Topic: Bitcoin is no longer decentralized - page 2. (Read 8359 times)

Exactly. In our case the source of their wealth is untamperability (is there such a word? ) of bitcoin so they will look at it. And regulation works just fine without any centralisation, ask any libertarian

I'll admit that gmaxwell brought up some potential issues I hadn't considered. Most of the centralization alarmists have painted a less nuanced picture, leading me to think economics and incentives were being ignored. With that consideration understood, becoin is correct in saying that despite this natural order or free market being able to adapt, the time frame for adaptation matters. If miners don't detect a problem in a matter of minutes, Bitcoin could possibly suffer a major setback and PR fiasco. The market would adapt, but its solution might put a damper on Bitcoin growth for a few years, or the market's solution might even be a (good) protocol change or a new coin.

Nevertheless, the question remains: why would bad acters refuse to take advantage of vulnerabilities as the ongoing centralization makes them available? Why would they hold off their attacks until Bitcoin is so centralized that they could do extreme damage, especially given only one criminal gets only one shot? Every incentive seems to point to being the first to exploit a centralization weakness, which should lead to a smaller issue, or at worst a series of smaller issues that would make miners steadily more wary of large mining pools. Why aren't these supposed weaknesses being exploited right now? Hackers don't seem to generally shy away from taking free money, even if the stakes aren't yet as high as they could be.

Ultimately there needs to be a reason why a bad acter would choose not to "get while the getting's good," and in so doing actually do Bitcoin a favor by waking people up to any actual vulnerabilities as they arise. Centralization is a gradual process, so why wouldn't vulnerabilities open up (and be exploited) gradually rather than suddenly and catastrophically? Only a government or other entity wishing to do damage to Bitcoin (a competing system or altcoin, etc.) would have the right incentives to wait.

History proves you're wrong. The rich people of a certain guild will always form a club that will put every aspect of the source of their wealth under control and regulation. Control and regulation is just another name of centralization!

I agree with you on a "speedier blockchain." It's painful to download and store the whole chain (~10GB now). Even harder to do it on a mobile device.
But I don't yet know how your proposal could be implemented easily, considering that all account balances have to be deduced from historical transactions in blockchain. I haven't read the blockchain pruning techniques proposed by Satoshi though.

Strong enough points here to sustain a conversation, I have noticed bitcoin is becoming more regulated recently and brought in line by governments but it still presents a new idea the issue is how to promote independence in a state run society. The further issue is how they will decide taxation

I have  Self-correcting: the more money you have, the more money you put into protecting them. When your 100 coins cost 10K$, you'll be happy with Electrum, but when they'll grow to 1M$, you'll istall full node, just in case. The same with all other vulnerabilities: the more rich bitcoiners are around, the more money will be spend on developing de-centralized solutions.

guys stop trolling if you don't have any new ideas or facts to add.

centralization is visible in my opinion
look at the faucets most are coinbox or inputs now very very few send directly to a wallet that you chose without hitting a minimum
and having a minimum is also an attempt (a needed one) at controling what people can and can't do with there $$ (just like daily limits at a bank)

The red text provides context -- that's what we're talking about.  You did, and that's what i'm replying to.  If you'd like to discuss commercial banks, i'm happy to -- as long as i can has polite.

But I didn't say multiple central banks.
I said multiple banks.

Sorry -- the "living under a rock" reference threw me off.
As far as "multiple [central] banks competing with each other" -- that's not the way central banks work, so it's the technical aspects of fiat that you should look into.

well no need to be a dick about it.
Anyways what i was saying is that there will be multiple banks that compete with each other.
Unless I there is something I'm missing about the technical aspect of bitcoins?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

You're just picking on the latest bugaboo there. There is nothing especially centeralizing about ASICs, in fact, when we were using GPU mining there was just a _single_ hardware vendor. We went months in 2011 with no 58xx gpus being available pretty much anywhere in the US.

All proof of work does effectively the same thing: It converts joules to cryptographic signatures that have verifiable scarcity. Differences in proof of work can only move around constant factors in the economics.

See section 7 of bitcoin.pdf

My prediction: People who don't understand bitcoin will continue to reinvent it poorly.

One of the most frustrating things about having concerns about Bitcoin's ongoing decentralization level is that half the other people complaining about it are simply confused.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Same way that pooled mining always works:  You attempt to mine a block, if you produce work which is less than some target set by the pool (which is a much easier bar than the network difficulty) you submit that work to the pool, and they decide if they like it or not, and then credit you based on how many of these shares you return. The shares constitute compelling evidence that you are working on work which is agreeable to the pool.

The pool could demand any level of disclosure and validation that it wants, but it really only needs to check that the coinbase transaction is correct. Any miner could always selectively throw away solutions which have hashes low enough to be valid blocks in order to attack the pool (this is called a withholding attack), so maliciously invalid blocks aren't an additional risk.

P2Pool goes all the way and replaces the pool with a decentralized system, but you don't have to go that far to still remove pools from the business of controlling the Bitcoin consensus algorithm.

what do you mean by transaction fees exactly...
Is it like some in built bitcoin feature or you mean the cost for doing business?

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Yes, I am guilty for asking before researching.

It becomes a p2p version of SWIFT, maybe not so profitable when mining, but under control of the banking sector.
At that stage they will make more money on bitcoin transaction fees than mining.