Topic: Change Bitcoin to Asic Resistant (Read 405 times)

I totally agree with you. Satoshi himself was anti-mining centralization. He clearly wanted more users to be involved in mining. He even warned against gpu mining.
 I was a little confused by some of his comments on mining though... It is as if he wasn't aware that mining with multiple CPUs/GPUs was bound to happen. He probably wanted it to happen slowly?  Unfortunately it progressed too quickly from gpu mining to ASICs.

Below is his quote on mining with CPU/GPU :
 
— Satoshi Nakamoto

It's too late to change. Imagine all the hardware now that is not going to be able to mine bitcoin. ALtcoins will go up like made if the sha256 algo. It would be interesting though since bitcoin might take an initial tumble due to no miners for a while. So the value of the altcoin won't go up right away. There is simply just too much invested right now in hardware to make this a viable option.

Plus a POW change would require a hard fork. A hard fork that would not only amputate the network of full nodes, but a hard fork that would amputate the network of hashing power.

What you fail to see is how the market forces will fix this issue on their own. While bitcoin value may keep climbing, bitcoin mining is doomed to become unprofitable, and the largest operations are the first ones to close. Asic efficiency plays an important role to this, more and more hashrate makes it harder for everyone to continue, starting with the countries with the most expensive electricity. But some years down the road, both factors will play against bitcoin mining, especially large operations.

See, soon only 100TH Asic miners will be worth running, perhaps at 7nm or 4nm, those might eat a quarter less electricity than the earlier offerings but that's still a lot of power for ever diminishing returns. What you saw last year, people quitting at 3k bitcoin prices, will repeat again. People will find it impossible to mine at 6k or even 9k price which will return to at some point, and then back to profitability a little more, but every time less and less until its no longer profitable to mine with electricity price above 1¢ the kw/h.

A miner who fails to see this and keeps expanding like crazy instead of diversifying into different income sources or thinking in shrinking operations and going renewable energy (now when they can), are going to get hit hard. I can imagine some Chinese and Russians getting burned by this...

This is going to return to hobby miners, like those who don't mind wasting money running a few miners, or those miners who invested in renewable energy sources now when it was still profitable, instead of burning all their money in more miners or other energy wasting ideas (everytime you expand, you need to spend more and more in infrastructure and climate control).

You see, its like the Austrian school of economics. The best thing you can do, is do nothing. Don't intervene.

I understand your opinion and it really is true, the ASIC technology for mining somehow supports centralization for large companies, I consider this to be something inevitable, because any cryptocurrency project will always face the same thing and that is that the people who more money you have, you can buy a lot of mining equipment or a large volume of tokens, so I do not think a change in technology will change that market pattern.

those are "pools" not miners so they don't exactly control the mining power and the network. the minute they start showing any shadiness miners are going to pull their hashrate from their pool and move it to another place. not to mention that it can have legal precautions for them.

as for the topic of ASIC resistance, go ahead and introduce another algorithm that is superior to bitcoin's PoW first and then talk about changing to that. but as long as you don't have that algorithm, discussion about such change is moot.

you mean "remove" difficulty entirely and that would require a ton of fundamental changes to the protocol to achieve that and somehow link block generation time with transaction volume. otherwise if you "freeze" the difficulty number to some fixed amount you are practically assuming hashrate is never going to change again and if it does, everything would be ruined!

While I agree the electrical use of the bitcoin network is something to be concerned about I doubt anyone is keen on changing from ASIC.
I do think more effort is needed to ensure bitcoin is not a massive pollution source better machine with more efficiency are what is required but this may take another 10 years to reach where we need to be.

Another effort I feel is missed out on in bitcoin is Green energy.



The African nations really could be green-energy-zones of the world but we all know that fossil fuel company's won't let there grip go of the industry why is bitcoin not aiming to make the sun power the network I know there has been much good work done by some members of the forum in this regard but there is wind power and wave power that is yet to be fully tapped or the potential for the use of them in bitcoin is massive.

"If it's not broken, don't fix it."

I see lately the revival of the old proposals: "ASIC resistant Bitcoin" and "PoS Bitcoin".
I don't know why people think that such changes would be good, really. It would anger the miners. It would clearly create a ETH/ETC like "war", where, because of the bigger security of the network and the similarity to Satoshi's proposal, the ASIC-PoW fork will become (actually remain!) the true Bitcoin, while these proposal will become altcoins.
And I think that there are such forks already - at least for ASIC resistance - proving that the idea is not viable.

Also, as said, ASIC resistance is achieved by constantly changing the algo, like Monero does. Just Monero's anonymous nature may help a little with that; on transparent blockchains such changes may be the recipe for disaster.

Are you telling that these pool operators will kill the golden goose, not everyone will be that stupid as they have invested millions for mining and their aim is to make profit and we have ten years of history now with bitcoin can you showcase one instance that the pools did anything of that sort to jeopardize the entire network. I am sure you will not have an answer for that  .

Not everyone needs to mine bitcoin to be a decentralized currency, equality is not attained everywhere in society and that is how it functions, so the idea of everyone running a node in their basement is a joke, if you are willing to support the network spend some dime to do so rather than having a complete change in the process.

It's not like major changes could and would happen overnight, and if such an idea be proposed, you know that it will ultimately be the miner's choice on where would this network move to, so it's a dire effort all in all. Also, the network is heavily dependent from ASICs for processing everything, and while that may seem to be implying something negative, it has well protected the integrity of bitcoin transactions for the past 10 years, and is not, in any way, prone to any 51% attack that could potentially destroy bitcoin (hi bitcoin gold), not unless miners banded together and decide to screw it up--which they will not do as it will only cost them money in the long run.

it is incredibly difficult to convey a satirical message in text without making it incredibly obvious. it's pretty easy to miss to be fair. however, there's no basis for converting bitcoin holdings to its altcoin forks in the hypothetical scenario, nor have you provided any explanation for your thought process. care to explain?

an interesting idea, but personally, I think there has to be some correlation between the difficulty and the network's total hash rate; as long as there is a reasonable amount to be made from mining blocks, people will keep buying miners to increase their odds of mining a block / their share form the pool. if we end up basing the difficulty purely off other variables (tx volume + fees in this case) we might end up with an incredibly disproportionate difficulty and drastic changes to the bitcoin network.

How about freezing the difficulty once the block rewards have finished. This could lead to the block generation time being linked to transaction volumes and fee rewards. This could also help with scaling.

Both of you probably missed the subtle satire in my post. It definitely was not an advice. But, if someone proposes to change the Bitcoin protocol to be ASIC resistant, then they will be better off by converting their own BTC holding to BTG or BCD.

How do you make a protocol 100% Asic resistance? The Chinese engineers will eventually find a way to bypass these restrictions and they will just develop something that would exploit some loophole in the code and then monopolize the whole mining section. 

In any way, most people will resort to GPU mining and the GPU manufacturers will develop multi core GPUs that would be specifically targeted at Bitcoin mining. The demand for these cards will increase and it would become prohibitively expensive to buy these cards. 

The guy with the most money, win again. 

Here's a good detailed read for you:


Wherever you may stand on the matter though, it should generally be agreed upon that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" is a good saying to stand upon, especially on matters of massive scale like Bitcoin.

first of all there is absolutely nothing wrong with being ASIC mineable. if you are unhappy about how hashrate distribution is then start investing your money and own hashrate to mine bitcoin and help it become more decentralized than it is right now.

secondly there is no such thing as ASIC resistance. somewhere in 2011 when LTC forked as "ASIC resistance" with its scrypt algorithm, everyone has been coming up with other algorithms and have been claiming to be "ASIC resistance" and none of them has ever been capable of reaching that.
apart from that, the problem that you are referring to as "ASIC resistance" has nothing to do with ASICs, it is about centralization that is caused by some parties having invested more money and having higher hashrate. no matter what algorithm you mine the coin with, the same parties can invest more money and gain the same control (that includes PoS coins too)

and finally despite  what the advertisement of altcoins tells you most of the alternative algorithms are so much inferior to PoW that bitcoin is using whether by design or by security flaws or financial design.

bitcoin gold the fork that was 51% attacked quite successfully? yeah how about not.

except these are just pools, and the pools do not control the miners and where those miners point their hashing power to. if the pools did decide to band together (which i personally think is extremely unlikely) and launch a coordinated attack on the network, the miners can choose to stop pointing their miners to the pool. The way you try to explain to this is only a half truth, in reality it's a lot more decentralized than you're trying to make it seem.

What kind of atrocious advice is this?  BTG has already suffered a successful hashrate and double-spend attack because their hashing power is far more centralised than BTC's.  Hence my earlier comment on how changing algorithms has a direct impact on the security of the network.  It creates power vacuums that are very easily filled by malicious users.

BTG?  More like BTGTFO.  

There are already 2 ASIC resistant forks of Bitcoin, namely Bitcoin Gold aka BTG and Bitcoin Diamond aka BCD. So, instead of changing Bitcoin to Asic Resistant, it is better to change your BTC holding to BTG & BCD.