CEM

Welcome to the BIP wiki! ..Work in Progress.. "how the chain is secure when the block reward runs out. " IIRC, bitcoin's idea is that the transaction fees paid to miners alone will sustain hashing (Proof-of-Work) once block reward is essentially zero. That might be true when the value of the coin is very high, like bitcoin. In our case, I feel more comfortable if the period of substantial block rewards is extended; at least to give us time to develop marking itself (as was always the goal) and drive demand and value for the coin up. Helping in this regard is the "Coin Emission Modulation" CEM v0.1 algo (which is in now in operation), which scales back the block reward in proportion to the ratio current hashrate: historical high hashrate.

CEM is a Bitmark innovation, born of discussions going back 3 years. Because it was unproven at the time we implemented it (in the current Fork #1), after much deliberation, I decided to only apply CEM block reward scaling to 50% of the block reward, ensuring that miners always get at least 50% of the epoch's nominal block reward.

CEM is reducing the block reward, by a certain amount, whenever the hashrate for a PoW algo is less than the historical peak (looking back one year), so by virtue of this, our block rewards are in fact being extended into the future, because the full nominal epoch block reward is only given out if the current hashrate equals the historic hashrate. Any slack in the hashrate translates into Bitmarks being held back in the pool of un-issued coins, to be minted at some future time.

CEM respects the absolute coin emission limits that the original halving and quartering block-reward reduction scheme strictly linked to number of blocks issued, so that we will never issue more than the 27-plus million bitmarks that were settled on in the beginning.

Which brings me to the question of why merge-mining was adopted. It is a good way to secure the chain, as it becomes very easy and practically zero cost for pre-existing large mining operations to simply merge-mine for bitmarks ( with no additional hardware or energy costs ). Thus, very large hashrate now secures our blockchain. That part is good. Additionally, I thought that by virtue of enabling merge-mining, we could make bitmark known and adopted by a larger fraction of the crypto-community at large.

What we didn't fully realize was that merge-mining tends to lessen the value attached to the coins because most miners see them as a mere "freebie" which did not cost them very much at all to acquire (being a new "byproduct" if you will of a pre-existing mining operation) . I take responsibility for allowing all 8 of the algos to be merge-mined. Perhaps a more cautious approach would have been to only enable merge-mining on a few of the algos, but I was just simply unaware of the down side to merge mining. Most other multi-PoW coins have enabled merge mining on no more than 40 or 60% of their PoW algos.

Another complaint against the merge-mining is that it punishes the loyal long-time Bitmark miners who now have to compete with many other chains. Thus, there is a call from this part of the community to return some of the algos to native-only mining, by disabling merge-mining. At the moment, there is no algo which is dedicated exclusively to Bitmark. On all our algos, bitmark can be a mere by-product of the mining of another block chain.

@melvincarvalho, many thanks for your kind words of encouragement and appreciation, for it indeed has been a large task to evolve our blockchain to where it is now, and we have in fact achieved a lot, thanks to the input of many members, and the dedication and coding ability of @akrmn, (who despite being brought on the project initially as a paid job, has taken the project to heart like any other one of us. ) It took much longer than I would have thought, but we made it. 🙂