interesting read. The three P.O.S. pools will crash the coin out if they are really doing it exactly as accused.
Which means the un - named Alt coin will be boosted by this behavior ( I know no ALT COINS to be mentioned).
I know I have done a 2 year long set of diff threads giving away a lot of btc for a few reasons,
one of which was to track the diff moves publicly.
So diff manipulation seems pretty factual based on my studies of diff since Summer of 2014.
Not so sure what can be done since asic's are mostly built in China.
Agreed, Phil. I don't think they're going to blow it up, however. My rather simplistic view (based on several decades of behavioral science) is that, despite my personal philosophical view re BTC, we're talking about money.
...
Indeed - that's the main point.
Bitcoin IS money, and as with all money, most people are controlled by it.
However, since I'm in the mood to do so, I'll bring up some points that make this even more interesting.
Firstly, and most importantly, if anyone hasn't realised it yet
I don't advocate coding changes into bitcoin to resolve 'perceived problems'.
If you consider there is a problem, then you get the support of others to make that problem insignificant, or you educate those causing the problem.
On the other side of the GFW, indeed the pools there make their decisions based on short sighted greed.
SPV mining proves that.
On this side of the GFW, you have the same situation.
Bitminter, Slush and eligius all have, over various times, a large % of EMPTY blocks and low size blocks.
The EMPTY block discussion has a whole thread about that ...
But I will add one point about it. For those 3 pools, they each have a different strategy for dealing with malcontent about EMPTY blocks:
eligius: "Yeah so what"
Slush: "..." (silence) or "sorry that was a bug we fixed it" (so why is it still happening?)
Bitminter: "No we don't" (lying about it - yes he and I had an argument about it long ago, and he lied about it)
The halving will make this issue more obvious, since if you look at our Block Statistics table, the 50 block 102% MeanTx% number, with a 12.5BTC reward, would be ... 104%
But, even the Bitcoin Devs fall CLEARLY under the header of greed.
Their aim for a long time has been the Lightning network.
Why? Coz it takes mining fees away from miners and give them to centrally controlled entities.
The first step in that path is SegWit, then the next step is the Lightning network.
Bitcoin's design is to replace block rewards with txn fees.
The devs don't want to be involved in mining, they want the fees without having to mine.
Fortunately, as far as I see it, their ideas will fail.
SegWit - unnecessary and bad for storage.
I was amused at 2 comments by gmaxwell about this
1) It doesn't increase size, oh except only by a little bit ... per transaction
Well 2 points, yes a little bit, is an increase, so, saying it isn't is a lie, and per transaction is a lot.
Secondly, no it's more than that, he's ignored something that (again) clearly shows he has limited understanding of computers: DB storage.
If you have to store 2 things, you need twice the amount of DB index and key data.
2) He can't code well enough to produce a maleability solution without segwit. His coding ability is limited, as he has stated himself.
Lightning is pointless and no one in their right mind would use it.
Firstly, it's pure centralisation.
Secondly, as an example, why would Starbucks want to make an alt-coin that's controlled by bitcoin, when they could have their own blockchain out of bitcoin's control?
They could have starbuckcoins that have a 'fixed value' at starbucks and you buy them online with $ or BTC or whatever.
With sidechains, as far as I can see, it's just an alt-coin with loss of some control for starbucks, and no gain.