Mining Issue

@dbkeys (slack)

The bottom line is that all blocks I've mined recently are 'orphaned', ie, end up in a branch that is abandoned as not the 'main' branch. In short, it's a waste of time / equipment / electricity to mine Bitmark at the moment, because this "selfish" mining syndicate (whoever they are) are in control of enough hash power to overpower all the other miners. I tried buying hashpower from nicehash.com, and even with 60 GH/s all my blocks were orphaned.

If the selfish miners don't adopt the new code, well, then they would be mining their own fork. Kind of what happened to Ethereum. Now there is "new" Ethereum [ETH] and "Classic" Ethereum [ETC]. But, it depends on the exchanges and other people whether the original fork like that is viable at all. Polo opted to support both forks of ethereum, legitimizing both forks. If Poloniex supports the new fork for Bitmark, and not the old chain, I don't think mining the old bitmark (when there is a new fork which makes it viable for honest miners again) would work for the rogues. They would probably move on to victimize other coins, or switch to the new fork. The support of the exchanges is certainly key, if Polo backs up the new fork, it think that is definitive.

and the cryptography makes it so the selfish miners can't do double spends of anybody elses coins (they don't have those private keys), and certainly have not been double spending their own mining, as far as I know

@melvincarvalho

final working thoughts on this ... there is a syndicate that has more hashing that us, that is making a profit out of mining the coin ... downside is that we lose mining diversity and are at their mercy (or the mercy of those with higher hashing) ... upside is that they havent proved to be bad actors yet, and we are always at the mercy of bad actors with more hashing ... indeed if someone comes in with extra hashing there's every evidence they'll up their game ... the other scenario we had was before the syndicate with mining pools ... this was a WORSE situation because coinwarz would pump us when we were profitable and people would feast, then during the lower profitability there would be a famine sometimes with no blocks for days -- which is very bad due to tx backlog and also very easy 51% attack ... our situation today is not ideal in that it relies on good actors in mining basically working in their self interest, it's also not idea in that our hashing power is low ... the reason for this is simple. It's because we are a small project with 10,000 or so user and not a big project with 1 million+ users which we want to become. With that as a background we have not had a supportive mining community leading to warped market dynamics. We would like to have a supportive mining community, with the hash rate so low, it's time to take that chance. We have options at our disposal such as changing the difficulty to suit coinwarz more, gaining more users, or changing the diff algo completely. But the algo was chosen specifically to reuse the mining infrastructure or scyrpt, which is a double edged sword. I see the current situation as not ideal, but FAR better than the period we had for about a year when coin warz would not let us rebase for months. We should keep innovating on all fronts, and have the ability to react to our main danger, which is if poloniex suspend us for any reason. I dont have a reason to believe that's imminent, but we'll explore possible solutions and hopefully be ready to change at the right time. Main thing is still to bring marking to a wider audience.

Notes

• Selfish mining links
• https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/what-is-bitcoin-selfish-mining/