Topic: Is POW systematically doomed to get a huge monster in its midst? - page 5. (Read 2722 times)

I prefer a coin I can use. I have not enought bitcoins to pay 50000$ fee, so if their chain wins there is nothing I can do to stay in their game. I have to use something else or die poor.

No, they have economic incentives to fisically destroy concurrent farms or energy sources.

You don't consider that the Bitcoin Core 0.16  is a better coin than what it was in 2012. And it will be better when things like shnorr and mast will be implemented. No one need a non spendable coin. No multisig means you can not buy anything from anonymous. No multisig means you have to trust. WoT means you are not anonymous, If you are not anonymous you can be banned and censored. If you have to be trusted and not anonymous you don't need a blockchain.

When I signed for bitcoin I knew it can be replaced by a better coin, p2sh was a better coin, segwit is a better coin, I hope some day we will have shnorr and mast and I hope it will be better.

Miner oligarchy will fail because they are anonymous, they have to be anonymous or someone with guns and missiles can destroy their precious farms and they end up fucked.

https://programmingblockchain.gitbooks.io/programmingblockchain/content/other_types_of_ownership/p2wsh_pay_to_witness_script_hash.html

You have no greater claim to what Satoshi's vision was than anyone else does.  You can keep calling 0.5.4 "Satoshi's protocol" all you like, but that doesn't give it any sort of special status or privilege.  No one in their right mind is going to use it.  It exists just for the crazed fundamentalists.  If Bitcoin went to zero, the 0.5.4 chain (assuming it ever exists) would go with it.  People would simply abandon Bitcoin altogether because the project has clearly failed if any of this were to occur.  There's no conceivable way they would reward a bunch of isolated headcases who clearly have no respect for property rights, particularly if it cost them money to do so.  If you think they would, not only does it show your game theory needs some serious work, but also that your brain is so "special" that you are totally incapable of understanding how normal human beings behave.

Literally the only reason you believe you're right about this is that your ego is beyond measure.  You think so highly of yourself that, in your mind, there's no other outcome possible than the masses bending to your glorious vision.  If you were to briefly climb out of your own posterior for just a moment and observe the world for what it is, you might realise that it's not remotely plausible for any of your vivid fantasies to come to fruition.



Are you their new spokesperson or something?  Is your presence here solely to promote that loony bin because they're short on patients and need some fresh volunteers to have themselves committed?  Are the poor deluded souls getting lonely over there?  Aww, bless.

If they offer you the lobotomy, I suggest you take it.  

It's even more amazing that you keep dodging the key point under the weight of your ever bloviated responses


4.3 million BTC in P2SH addresses. Why aren't the miners forking and "donating" it to themselves in the fork? Answer the question

It's not a question of semantics.  The chain with the most people behind it is Bitcoin.  Anything else is an altcoin.  You don't get to pick an arbitrary point in history and declare that "nothing beyond this point is the real Bitcoin", because that's not your sole decision to make.  Again, 0.5.4 is an outdated client run by a small but vocal number of hardline fanatics.  That's a speck in the wind compared to the combined will of an entire network of users all over the world who couldn't give two shits what you or MP thinks.  The moment a fork occurs and 0.5.4 isn't compatible with what everyone else is running, 0.5.4 becomes the altcoin.  They can have their Thiefcoin, the rest of us will ignore them and have Bitcoin.

You don't decide what the "real Bitcoin" looks like.  That's not how consensus works.  You've been duped if you think otherwise.  But then that's only natural, because that's what drinking the trilemma kool-aid does to you.



You may have noticed that any fork which proposes a fundamental change to the founding principles doesn't even get off the ground.  Your fork would be held in the same esteem as forks that propose raising the 21 million supply, bringing "lost" coins back into circulation, anything to do with blacklisting certain addresses.  People who appreciate Bitcoin for what it is don't give those projects the slightest bit of notice.  They're irrelevant.  As is Thiefcoin.

If you have coins held in SegWit addresses, you would indeed fight against the 0.5.4 chain, but you wouldn't do it by buying 0.5.4 coins to dump them.  It would be contrary to your own financial well being to give even the slightest hint of recognition to the chain trying to steal from you.  The best way to combat a chain like that (which is clearly an affront to the underlying principles of property ownership and crypto in general), would naturally be to tell everyone to ignore the 0.5.4 chain completely and leave it to rot in the gutter.  There wouldn't be an actual economy on that chain and it wouldn't be sustainable.  So all that would remain is a niche blockchain where the sole purpose is to effectively quarantine the insane from the rest of society.  As such, I eagerly await your fork and you disappearing off to the land of make-believe to play with the other inmates in the asylum.
  

@anunymint, @Wind_FURY you guys better take care of your anti-segwit fork issue in a dedicated topic, imo.
It is a weak argument, so much weak that although you made it somewhere in PoCW topic, I didn't consider it seriously. Byzantine fault tolerance needs more than few players for security, you already know it as a PBFT fan, don't you?

Saying that pools don't matter in this context, centralization of PoW, is the most weird thing ever. Yet, I'm not completely convinced about you being serious in saying that.

After all OP is the one who started this topic by accusing PoW to be doomed to centralization because of 'associations', isn't he?

As much as the predicate is false (PoW = winner-takes-all) your reasoning is irrelevant. ASICs are a challenge, no doubts, but a separate one. Ethereum is not 'ASICed' because of its memory hard algorithm and yet it is centralized by pools even more than bitcoin (only 3 pools control +50% Ethereum's total hashrate).
With or without ASICs, PoW is doomed to centralization because of pooling pressure flaw, as long as it is implemented as a winner-takes-all variant.

Although bitcoin has not been overtaken by a 50%+1 attack (yet), pools are very powerful players in the ecosystem and there will be no future for bitcoin as a decentralized system with them, no improvements, no evolution.

ASIC is completely a different problem. I've spent a considerable time to fight against the "inevitability of ASICs" discourse going that far to suggest a strategy for bitcoin to get rid of ASICs, but now I'm realizing that pools are far more important points of failure. So, please let remain focused on pools instead of losing the direction.

Now we have something to digest

Bitcoin is meant to be a monetary system based on a public, decentralized ledger maintained by a large number of players who can not practically collude to do anything harmful against users of the system.

Like any other monetary system, an economy is built around bitcoin. Although centralization of mining does not necessarily imply centralization of this economy, it is definitely a prohibitive factor.

For traditional economies built around fiat currencies and national central banks, it has been understood that economic growth is directly related to the confidence the investors/entrepreneurs have to the system to function as it has been promised.

In under-developed countries where central banks have less autonomy and follow the governments' thirst for money instead of keeping their promise for regulating the financial market, economies collapse overnight.

Likewise, if bitcoin might fail to keep its promises like decentralization, security, immutability, anti-censorship, ... its economy would collapse not because of a stupid super-pool stealing funds but because of the sole fact of its failure to fulfil its promise.

People won't wait for centralized mining to make a ridiculous move against them, they will just back-off whenever they feel it is not what they have invested in: a decentralized system.

We have a handful of currencies managed and supervised centrally by a huge system and a network of well organized, disciplined organisations for decades: USD, Euro, Pound, Yen, etc. Banks mine these currencies transparently and keep our balances practically safe and secure and fees are not that high to be considered intolerable, ... so, why in the hell we should invest in bitcoin and build an economy when it is just another centralized system (based in China)?

Scalability is another separate issue too.

Seriously @anunymint, isn't it better to remain focused?

Yes, I use Bech32 addresses for my main storage, and I also use Segwit addresses that start with a "3" for others. I believe many people are too.