Topic: Bitcoin - we have a problem. - page 7. (Read 14570 times)

Prove is the money. If one of the biggest pools goes down, other, in fact, will be delighted (not for public). This mean a significant increase of their profits. They will make decent investments in infrastructure and will be vying with each other to offer their services to freed miners. Big pools holders isn't poor people, they have some money for business expanding in suitable moment.
In addition, there is p2pool.

It's foolishness to rubbish this point of view. Yes the OP is probably talking with a very pessimistic view but everything he has said is plausible, although highly unlikely.

Mate I do worry - Prove that the other pools can cope with that sudden influx of load. The most likely scenario is they will head for the next biggest pool (BTCGuild?) and then that will go down like a house of cards and as you go down the chain each pool can cope with less load. Its quite feasible that the miners themselves will accidentally knock the pools off line as their fail overs are handled automatically by the mining software.

Also prove that the smaller pools are not going to die off further as the difficulty increases and their hashing capacity does not grow accordingly .

BTCMine.com is a perfect example - I will be amazed if that is still around in a few weeks. Currently its at 10 days and still has not found a block and could possibly go to 30 days based on 90 million shares which is what one round was on Slush's pool. Those miners will leave because they can not go that length of time without a payment. They will almost certainly move to Slush's pool as it is the only other score based pool. Ill be honest I already have.

Any large company that would like to involve themselves with Bitcoins will be looking at these factors. I can tell you categorically that they will not touch BTC with issues as big as these.

The other issue is - with a few big pools it is much easier to compromise the network.

You may only have to DDOS 5 sites and then everything stops. Where as if it was highly decentralised by solo miners it is impossible to DDOS.

Bitcoins have morphed into something never envisaged by Satoshi and that is quite clear if you read the whitepaper. One of the founding features was decentralisation.

None of you guys have made it clear why the network is not going to get more centralised!

Is it not the pool operator that dictates the transaction fee and not the miner?

If one or even few of the biggest pools goes down, miners will switch to another pools. They will survive, don't worry, rovchris. In addition, there is p2pool.
Increasing of transactions time is also not a big problem - if it be perceptible, users will begin to add more fee to their transactions which would entail increasing of miners profit. This mean more hashing power in the network. So the problem will be solved.

It only opens it up to a wider group of people that can't do math well enough to realize they'll never even break even.

Dude come on ? Just because it has not happened yet it will not happen. That is insane.

To give you an analogy - because my house has never burnt to the ground it is therefore not a problem and will never burn down?

The potential is always there.

Give me some real facts why it could not happen.

Pooled mining has been going on for almost three years now, and the problem you are describing has never happened.  Therefore, it is not really a problem worth worrying about.

Man if 50btc goes down how many other mining pools could cope with that surge of users - It is quite likely the other pools would be knocked out from the sudden increase in traffic further compounding the problem.

Plus with all the DDOS protection they now run - it is quite likely it would kick in as it would see the sudden increase as an attack.

So at 10 min intervals it can take 1 hour every 48 - OK was not aware of that. Using the same argument if the interval jumped to 30 mins then every 48 hours it could take over 3 hours?

Statistically, even if hashing is at the target rate then once every 48 hours there will be at least one block that took an hour to solve.  Can you remember even one time that this was a significant problem for you?

And if one pool suffers technical issues those miners will just switch to another pool.

As far as this being a problem if hashing capacity drops below target and that persists for a couple weeks ... there is little difference between six confirmations taking an hour versus six confirmations taking two hours.

With most of the costs for ASIC mining being fixed (i.e., for the purchase of the equipment), there is little reason why hashing capacity would suddenly drop dramatically.  

Single click and it was a miner - those were the days

The trouble is dude we need more than hope here we need some concrete facts.

Unless someone can come up with some phenomenal explanation of why this will not happen it makes the BTC game a very high risk venture.

I will be honest I am very close just to throwing the towel in even though I really enjoy the whole BTC arena. But its long term prospects are not good.

I have a feeling many other small miners are in the same boat and not because of the long term prospects because of the ridiculous difficulty level and the inability to get their hands on ASIC's as they are such an exclusive technology and will be for the foreseeable future.

Agreed.  It is probably -the- issue.

I can only hope you're wrong.

As I'm sure you know, the client was also (with a single click) a miner.  Obviously things got out of hand somewhere along the line

Man that is a very tall order and we both know that they will not do that.

For example on another thread about "regulating bitcoins" the biggest argument for regulating them is they will increase massively in value - even though it would destroy everything they stand for.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2522678

I suggest reading through and then you will realise the gravity of the situation.

This is what you are up against - personal gain first and to hell with everyone else. With attitudes like that there is really no hope.

This is indeed true.  

But do not users with a healthy balance of coins owe it to themselves (for the long term value of their coins) to help in this goal, by

1) running a full node  
2) mining  
3) supporting the new/smaller pools

..?

So we agree this is quite a big issue.

I am going to put my neck on the line hear and state this is going to cause the downfall of bitcoins.

I don't understand when they developed it why they did not make the difficulty fixed and vary the reward to maintain the steady creation of coins. This way you can mine solo.

^ I don't see a way around this hurdle. 

It is impossible to enforce - pool operators want as many users as possible so they can collect more fees. Even if most agree - some will not and lots of users will end up on them because the payouts are more consistent.

The trouble is we are greedy bastards by our very nature

Perhaps we should target, e.g. 10 or 20 pools, each with no more than 10% or 5%.  Heck 50 or 100 pools with 2% or 1% share.

Surely that's would help and is achievable.

And that is the problem man - nothing will stop centralisation at this rate. When the difficulty reaches 1 billion there will only be a few pools with enough hashing power to solve anything.

It will be so far out of reach of the ordinary man they might as well be a central bank

Agreed, but it does open it up mining to a wider group of people with, e.g. a notebook, or a MAC, etc. that aren't running GPUs.

I know it's not brilliant, but it's a step in the right direction.  And I see a new pool being setup which is also needed - diversity in equipment and pools.

I'd love to get a 28nm ASIC setup but realistically can't expect a large percentage of users to buy these.  So the centralization looks set to continue...

Dude this does not change the market share - and people will still point them at mining pools.

Bitcoins by their very nature cause centralisation because of the difficulty.

Put it like this - if you could mine solo and still receive the same reward that you do from a mining pool you would not use the mining pool.