6 Weeks old! Report from Mordor

Good morning Woodcutters–

Woodcoin is 6 weeks old!  We have chopped more than 30,000 blocks and now there are close to 6 million LOG outstanding.  Nearly 1/5 of the maximum supply.  Difficulty remains low, mostly solo chopped, and there is no evidence of GPU or ASIC chainsaws nearby.  Our most often used block explorer at multifaucet is unfortunately down at the moment, not synching with the chain.  New ones are on the way, don’t worry.

As some of you might know from LOGging IP addresses, I have been travelling recently, through the infamous land of Mordor.  So without further ado, I give you Report from Mordor, volume 1.

Report from Mordor   —  Introduction

Mordor is a place that to most of middle Earth needs no introduction.  The long arms of its so called powerful, pushing old buttons of fear, control, and small ego, have reached to nearly every corner of this world spreading fiat wherever they go.  Mostly susceptible to this influence are Orcs and Men, though I will admit that Dwarfs also can be influenced, as well as hobbits, and it is said even the occasional elf.

While this influence is not arguable, I have found here that the idea that it has a nexus or source in Mordor may be overplayed.  In fact these important issues in the minds of the subjects are not always observable in the lay of the land.  Mordor can be a beautiful place, with some green fields and a large variety of birds that appear unphased by debtor’s prisons and the constant hum of massive concrete motorways.

True, the forests have been cut down.  This sad fact does stand out, though beautiful trees can be found here.  Alas I am unable to interact with their network here, without the help of elves and wizards, but I can surmise a few things.  The cutting of the forest for the so-called industry of Mordor has devastated the energy of this once great land as a full node of the Gaia consensus network.  The relics of great wizards of the old age can still be found here but lie unused as playthings of the citizens and are likely powerless with the loss of the forests.  However, I also notice that fungal life is very strong here.  It could be that the fungal networks partially compensate for the loss of the massive root networks.  The resilience of life is remarkable.

Some of you are probably disappointed in me.  Learning the Mordor tongue?  Aiding the enemy?  What’s next, stacking fiat?

Well, it is true that my motives are somewhat selfish.  I wished to learn more about middle earth, the influences that shaped our ancestors and our traditions.  The Mordor tongue is after all quite similar to my mother tongue (more on this history later dear reader, should you request it).  After following the creation of public coin by the great Satoshi, I want to see how the transition will go.  Where better to observe and understand the coming changes in the world than in the heart of Mordor itself?  It is true that to remain out of the view of the dark lords I have had to feign attraction to Fiat.  One way to go unnoticed here is to beg loudly for spare change.

I must admit that I have learned a lot here.  When I first ninja’d my way past the massive orcs that guard the border harassing all passers I was thinking that things would change here rapidly now that any citizen of Mordor can access verifiable coin networks.  It’s not that simple; I was naive.  Behavior is most often based on past experience and traditions.  My current opinion is that many orcs of mordor will continue their old ways for as long as they can, even while complaining about them the whole time.

Well that should be enough for volume 1, I know you have LOG to chop and great works to accomplish of all kinds.  If you like, I will tell you more of my stay in Mordor in the next installment.

Your humble servant —  Funkenstein the Dwarf

Woodcoin is an open source project – you are the woodcoin team.  There is no alert or checkpoint system in woodcoin.  The use of LOGs to help people make payments and use cryptography is encouraged in all forms.

One Month Old!

–Good evening woodcutters –Woodcoin is one month old!  Come take a breather from your chopping and hear of my tales of my travels through the lands of the ents.
It’s true, I have spoken with the trees.

.        _-_
.   /~~   ~~
./~~         ~~
. {                 }
.   _-     -_  /
.   ~  \ //  ~~
.        | |
.        | |
.        // \

 

To communicate properly with someone, you have to have some empathy with them.  One must be able to not only visualize but really to be in their predicament.  It’s not always easy with the trees.  It takes a lot of time.  Of course without the help of the wizards and the elves I would have never had the opportunity.

It turns out they run consensus networks as well, through massive root networks bridged by interaction with external fungal networks.  Block time is most often on the order of a year.

I asked in a trance by the roots of a tall pine about slow networks.  They won’t touch a coin with block time under 4 months.
You’d be amazed what they can do!  Even if the block time is slow they get much more rapid transaction depth than you’d think.  Some kind of distributed mempool and global.

And yet, apparently it was impossible for me to navigate.  The wizards said it was a spaghetti of multiple forks sometimes thousands of years old and yet all coexisting.  The ents are astronomers.  Big thinkers.  I’m not sure we’re ready.

Extremely friendly and beautiful creatures, the trees seem to speak in riddles.  I went into a trance and tried to visualize the network on the console and communicate with the tree beside me.  The tree seemed to tell me that I’m already mining in its consensus network!  Something about the mitochondria of our cells as ASIC cores.

I started to understand their transaction formats.  Extremely flexible protocols.  I realized part of what I couldn’t understand was I couldn’t find where the value or tokens were tallied in the transaction body.  The tree seemed to sense my trouble and told me that they had no need for artificial scarcity in their activities.

It might sound crazy but it seemed almost like the trees are in an upsidedown world compared to my usual viewpoint.  Their heads are where we would call below the surface, and they dangle their legs “down” into the sky.  One thing I felt sure about was that we would not be alive here without them.

—–

OK ok, lets get back to work.  I didn’t just start this post to hint at future donations to tree hugging organizations, but yes these are indeed in the timeline soon enough.  I also would like to take this opportunity to thank the early supporters of woodcoin, in a sacrificial ceremony in honor of the trees.

The ents gave me a placeholder address for when we finally plug woodcoin in as a sidechain to the Gaia mainnet:

WeHonorTheForestsAndTheTrees4pPXTQ

I have sent a generous donation Smiley

—   Funkenstein the Dwarf

Discussion of release curve

(from bitcointalk.org discussion)

“Linear reduce is better.. some coins do that (the ones i know have premine. so not good)
with logarithmic reduce, early adopters have too much ?”

Thanks for your comment Salim, it gives us a chance to step back and compare mainnet bitcoin and woodcoin release functions.

It may seem like logarithmic is too fast for the very first part of the curve.  That’s why we have a forest.  However very quickly you will see that the logarithmic curve is the slower release.  Remember we reach half of our total supply after well over a hundred years.  Bitcoin released half the supply in four years.

Right now we are at about 34 LOG per block, and our two minute target means 30 block an hour or 720 blocks per day.  Thats close to 25,000 LOG per day.  Note that Bitcoin is at about 3600 BTC per day released at the moment.  Yes we are faster now.

When we hit block 200k, we will have a reward of 5 LOG per block and our units per day release will exactly equal BTC.  This will happen in about 9 months from now.  At this point, new LOGs will start entering the system more slowly than new BTCs.

However sometime in 2016 mainnet bitcoin will reach block 420,000 and the reward will drop in half, so only 1800 BTC per day.  At this point, the newly chopped LOG supply will again be larger than newly chopped BTC.

Then when woodcoin reaches block 400k, we will be at 2.5LOG per block and again we will be releasing newly chopped LOG slower than BTC.

In 2020 sometime, BTC will reach block 630,000 and the reward will drop to 6.25 BTC per block or 900 BTC per day.  This is about 1.5 million LOG blocks away from now.  At this point, newly chopped LOG will be coming in more slowly than newly mined BTC.

This kind of behavior will continue until about 2032.  At this point, the coinbase reward for BTC mining will be in total 112.5 BTC per day, to be shared by all miners.  There will still be more than 150 fresh LOG released per day at that point.  From there on into the future, there will always be more newly released LOG than BTC.

At that point and forever into the future, it will be clear that BTC is the coin that more heavily favors the early adopters.

So why do we mine or chop?  Of course we want to support the network, to help each other transact.  But also we are doing so because we think that the LOG we are chopping (or BTC we are mining) will be more valuable in the future.  We seek an early mover advantage.  Network participation is incentivised by the chance to be an early adopter.

It is not clear what will happen when that incentive is removed.  In 2016, with 3/4 of the BTC supply released, will miners still consider themselves early adopters?  How about in 2030?  How about in 2130 when there is zero coinbase reward?

With woodcoin, there is ALWAYS the early adopter advantage.  Even a thousand years from now, new choppers will come across woodcoin and say:   tomorrow’s choppers won’t be able to get as many LOG as I can.

Conclusions:  Get chopping!