mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[John Tromp <john.tromp@xxxxxxxxx>]

dear all,

In the very first message to this list, I made a proposal for
a block reward schedule, involving some exponential stepping.

In retrospect that seems overly complicated. The simplest
possible schedule, namely a fixed constant block reward,
probably works well enough. It's also what Ethereum uses,
except they started out with about 7 years worth of rewards
sold in an ICO, judging from https://etherscan.io/chart/ethersupplygrowth

The only deviation I'd like to make from that is a slow start, where
block rewards are initially zero. This allows everyone to setup and
test their miners and pools in a relaxed manner, no matter their
timezone, and offers a unique opportunity to advertise an already
up-and-running coin where people can still get ready to mine the first
reward.

The question is how long the slow start should last. To cover all
timezones, it should be at least one day. Preferably a few. A week is
probably more than enough. I propose two options:

1) At a fixed block height, some 5 days from genesis. assuming block
intervals are on target.

2) As soon as difficulty stabilizes. This could be defined as 2
consecutive 24-hour block ranges having summed difficulties not too
far apart (e.g. 25% or 12.5%)

In either case I propose that we try to overestimate the initial
difficulty, so that the first block after genesis is more likely to
take an hour instead of a second.

regards,
-John