DECIDING THE FUTURE OF PODC - PROOF OF DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
Feb 28th, 2019
My what a ride its been in 2018. (If we only knew everything that we know now, before the beginning of 2018, we would all be a little further ahead in life) - but for me - drawing closer to Jesus is the greatest achievement, and should never be traded for anything.
Going into 2018, I thought I was already experienced, but 2018 redefined that 'assumption' in many ways. We had lots of things happen in our forums. We had the huge HODL rise and crash. I think while we were at our peak of 329 monthly orphans, we also took a lot of credit for this rise as if we - as a community - succeeded at something. Another words, we should have been monitoring for our own pride and improving - but we let ourselves fall with the HODL fall. Be very wary of taking credit for achievements -- I believe we were primarily influenced from external forces. The cryptocurrency market was clearly influenced by Bitcoin and Dashes rise (and fall).
I personally had strong opinions of long held beliefs in certain areas only to be tested, and I've changed my opinion about certain things. We had our sessions with our focus group (our internal advisors) and our external advisors (an SEC attorney, Manna, outwest advisors, DAHF, etc) and learned that we should be a utility, with a known revenue stream. That going with DAHF would have pulled us in an anti-God direction. And that we should add infrastructure to invite a Christian base to use the gospel features.
I'm only saying all of this because I want people to realize that many factors influence the decision of a good algorithm for BiblePay. It's not that we are being hot and cold, it's that this is a complicated environment, and I personally want to make a long lasting decision that satisfies all of the facets to the highest degree.
We are trying to decide if we should retire PODC or keep it as an algorithm within Biblepay-core.
The impetus for removing it is that a lot of us feel that our user-base has stagnated because PODC is too hard to understand and set up.
Thefore, it prevents us from sending the wallet to a brand new user - and allowing them to figure out on their own how to set up mining, receive rewards and tell their friends about BBP (free advertising and growth).
The problem with keeping both algorithms is it requires constant maintenace from the developers to focus on more than one. The other problem is splitting rewards by 96% and 4% does not give POG the chance to grow. So, the question is, should we completely retire PODC, and give the budget over to POG, so that POG can potentially grow our userbase automatically?
It could also be potentially floated to split the algorithms 50-50, allowing them to compete. However, the issue with this is then our IT department still must support PODC and all of its related dependencies and infrastructure. And, does a 50% PODC environment help biblepay more than a 100% POG environment?
That is what we will be discussing here.
Let me name off some of the facets in a mining algorithm:
IT Development Hours
IT Maintenance Hours
Coolness factor
Risk of a constantly supply of work units
User attrition/augmentation levels, Practicality, User Acceptance, Ease of Use, Community Growth/Price appreciation/Total orphan benefit
Algorithm Extensibility/Fragility
Hard emission reconciliation/Oracles, Whale Approval
Total infrastructure size and maintenance (3rd party credit sites, credit network, debug tool sites, pools)
Greed-Arms Race-Rat Race Levels
Jesus' (Christian Growth) levels/Christian Attraction/Christian Future
Blockchain Security
To start to compare the PODC algorithm to POG, let me first attempt to name some of the pros and cons of PODC:
NOTE! The following views are *my opinion* as founder; if you disagree please have a civil conversation below, and vote appropriately.
Pros with PODC:
IT/Development: The Creation of PODC is already coded
Coolness: The Rosetta cancer mining program is 'cool' and gives us a good image as in doing positive work for humanity, the highly technical users are drawn to 'try' podc as a challenge
Extensibility: The algorithm is modular (in that it works outside of biblepay and uses a sanctuary consensus), and extensible (in that business logic changes can be made at the sanc level without requiring a mandatory)
Price Support: PODC has the 20bbp-per-rac rule meaning it "may or may not" cause price appreciation (I vote neutral on this as we can't tell at this point if this is good or bad for our price, since we appear to be stagnating).
Cons with PODC:
User Acceptance: The algorithm requires a dictionary of terminology to understand, so it appears to be complicated to learn by newbies, it appears to be complicated to be activated and maintained (without knowing the inner workings under the hood to understand how to keep it purring)
Dev Maintenance: Development hours for Enhancing podc are still not complete, the algorithm certainly needs improved in the area of ease of use, the maintenance hours involved in maintaining PODC from an IT standpoint are relatively high
Fragility: Fragility is high, the risk of the contract breaking or changing is high, and the BOINC/Rosetta/WCG interface risk is high
Work-unit-risk: The risk of work-units running out is medium to high
User attrition levels: User levels appear to be low and stagnating (based on our sideways to shrinking podc diff level and user count), podc appears to attract richer users with many horizontal computers (in contrast to average users with a low pc count)-and this appears to stagnate growth as the rich users take a high percentage of rewards away from the small users. The small user base appears to have stagnated our price into a range of 7 satoshi (due to the average miner being reluctant to sell below the electricity cost of PODC). (I feel BBP has a much bigger potential in many other ways).
Infrastructure Size and maintenance: The total infrastructure size is High (due to needing 3rd party tools for debugging and for credit reporting), and third party sites like pools and web support sites need maintained.
Greed-Rat-Race-Arms Race Level: The Greed/Rat-Race level appears to be very high (as each user wants to achieve higher RAC than others) and this appears to create an environment in BBP where higher results are more important than talking about the gospel (Ive posted many snippets to links about Jesus in the middle of our forum, and actually was screamed at by people saying I was spamming, but yet I dont recall anyone starting a real conversation - other than a couple people who just disagreed about the Jews a year ago).
The people we are attracting to the community for cancer research seem to be more scientific and less Theological (this is entirely an assumption and I dont mean to offend anyone - I actually want the atheists to come, but they dont appear to be coming to learn about Jesus from PODC), and I realize this is a hard requirement, so I simplify this down to : how can we attract a LOT of new users that turn to Christians that stick around.
Blockchain Security: We have less hashpower being directed at POBH and more to PODC (because financially PODC pays 96% of the reward) so this results in less total network security with more machine power being used for RAC.
Oracle/Whale Approval: Whales may be reluctant to jump in as a BiblePay investor if emissions are not fully reconcilable in a hard way on-chain (when the whale takes into account the entire subject for coinbase-reconciliation).
Pros with POG:
IT/Creation: POG is coded, 99% of the POG maintenance (est) is already completed
IT/Maintenance: POG is low maintenance
Work-Unit-Risk: POG does not have a work-unit limit
User attrition/growth: POG has the capacity to attract *more users per consumed electricity KWH than PODC* because it is 80% greener than PODC and in addition it rewards users for holding distinct coins (meaning that a reconciled POG user daily reward points to One head, not many machines) therefore I conclude POG equals more HEADCOUNT than PODC, This theoretically means BiblePay expands its participation level, this results in community growth/help with tasks/price appreciation/more orphans, POG is very easy to setup - it is almost turnkey.
Fragility: The algorithm is not fragile
Reconciliation/Trust/WhaleApproval: The payment emissions are hard and reconcilable, there is no oracle / trust issue, there is no tampering issue, POG would theoretically be whale approved.
Infrastructure: POG reduces total infrastructure down to an in-wallet novel pool and removes the need for 3rd party credit sites, pools, and debug tools.
Greed-arms-race-rat-race: The rat-race and greed level appears to be very low (as people will be Giving to the foundation to receive a reward and hashing on single machines per head) and only out of personal generosity running multiple hashing machines.
Christian Growth: The total headcount appears to be aligned with increasing the attraction of Christian community members
Blockchain Security: Security is increased due to having an increasing reward (1 mil per day towards pog) means a 10* userbase size increase, meaning a 10* POW security increase. POG scales well to thousands of users.
Cons with POG:
Coolness factor: POG is much more "simple" than PODC (IE we aren't solving humanity's most complex problems) so we lose the "cool" factor of cancer-mining.
Extensibility: POG can't allow us (currently) to change its rules without a mandatory (extensibility).