Topic: Is Bitcoin infrastructure too Chinese? What should be done technically? - page 2. (Read 1188 times)

I have worked on this, PoCW, it is based on few tricks:
Trick 1: Miners not only generate nonce for block headers,  they are also free to commit to Merkle root by generating nonce for it.
Trick 2: Miners do not include coinbase transaction in the Merkle tree they commit to. This way validating a Merkle path happens once and shares are being validated in microsecond scales to be at least partially difficult (good) compared to what is dictated by the target.
Trick 3:  Coinbase transaction provides both proof for difficulty and reward distribution i.e. a coinbase consists of like thousands of wallet addresses and nonces that commit to the Merkle tree (coinbase excluded).

Many other details are also devised ,,,, Understanding that it is about a hard fork, I just decided to postpone implementation to a more complete package and a much stronger community support.
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First: It is absolutely a guaranteed secure decentralized schema because when you have tens of thousands of distinct almost anonymous human beings involved in solo mining bitcoin, there would be no practical chance for collusion or state control. Absolutely secure, no doubts.

Follow up: no technical obstacles, I just need more community support and contribution.

Definitively off tangent 

It is axiomatic, and I afraid you put yourself in shadowy borders of cryptocurrency movement once you begin revisioning its mission. Inflationary monetary disciplines which are meant to help 'relieving' market pressure (like fiat) are aligned with state control and government intervention eventually and it is not an option for us, rebels. Bitcoin is based on a resistance axiom, resistance against sate control, it is deflationary by definition and indisputably.

Also, I think it is too soon, to argue about how economic growth could ever be compatible with a true deflationary monetary system and we could relax and focus on preliminary phase: mass adoption.

Slightly off tangent, but I think for this we'd need to start from scratch either way.

Regardless of what growth potential I still expect from Bitcoin and some of the other cryptos I'm not convinced that a deflationary currency can work without an inflationary currency to relieve market pressure -- ie. without credit I'd expect economic growth to stagnate, and credit within a deflationary ecosystem is financial suicide. Note that I mean credit as in company bonds, not as in maxing out ones credit card.

I agree that pools are the biggest problem.

They logically result from the winner take all algo.

I postulate that in a theoretically ideal POW system, every single participant that contributes cycles/work towards securing the network would be rewarded in direct proportion to their contribution.  ie, even if they only calculate 1 hash during a given block and do not match target difficulty.

How to achieve that?  I have no idea.  haha.  But I'd like to see more discussion/brainpower/research on it.


First question:  Is the above scenario ideal/desirable for maximizing distribution of work across non-colluding parties?   Or the incentives are flawed somehow?

Followup question:  What technical obstacles prevent it, and how might they be overcome?   (assuming a brand-new system with no legacy code/chain).







I will leave these open-ended for now...

Replacing fiat definitively. To accomplish this you just can't put all the eggs in a Chinese basket and give it to XI JInping to keep it secure and act rational.

Massive adoption of bitcoin rises scalability challenges, but we could just wait for them to actually happen then figure out a solution but it is a process that never gonna boost with the current fragile situation.

Actually I  suppose the level of adoption we got right now is even a bit higher than what a realistic assessment of the level of decentralization would suggest as a safe situation.

I don't see the old scaling debate's  scalability vs decentralization dilemma (or the stupid Buterin trilemma) as a viable discourse, (as you know already) but I think it is not our problem today. Once bitcoin got enough stem and started boosting in adoption, we can debate  off-chain vs on-chain disputes. Without mass adoption, arguing about scalability is pointless.

Most people suppose we need scaling bitcoin to help with adoption. It is absolutely false. Adoption is a slow process and won't be even triggered as a massive one, without a solid, decentralized, uncompromisable network, scaling challenges won't show up until the midst of this process.

By convenient, I mean forking to an ASIC-resistant algo is both desirable and achievable (incrementally tho) but not very effective and helpful while fixing mining variance and proximity premium flaws and  pooling pressure, is the hard job comparatively and the ultimate decentralization solution.

Boring I know,  but I have to rephrase it: with pools being in charge no cryptocoin could be considered decentralized enough to get mass adopted no matter how popular it would be, period.

What "bigger missions" are you speaking of that would put decentralization on top of its list?


I agree, decentralization secures on-chain censorship resistance. That's why many people in the community believe, me included, that an off-chain layer is the best way to scale Bitcoin.


Is it convenient to hard fork to cut nodes and hash power from the network, and hurt its security? For a developer like yourself, I believe you need to think about these things.

Slightly off-topic, but it's worth pointing out that the truth is rather dire in this regard:

https://bgr.com/2018/10/04/china-hardware-backdoors-sophisticated-chips-used-in-us-bound-tech/

In short, supply chain attacks on hardware do happen. However it doesn't appear to be as critical if you only produce the chips in China and assemble the rest of the hardware within a trusted environment (ie. backdooring a chip is much harder than backdooring a motherboard).

Right to the point.

ASICs are bad but pools are horrible, both should be taken care of but we need to understand without a truly pool-resistant fork bitcoin has no chance to be adopted in levels much higher than what it is right now because it is not decentralized enough and could not be considered secure for bigger missions.

Let's just forget about scalability, decentralization is a more urgent issue and although I think it is very convenient to retire ASICs and let more commodity devices in, but it would make no difference with pools being in charge.

Maybe manufacturing the chips in China isn't really a problem. Many companies from other countries manufacture their products in China, and they control that the producers don't "tamper" with the design of their products. If the Chinese manufacturer manipulated the product, the customer would be able to charge a penalty for breaching the contract and change the manufacturer. An "open mining hardware" project could do the same thing, ensuring no Antbleed-style backdoors are implemented - and such a backdoor would be very easy to discover, above all if the firmware is open-source.

Once Bitcoin and the mining market becomes really big, it would be perhaps no problem to install production infrastructure outside of China able to deliver similar production costs.

That would still require trust in none of the developers leaking the selected algorithm.



...just like all GPUs where apparently no one is bothered about where the chips come from. Like I said, I think it's more a question of where the miners are deployed, not where they are produced.



Focusing on software, rather than hardware. We live in a globalized society of specialization, so naturally knowledge accumulates where its applied most.



Because it's apparently neither profitable nor interesting enough.

That to me is a slap in the face of the Western world. Trump is saying "Make America great again" and trade restrictions are implemented, but the Chinese still rule the technical manufacturing of complex electronic components.   Where are all the brilliant engineers and scientists of the western world?

Elon Musk are one of the leaders in electronic manufacturing of components like this... Why are they not stepping up to the plate to fulfil this role?

We are gifting this to the Chinese.  

But where will they make the chips and assemble the miners for mass production that would make the price more competitive? I believe it will still end up to be "Made in China". Haha.

I agree with the need for preparations - above all, with what Theymos said about finding clear criteria for a malicious attack.

I'm also a bit concerned about the "new monopolies" that could emerge after a PoW change. It may sound a bit naive, but - is there a possibility to create/fund an open hardware project for mining chips running the "new Bitcoin algorithm"? It's true however that major "chip foundries" are located in China, but there are at least some scattered around the world (mainly Europe and North America) which could step in for production.

In this case, time is on our side - renewable-based (e.g. solar/wind powered) off-grid mining probably very soon (in the next 5 years) could be cheaper than Chinese electricity, where the cheapest price is ~3 cent per kWh. I already mentioned in other threads that ~2 cent/kWh solar power costs are probably becoming real in the next 5-10 years (the article I linked makes pretty conservative assumptions).

While China has good solar energy spots, there are even better ones in the Americas (south-western North America and western South America) and, of course, Africa and the Middle East.

It is odd, imo, too much concerns about ASICs and zero interest in the situation with pools.

Agreed. I think it would make sense if such a selection process would be formally defined -- and agreed upon -- in advance. Otherwise we'll end up with a debate on the selection process itself and during the worst time at that.



Pretty [1] much [2] every [3] chip [4] gets produced in China. GPUs included. So naturally they not only have the know-how but also the infrastructure. It'd be weird if it were any different with Bitcoin miners. The means of productions have been gifted rather than seized.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/17/nvidia-corp-relationship-taiwan-semiconductor.aspx
[2] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276169-amd-moves-all-7nm-cpu-gpu-production-to-tsmc
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276690-report-intel-will-outsource-chipset-production-to-tsmc
[4] https://www.gsmarena.com/qualcomm_going_back_to_tsmc_for_its_7nm_chips_production_starts_later_this_year-news-31804.php


I think electricity cost plays a larger role in terms of geographical (and by extension legislative) decentralization than where the miners are produced. If Europe and the US had electricity prices closer to China I'd expect the dominance of a certain ASIC manufacturer to be much less of an issue than it is today.

Bitfury's latest ASIC https://bitfury.com/hardware/asic is pretty competitive with Chinese designs...

No, but "the rest of the world" cannot compete to make ASICs as cheap as the Chinese, both the chips and the miners. I believe that's because of their less strict electrical safety regulations in manufacturing electronics.