Topic: Bitcoin - we have a problem. - page 6. (Read 14570 times)

I followed this thread with great interest and I was glad you kept coming back to the question. Does hashman's answer resolve it? If so, that's great and it leaves a useful trail. If not... it's better to hammer this stuff out by discussing hypotheticals than to have it appear unexpectedly in the wild.
 

Thank you for explaining the difficulty / coin value issue - it is like trying to get blood out of a stone round here for informative information

the fee structure would kick in if any of those catastrophic disaster scenarios happened, drive the fee price up offsets the loss in hash power. The ASICs right now are an issue, driving the difficulty up that high and dropping it all of a sudden would increase the time for a block by 100%. If it is known immediately, the fee structure can be implemented to saturate the blocks in the 20 minute period that will occur for 3 weeks; doubling the transaction per block would increase the fees within a day drawing reserve power from hibernating miners the moment they heard the news.

Nice idea.  The problem is that then the block creation rate would increase out of control, you'd have way too much orphaning and block chain bloat.  Take a closer look at Liquidcoin experiment.

And to the OP, there are a couple solutions.  One, is that miners have a bit more control over which pools they mine for than say, citizenry can decide which country to live in.  If a pool does get out of control and start messing with fee structures and TX insertion, people can move without totally abandoning their life.  Two, is that centralized massive pools still won't be able to keep the money supply hidden and create new coins like the central banks have done.  That will be for the next payment layer on top of bitcoin    

interesting discussion. From what i understand, the mining rigs are already distributed, only the pools, which essentially are just software, are centralised. So if a pool goes down, surely they can just switch servers? What am i not getting?

Good god, read what I said above. You are so wrong it isn't even funny.

It would only help if you had enough hashing power to actually solve a block, otherwise you would have to join a mining pool and then we don't actually solve the problem it just makes it worse.

Bitcoin by its very design is causing centralisation.

I realise there are people that will blindly accept the Bitcoin is the greatest thing ever but this is a fundamental flaw.

Fast forward 1 year when the difficulty could be near a billion then what is going to happen?

Simple truth is this - if you counted the number of mining pools that were around 1 year ago and compare that number today there are probably less than half. Its not difficult to draw a graph and extrapolate how many mining pools will be around in 1 years time.

At the moment Bitcoins are not too centralised but 1 year - 2 years its going to be a mess.

Would people running these asic miners as lone miners help, even if they never profit?

How much would it cost for me to get a basic miner I can plug into my router and just let it sit there, for no other purpose than to help in the event a pool goes down? Or is that just not needed?

I think the OP and most people here do not understand how pools work and how they can work to create 100% uptime.

Coming from experience in the web hosting industry, there is something we call "cloud hosting" where instead of being hosted on one server, you are actually on a network of servers, therefor if even 50% of the servers were to say, shut off, you are still online.

Also think about how Google and Facebook operate, they use similar networking methods.

The answer to what you believe is a problem is simple---to use cloud web hosting/computing that basically guarantees 100% uptime..

The pools could also have server backup after server backup meaning possibly one server goes down/breaks a new one takes over.. You have so many methods of creating pools that would never go down.

5-10 years ago this would be a problem, but not today. -- we haz da technology! 

If you are still having issues understanding cloud hosting..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1269145

/endthread

Clearly the solution is to distribute currency in a pyramid-like fashion to achieve this goal.

Thats an FPGA. Bitfury ASIC chip is being tested and seems to be much more efficient than any other chip available. First batch device shipment is planned for August. 120Gh/s at about 100 Watt

Greedy bastard by our culture, not nature.. a change in our personal value must occur.. 

BitFury !  As I read on their web pages :

110 Gh/s overall performance
10 kW power consumed
Under $100'000 estimated cost to build

Wow, as power hungry as a furnace, priced like a small house, for less Gh/s than 2 Avalon

Is it serious ?

If this is really a crippling problem, it seems like there would be a relatively easy solution to it: release an update that makes the difficulty adjustment happen more frequently.  Thus with this flood of ASICs come on the market, maybe it'll adjust in a day or two rather than two weeks.  Wouldn't that just totally solve the problem?

I used to feel that way, but then I grew to realize that Bitcoin, much like any other technology, is ideologically neutral. Anyone is free to use it however they see fit, and boy is it versatile! While a majority of us in this forum likes to see it as a tool to more freedom from central powers, it can very well be used by central powers to achive level of financial control impossible today. It's not a popular thing to point out around here. In Bitcoin's defense, the public nature of the ledger does enable tracking, but it enables it for everyone. But I digress. The point is, Bitcoin can be useful in many ways, and you might not like all of them.

Think radio, or printing press, or the Internet. These are similarly enabling, revolutionary technologies, that throughout history went through different phases, from freedom-enabling, to propaganda, to education, to surveilance, to central control, to revivals, back-and-forth... Ideas that Bitcoin is based on are no different. It will be whatever people make it to be, and you and I have only so much influence in the big scheme. Ultimately, do what you think is right, and don't worry. Mining included.

That was a good response man - but do you not feel that making it specialised goes against why it was created in the first place? The more specialised it becomes the fewer people can get involved and then we end up with a situation similar to the current banking model where a select few are in control?



                                                                   

Who is whining?

The amount of whining around here is just amazing.

People bitch about hash rate going up causing the difficulty to go up. (That was last week).

Now that the hash rate has gone down, they bitch about the time between blocks going up. (That's apparently this week's bitch).

Then people complain about the price going up, the price going down, the percent of the network of this or some other pool.

Not to mention delays of X company shipping Y vaporware ASIC crap.

You guys are worse than the hormonal induced fertility forums my wife used to visit.

And let me tell you, when you have women stimulated by 10 times the normal level of hormones, they bitch a lot.

You guys take the cake, however.

Sheesh...

No. It's more like you are saying that every building is doomed because you just realized that it might happen that firefighter crews are busy at two other building which are on fire at the same time, and it happens that the remaining crew gets stuck because of a mechanical breakdown of the truck en route to the site. That is insane. My argument was not insane.

Why it could not happen: for the same reasons it hasn't happened up to this point, even though pools were hacked, DDoSed to death, huge farms of GPU and FPGA and now ASIC miners came online. It hasn't happened because in reality bitcoin mining is much more resilient, and network does not come down "like a house of cards" when a major miner goes offline.
Sure, if Bitcoin continues to grow, mining will inevitably become a specialized (but not necessarily centralized) industry. There will be no more hobby miners, much like most of radio today is a regulated big business. But we are not there yet. There will be proprietary, closed-source ASIC miners competing with each others, there will be large co-operative companies where you or I can join, there will be Bitcoin businesses who also mine simply because they have vested interest in securing the network, there will be a rush to cheap electricity once technological bottlenecks are reached, there will be technological breakthroughs, there will be ASIC heaters in cold regions...

It's good that you are worrying, but man you are worrying about the wrong things.

Man what you have just said reinforces the fact that pools will become more centralised. If the cost of setting up a pool increases to the point where you need that level of redundancy - the barrier to entry is raised even higher further pushing out the little guys and consolidating the power in even fewer hands.

Guys you are not convincing me.