Mining, a flawed concept coming home to roost? - page 2.

Blinken

sr. member

Activity: 338

Merit: 253

Quote from: Stephen Gornick on August 10, 2012, 02:10:31 PM

Quote from: Blinken on August 10, 2012, 01:32:19 PM

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could. Then what would you do with this voting power?

Well, what I would do is muster a DDOS attack on www.sesamestreet.org, but that's just me.

The more important question is what would a group of professional Russian hackers do? The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

Vernon715

full member

Activity: 182

Merit: 100

If someone was going to do what you are talking about they would have **probably**done so already.

Stephen Gornick

legendary

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Quote from: Blinken on August 10, 2012, 01:32:19 PM

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could. Then what would you do with this voting power?

Blinken

sr. member

Activity: 338

Merit: 253

Ok, maybe I was misinformed but I thought the network hash rate was like 15 Thash/s and I see that Deepbit advertises a hash rate of 3 Thash/s and it is only one of 6 major pools. I would think that if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

DeathAndTaxes

donator

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Merit: 1079

Gerald Davis

Collectively mining pools have gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power).
The largest pool has gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power).
The four largest pools have gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power) and now combined represent less than 50% of hashing power.
There are far more stable and well run medium sized pools giving miners a real choice on where to send their hashes.

So no need to dump anything.

Also it is possible for block construction/validation to happen locally. Two pools (p2pool & eligius) already support it. Most pools will be forced to support this eventually due to significantly faster miners (FPGA & ASICs) combined with the constraint of the 32bit nonce. When block generation occurs locally the reward is pooled (less variance) but the validation of tx are distributed.

Any more FUD you need refuted? I will be here all day.

grue

legendary

Activity: 2058

Merit: 1431

Ok, go design your own inflation based crypto-currency.

casascius

vip

Activity: 1386

Merit: 1140

The Casascius 1oz 10BTC Silver Round (w/ Gold B)

You're right, the whole thing is flawed, mining is just a crude electricity-wasting practical joke, Bitcoin doesn't really work, it's all just going to collapse any minute, so let's all pack our stuff up and go home now, it was fun while it lasted. I will bail you out and buy all your worthless coins at 50 cents on the dollar!

Blinken

sr. member

Activity: 338

Merit: 253

I hate to question the fundamental Satoishian principles, but I have to admit, I thought mining was a really bad idea even the first time I heard of Bitcoin years ago, and now that rotten vulture is coming home to roost.

The mining pools are getting bigger and bigger and this is a really serious danger that is presenting itself. It appears to be only a question of time before the pools have the critical mass to control verification and then really bad things are going to start to happen. Once the St. Petersburg cyber mafia realizes they can garner a few million by writing a specialized client and then hacking a few big pools, there will be chaos and devastation.

Unfortunately there is no way out of this problem without dumping the whole, flawed mining concept, and replacing it with a distributed inflation mechanism.

Topic: Mining, a flawed concept coming home to roost? - page 2. (Read 2773 times)