Topic: Hashers are not miners, and Bitcoin network doesn't need them. - page 3. (Read 6824 times)

Any suggestions on how we convince people to become smart miners instead of stupid hashers?

Many of us have been banging our head against this wall for years. After a while one grows tired of banging their head against a wall.

I don't think "force" is the correct way to get people to look out for their own best interests. Unfortunately, people are good at ignoring their own best interests.

Bump..




Why is 'centralization of mining' not the no.1 topic that the community is trying to address everyday?

I hope you're right and changes can be implemented successfully but I do worry that the users will not support it all. It's not that the systems can't be developed but the great unwashed will not support it for lack of understanding. I've been watching the development of CoinJoin and have always known that Gmaxwell is fighting the good fight but (because Bitcoin is a political instrument now) I don't believe he will ever get it included in the QT wallet. It will be interesting to watch it all unfold. In the end I suppose it really doesn't matter if Bitcoin can't be saved because entrepreneurs and exchange deceit have created a windfall for me that can simply be exchanged to a competing coin.   

Lemme cheer you up then.

I am amazed that we've seen the success we have without excessive pressure to expand beyond the point of no return.  This is, I believe, because things are becoming 'off-chain' more or less organically.  Of course I would love to see everything be on-chain from a 'purity' perspective except that it would put unhealthy pressure on the infrastructure, and might have undesired privacy issues.  Going 'off-chain' or 'multi-tiered' actually takes away relatively little of Bitcoin's strength because Bitcoin still serves as the foundation.

Further some of the best devs are on 'our side' and there is fighting chance that methods will be implemented which can make blacklist tracking impractical.  At least I believe that the case though I admit to not really studying things that hard lately.

Upshot:  All hope is not lost for Bitcoin proper, and even if it goes bye-bye (as something that certain of us can respect) it has opened the door for follow-ons to improve upon.  These are going to be very interesting times for we who are interested in political/monetary issues.

LOL Sorry, that came off wrong. I agree with much of what you say. I meant I can't believe that Bitcoin has become so fucked so fast and had so much promise in the beginning.

Ya, I know what you mean.  I find myself agreeing with the likes of you, Justusravinair, etc more than I wish as well.  What can a guy do?

'downfall' is a misnomer.  I imagine that Bitcoin will be highly 'successful' in terms of utilization rates, valuations, and user satisfaction even if it does end up being operated by a handful of multi-nationals and some blacklist authority is fully operational.  Most people don't care about that shit.  But yes, I anticipate that it is more likely than not that this is the eventual path that Bitcoin will follow.

Hopefully what will happen is that simultaneously a variety of 'free' (to some degree or another) distributed crypto-currencies will develop and be used by entities for the benefit of people who willingly choose to support said entities.

I do not think it would be technically challenging to have exchange services find the natural valuations of any number of crypto-currencies.  Nor do I think it should be very expensive for the end-user to use these exchanges.  It's simply not a tough problem because the 'correct' state is one which is arrived at by nature.  There is no 'wrong answer' to valuations provided that the exchanges can function free of interference.  A natural consequence would be that the alternate crypto-currencies which are well managed and representative of a popular entity will hold higher values.  The big sticking point here is that it must be recognized as a natural and global human right to freely participate in such interactions and it is far from a sure thing that our political leaderships will be very keen on this concept.

There will likely evolve a viable 'reserve' or 'balancing' crypto-currency.  This is basically the function that XRP wishes to play in that Ripple monetary system I think.  I had hopes that Bitcoin would fill that role, and it may not be to late because the transaction rate (block size) has not been increased yet and because there is still the potential to foul up blacklisting I think.  But I'm expecting it more likely than not at this point that Bitcoin will blow it's chances here.  As I've said before, the old fable about 'The Fisherman's Wife'* fits real well.

 * The Western one...not the pornographic Japanese one involving penetration by slimy multi-armed creatures...though come to think of it that could have some applicability to the situation with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Foundation and such as well...Hmmm...

Being online all the time is not the issue, as miners already have to do that. But p2pool installation, configuration, etc. is definitely an issue. If you want to help with decentralization, work on making that easier (along with the other issues I mentioned -- pretty charts, etc.)

Coin-which-does-not-exist-yet.

You seem to be predicting the eventual downfall of Bitcoin. Any guess about which alt will be the successor and how long it will take?

It is simply because p2pool involve another step of setting up a full node, which is not included in all the delivered ASIC miners. Being a full node need to download the whole blockchain and be online all the time, many people do not have that extra machine

If a miner receive his ASIC miners with a full node and p2pool configuration built in, then there will be more people running p2pool

I can't speak for everyone here, but I don't see where morals are involved at all. The entire issue revolves around profit. Short term profit versus long term sustainable profit.

I have no problem with hashers voluntarily selling their hashing power to centralized pools, but if that behavior results in those pools having the ability to attack Bitcoin, thus possibly destroying confidence in Bitcoin itself, those hashers are no longer going to be able to profit from selling hashing power.

Many people who hold large amounts of Bitcoin do so because of Bitcoin's decentralized nature. It would be wise to keep that in mind if your business is selling hash rate.

Satoshi did forsee a hashing power "arms race".

Makes a lot more sense to simply appropriate Bitcoin and it's existing credibility.  90%+ of the current users, and a higher percentage every day, consider Bitcoin credible because someone else does without much concept about why.

Anyway, if/when blacklists come to town, controlling the blacklist entity is effectively controlling Bitcoin.  For people who know how money works that is fairly obvious.  I'm sure that is why we see the Mellon family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellon_family) taking an active interest in getting out in front of this one.

This could be a reality if the big players in fiat transactions get involved. (Think paypal issuing an eBay coin or Visa issuing a real Visa coin). Expect massive advertising budgets, FUD, misinformation and the smear campaign against bitcoin and its users.

The majority of the public are not yet 'on board', there will be a war, the big players are just biding their time to strike.

We've gone around and around on this topic for years.  Some of the real old-timers and significant contributes who have had an actual relationship with 'Satoshi' have produced information which makes it pretty clear to me that the guy not only anticipated pretty significant centralization but welcomed it.  The whole "Moore's law" thing is just marketing material for technically deficient clowns/victims.

This puts me personally in a bind because I take the opposite view of how A-OK centralization is.  As a defensive mechanism I take the approach of simply disagreeing with Satoshi and not really considering him/them some sort of a mythical deity-like being.  Whoever he/they are/were they obviously had some good ideas and the implementation of Bitcoin is very impressive as an experimental first-cut.  Bitcoin has been one of the more disruptive technologies in probably forever and it's just getting started, but it will probably be mostly remembered as being sort of a spark that ignited a lot more I'll bet.

Yes, I should have used 'hasher' in place of 'miner'. Hasher doesn't really add anything to bitcoin, but a Miner does add value to bitcoin.

What I am trying to do is different, good definitions have a much greater chance to lead to intelligent discussion and this is why it is important to recognize difference between Miners and Hashers. Opening up a good discussion is a first step in finding solution.



Helping new people to understand the difference between Miners and Hashers is important. Miners are different from Hashers because they honor the social contract with Bitcoin community, in exchange for the reward they provide security to Bitcoin network. I think that development of tools that would make it easier for Hashers to become Miners would be a good thing.

This is a very thoughtful reply, I completely agree.

Believe it or not OP, miners, hashers, are in this to generate bitcoin. Do you believe anyone would buy a jupiter or example if they were told they might not generate a block, ever? People join one pool over another not because they are evil parasites, but because they're new and they don't yet understand everything there is to know about the protocol.

Wow, great post. Please, post more often.