After the next hard fork in a month, there will be another one in ~3 months to implement the following changes:
a) Implement the results of the community poll for VRAM requirement
b) Relax the Spark spend limit of 10k FIRO per spend/block to a higher number
c) Implement Spark Name transfer protocol
d) (Maybe) Optional Spark coinbase (mining and masternodes) and eventually switch to mandatory.
This thread to is to seek feedback on the above and give the community heads up on the next change.
Everything looks good but I think more input is needed from miners.
What ever happened to a tail emission with Firo?
When looking at Bitcoin, without tail emission, miners will eventually rely solely on transaction fees for rewards after all Bitcoins are mined.
The fixed supply, combined with growing demand, can drive up the price due to scarcity, in my opinion Bitcoin is being squeezed and only centralized miners are mining it obviously. It doesn’t look like Firo is there yet with this as people haven’t caught on yet, but a tail emission is a good idea.
I’m not a miner (looking into it) but have looked at different arguments and remember it being discussed awhile back wether a tail emission was gonna be chosen for Firo.
So currently, all mining and masternode rewards go into transparent addresses with no option to go into Spark addresses.
Spark was relatively new and we didn’t want to risk coinbase transactions in Spark addresses and also we were a bit concerned if it would affect performance of block verification. Similarly, much of the ecosystem like mining pools and masternode providers don’t support Spark addresses yet.
While we are much more confident on Spark’s robustness now and while it does add a little performance overheads, Spark ‘mints’ (from transparent into Spark) into Spark addresses are relatively light so mining/masternode rewards into Spark won’t add much performance drawback.
The heavy computation is in Spark ‘spends’, when you send Spark funds to another Spark address or Spark to transparent. If we mandated it, all the tiny inputs would need to be Spark spent later, which might lead to much higher block verification times. Additionally, we are not sure how many mining pools or masternode providers would adopt it or just drop support (more likely for former given that they are operating at a loss now).
So as an interim solution, we want to make it as an option for mining pools or masternode hosters to allow payment to Spark address directly so that we ease into it, give notice to the ecosystem that we do intend to mandate it while giving them time to adopt and also evaluate performance drawbacks.
I am assuming of course this means block reward values will no longer be visible when distributed to Spark addresses, or would we simply not see the recipient address?
Either way, I think moving toward privacy by default is a good direction.