Quote from: radi324 on June 06, 2014, 12:09:57 PM

Are there going to be any fixes for this whole bot issue?

I'm starting to feel like I'm screaming into the wind on this, but here goes again!

This bot "issue" is not a problem that needs some "fixes" like a bug or design flaw. The bots have greatly increased the security of the network, and will continue to do so. The problem is that the prevalence of the bots, in their current form, put the parameters of the work challenge into a strange in-between point where the difficulty is neither low enough nor high enough for human players to even have an opportunity to compete. This is unfortunate, but is also (one way or another) entirely temporary. Either the semantics of map reset will be patched to afford humans more opportunity to compete while we are still in this odd midpoint phase, or the coin will be left alone entirely and eventually difficulty re-targeting will (probably?) reach a point where bots can no longer find solutions so quickly that humans have no opportunity to even try (albeit probably a while from now, as it is in bot miners' best interests to increase their hashrate as slowly as possible while still remaining competitive with other miners) and the human mining game will become playable again. (The one big, unknown wildcard in this depends on what the actual computational complexity of an ideal solver would be. If there is a possible deterministic linear integer solver (someone PLEASE convince me that there is not?!?!?!) then not only would humans never be able to compete again, but the coin as a whole would be entirely non-viable.)

Whether we patch and hard-fork to give humans opportunity right now, or wait until opportunity presents itself to humans again naturally, remains to be seen. Even if/when such a patch is added to the network by devs there will need to be a consensus around the upgrade. If the majority hashing strength does not adopt the patch, then the network will fork and users will have to wait for the natural adjustment anyway. Hooray for global digital consensus mechanisms.

Myself, I will be quite likely to adopt any patch the developers put out. I very much *want* humans to be competitive again, even though this may seem directly at odds with my actions of botting. (This may seem counter-intuitive and not rational, but I assure you that on a long curve it is entirely the rational thing for a botter. Think about it... our botted up coins are just a waste of our time and electricity if there is no interest in the coin.)