Mining will soon get more profitable

When BTG upgrades to the new difficulty algorithm, mining will get a lot more profitable. This shows how many blocks are being “stolen” by on-off mining every 4 days (per chart)

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What’s on-off mining?? I noticed a pattern with the hashrate and the price of BTG

More blocks are stolen with hash attacks. Then these blocks are sold to make prices down

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Big miners come online when the difficulty is low and get a lot of blocks before it can rise and then they leave, leaving your dedicated miners stuck with a higher difficulty and causing delays. This was supposed to be a really fast algorithm but there was a quirk in the old DigiShield code that is preventing it from being fast.

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Will btg fork will make two blockchains.

Or
It will go smoothly without the things notice

Ahuuuuuh that’s what’s happening…Thanks guys :call_me_hand:t4:

I should mention “stolen” blocks is my bad phrasing. The blocks are obtained at an inappropriately low difficulty, not obtained for free.

We’ll work hard to ensure that all of our future hard forks are painless upgrades to our code and infrastructure. A second blockchain would be extraordinarily unlikely.

Right. Also, calling these moves a “hash attack” is probably bad phrasing, as well. It’s probably not done maliciously, in the sense of wanting to “attack” Bitcoin Gold.

It’s most likely a natural result of profit-seeking behavior. There are miners who “automatically” switch to whichever coin is more profitable at the moment. When some other coin is profitable, they go there, and our network re-stabilizes. Meanwhile, the other coin’s profitability goes down, because of those incoming miners, and our profitability goes back up, because those miners left.

Of course, since the profitability is now flipped, the miners come back into Bitcoin Gold. When they rush in, the network (as a whole) is mining too many blocks for a while, until the Difficulty adjusts.

There are a number of different coins involved, all suffering the same effects. There’s a kind of “harmonic resonance” that occurs between the many GPU-minable coins, with bunches of miners sloshing from one coin to another.

When it’s happening because of price movements in the coins, then it’s not really harmful to the networks - that tends to just cause a shift in mining power which stabilizes at a new level. But if enough miners are doing it, then their own movements are causing the waves back and forth, and the oscillations will happen with any price movement, and nobody’s network can stabilize.

The solution to the problem is to have a DAA (Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm) that reacts more quickly to lots of miners entering or leaving at once - it needs to be more sensitive. But being too sensitive causes new problems!

You see, if we make the automatic DAA too sensitive, it will oscillate up and down wildly, even if no miners are joining or leaving!

Why? Because blocks are found at random. It takes roughly 10 minutes, but it could be 5 minutes, and it could be 15. If we have have a bunch of blocks come in every 5 minutes, it could mean:

maybe we’ve had an influx of miners ← we need to raise the difficulty!
or it could mean
we’ve just had a couple of lucky blocks ← if we raise the difficulty, we’re making a mistake and will slow the network down!

If the DAA is too sensitive, it will react too frequently to random variance, raising the difficulty when not necessary. A short time later, we’ll start seeing a lot of slow blocks - 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And then the over-sensitive DAA will need to crank itself back down! The way to minimize this is to be less sensitive.

So, it’s a difficult balance: find the right formula to ensure the Difficulty doesn’t change much due to normal random variance in block times, but to ensure that the Difficulty changes quickly when the change in block times is due to actual changes in the amount of mining being done in the network.

This is really hard. That’s why @Zawy’s work is so important.

Lastly… just because some people may think we’re missing an obvious solution: no, you can’t just look at the network hashrate being reported by some websites. You see, those reported network hashrates are estimates. Those estimates are made by looking at many recent blocks, knowing exactly what the difficulty was and exactly how quickly blocks were found, and turning that into an estimate of the what kind of hashpower must have been around to do that. In other words, it’s a guess, and it’s a guess based on the recent past. So these listing of “total network hashrate” tell you what the hashpower of the network probably has been in the recent past, but it never tells you what the hashpower of the network actually is right now. So, sadly, those numbers don’t really help in trying to solve the problem. :frowning:

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“stolen” and “attack” sometimes apply directly, when the timestamps are falsified. And little coins definitely feel a sudden increase is an “attack” even if they are following simple profit motive. Even then it is not fair to your constant miners.

One additional point to the random variation: the variation by itself is not a big problem. The big problem from the variation (if it is too much) is that it attracts big miners when your difficulty is accidentally low.

The best difficulty algorithm will give the best estimate of current hashrate. There’s a proportionality constant having to do with your target solvetime and the max_target (leading zeros) in your coin.

Hashrate = 2^x * difficulty / target_solvetime

where x = leading zeros in the target as defined by maxTaget. It’s there simply to allow the difficulty number to scale down to a much smaller number instead of being in the quadrillions.

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I think this is the key - whether it’s a natural event or a malicious attack, if it tends to result in unfairness to the steady miners, we’ll continue to work to minimize it.

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when you say soon, what kind of time-frame do you mean?

Looks like it’s already happening

There is noticable difference in mining profitability, my question is, how does the new algorithm effect it??

The current change is simply the effect of market economics - the mining hashpower market interacting with the exchanges for coin pricing.

No changes have been implemented in the BTG network lately. Anything like this changes the rules and requires a hard fork - not something to be done casually!

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When is the hard fork scheduled to happen?

Mining is already known for its profitability feature, the difference is it just got better with time. Also, if you are looking to advertise on a crypto-based advertising platform then Adconity may best suit your needs as it is user-friendly bitcoin-based advertising platform with competitive pricing.