50% Inflation Reduction

We’re going to cover what this proposal does and why it’s being proposed. As the title suggests, it’s going to be about the inflation in PascalCoin. Namely, its reduction in response to some movement that has been occurring within the currency. Let’s begin.

Why Is This Happening?

Per the proposal, it is said that PascalCoin’s growth has been stunted. It may have grown twice as much as it has now and the price may have been upwards of four times greater than that of its current price. That’s quite a lot of lost potential.

Why has this happened, though? One word — centralization. Through the extreme centralization of the currency by those dual-mining Ethereum and PascalCoin on a particular pool, PascalCoin has been mined extensively even when unprofitable. As explained in PIP-0009, this is due to Ethereum miners having unused memory on their GPUs. They use this idle memory to mine PascalCoin no matter the profitability, driving worker count up, profits down, and, subsequently, price down.

To fix this issue, you have to address the dual-miners. It is clear that those miners are causing a negative side-effect to the currency even if its not intentional. So, PIP-0009 (making GPU and ASIC mining less advantageous) and PIP-0010 were introduced. They complement each other nicely to bring the ecosystem back into a state of equilibrium.

OK. So, What’s Happening, Then?

Well, if you couldn’t guess so far, there will be a reduction in the inflation of the currency. Per the proposal, “this PIP intends to compensate the existing ecosystem for the damage it has incurred.” And, well, that’s exactly what it does. By reducing the inflation, each coin is worth more. Moving forward, without dual-mining being allowed, those that remain and help grow this ecosystem will be rewarded with a more valuable piece of the pie.

A Little More Detail, Please.

Well, all right! The current block reward is 100 PASC. Every four years, this reward is halved. Every four years is also referred to as an epoch (a fancy way of saying some period of time in one word). In code, though, they use an estimate of 420,480 blocks per epoch rather than using a time period of four years.

The minimum PASC that can be rewarded for a block is 1 PASC. Eventually, the halving will reach that minimum — technically, it would surpass it if you let it exceed the minimum. This never-ending 1 PASC minimum reward is referred to as tail emission.

Now, what this proposal proposes is that they move to reduce the epoch to two years, or 210,240 blocks per epoch. This would halve the inflation. That is, total supply would go from 83,439,000 to 41,719,500, excluding tail emission. Now, in doing so, we would also reach tail emission faster. So, that is something to think about potentially.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this should go into effect in epoch 0 if it is to move forward. This is because it is relatively low-impact to make this change now, in epoch 0, as we haven’t hit block 210241 (the first block in epoch 1, if the proposal takes effect) yet.

This proposal, along with PIP-0009, should help to grow PascalCoin and cause its ecosystem to thrive as initially intended.

This proposal can be implemented with a single line of code.

For more information on PIP-0010, please see: https://github.com/PascalCoin/PascalCoin/blob/master/PIP/PIP-0010.md

For more information on PascalCoin, please see: http://pascalcoin.org