One member of the public's response to Twitter

General
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Nockchain on X: “It seems many people trying to mine Nockchain may not fully understand the current state of the mining competition. We’re honored to see so many people eager to participate, including many beginners, we just want to make sure everyone understands what they can reasonably expect” / X

So here is my take on Nockchain’s twitter post and I will respond point by point (and this is coming from someone with a lot more hours than money invested in mining):

1st We can confirm open source client works:
Well yes, it does work but not well. Communications led the community to believe that Zorp would be hardware optimized at launch, not that we would need to fix the software at launch.

2nd Regarding proof of work mining:
I think most of us understood that if there are 10,000 machines it was going to be difficult to mine a block…could take months and might never happen so that is not where I take issue…so read on.

3rd Regarding vanishingly small:
Yep, you’re right, but wouldn’t it have been a lot more honest to tell everyone that you spent months creating a better mining algo rhythm than what was publicly available at the release? We expected you to have a hardware advantage, but not a huge software advantage too.

I would describe it this way. Zorp created a roulette wheel where there are 1000 spots on the wheel and the house owns 999 of them. If…by some miracle…the one ‘fan/participant’ spot gets selected, we spin the wheel again and one mining machine gets the reward. That is roughly 1 in a million folks. If everyone not Zorp were to form a pool, we still would have a miniscule chance of sharing a block.

4th They’re glad we came:
Let’s say 1000-2000 people in the orbit of Urbit and following Zorp and nockchain decided to be an early adopter/supporter…maybe average spend of $1500 and 40-60 hours to get to decent running machines. We went in with the knowledge that no hardware requirements were given so that is on us. What isn’t on us is that if 99.9% of the nock is mined by Zorp/insiders, and there is virtually zero reward for supporting this project which is quickly becoming disturbingly centralized.

I personally thought it would be really cool to contribute to a massive super-computer that could be used to solve real world problems with a neat technology. However, I did not anticipate that 2 wallets would own all of the nock.

I think you believe that is by design, but as a seasoned professional I can tell you that it is, in fact a bug. It is a marketing disaster! The people who are most supportive and care just got taken behind the wood shed…as more and more drop out to spend their time on more lucrative opportunities…which by the way would include buying a net and catching butterflies, the network will further centralize into 2 wallets. Maybe this project made the best machine to date and it has so much potential, but if there is no hype and no hope there will be no interest. You can mine all of the nock over the next 100 years by yourself with ZERO adoption and zero interest because you initially treated the people who actually cared like ungrateful children.

I think the big disappointment for me is that I had hope that nock would help facilitate Urbit adoption…but in all likelihood it has just increased the pace of the death spiral. Nock might as well be Trump coin, because having it all in 10 years will be worth absolutely nothing.

There is a chance that I am wrong…but I am in league with a group that was planning on purchasing nock when it became available on exchanges. Now that (let’s round up) 100% is in 2 wallets, we have no interest. Maybe this all gets fixed within a few months and we get back in, but with the arrogance expressed in the twitter post I have no confidence anything will change. Congratulations…you have successfully taken a Fair Launch and turned it into a centralized token. (OK, it has only been a week so that might be a stretch). Something like 30%-50% Zorp/Insider success would’ve been livable, 100% is not.

I’ve said a lot and I will end on this. If you don’t care about the people who are trying to support the project by arrogantly giving them no hope of real participation, you will be left with nothing and if that is acceptable to you then that is what you deserve.

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Absolutely perfect. I agree 100% with everything you said.

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Thanks for taking the time to write this.

The first thing is to remember is… this whole thing just started. The open-source client will be improved (we’re already getting pull requests!) and we’re going to improve it ourselves. There will be pools, etc. Obviously we want many external parties to win blocks sooner or later, as you correctly note, that is necessary for this project to make any sense!

We recognize that some people’s expectations were not calibrated with the actual state of things on launch day. Including among very smart people who we highly respect, so of course we don’t blame anyone who meets this description.

Could we have done some things better? Of course, that’s always the case. But another part of this is just that launching a distributed network is very dynamic, certain things change at last minute, certain plans could not get done before launch, etc.

So I want to focus my reply on just giving you information and context, which I think will best respond to your questions and concerns.

The truth is we did not know until the last minute how exactly the open source client would fare on day one. We of course knew from the beginning that the open source client would need to be optimized to be competitive (which we said explicitly and signaled implicitly even more) but we had hopes of making more progress on the open source client ourselves before launch. Other things came up and the show had to go on. We did not plan for the chance of the open source client winning a block to be effectively zero out of the gate, hence our blunt tweet clarifying this the minute we realized it and saw that many people had higher hopes than that. That was not ideal, for sure, but we tried to handle forthrightly.

Also we learned of at least some specific parties who started working on the client privately on the day we released the code. This isn’t to say we expected everyone to be following that closely, or to have the time/energy to be so on top of it, but we took this to mean that the competitive element was clearly being registered.

Also to be clear, we discouraged people from spending money, we called it “Dumbnet,” and did much more to under-sell the state of the v1 mainnet at launch.

Currently, success with the open-source client admittedly seems farther off than we planned for, but we’re not sure this is something to be sorry for exactly. We take responsibility for the fact that we did not make as much progress on it as we hoped to pre-launch, and we take responsibility for maybe creating a little too much excitement relative to the capabilities of those whom we excited (including smart and thoughtful people), or for not getting the facts out more widely and aggressively. We’ve learned from all this. We aim to do better with any big anticipated events in the future. We will do everything we can to prevent any future misunderstandings. We certainly did say a few times that people would need to improve it, that it would be competitive, and we never promised anyone they would win blocks with the open source miner, so all in all… I feel like it’s just a little confusion, perhaps on our part and also the part of people who got really excited.

We’re deeply invested in the open-source mining community finding success. We just can’t control exactly how or when. That’s the point of doing PoW and this unpredictable and difficult fair-launch strategy we concocted: We can’t control everything.

Does this make sense? Is that fair?

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I do appreciate your reply…it was much better thought out than the twitter post. I think part of the communication issue is things are spread over multiple platforms (x, telegram, forum). Telegram is a lot of noise with some really great stuff sprinkled in if you know how to find it.

I can’t say what the future will bring, but 3 successful mining wallets is still far from ‘this is going places’. I’m not wrong about the marketing. If the project doesn’t successfully transition to decentralization of the nocks/mining it will die. People will lose interest and they won’t come back. To make a successful transition from decentralization requires increasing interest…it is that simple. Increasing interest isn’t going to be achieved by having a relatively small number of new competition monarchs.