Quote from: TheRealSteve on April 11, 2014, 02:27:35 AM

Quote from: jakiman on April 11, 2014, 01:40:09 AM

Yeah, it would have been much better if it was set to 128 or so as default instead of 512. Still better than not changing.

Not sure why that would have been 'better'. The premise of the coin was, after all, that people could 'democratically' vote for the reward and some derived numbers from the get-go. If you have to* pick a number between 0 and 1023, 512 is about as sane as it gets ( an argument could be made for 511 Wink

).

I think the power of pools + apathy of miners was simply not anticipated. The former causing pools to effectively 'dictate' the defaults, and the latter causing those defaults to not be changed. Pools could have been more proactive in teaching people about it (by not inserting a default numeric value at all, instead using a textual placeholder - same as they do for the username / password placeholders, and explaining to users what the value does) but then they'd be putting up a barrier for the apathetic miners who just want to get up and running with mining fast.. and if Pool A makes them read a bunch of stuff and think about the vote, while Pool B does not.. all things being equal, Pool B gets the miners.

Perhaps truly 'better' would have been for vote-less results to be accepted - essentially have the miner abstaining from voting, and going along with whatever 'the network' ends up voting. Then the minority who do care could have had more control, and those who didn't care but suddenly wondered why the reward was changing the way it did would educate themselves and join in on the voting. Of course this wouldn't prevent pools from setting default values anyway, but at least it would put the onus on the pool to explain why they are voting the exact value they are, instead of the current 'well, we have to put something there, so we set it mid-way'.

* Oddly enough, the website does mention "to disable voting then see How to mine", but the mining page ( http://heavycoin.github.io/mining.html ) doesn't mentioning anything about voting at all.

Technically speaking, the miner is required to set the vote (it is a part of hashed block header), so there is no way a pool could override that.

On a side note, cryptos are already fueled by a fusion of trustlessness, greed and ignorance, adding democracy to that is pretty much counter-productive IMO.