Topic: Is POW systematically doomed to get a huge monster in its midst? - page 8. (Read 2731 times)

Although it is definitively true that PoW is experiencing bad days, I'm against the op:

In my opinion, PoW being nothing less than a great innovative idea is nothing more than just an idea. It needs development and treatment, the very specific job that bitcoin developers failed and are failing to do (deliberately?).

They failed improving bitcoin's SHA256 to resist ASICs and now they are preaching about its inevitability, a ridiculous hype made and propagated by  Bitamain.

Before that and most importantly, they overlooked/failed improving the protocol to eliminate the desperate need for pool mining. I have just started a topic regarding an improvement proposal for this problem.

But it is very important to be reminded that unlike what op supposes, PoW is not some kind of an "old fashioned"  technology to be replaced trivially, I believe, and if it was the case, PoS was not such a "new alternative" that he suggests, it is so ridiculous that I can't stop laughing at such a claim!

Years before Stoshi invention of PoW and bitcoin, reputation based systems were discussed and reached to their ultimate dead end suffering  the same subjectivity issues PoS proponents have not addressed yet (don't take junior hackers like Butterin and his stupid 'weak subjectivity'  words or foolish 'slasher' proposal that serious, this kid is obsessed with being genious and will never manage to be one, I suppose) ...

So, forget about changing PoW with something totally new. It is not art, it is not fashion show, it is about technology and science, it is about mathematics for the god sake!

I understand the hype and merchandisation has produced so much fog and confusion, but we shouldn't lose our direction, we should work harder and improve faster. Just check the above link to get better what I'm talking about.

Sure, we can.
Pos don't work, will never work in teory and in pratice. It is like using children to stop a bomb to save the same children.
No matter which esoteric algorithm you try to find, soon or later the bomb will explode and childrens will die. To be safe they need a big trusted centralized shield or at least a personal decentralized shield. Shield is a resource outside the system to be wasted, if it is decentralized you are talking about a pow algorithm, if it is centralized you are talking about visa.

I have stopped to read your posts because your tldrs are too full of arrogance, fud and politics, completly missing fairness and maidenliness.
You would like to be right at any cost without trying to understand your errors.

   

Claiming an argument to be myopic while not addressing its content is not very productive.

Claiming that "[Satoshi] (intentionally) left proof-of-work mining vulnerable" [1], assuming both intent and future outcome is conjecture. Heck, even the statement that "Satoshi designed Bitcoin addresses to be secure against quantum computing by wrapping them in a hash." is nothing more than retroactive attribution.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4266048.40#msg39054129



The 1MB blocksize limit was introduced for both technical and security reasons. Satoshi himself actually did consider increasing the blocksize further down the road:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15366

Whether Bitcoin was intended as transactional or as reserve currency, is a question of both speculative and irrelevant nature. How the future will look like in practice, is the only thing that matters. In my personal opinion the jury on whether Bitcoin will end up as a transactional or a reserve currency is still out and will largely depend on how well current and future scaling approaches will fare in the real world.

Please link me to your calculations of USD 50,000,- per Bitcoin transaction.



Bitcoin has no monopoly on money though. The rest I agree with. At least it seems to apply for the majority of people that they measure their trading success in either BTC or fiat.



I'm not sure I quite get you there. First you state that a transactional alt coin would be superior. Then you lament that a transactional alt coin would never become a reserve currency. Combined with the dichotomy of transactional currency vs reserve currency you established above this seems to be a contradictory statement.

---

I'll try to dissect the rest of your post at a later time. For now I'll have to leave, I'm afraid.

I understand that POW will lead to an oligopoly (and maybe a monopoly), but what's with this statement "It would mean that an honorable POS system would get a chance to regain popularity again?" From what I know, POS is inferior to POW and has more security issues?

In terms of currency issuance, most coins already have been mined, that is a fact. (referring to Bitcoin, of course)

Obviously I misunderstood your argument though.

So what you are saying is, that in the long run, an oligarchy of miners will amass the majority of bitcoins through transaction fees? Meaning that even old stashes from the pre-ASIC days will trickle up towards miners?

That's a very interesting line of thinking. I doubt that the shift from block subsidies towards transaction fees alone will redistribute wealth in any meaningful way though. Bitcoin would become unusuable long before transaction fees reach such levels. People would simply switch to different means of payment. Bitcoin does not exist in a vacuum and does not and will never have a monopoly on money. Thus "the maximum transaction fees that the market can bear" will likely be too small to have much impact on wealth redistribution towards miners.

The theory about how relying on transaction fees only will destabilize the network due to a shift in incentives due to higher payout variance is quite interesting as well. In practice the fundamental assumption of high payout variance will likely not hold though. The report itself acknowledges that Bitcoin running at or close to capacity decreases variance [1]. Assuming Bitcoin gaining popularity, this will likely be the case. In the case of Bitcoin not running at capacity, "the maximum transaction fees that the market can bear" will be even less.

[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-reward/




Conjecture.



The only way to steal P2SH SegWit transactions is by rolling back via a hard fork. Good luck with that.




I stated my case regarding transaction fees resulting in unproportional wealth distribution from hobbyists miners of the old guard towards current industrial mining operations above.

In regards to alt coins have little security and thus very low real value... I fully agree with you, but am not sure what this has to do with the way Bitcoin used to be mined.




What if I told you that I am a Zionist?

Seriously though. That the largest part of Bitcoin's initial money supply went mostly to hobbyists and small scale operations is a historical fact. You can't rewrite history by making theories about future distributions.



I overlooked it initially. I think I covered at least part of it above. Not all of it did seem relevant to the current discussion to me though. That might be because it's getting late in my timezone however. Feel free to point out concrete arguments that I left unaddressed.

Most coins have already been mined, current and future mining operations will never be able to amass (crypto)capital in the self-devouring vision of capitalism that Marx brought into the world. And due to the ever shrinking size of the block reward the capital of these "oligarchs" will always be dwarved by the coins mined by hobbyists using their GPUs or even CPUs. Mining may become ever more industrialized, but the initial coin distribution worked surprisingly well, despite or rather because Bitcoin flew under the radar for so long.

As far as 51% attacks are concerned -- Bitcoin is lucky to be the largest coin using SHA256 and in a weird turn of events, ASICs may actually be what keeps Bitcoin relatively safe from miner associations as described by OP. Given the amount of GPU based hashpower that is currently distributed amongst various alts, things would indeed look grim if Bitcoin were still a viable target for GPU miners. That being said, I'm actually surprised how few attacks actually take place. Many alts could be pretty much eradicated if a large enough miner would decide to do so. Heck, even Bitcoin Cash, despite being one of the top 5 coins in terms of market cap, could be wiped out at will, just because it shares its PoW scheme with a much larger counterpart (ie. Bitcoin).

PoS does have the advantage of not being vulnerable to what I would call drive-by 51% attacks. The question of fair distribution is unlikely to be solved by PoS though. Matter of fact it's pretty much built upon the principle of gaining capital merely by owning capital.



BFL was the first to announce; Avalon was first to deliver[1]. They beat BFL by what turned out to be the longest 14 days ever.

Also you forgot to mention ASICMiner. RIP friedcat

(technically friedcat is probably still alive, but he pretty much disappeared into thin air)

[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/avalon-ships-bitcoins-first-consumer-asics-1358905223/

Global economy always grow, but as soon as  energy get concentrated into a little point a new big bang will happen.

Egypt was big and powerful,
Greek was big and powerful,
Phoenician was big and powerful,
Rome caput mundi, but now Rome have no power,
France was big
Spain was big
Europe have a little power compared to the past,
Japan was the most advanced country in electronics,
China is big and powerful now, but as any other population in the history they will become victim of their power.

Colombian cocaine cartel now have a lot of concurrency from peru, bolivia, brazil and china

Motorola was big
Nokia was big

IBM was big
Altavista was big
Lycos was big

Microsoft was big

deepbit was big
cex was big
bfl was the first asic manufacturer
cointerra was big
knc was big
bitfury was big

bitmain gained his power with their antminer S5, they was nothing before and will be nothing in the future. New manufacturer are already coming up eating bitmain resources.

I'm not so updated with the latest pos evolution, but from what I can understand, there is no way to prevent a staker to validate blocks on infinite parallels chains so it is a solution to nothing.

thx for your help,

next article i write is about systematic media corruption,

ok upgraded the article 1 merit for anunymint and his nice help

check article under

https://www.cryptoproductivity.com/single-post/2018/06/07/The-Systematic-POW-doom-and-the-inevitable-emergence-of-a-POW-Monster-in-the-Cryptoindustry


i will now add the issue with the mass media which i wrote also in a seperate article and prepared it.

i think i will write more often helpful articles around the economy and reward my merit here for the good helpers those articles then give important insight

regards

do you realy think this way? i would rather say power change its form and how it looks,

compare the roman empire, with the european colonial empires,

europe from beeing an empire -> towards housing imperial centers,

rome officially collapsed and declined but population grew economy continued to grow and is now bigger than ever before,

same is with china and its empire, its gone, but china became even bigger and more powerful also economically richer, although unequality remainded

if the central banking cartels in the west disappear, society might flourish much more, the banksters the billionaires, the warren buffets and the oligarchs will call and propagate this as the end of the usa or the end of the west,

Perceptive historians recognize that great powers go through a cycle of growth, stability, maturity and decline.

Although I would agree with everything being said about PoW is disagree with this approach of black and white (centralized and decentralized). No one ever heard of so-called semi-decentralized or as some refer them as consortium blockchains?
Just like in nature no extreme opposites will survive. Centralised projects will be abandoned by public awareness, decentralized by institutional market players leaving only some sort of consensus to be done, the one that suits both institutions and commoners. One doesn`t need to be a clairvoyant to foresee developments towards this direction. I hope this remark was of some good use to anyone interested in this topic read.

Yes.  Every system is doomed to centralized the only question is how long it will last.  US constitution held it off for a hundred years perhaps and look at the success it brought.  Shoot for 200 years of limited centralization whenever you design a system.  Bitcoin was a good start but proof of work needs to be improved and many algorithms are achieving various levels of success.

The systematic (POW) doom, the inevitable emergence of a POW monster in the cryptoindustry, and bitcoins doom to become oligarchic




It is as Karl Marx described it, that in a national economy the big established players all tend to grow in power and size into a monopoly, and it is as we know it from the equally named board game "Monopoly" (picture) the player that owns a big share, of the total size early over time grows automaticallly bigger and bigger, creating ultimately a plutocratic society that creates not as many winners as possible but that seeks to create as many loosers as possible for the benefit and power of monopolistic and plutocratic or oligarchic few. That society might then be vastly influenced by those big players, media, legislation, elections etc. nothing published really matters anymore as the strings are pulled by forces that grew with the system and are now ruling it.

Can this also happen for cryptocurrencies or more specific POW systems?

Yes it is likely to happen and it is already observable, lets start:
Tendencies to manipulate the media:
I wrote an article about the systematic pump and dump scemes and the "bull calls" that are being issued now in the american cryptomedia but it also reveals of a tendency to create vast and big influencing associations. Thinking that to the end, it is logically to understand that associations regarding hashpower in the worlds total POW system will be created out of interests to achieve certain economic goals, similar like caribbean pirates the worlds pow system might get its miner associations, which could hide their secretive coordinating core somewhere unknown and far away from legislation and police in an offshore sector. Such a secretive hashpower coordinating association will then for their reasons behave like a cancer, trying to feast on the smaller POW coins first, then grow in size so it can attack later the bigger ones. The profits from 51% attacks might even be a secondary goal, that delivers the profit, but the true goal being the destruction of trust which that particular POW system had in the first place. Take Verge as an example which lost a lot of trust and confidence after a 51% attack.

What would that mean for the future of the cryptoindustry and the POW concepts like Bitcoin itself?

It would mean that a honorable POS system would get a chance to regain popularity again, take for example the new cryptocurrency index: stakingrewards which lists POS token only. it might be a beginning of a trend to drop the pow concept as its becoming like a wild west.
additionaly the mining pools and leaked or even open associations like shown in their various lamo meeting events, might sooner or later be seen like a the same dragon the people saw in the banking cartels, and then supported them, creating the hype price of Bitcoin, that is now demerging.

Discussing this issue in Bitcointalk.org, revealed even deeper issues of the systematic

We brought and asked for that issue in Bitcointalk, and there we were answered that "Nakamoto proof-of-work MUST become centralized by an oligarchy otherwise it will no longer converge on a longest chain." and
"This research proven game theory and economic fact becomes true as the revenues from transaction fees become much greater than the revenue from the repeated halving of the block reward."

Our Fazit: The POW concept will get its huge pool shark that will haunt it, thats unavoidable and Bitcoin marketed as decentral will become central, but a quite low quality unpopular cryptocurrency that will stand for its unpopular ressource waste, caused by its core association of miners, bitcoin isn't made for the longterm, and its even more not made to enrich the collective. It is a zero sum game of its miner cartel against everyone else, using the mass media, and the illusion of decentrality.

with thanks to:

anunymint

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