Topic: Did pools scare Satoshi away? (Read 6287 times)

Satoshi went most of his BTC history not knowing if GPU mining would ever be. And not he never implemented his ideas of which there were many that counted on no GPU mining.


Following Dr. Goss is one of the fastest ways noobs in BTC historically can lose coins.

I expected Bitcoin to be a decentralized movement, not something effectively owned by a select few individuals. Maybe I misunderstood, and its supposed to be in the grips of such moralistic stalwarts like Luke Jr.

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I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less.  It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in.  The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.

At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms
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If the network becomes very large, like over 100,000 nodes, this is what we'll use to allow common users to do transactions without being full blown nodes.  At that stage, most users should start running client-only software and only the specialist server farms keep running full network nodes, kind of like how the usenet network has consolidated.
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The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions
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Satoshi knew pool mining was coming just like he knew gpu mining was coming. Back when I was mining with my laptop, the tiny bitcoin mining world was about to shrink to include only those willing to buy gpu's. Satoshi saw that as bad because it would mean that it would take longer for a large number of people to obtain bitcoin. There was a gentlemen's agreement to delay gpu mining.

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

Reading some of the earlier mailing list posts made by Satoshi back in 2008 and in his discussions with Hal Finney, it seems that his original vision of Bitcoin was quite different compared to the situation today. He did briefly mention ASICs as a possibility by referring to "specialized hardware" as well as the transition towards light wallets like Electrum and Multibit but he mostly referred to miners as being discrete individuals who mined using their personal computers. The only times where he talks about miners cooperating with each other to mine bitcoins is when botnets are discussed. Neither in his mailing list postings nor in his white paper does he ever mention the possibility of mining pools.


That quote is from a couple of months before he left the forum. Even then, he still held onto the belief that nodes are directly proportional to CPU power. Of course now we know that from the perspective of the network, someone that is mining on a pool is not considered a node and has no influence on the network. Instead, the influence lies in the operator of the mining pool.

Satoshi left this forum in late 2010. By then, the first pool (Slush's Pool) had opened and CPU mining was on it's way out. Perhaps Satoshi saw something that he had not anticipated and realizing what was coming, he panicked and decided to leave.

I expected Bitcoin to be a decentralized movement, not something effectively owned by a select few individuals. Maybe I misunderstood, and its supposed to be in the grips of such moralistic stalwarts like Luke Jr.

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

The concept of large scale mining pools was designed into the system from the very beginning.  Satoshi said so himself multiple times.  If it wasn't "what you expected to be", then you weren't paying attention.

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Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

Ummmmm what?

Ummmmm what?

I would argue that he would prefer the mining pools above either having a more central network of miners or having an overall lower network hashrate. Pool mining is much more decentralized then what many people understand. If a pool were to in any way act dishonestly or harmful to the network then the owners of the miners would likely promptly pull their equipment and redirect it to another pool

As people have already said, it was probably Gavin's involvement with the CIA that was the final straw, he warned people many times about other things, openly so, but the CIA thing is clearly what made him most wary, he's clearly someone who knows just how heavily protective governments are of their monopoly over currency.