as miners, that is the only way forward to give people true security. Humans need hard crypto at Point of Purchase, nothing less will do, and enlisting merchants to do that (or third party merchant mining services) to do that, only serves to bond the merchants and the concept of them merchants supporting their blockchain. You need buy-in from the merchants which even now is only just starting for BTC so it is still anyone's game. I see this as an honest coin which OP will fork well once he is released from those who would thwart his efforts.