Quote from: ontopicplease on May 26, 2014, 07:17:11 AM

I think, Rofo has a very good longterm vision and a bright mind. He must be able to refrain from many Nobles and just make 1 TOP-Noble that is updated a lot. I can imagime this will lead to many hardforks, but I think there is no other solution.

The problem with this is there are hardforks you can't really come back from without more disruption. I'll try to put forward why we are taking things slower in summary. My months/weeks might be slightly off because I'm not double-checking the dates to be exact, but the pattern is the same.

Jan: The big thing was halving (everyone yelling maths ensured it doubled the price, cut supply, etc.), and an announcement of cutting supply and halving was a big deal. It led to pumps, speculation and a short-term price rise. Once the joy was over, the coin was dumped, the mining rewards were less, people made less money and the coin had less miners/community. 95% of coins that followed this pattern in Jan/Feb have since been abandoned. The expected increase in value didn't stay, and people stopped caring about halvings. The problem was never supply, it was noone demanded these coins to begin with.

Feb: The big thing was KGW & n-factor/fighting ASICs & multipools. Coins forked for KGW, and despite pressure to we didn't need to because of our single-block retargeting we've kept since release. Looking back KGW is now considered a disaster because of the weaknesses exposed in the way it is implemented. In reality they weren't abused too much to the best of our knowledge, but there were some very high profile cases that just destroyed confidence in that spec. DGW and DigiShield stepped in to fill this gap, and while I'm not sure if initial criticism of these still being vulnerable to some extent or another is true (including even classical retargeting), they still do fundamentally a very similar thing to what classical code can do without given fancy names.

Mar: Around this time it was X11 I believe? Everyone wanted to start fighting ASICs and x11 and new algos were here to save the day. They do well short-term, but will still have ASICs developed for them if they 'make it big' and are even more susceptible to bot-farms and FPGAs, they are far from infallible either. X11 coins still suffer now the same selling and people can't blame ASICs any more, so every day they aren't seen as crash hot as people hop over to PoS.

April/May: PoS/Multipools are now the big thing for a little while. However even these fads are slowly fading as people become more aware of the security and distribution implications of PoS. It also didn't help that everyone was so sure that the price would never go down because the 'evil miners' would never sell because there weren't any! People don't sell because they're miners, they sell because they want profit and don't want to hold the coin. That is the problem that needs to be fixed. Multipools also started gaining too much criticism because people stopped trusting the times they bought and sold and started accusing the owners of using them to manipulate the prices too strongly, which I agree with. Once the hype settled and the maths sunk it, as well as the fact they didn't provide an 'eternal increase in price to the moon', people realised they had relatively small effect on prices during the medium-high volume days these coins saw on exchanges.

May/June: Now we're hitting anonymity as the next thing. The problem with this is regulatory as well as the fact this feature is untested in the medium-long term, for the most part closed source if it is groundbreaking, or it is centralized and requires a somewhat trusted middleman if it's been rushed out this week to jump on the latest hype train. These criticisms are more and more coming to light. I think there is a lot of value in anonymity, but a feature like this needs much more than a month or two to be tried and tested as well as vetted for weaknesses. This cannot happen while it is in beta, is closed source, or relies on a central actor acting as an intermediary for anonymity. People simply won't trust it in the long term.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Now I personally believe what we are seeing are simple pump & dumps, for the most part. I'm not implying that's what these coins were made for or that any particular actor or key player behind a coin is a part of them, though in some cases it wouldn't surprise me, nor do I mean to imply these coins and communities are trash. These features, from halving, to KGW, to PoS, to multipools are then during these pumps being given the reason for these rises in value. They are being used as justification for a 'natural' increase in value, which ultimately proves false as the coin, as well as the dozen imitators released to milk the hype, slowly lose value over time when the ecstasy settles.

What this also means is if a big coin is pumped and becomes a hit for the month, all these other coins change to similar specifications expecting to do very well because of the value seen in these specifications. They do get some attention but never make it big either, because it is not the spec. itself adding value, it is simply the exposure and pump that the original coin received, planned or otherwise, that is never intended for other coins looking to capitalise on the original coins perceived advantage.

It is happening every 3-4 weeks, there is a new fad/specification that has been completely cast aside a month or two later. A number of them, were we to fork, would have already degraded confidence in our coin and done more damage than not doing anything at all and sticking to our guns with infrastructure and taking a more measured, thoughtful approach. These specifications are definitely valuable to varying degrees, but some are dangerous and difficult to undo any damage if a new fork/fad is required the following month. Those with a longer-term approach who are more critical know you cannot trust a coin that is simply going to fork every month and completely change its distribution and fundamentals and potentially take on something that does it more harm than good long-term. That's even if people see long-term potential in any coin, but that's a whole other can of worms and something we need to continue to work on hardcore for some time to make our case.

That's why our approach is always going to be on pushing our 'brand' and what we represent out there as well as working on infrastructure and uses for the actual coin. We are actively working on a number of forks/ideas and wallets to test right now but we wanted to get the new Marketplace and Steps in full gear beforehand. I've been called stubborn and in some ways I am, but every time we've stuck to our guns since Jan. and taken a more measured approach we've been more or less right. Now I know it unfortunately hasn't helped our price short-term, but it's stopped us from dying medium-term. We believe you simply cannot just jump on every bandwagon these coins try to jump on to get a short-term value rise.

NOBL: Noblesse oblige:

This is just my humble opinion. I do see value in PoS alongside PoW to some degrees, and I think anonymity so far is the best real winner of these specs., but it's a niche now owned by DRK that we shouldn't try to compete with. I believe our niche and what NOBL best represents is staying true to cryptocurrency, merchants, long-term perspectives, acting noble (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige), charity/philanthropy, Steps and from a purely economic advantage perspective the Marketplace and where we want to take it. These have been applied to us and I believe they've stuck so they need to become our strongest point.