Two side of any coin including cryptocoin.

Quark is the first rather successful effort to make a cryptocurrency according to macroeconomic theory and human experience in this field. In fact Satoshi made bitcoin as a program not a money. His ideas in computer science are brilliant but economic ones are rather amateur. To name a few economic flaws:

Large average transaction time. Considering the security there is no difference between 10 1-minute blocks and a 10-minute one. It’s equally difficult to find either of them and reverse a transaction. But for end user it’s better to have freedom of choice in security-time trade-off.

Lame hashing algorythm which produce ASIC mining industry with huge entering treshold and centralization.

Economically weak initial distribution model, resulting with degradation of miners from partners in decentralized consensuns as a mechanizm of network self-control to profit-seeking looters who give a crap on benefits of cryptocurrency, paradigm-shift and thw whole cryptocoin idea.

One could find others but these are the most conserning ones in our time, roughly 5 years since Bitcoin genesis block.

Quark tried to solve this issues and offered the following:

30 sec block time which results in average transaction confirmation time in range of 10-15 sec which is appropriate for an everyday trade.

6 “non-NSA” hashes which provide a better realization of “one CPU equals one vote” rule completely forgotten in SHA256 or Scrypt-secured coins (“one ASIC datacenter equals one vote”).

Fast inintial distribution model with 0.5% inflation rate in long run. It should secure investors and supportes funds from devaluation through new coin minting and coin mass growing.

Excluding fast block time which is proven working, other measures mostly do solve issues they intend to solve but produce other problems and challenges.

Right now [27 of May 2014] the main problem for Quark is completely hoppible situation in mining. Pool coinmine.pl generate from 60% to 70% of blocks and we have roughly 500 i7-class CPUs hashing ATM. So, we could experience a 51% attack virtually at any moment. And even assuming pool operator completely honest it’s very easy for someone to DDOS the location of major hashrate and attack Quark with no more than half a thousand CPUs. It’s a small botnet or a not very large corporate network -- e.g. Microsoft has 1200 000 server nodes, Google -- 800 000. The reason for such a pathetic situation is generally the initial coin distribution model, which generate very few Quarks, not enough to feed profit-seeking commercial miners. Just an other side of one of the greatest advantage of Quark.

Considering this we can conclude that right now Quark is unsecure at all and it would be highly unreasonable to use it for large transactions.



To fight this we of course could use new pools, donation mining, but these are half-measures. We can’t gather more computing power than a large corporate network on a donation basis.

The problem is fundamental and will stay long-term, so the solution must be fundamental. I think the only viable option is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), the form of mining when a probability of block generation increases dramatically with increase of coins in the wallet of miner. TO day this technology has already proven itself with a several years of operating in probably a hundred of coins. I know no serious issues reported or acknowledged security concerns.

Moreover, PoS is viable economically, as it reward long-term coin supportes and provide income on capital. Also PoS stimulate people to maintain full nodes which favorably affects network integrity and security.

Still, PoS is not ideal because it give a significant share of block and coin generation to coin bags with large wallets. But it could be adjusted to reduce such factor. For example the network could provide even tiny amount of coins generated this way and the process will be still continuing since the costs is almost zero. Or amount of PoS generated coins and/or probability of block finding may be depend nonlinear from wallet. Anyway we could find some intelligent and economically justified solution.

I believe the community must reach a consensus on this matter. We can’t build a succesful coin without an appropriate security basis. And we need to prove the world that we are able to handle such security problems.

I agree PoS solves a lot of problems, namely the security of the network.
This is an opportunity to implement a fairer distribution of stake rewards based on wallet size.
We could have a max stake reward based on wallet sizes of say 200,000.
Such that if someone has 100,000 coins stakes at 0.4%: (400 coins), someone who has 200,000 coins would receive a max stake at 0.4% (800 coins.) someone who has 300,000 coins would receive a max stake at ~0.266% (800 coins)
Large wallet holder receives the full 0.4% stake on their first 200k coins only.
This gives incentive for smaller wallet holders to stake (and secure the network) increasing decentralization and doesn't reward super large wallet holders 'unfairly'.

Guys, I appreciate the discussion and voting on POS, but do realize that this is not the only way to do things, it does come with its own set of issues, and it is NOT a trivial undertaking. I have multiple times posted the list below with the intention of sparking discussion on alternative measures to implement to ensure blockchain security. Please join me in discussing these and other alternatives that you can think of as well.

*1. Jackpot related mining rewards - if we can get the Grotto Lotto jackpots raised then we can produce mining incentive by paying people indirectly through grotto lotto. This is a stop gap solution until our valuation is high enough.

Proposed Goal - 20K starting point for jackpots each month going forward. We need help funding this.

*2. Mining software that allows easy access to GPU mining on multipools that pay out in Quark and that also donate 10-20% of mining power to the Quark network. There is a practical means of implementation of this - I may have found someone to code this for us now.

We have a community member now actively looking at doing this for us

*3. ? Merge mined coin. Lots of issues including constant dumping, the fact that its value is tied to investment,which would be hard to obtain if all it is is a mining token for Quark.

I don't think this option is likely viable currently but would appreciate suggestions on implementation

Currently NO. Current situation is not the best, but POS is a tough question too with its own vices. Currently what comes in mind:
Forking issues, POS is really hard to maintain, it was proven buy quite a lot of coins. Getting in functioning correctly could be tough thing. This is very big concern, because at this stage if we would have forking issues this could effectively kill Quark and push it into oblivion. Currently QRK network is stable and never required dev to fix it. Its a big deal. Once we turn to POS problems can arise at any moment and without dedicated(not hired for one time) competent dev we could be unable to fix it at all.
Requires hardfork. This is also not a benefit. This requires all services to support our fork. And for example if coinmine.pl refuses to update than our POS is screwed.

Different emission model. POS will increase inflation and actually will eliminate one of Quarks USP - constant mining rate (or EQ reward as some calls it). In this terms Quark will lose its identity to an extent (there are quite a bit coins with POS+POW design and fast mining schedule - CGB for example)

So my point is that we should try everything in our capabilities to solve network security issue prior to hard forking to POS. Hardforking is always last resort, when everything else does not work, its obviously not the case as we are only starting to work towards fixing this issue. I invite everyone to join a discussion started by Vic
http://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkCoin/comments/26lj2g/hashrate_non_pos_supporting_measures/
Lets work together and look at the problem from different angles, only that way we can find optimal solution.