Topic: Mining Pools - Good or Bad? (Read 1169 times)

I didn't know that was even possible, how exactly do you prevent miners from grouping into pools? Has this already been tried or are you merely hypothesizing?

there are more ways to get an income, than just mining.
bitcoin is a whole economy system

Bottom line is that pools are beneficial and support the overall growing network.

That being said however, it would be wonderful if somehow the small-time miner
could receive better rewards, which in turn would draw more peoples attention.

you're not solving the mining centralization issue in this way

think about it, if mining can only be done with laptop, then someone rich will buy 10k laptop and centralized the mining again

the truth is that there is no real mining centralization, ever, no matter what you do, this because the fundamental of wealth distribution are wrong in the first place

The reason I stopped running folding@home is because it made my downtime expensive, the cpu was always drawing power and the fan was always maxed out.

I would only want my idle CPU time used for mining if it paid more than the power it consumed.

I think that's what 21 co was aiming to do but those plans seem to have gone quiet. Even then I think the purchase cost of your mining gadgets would never be returned.

If mining could be done by anyone with a laptop computer for a few satoshis per hour without needing a mining pool, I think that would be not only good for the btc ecosystem, but for engaging the wider public, and promoting global adoption. Who wouldn't want to get satoshis, or something, just for having a computer with some "downtime" to use for mining.

(Caveat - I did not do the math, I don't know if I am talking about satoshis or smalll fractions of satoshi) But the concept I think stands and I voted accordingly in the poll.

firstly something real big to point out to you
conglomerate=pool and pool=conglomerate

so your whole idea.. is to ruin todays bitcoin security for a temporal code that makes each person only get 1 win every couple years..
thus not only not providing a regular income but also making people less inclined to be involved as it becomes more costly than playing the lottery and less rewarding. thats right not even the odd $1 now and again. just a rare chance of a $10k jackpot, if you can cross your fingers long enough.


and because each block would be solved by just a combined hash power of 1 asic. the difficulty(security) would be low.
and then.. get this.. you want it to form pools again (you call it a conglomerate but its the same damn thing) to bring back the security

by which im thinking you mean someone can find a work around to your mining code fix and then form a pool .. to initially abuse the network for profit, and then to utilize the work around to let many people form pools to then bring balance to the network and restore security..

i got a great idea.. how about you go back to 2011-2012 and see that has already happened and bitcoin is more safer and secure now with pools than it is to temporarily break it up again to repeat the past.

I don't think the concept of a pool itself is so bad, but do agree that mining should be spread to more than just 3-4 super-pools. Maybe 30-40 pools would be better, but unfortunately most miners are just out for immediate profits more than they are looking out for the long term health of a coin. What I would like to see is more emphasis on non-asic mining. Even with GPU mining, at least the average person has somewhat of a chance to stay in the mining game. Once a coin switches to dedicated hardware, home miners quickly become out-priced with both hardware and electrical costs. Of course there will always be the mega farmers in warehouses located where there is cheap electricity no matter what, but I think the move to totally dedicated asic hardware was the death-blow to most home mining.

New coins such as Ethereum with memory-hard algorithms seems for now to be resistant to this, so while the difficulty is still going up, it is still possible for many home miners to make a ROI and then a bit extra. I think to maintain decentralization this needs to be a requirement going forward. It will be interesting to see how much more Bitcoin mining centralized after the block halving, as I am sure many borderline miners will be forced to turn off their unprofitable rigs. Fast forward another 4 years, and we will again see another halving further reducing the number of miners, etc until is all in the hands of a few big players.

I would think in addition to keeping mining on platforms available to the most people, GPUs are probably more preferable to CPU only as to avoid botnets, but there would need to be a way to minimize the electrical cost to help even the playing field. So maybe some hybrid GPU PoW, with a storage cost attached, such as needing 1 TB HDD space for each mining instance. I don't know what, if anything would work, but believe any coin with a true chance at decentralization will need to keep mining accessible to the masses.

Don't get me wrong, it's clear that pools are a necessity to get a decent number of miners, I just think it turns them into another level of customer to an extent.

While I do partially agree with your opinion, considering that there are petahashes of mining power on the network, it would be borderline impossible for individual miners to actually get any blocks. With pools, more miners have access to get a part of a block, allowing for them to continue mining without relying on finding an entire block themselves.

Pools are good to mine on so long as the fees are low and it is a good coin to mine on. Pools that have old coins on are useless and lots of pools now days need to support the most up to date coins in order to succeed.

I prefer to live in la la land where everything is possible and lovely. In that case we should all be mining on our alarm clocks.

I think one problem with pools is that it makes miners complacent and placid. They're letting the guy at the head make the moves while the coins still arrive when it might be better to show some independent thought on occasion.

I think an altcoin or two has already implemented the Andrew Miller non-outsourceable puzzle type fix (spreadcoin I think?).  All it does is make the barrier to entry higher and the same giant pools would still exist, they would just charge a security deposit fee to mine with them so you can't run off with the entire block reward.  So, like a $10,000 security deposit in the case of current Bitcoin block rewards.  You're then required to pre-order an ASIC and get scammed by some fly by night company, then when you try to mine, the fly by night mining pool runs off with your $10,000 security deposit.

Maybe people wouldn't risk getting their security deposit stolen and only huge solo miners would exist.  Then you have a system where only multi-millionaires can enter the network to extract block rewards.  If governments tried to ban Bitcoin, this would make it easier for them because it would be harder to pseudo-anonymously acquire coins by plucking them off the tree, and all fresh coins would have to be acquired from some huge entity that can easily be shut down or regulated into oblivion.

Trying to force people into some type of system like P2Pool seems like a better option than trying to eradicate mining pools in general.

Having low-latency internet is just another kind of POW, like having a fast CPU, a GPU, or any other kind of work.

Yeah. I don't use P2Pool but that is how I would mine if my power was cheap. I want it to grow, and hopefully be copied with other implementations so that little guys have a choice. The concept however is beautiful IMHO.

this would bring up the barrier to entry for mining bitcoin several orders of magnitude.  not good.


With pooled mining, anyone, even someone with very very bad internet connection and low hashrate CAN mine bitcoin. the fact that a handful pools each have a big slice of hashing power is not an issue, pools must behave they way there users want them to behave,  Individual miners choose the pool they mine at, if they are unhappy with the way to pool operates they will leave an another pool.

not only does pool mining greatly lower the barrier to entry, I believe they will be instrumental in scaling bitcoin while keeping it highly decentralized.  

This could be mostly mitigated by moving to 3 second block intervals.  Under this model you effectively turn the blockchain INTO a pool by allowing 200 times as many blocks to be produced, each with a reward of 0.5%. 

Mining pools should actually be considered good thinking that not all miners are able to find a block on their own to get a full reward, but instead of that, in pools, one is at least assured of having a secured share for his mining work, one can at least gain what one invested into mining...

there is a good attempt for this, check spreadcoin, it was designed in a way where only the first who find the block can sign the block itself and trasmit it to the network

so it's not convenient for pool to run this coin