Topic: Complete dezentralisation of mining possible ? (Read 7298 times)

Ah! I wasn't aware of that.  Thanks for the pointer.
It looks like with some effort, a USB 2.0 dongle could reach 0.5 TH/s (consuming 2.5 watts)
That is, 1.8 KWH / month (assuming 24h/24h operations - unrealistic!), that is roughly 4 USD energy costs per month - less than your bank fees!
If such a dongle was available, it is likely that many bitcoin (and other alts!) users would purchase and use it, as it guanrantees their own security (ie protection against 51% attacks / other forms or attacks...), this would decentralize mining effectively.
Let us suppose that such a dongle would sell for 20 USD, profit 5 USD.
When motherboard manufacturers will realize that they can get enter this market easily by providing it on board, at cost 10 USD, profit 2 USD, they will do...

So the question is: how to lower the barrier of entry to mining and make it affordable for the masses.

If the (current) bitcoin protocol has been foreseen to cope with tenths of millions of miners, that should work and is only a question of time.

It has existed since years ago. Gekkoscience do have a USB miner that outputs 20+ GH or so.
Why would they? If consumers do not want it, they wouldn't think of implementing it. It really seems like you are underestimating the additional cost and benefit of companies actually doing this. Its really pointless to put a single chip into a device.
Alright fine. Then how about the cooling? How about the cost of companies actually purchasing chips to stuff it into their device which 50% of the users wouldn't use?

It's not within reach. Even if you were to implement chips in the device which every Bitcoin user is using, it would hardly match the current hashpower that most farms have. Furthermore, the hashpower will not be constant, it will fluctuate ALOT and Bitcoin will experience slow block times at certain time of the day. Anyway, it is rather hard for the protocol to be changed such that only those who mine can use Bitcoin.

I gave you an example of a good commercial existing chip to explain that there is no need for billions of users.
That chip is using 14nm technology (and is less than 20mm2 btw), so by far not the most optimized thing that could be achieved with the most recent technologies.
We are not far from the 2.5watts of USB2.0 for example, which opens the door for simple mining using USB dongles.
You can also be quite certain that big players could design faster/smaller/more efficient chips.

It looks to me like completely decentralized mining is within reach.  Laptops consuming 50 watts for example could easily accomodate 5 watts overhead.

So, the question is more about the network related issues, and the underlying bitcoin mining protocol requirements.

Read this paper (which discusses the technique), comment, lets talk about it:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/teto-trustless-total-order-for-transactions-in-a-dag-based-cryptocurrency-1992827

Honestly, I don't know why you have refused to listen to my comments on this. No phone or laptop will ever be able to support this. The power consumption is way too high. Less than an hour of mining and your battery will be drained.

What do you think ASIC chips are? LEGOS? Do you seriously think that anyone can smack a big ASIC chip into a device with a LOW TDP design in mind? The price for the design could very well cost more than several HUNDRED thousands and the phone would each cost more than $100 extra and not everyone would use it. Honestly, no one would buy it.

Its not. Why the hell would it be? Decentralised mining will NEVER be realistic.

You can either prune the chain or use a pool.  I don't see this as a major issue.

1 small thing, what about the full blockchain size of 120gb + does it need to be installed on my phone to mine?
Otherwise, with 2 billions of phone's sold world wide the is a potention in it 

The BM1387 ASIC chip is capable of ca 0.07 TH/s and consumes roughly 5 watts.
You would need some 70 millions of those installed to match the current total network hash rate.  No need for billions or users.

Phone and PC/laptop manufacturers could add an ASIC to their boards for example.
Or dongles could be made (possibly combining OTP generation with mining killing two birds with one stone...).
Quite honestly the "price" to pay (ie device + energy costs) is well worth it !

I believe that the major issue would be rather on the network bandwidth / latency side of things.
I do not know if bitcoin has been designed with such a heavily decentralized mining in mind.

i will give it a read.

I see some good ideas here. remember that many great things nowadays were considered impossible many many years ago

BM1387 ASIC inside the Antminer S9: 189 pcs per unit, each unit 14 TH/s
So, each BM1387 is capable of ca 0.07 TH/s, consumption roughly 5 watts as well
To achieve the current 5.000.000 TH/s, you would need 71 millions of those.
Assume 50% mobile users with one chip, and 50% desktop users with two chips, that means a completely fully decentralized network of roughly 50 millions users.
The issues would seem to be more on the network bandwidth / latency etc side than on the ASIC side I believe.

Do remember to factor in: the additional cost of miniaturizing the chips such that the performance of the phone is not affected, the heat output is eliminated, every company in the world is willing to redesign their board. Honestly, if you were to launch a phone with this feature, the only people that may even be interested (not necessarily buying) in it are hardcore Bitcoin enthusiast. It simply doesn't make sense for manufacturers to do this especially if they don't gain anything, neither do most people that is using the phone.
Nice. Divide that by 750 and that might be 1/2 of the Bitcoin users.

Yeah I forgot this: In comparison, a phone's battery is about 3000mAH.

150pcs of A3233-q48 are fitted in a 1TH/s Avalon Miner.
See https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a3233q48-avalon-3rd-generation-sha256-processor-28nm-523309
Cost per unit is ca 0.1 USD
Consumption is about 5 watts

So it seems that if each user/miner would be equipped with one chip, the number of users/miners necessary to achieve the same hash power as of today would be 5000000 TH/s * 150 = 750 millions.  That is much less than the number of facebook users !

Hence, removing the competition for ASIC manufacturers. Open sourced does not mean that they will follow that design in their ASIC.
Uhh. No. There is definitely some overhead to this. It isn't possible for you to fit an ASIC chip into your phone together with your CPU. The hashpower is negligible too.
No rewards=Lesser people having incentive to mine = easily attacked. You cannot assume that there would be 100Million miners at any time. If you can fit it into a phone, the will be very insignificant due to the low TDP design.
No No No. If every node IS a mining node, everyone would have to fork out their resources to the network. If I have a phone and I want to use Bitcoin, do I have to risk overheating my phone just to use it? The idea is frankly impossible.

Maybe the PoW function should be made as simple as possible, so that ASICs can be devised for it very easily.
The design of such ASIC could be open sourced - removing the barrier of entry, ensuring a level playing field.
Then, every device on the planet can easily be fitted with these ASICs and the overhead of doing would be negligible for HW manufacturer.
I do not think it would be necessary to reward miner in a heavily decentralized scenario (say, > 100M miners) - the fact that you would get secure transactions for the cost of the energy you spend seems to be enough of incentive.
Then, I also believe that any user node should (must) be a mining node.
That is, it should not be possible to use the system without contributing to mining.

Last year I finally got around to writing up the system I was alluding to in this old thread. It proposes creating a new consensus mechanism inspired by the core values of bitcoin but solving the major problems inherent in the current bitcoin concensus model:

* centralisation of mining
* transaction throughput
* confirmation times

The key to solving the problem is to create a trustless, total order for all transactions in a system where every user is the only person who can mine their own transactions.

The paper is a draft with all the proofs missing and there is still an open question related to the claim that miners are incentivised to include uncle references. With that said, I think it could inspire some debate and maybe be useful in general. In any case, I think it's better to share this work even in it's current incomplete state than to let it vanish into obscurity.

https://github.com/wildbunny/docs/blob/master/T.E.T.O-draft.pdf

Cheers, Paul.

It will never be possible just think about it, those who have the big mines are the one centralized mines in the world, then how can you hope for anything else?

Mining is profitable because the miner is rewarded for every created block by the assignment of a certain amount of coins (fiat coins, transaction fees). The rewards therefore consist in (a) a direct financial gain that is (b) more or less proportional to the number of mined coins. If we were able to build an incentive scheme for mining that acts in an indirect manner and doesn’t generate profit on its own, we might be able to put an end to commercial mining and decentralize the blockchain.

To that end, we could leverage transaction fees in a completely different way than most existing cryptocurrencies do. Instead of allowing the miner to collect the fees paid by other users as a financial reward, we should shift the focus on the transaction fees that a miner has to pay when making a transaction himself. Let’s assume that each newly created address must pay a fixed percentage of the transferred amount to get his transaction acknowledged by the chain. This constitutes a financial burden that we can lower by a certain rate, every time a valid block is mined by the given address. Hence, after mining a couple of blocks, the address will benefit from very low transaction fees.

With such a scheme, users who want to actively use their address for sending payments have a strong incentive to mine blocks, even though they don’t receive any direct reward by creating the block itself. On the other hand, the system doesn’t offer any business opportunity for commercial miners who are seeking profit out of mining. The only possible thing they might try is creating and selling accounts with low transaction fees to new users. But since accounts can only be transferred by revealing the corresponding private key, such transactions will always be very risky.

Another twist to the system would please to users who stand on the receiving side of the transactions, like merchants. In addition to lowering the fees as a reward for every mined block, we could introduce an increasing fee discount linked to the receiver's address. So, when a sender wants to pay money to a receiver, he will end up paying the standard fee * sender's discount * receiver's discount. Both discounts will grow with every block created by the miner.

The drawback of the described incentive mechanism is the fact that due to the lack of professional miners it would need a lot of active users to reach the current hash rate of Bitcoin. Furthermore, every user would need to have a realistic chance of getting some discounts by mining on a regular PC or smartphone for some time. With the current block time of Bitcoin it's impossible to realise such a system for more than maybe a few 1000 users.

The Sybil problem is giving a voting stake to an inherently unlimited resource e.g. a pseudonymous identity.  The key is to not give votes to an unlimited resource i.e. give votes to proof of work or stake.  With RaiBlocks the only way to forge a vote would be to have the private key of an account with a balance.

Lol, you know that captchas are inherently broken right?  I can always build a decaptcha service if the product is worthwhile.  Granted captchas have their use as script kiddie deterrents but they don't work for things like Ticketmaster and they certainly wouldn't work for securing a currency. 

The Sybil problem is not solvable.  There is no way to distinguish and individual person -  dna, fingerprints, etc. can all be forged in tests or manipulated by testers. 

This can never work over the long run.  It will fail for the same reason that all socialist/communist schemes fail - hashrate costs resources.  If you create a system where resource/productivity investment is not rewarded based on a free-market curve, investment in resources and productivity lags behind he efficient frontier and generally declines until everyone is poor.  Attempting to "fix" that problem by setting an arbitrary minimum resource investment (presumably decided by some central committee) will forestall the ultimate failure of the system, but not prevent it.  Committees setting arbitrary investment/production quotas have historically proven to be horrendously unreliable market price setting mechanisms.

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