The "other" premine wasn't really a premine at all. The chain was soft-launched between a few people, and spread quietly for a few days (~6) before being announced here and elsewhere just before/around the block 8000 fork.
WHAT? This coin was announced here 20 days before launch.
Ok, re-announced here, I guess. :-)
Are you a troll? Everyone can just read beginning of this thread to understand that what you are saying is a complete nonsense.
As I said, those coins (aside from the three 150k blocks) weren't really a pre-mine at all. The game was public for those 8k blocks, it just wasn't until that time that it was really being promoted, reddit activity, etc. That is all I mean.
This is just what you would expect, information spreads over time. But you were saying like if it was announced only 6 days after launch.
EDIT: I had dozens of connections in those early days, so it wasn't "a few people".
I didn't intend to start any drama, I was just making an offhand comment, and it started others in on the premine argument. I couldn't care less about the bounty. It is a bit of a shame that the giveaways won't happen, but that doesn't affect me any.
Can we get back to the topic at hand?
Is there any ETA on patches for the difficulty target or for the map reset frequency? Should I consider putting something together?
One thing I have been looking into for difficulty control is the possibility of setting the perlin function itself to scale with difficulty. Perlin complexity scales exponentially with dimension of the seed, so this might be a nice place to inject computational difficulty. I think that it would make more sense to increase complexity of frame calculation as opposed to increasing complexity of map generation (so that we never get into a situation where a user can't start a game because they don't have sufficient hardware to generate a map in reasonable time) but I'm not really sure if this is a better approach or not. I could imagine a similar situation where users' framerates are throttled to something annoyingly low simply because they can't calculate the perlin quickly enough to maintain.
As for the map reset, I still think that simply allowing the users something like 4 blocks of "slack time" (by using 2 bits of nonce to specify which of the top 4 blocks to generate map from, and adjusting confirmation semantics accordingly) is the best approach.