Topic: Bitcoin - we have a problem. - page 3. (Read 14570 times)

The other part, since I did say there are way too many parts to talk about, is that if you can't mine for whatever reason, then focus on selling things/services in btc to the miners.

A large part of the FUD community only see things as 'I can't mine for easy btc' instead of the other heavy lifting.

And before you say it is too risy to sell things in btc because of the price swings. well that means you dont have faith and are a dumper at heart.  And the miners have to have faith too right? if btc dies then asicminer dies too

You guys talk like these are actual real products that you can buy next day. They are far from it.

Try and buy an AVALON 60ghs miner - you can not as they have stopped manufacture and only sell chips which then leaves you to manufacture your own circuit board.

Try and get anything from BFL delivered before the year 2015

KNCMiner do not have anything that even works and no guaranteed delivery date - they have just said these are the specs.  What happens if they do a BFL and find out they actually use three or four times the power they stated and deliver a year late? The difficulty will be so high then you a 400ghs miner could well be redundant.

Mining pools require servers to log,  validate and calculate the payouts of the shares submitted by the miners - The amount of bandwidth is not the issue it is the databases, web severs, application servers that require data centre space if you want any kind of reliability.

I do not live in America and electricity is becoming more expensive every day due to green taxation and other factors. 1000w is a large amount of electricity and I can guarantee that they will have to revise that figure when it gets closer to them delivering a product. So far every ASIC manufacturer has overstated and under delivered.

You are really tipping the FUD scale with your last prose.   With the kncminers you get 400 Gh at 1000W.  at .15 kWh that is $3.60 a day.  How is that insane costs?

And I am not expert on mining pools, but if a mining pools is mostly created by people joining it and not some datacenter then there isn't a lot of costs to organize a pool either.  It isn't like there is tons of data usage

On the other side of the coin, other countries have different ROI than an American.  Some countries with pisspoor currency that get electricity at a decent rate for their locality make a huge gain on the conversion to $$.  So that is one of the many many reasons that btc is going through its trial by fire for price discovery now.

Have a little more faith, or just jump ship.  I will take my chances buying up all the clearance sale ASIC miners and cheap btc and see what happens in the next year or two.  

Getting involved using btc in commerce will always help.  

BTC has many facets... so it is not really a one topic conversation.  There has never been anything like btc so we'll see how this distruptive tech will pan out

AsicMiner currently has ~35ths while the network is 200th,   You say half of this being down is causing problems ?

If AM goes down I'll have to wait 10.9 minutes per transaction instead of 10 ,,,  Big effing deal ! (BTW: I'm so unlucky I have to wait on average 40 min per block when it's an important transaction)

With 4-5 Company who'll be shipping ASICs do you really think this is going to be a problem in the long term ?

What's securing the network the most is not decentralization of mining, It's the greed provided by the block reward.
I wouldn't be to worried if AM temporarily had 60% of hashrate,  They would NOT double-spend,,, because $$$.

If 50BTC goes down, do you think miners will wait for it to come back ? Falling-back to solo or switching pools is near instantaneous.

Well it does.  Your bogus claim was transaction times doubling.  That would require them to have 50% of network hashing power AND have that hashing power goes to 0.0 MH/s.  Anything less wouldn't be a doubling.  Actually with the network exceeding difficulty by about 10% it would require more like a 60% drop in network hashrate to double transactions.



How exactly would you have a disaster recovery site.  Build double the hashing capacity and leave half of it offline forever?  Yeah that will work.


What large operations would they shutdown?  Mining operations in foreign countries?  Mining pools (which would quickly be replaced by other mining pools)?

The USB devices will NEVER pay for themselves let alone make any money. Use a mining calculator it will be show you this. Since the last difficulty adjustment the network hash rate has gone from around 140 to 180 ths - this represents a 25% increase in difficulty at the next change which mining calculators can not predict - they were working on an average 13% increase.

The bank bailouts did not just impact on the western world it had a global impact.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.
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The issue is this - there will be no small pools because they will have all closed down as everyone has moved to the bigger ones. Who is going to keep running a mining pool with sufficient infrastructure to cope with the load if one of the bigger ones goes down and 99% of the time have no miners using it? They are not going to pay ongoing hosting costs if there is no revenue being generated.

I disagree about mining solo - Very few people will burn insane amounts of electricity for months on end with NO guarantee of solving a block - hence the reason mining pools came into existence. There may be a hardcore minority of around 10% that might but the rest will not.

It does not have to go down to 0 MH/s - just look at the charts they publish - It looks like a mountain range which is not the sign of a stable infrastructure if anything the swings have increased in size and become more erratic. I guarantee they do not have a disaster recovery site which given their position is really quite astonishing.

There is not one central bank that controls 1/4 of the global money supply! Yet it is OK for one company to control 1/4 of the bitcoin money supply. What happens when another corporation controls another 1/4 or 1/3.

What guarantees are there that they will stop at 1/4 - their word? What is stopping them going to 45% or 65% - People will just argue when the time comes "it is safer that way" less chance of a 51% attack. A 51% attack is not the issue any longer there is a far bigger problem - the State.

Since I created this post the game has changed somewhat and Governments are now looking to interfere - California's cease and desist order against the Bitcoin Foundation - that is just the start. When they only have to shut down a few big operations then what will happen. The network would grind to halt overnight with the difficulty stuck at some astronomical level everyone would just give up. The time to mine 2016 blocks at 10th/s with the difficulty at a few hundred million would take years for the difficulty to readjust. Who is going to wait weeks for a transaction to be processed?

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

ASICMiner has ~ 1/4 of global hashing power it is simply not possible for them to double transaction times by shutting down.  Also how often (as a % of uptime) has ASICMiner shutdown (as in hashing power down to 0.0 MH/s)?

It is hard work trying to have any sensible discussion - you are either called a troll or no one actually provides anything concrete and just repeats arguments that have no basis.

No one has provided any satisfactory answer to why the network is not going to be more centralised and how that is not a greater threat to the stability of Bitcoins than having a massively distributed network.

I am not even sure what that means - what point are you trying to make?

Lol, how many miners were there when diff was 1? 1000?

The same way it was a conspiracy theory for a large number of banks to collapse at the same time in 2008 and governments forcing tax payers to bail them out? Ask anyone in 2007 if that could have happened and they would have given the same response as what you just posted.

You do not understand how mining works - when everyone has ASIC's the difficulty will rise accordingly and therefore make no difference to the centralisation. When the difficulty is 500 million how are you going to mine solo with an ASIC?

Either I am missing something or I was totally right with my previous post You are not mining any cryptocurrency are you?

I read the whole thread and I must say I am a bit worried that so few people could really address rovchris's points (like this one for example ) I may have expected some experts or bitcoin developers to comment here, but maybe they are too busy to read forums and develop at the same time... Some of you did not even bother to read the first post (like Rassah). That alone makes my trust in bitcoin go down

Also where are the p2pool fans? Can somebody just quickly summarize to me why p2pool did not take over normal pools thus solving this problem? My guess is that it is simply because of smaller profits for miners. Am I right? I tried using p2pool to mine LTC and it was almost unusable because of the transaction fees nullifying the profits. Not sure how it works with BTC though...

What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

I am all for Bitcoins and have spent significant sums of money but I am concerned that it is going to be futile if things carry on the way they are.

Imagine for one moment if you were in government and a significant part of the money supply is moving out of your control - what are you going to do - sit around and just let it happen? If you then had to stop the proliferation of Bitcoins you would target the big players and shut them down and we are making it all the easier for them.

  

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.

I hear you man - but VISA have redundancy - multiple data centres - disaster recovery etc etc.

Look at this chart - http://www.asicminercharts.com/ these guys can not even maintain consistent throughput - there processing fluctuates by 50% which is massive.

The other issue is - if governments legislate against Bitcoin which is looking increasingly likely and mining has been centralised by a few companies - how easy is it for them to shut down a few companies as opposed to hundreds of thousands of miners?

Look at the Bit Torrent network - this has survived because there is no centralisation and there are no big companies that have a large stake holding of the network throughput - any company that did try like Napster was blown out of the water in no time at all. If bit torrent had been more centralised it would have been history a long time ago.

What a constructive remark - The key element of the post was "what are your thoughts on this".