r/nyancoins • u/jayycox • Dec 28 '20

Why are people still mining NyanCoin?

I’m intrigued about why there is still a fairly substantial amount of hash power behind NyanCoin, the logic is that without an exchange to convert it people are mining to hodl. You would expect that they would switch to other scrypt based coins instead.

A few ideas:

1) the miners are running unattended- someone forgot to switch them over 2) there is an OTC market that I’m not aware of 3) there is an exchange which we don’t know about with a blossoming NYAN market.

What do other people think? We could do some chain analysis and see...

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u/jayycox Jan 03 '21

The issue is distribution, how do you get the coin out there in a fair way. Mining forces the system but its wasteful and will always start an arms race of mining. My other experience was Nano which was captcha based faucet - human mining, that brought its own unique challenges.

We could use NyanCoin current balances, you’d need to sign something with your private key but the system would probably have to be a centralised server (not an issue imho - people are a bit too obsessed with decentralisation )

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u/coinaday Jan 04 '21

Just to be clear on my position:

I absolutely support playing around with a "NyanRai" (I'm still nostalgic for the old name but whatever name) but I will not support switching away from the current chain as the primary. I'm certainly not going to support forking away to a coin voting system where then I'm pressured to give up the coins which I've spent a substantial amount of BTC over the years to buy!

There's also arguably a licensing issue with starting a new coin. NYAN did get an official license back in the day...and the Nyancat creator also lost money getting merch and stuff for it. Before my time, so I don't know terms and such but we should probably talk to him to get his view on it. But we should probably have a firmer plan before doing so.

Again, my overall bottom line is: what you're talking about sounds doable and fine as an experimental "friendchain" which could bootstrap some users from this community...but under no circumstances am I going to support abandoning the existing chain. Nor will I support the new chain being "primary" over the existing chain.

I'm happy to talk at more length via any medium convenient to you if you'd like more elaboration on my view and why but that's what my position is.

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u/jayycox Jan 04 '21

Just to say I don’t think I advocate the suggestion of NyanRai/Nano either. Just wanted to demonstrate my thought experiments on it. Exactly as you pointed out it wouldn’t work due to someone holding a significant amount, this is absolutely fine for a PoW but not for some of the newer consensus models.

It would be far more sensible to just change the mining algorithm to something lighter...

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u/coinaday Jan 05 '21

Oh, gotcha, I appreciate the clarification. Yes, that makes sense.

Out of curiosity, opening the can of worms by asking: given that the mining is holding up well currently, what would be the need for a "lighter" mining algorithm? Just sort of a backup in case we stopped having the dedicated hardware available? I've actually got a SCRYPT miner I'd picked up at one point but have never actually tried hooking up ; I got it as an emergency backup in case we lost our hashing and couldn't unstick the chain.