Welcome back to a third article analysing and discussing the implications of the new Gridcoin V8 stake engine. The last two entries can be found here:
To recap, the V8 stake engine is set to come live in just over 2000 blocks, and will remove mag based stake weight, thus preventing researchers from securing the network. This job will now be solely on the shoulders of investors in a classic POS system. Such a change was required to patch several security vulnerabilities uncovered by the dev team. An unfortunate side effect is that it will now be much harder for miners to get paid for their research by staking a block if they are 'mining' solo (instead of in a pool). The question over the last few weeks has been how much harder.
So, How Much Harder is 'Harder'?
In the last article I used the network stake weight to estimate how often anyone will stake a block on the Gridcoin blockchain, based on their balance. When comparing the numbers with @denravonska's (Ravon's) empirical data, we found a significant gap between the two predictions. Ravon contacted the Blackcoin dev team asking about the network weight, as Gridcoin is based on the Blackcoin architecture, who replied with:
There is no way to observe directly how many coins are staking. The network weight is just an estimator for the unobservable total staking funds. It is calculated from the difficulty. The network weight you see in the GUI is a function of a running average of the difficulty.
What this means is that the number that we have been assuming to be the total number of coins staking, is in fact not that at all. The number of coins staking will be lower. The implications are twofold:
We have been vastly overestimating how much of the total GRC in existence is actually staking and securing the network.
My estimates provided were overestimates of the time/balance required to stake. We have no way of knowing by how much.
That being said, the upper bound figures provided still hold true. If we assume all coins are actively staking (390 million GRC), then the required balances to stake at frequency X is:
- 432,000 GRC (USD$17280 of GRC) to stake daily
- 63,000 GRC (USD$2520 of GRC) to stake weekly
- 15,000 GRC (USD$600 of GRC) to stake monthly
- 2400 GRC (USD$96 of GRC) to stake every 6 months
The fact that we have been overestimating the number of coins staking is another good reason to only allow investors to earn interest when their wallets are online. Interest is paid in return for securing the network, and clearly most investors are not securing the network - instead only popping online for a few blocks every blue moon to collect their owed GRC. The side effect of this is that such a change will bring the reality of staking times far closer to the above estimate.
Some Final Notes Before V8
Make sure that you upgrade your client to the latest version, which is currently v3.6.0.2. If you do not, you will end up on the abandoned fork of the Gridcoin blockchain when it reaches block 1010001.
V8 will drop your stake rate if you are primarily a miner. If you are not staking often enough for your liking, I recommend joining a pool. There is currently only one pool, which charges zero fees aside from a withdrawal fee.
While I am critical of the changes affecting miners in V8, I want to reiterate that the change as a whole is good and necessary for the Gridcoin network. There are already ideas being fielded to benefit the miners, such as integrating research payment into superblocks.
Remember that this is the environment all successful crypto investors passed through. If you get in early on a coin, you deal with hiccups such as this, and if you get lucky it pays off. For all intents and purposes, it is still very early days for Gridcoin. Lets see where this journey takes us, and I'm looking forward to the many more valuable contributions we make to science.
Hi @dutch, a very nice wrap up of the situation! Iam really looking forward for V8 going live in order to see what this all really is condensing to. And seeing this will be quite easy for everyone of us even the ones in the pool right now because the wallet is still takes part in the POS system. So everyone will at least get the chance to see how often he or she is able to stake under V8 which in the end is one of the key data items for a decision between solo or pool researching.
Thanks alot for the info !
Keep on crunching !
There is something wrong with my estimate as well. I estimated that my 115 mag spread across 34 UTXOs was worth 3910 GRC of stake weight. This accounted for ~7.8% of my total weight so I shouldn't see a significant drop when disabling PoR staking. However, my tests showed that my stake rate halved. Granted, my tests were only done over a few days so they should maybe be taken with a grain of salt.
Thanks for refining your position @dutch, I reckon V8 is going to be fine. I always held that opinion, not through data, or analysis or technical prowess; but in my belief of the strength of the Gridcoin community. I don't think such a change would make many of us stop contributing to science.
Forcing investors to have their wallet online to earn interest sounds like a great short term solution to make sure we are securing the network properly while a better solution is figured out to allow miners to earn gridcoin with a low balance. Having 1.5% interest was a great way to bring people to gridcoin initially but I think we have passed the point of allowing people to earn gridcoin while not contributing at least to the network.
Exactly. With researchers unable to secure the network from tomorrow onward (V8 is almost here!), we need the investors to be online to secure the network on the behalf of everyone.
@Dutch, thank you for providing some further confirmation that net weight isn't reflective of stake. I think this furthers my concerns about v8.
It also helps crystallize the concerns about https://github.com/gridcoin/Gridcoin-Research/issues/106#issuecomment-325306653
So, would it be possible for us to get some sort of feature that tries to show the number of coins staking or - is it as the Blackcoin guys said - not possible?
I am told it is impossible, but I am not familiar enough with the underlying source code to give a definitive answer on that.
Given that the Blackcoin devs say it is impossible, I am happy to take their word for it.
Thanks for this update @dutch. I'm slightly relieved to know that your initial estimates constituted a worst-case scenario.
Well, I had two estimates. The worst case is still the worst case. The previous 'expected' case turned out to have been overestimated. But, we have no idea by how much...
Are you saying there is a pool for staking? Or are you talking about grcpool for mining? I thought there was another pool as well, but I could be mistaken.
I am talking about the mining pool, which effectively stakes on your behalf if you mine with it.
I'm a member of grcpool but they don't have any access to my stash of GRC. With the Waves platform they limit staking to larger holders of Waves (I think it's about 10,000) but smaller holders like me can lease theirs to another person who can stake the aggregate. Other platforms allow lending or an equivalent (STEEM is one of them).
If anyone is interested @Btcpopco has pooled staking for $GRC (if you’re not tech savvy like me).
(
Ehhh... no need to wait months to get paid...
I went back to crunch Prime numbers ;) just got my first block:
XPM is meh. With BOINC and Primegrid, you get GRC and you also get recognition for every new prime number you discover. Here are mine:
http://www.primegrid.com/primes/?section=primelist&userid=83714
and "vortac" added to prime numbers list adds what value? Does it makes You feel better?
BTW, just kidding... great job, Vortac!!!
Why does their website list the value as $2.82 USD/XPM? It is trading for a tiny fraction of that.
I think it's the other way around. 2.82 XMP/USD. This equates to 0.35 USD/XMP which is pretty close to market price.
That seems like a pretty colossal screw-up on their part...
Considering they have no active dev.....
Everything is working... I had NEVER a problem with using Primecoin...
I have mined in pools and now solo, traded a lot (many years), sent to friends - never had even a single problem!
And look at Gridcoin... mehh...
More BS. Today, setting up Primecoin GPU miner is much harder than setting up BOINC. Development is pretty much abandoned and users are left on their own to dig through various, obscure bitcointalk threads.
Got 3 blocks yesterday (solo)
3 x 7,9 XPM = 23,7 XPM x 0,41 $ = 9,7 $/day! Not bad for old 2 x R9280x cards?
To earn same amount with BOINC Primegrid I must earn 230 GRC! This is not possible with 2x R9280 cards, I think...
Grossly overinflated, if not completely invented.
Using Claymore GPU miner, users reported only 2.31 XPM per day (on a single 280X):
http://cryptomining-blog.com/2192-gpu-mining-for-primecoin-xpm-available-but-is-it-worth-it/
???
OK, I take a screenshot specially for you:
Happy now?
So, a lucky chance which tells us nothing about the usual, average mint. And by the looks of it, those two blocks aren't even confirmed (after two days?) so they could have been on a weird fork, for all we know. Sell your bs to noobz.
Whats wrong with you...
mined blocks take 3000 confirmations for Primecoin.
But you, as a crypto n00b, have found one crypto (GRC) and you are now total fanboy of that crypto :D
Shame on you...
Ah yes, the big crypto expert, your reputation is proportional to your knowledge, I guess. And you still haven't said anything about your average XPM mint, nor about the GPU miner you are using. Too difficult questions, probably?