Topic: Bitcoin should be decentralized even further - page 2. (Read 2308 times)

 think bitcoin needs to be decentralized, it has an impact on the development and existence of bitcoin, currently, bitcoin is being accepted by governments, which is one of the first steps to bitcoin decentralization.

If it is necessary to be in decentralized what may make it wider and better for the future.

This is what world think but no one knows that the miner owner by outsider of china and they are. Controlling it they are just set the miner setup in china for low cost in maintenance

My point is that people always say "ah we should watch out, China has control" not realising something more important such as the most powerful supercomputers are also in the hands of China. So if they have the most powerful supercomputer, having the most powerful group of miners should not be so surprising.

Also China produces most of the worlds products. Why again is the fact that they also produce miners of a surprise again? This is how it has been for a long time. They worked hard to catch up with the rest of the world, and now they are slowly surpassing everyone on many levels. Though none of this is a expression on my behalf that the mining power should be centralised, just a acceptance of where China has reached.

I terribly disagree with that

First of all, you are confusing the algo with its implementation in hardware. Obviously, these are two entirely different things. Not every algo can be implemented in hardware due to limitations imposed by physical laws, as simple as it gets. Thereby, your claim as such goes straight out the window just on this account alone. Further, I think you can easily come up with a lot of algos that would prohibit parallel execution, which is what asics are all about. And what follows next is the crux of the matter. We already reached physical limits in certain fields. For example, we can't make bigger CPU chips and keep their frequency at the same level for the simple fact that the speed of light is finite. And this is where physical laws make your claim as invalid conceptually. So you are twice wrong, and this is certainly not the case where two wrongs offset each other

These companies are not just taking all the decisions, but they have also been covering too much hash rate that is not at all a good part here. Such companies having huge hash rates are now taking advantage of the price that they are getting for their mining work and pies that they get from their mining. I don't think that small miners may be getting fair shares for all their efforts they put in mining through buying these expensive hardware from the same companies.

The idea is to change algorithms regularly as hard forks, without people knowing in advance what it will be.  You won't invest in hardware development if every year, another algorithm is chosen, rendering your hardware useless.

That said, the problem with asics is the problem that PoW is used for *consensus*.  That PoW is used for coin creation, is not a problem.  The real problem is that PoW decides on consensus, and hence also on protocol.  If one flips to non-remunerated proof of stake, with PoW only used for coin creation, but not for consensus, then the fact that PoW is in the hands of some would be much, much less problematic.

There is no algo that is ASIC resistant.
No matter how you try to modify it no matter what combination you use (I think there was a coin which combined 5 of them) there will always be an asic that would trash whatever mining power you can get from your videocard.

i am not sure what you are trying to say with the supercomputer news, do you think someone is going to use a supercomputer to mine bitcoin? is that it, i don't think it is even possible and if it was it would be waste of resources! and a supercomputer is not something you can buy at a computer shop it usually is only one!

also the pools are not the problem, if miners aren't happy with a pool they will simply switch to another or start a new one and gather around in that new pool.
the problem is the farms and the fact that manufacturing of ASICs is also in China.

The question of decentralization is not so much about a country but a company, Bitmain. There are other companies that could establish themselves in China and compete with them. Anyway, with the rise of bitcoin price may be companies in other parts of the world that could consider investing in bitcoin mining and in this way the mining power would be more distributed.

So many people are looking at china and are anxious that they have a greater control in terms of mining and pools. Though not many people realise that even with supercomputers such is the case, they overshadow USA in such things:
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/fastest-supercomputer-sunway-taihulight/

So i am not at all surprised that that is the case with Bitcoin.

It would be nice if a pool could not gain more than 10% control of the network, though in time when Bitcoin becomes more popular it will start spreading into businesses, peoples wallets and similar which should help. Because of its immense power now, Bitcoin will be going through many attacks of people trying to gain control of its network.

Well I do agree with that but first and foremost before any decentralization could come in hand I think Satoshi had already placed a standard or guidelines for miners to follow so at this point of time we will not have problems with the fees and slow confirmation. Though bitcoin is decentralized there are a lot of movements to make bitcoins under a centralized control.

I'm not aware of any, but of course there are so many alt coins...
I know that there are some alt coins that have a mechanism to obtain coins if somehow they prove bitcoin ownership ; that's half a fork, I'd say.

In fact, the notion of forking becomes somewhat vague if one also includes the possibility to exclude bitcoin addresses, and to allow for a new genesis block.  Because then, any block chain like thing can be considered to be a fork of any other block chain like thing that existed at the moment of its creation of course.

Nevertheless, a "bitcoin change of proof of work", or a "bitcoin change to proof of stake" would in fact be nothing else but the creation of an alt coin ; that could, or couldn't, have a success in the market, depending on how the "double coin owners" vote in the market.  Most probably, the "difficulty" in assigning this alt coin the name of bitcoin would be that the old chain wouldn't simply disappear: miners having SHA-256 mining hardware wouldn't see any reason to change their expensive equipment into door steps voluntary.

I certainly agree with the essence of your post

But I still should point it out that Bitcoin mining becoming more centralized actually makes it easier to reach a consensus, though likely not the consensus that you personally may be hoping and looking for. In other words, miners can force their agenda through their monopolistic position even if the whole world is against them. Other than that, miners are vitally interested in preserving the current status quo, so all talks about hard forks are aimed only at distracting out attention from the real issue

This is not a worry as we are actually moving towards decentralization.

This is because the current China-centralized mining pools was caused by the extremely fast evolution of mining ASIC. China has the factories and they are able to make these ASIC fast. It was more profitable to use the ASIC they made to mine bitcoin than selling the ASIC.

Therefore, manufacturers = miners => more China miners


However, as the best technology is now being used to make ASIC, the increase in hashing power for given unit of energy is slowing down, it gradually turns out that selling ASIC might be more profitable than using them for mining.

Therefore, manufacturers  =/= miners => buyers from all over the world => decentralization.

it has already happened a couple of times actually!
there is one active one currently in altcoins that has forked from bitcoin, the name is even similar it was "bitcoin something that i forgot"
and the funny thing is that they all fail to exist for any meaningful time.

Indeed.  But that's not bitcoin any more.  This is a new cryptocurrency, that needs a central hard fork policy.  Ethereum, DASH and monero are such central hard forking currencies.  Bitcoin has no central hard forking tradition and hence has no mechanism in place to "change the constitution", but of course nobody stops anyone from making an alt coin forking off bitcoin.

Indeed, it is bitcoin's 10 minute block rate that determines grossly the number of pools that will share the market.

If you want an income stability of less than 10% standard deviation per month, then the pool you adhere to should mine on average about 100 blocks per month (if you mine 100 blocks on average, then Poisson statistics give you a 10% standard deviation on that realisation).
In one month, there are 4000 blocks to be mined more or less, so this means that there will be of the order of 40 pools at most that can offer you a 10% variation per month.  (note that 10% standard deviation will give you sometimes a variation of 30% or so).

Knowing that a market never gives uniform shares, but rather power law shares, the current pool distribution doesn't seem too remote from what a normal market would do, with 5 market leaders having in total the majority share, and about 20 pools having almost all of the market.
The orders of magnitude are in agreement with what is to be expected with 10 minute blocks.

The good thing is that people can start moving out of Antpool once they realise just how much of their revenues Antpool is robbing from them. 

The bad thing is that people like an extremely steady stream of income and some people can't handle significant variance.

However, as people's margins of profits get tighter, pools will become more competitive with the fees they take and people will start moving to pools with less than 1% fees like Kanopool.  Fortunately, a block every ten minutes is good enough for a pool with 1% of the hashrate to mine 1.44 blocks per day on average, so eventually people will stop conforming to whichever pool is biggest at the time.

Bitcoin has never really been decentralized, until recently.  Bitcoin was centralized, first in Satoshi's hands.  Then in Core's hands.  These were the deciding entities over bitcoin, until recently.  With the advent of several pools, and their own ideas of self interest, and Core being over-confident in their central power (Vitalik style), the central line of command has been put into doubt.   This is why Core cannot impose its modifications any more in an evident way, in the same way that Vitalik could impose his "rewinding" of the DAO onto the ethereum ecosystem (be it with a split of a minority of non-sheep).

However, economies of scale make that the central authority is potentially formed by a cartel of mining pools, eventually with some Core devs, like what happened on Litecoin: from the moment that "important people" can "sit in a room and come to an agreement" the system is obviously centralized.  From the moment there is a charismatic "leader" that can motivate people to change something, the system is obviously centralized, in the same way that states are politically centralized, that the banking system is centralized, and that most other systems are centralized with "leadership".

I know of a few truly decentralized systems: science, and evolutionary biology.  No central authority/leader/cartel/... can change the rules of science or the contents of science.  No central authority/leader/cartel/.... can change the rules of evolutionary biology.

And there used to be an old, decentralized internet discussion system: usenet.

Bitcoin is close to that, but no cigar.  We are maybe witnessing a short period, right now, where bitcoin IS decentralized, when core lost its central power, and miners don't have it yet completely.