Thanks @noah-blaker for confirming. Now another question: What was the purpose of having the 6 month time limit to stake or you you do not get your earned research rewards (ERR)?
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Thanks @noah-blaker for confirming. Now another question: What was the purpose of having the 6 month time limit to stake or you you do not get your earned research rewards (ERR)?
There might be another reason but this is what I understand:
Beacons are a type of "contract" that tells the Neural Network to track statistics for a user. Each user tracked adds additional calculations and increases the total size when making a superblock. If there were no expiration on these contracts, the amount of users being tracked but no longer crunch can build up and this can cause issues with superblocks eventually.
The solution to this problem was to have beacons expire after an amount of time. Issue is, if your beacon expires before you stake all Research Rewards being tracked are lost. What @Ravonn proposes is a system where your old Research Rewards can be forwarded to a new beacon once your old one expires. That way no rewards are lost.
Ah yes, makes sense that you don't want a bunch of unused "contracts". But why can't we have it such that if your wallet is kept online then the the wallet automatically updates the beacons (eg. saying "hey i'm still here don't expire") and if your wallet is not online and a gridcoin user is no longer crunching or using gridcoin then it will automatically will expire after 6 months. Will the new "beacon forwarding" proposal by @Rvonn be like a "manual beacon reset" to let the system know that you are still wanting to stake?
The wallet actually does automatically renew beacons. Beacons expire after 6 months and your wallet will try to automatically renew your beacon after 5 months.
Problem is, the newly renewed beacon is an entirely new beacon. As if it were a brand new beacon with no previous Research Rewards. Beacon Forwarding makes it so the newly renewed beacon carries over rewards from your last beacon.