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Topic: Mining Pools - Good or Bad? - page 2. (Read 1169 times)

hero member
Activity: 770
Merit: 566
fractally
March 11, 2016, 01:58:49 PM
#3
Quote
"Solo mining even with 100,000 people, is meaningless and creates a reduction in the difficulty, ths increasing risk of attack aswell as blocks that wont be solved every 10 minutes on average. but days-weeks-years..."

This statement is false. Blocks will continue to be produced on average every 10 minutes with or without pools.

With 100,000 people who have equal hashing power, they will produce a block on average once every 2 years. 

With 144 mining conglomerates they would each produce a block once per day.... of course, if you increase mining frequency to once per minute, then you could have 1440 conglomerates each producing on average once per day.

The end result is that hash power would end up held by a couple thousand conglomerates each of which would still have acceptable variance.

Anyone with 0.05% or more of total hash power could produce daily.  Anyone with .001% of the hash power could produce monthly.

How many total individual miners does Bitcoin have today?  There are only ~500,000 unspent outputs. If 1% of all bitcoiners have mining hardware, that would be 5000 people mining. 

How many individuals miners actively mining less than 0.08 BTC per month?   Those are the only individuals who might get excluded by solo mining.
legendary
Activity: 4424
Merit: 4794
March 11, 2016, 01:42:29 PM
#2
lets clarify 3 categories
mining pools: are good(many people in a syndicate working together to share the reward)

mining FARMS: are bad(one person owning as much rigs as a pool and not needing to share profits (imagine mega solo-miner))

solo mining: 1 person, 1 ASIC is bad because the difficulty is super low and can be abused by someone finding a work around to dominate

solo mining even with 100,000 people, is meaningless and creates a reduction in the difficulty, ths increasing risk of attack aswell as blocks that wont be solved every 10 minutes on average. but days-weeks-years
pool mining brings the resources together to get regular block solution, thus increasing difficulty and the miners in the pool get to share a regular reward (rather then 1 reward per lifetime each solo mining)

but because farms do not need to share profits. they can spend more on gear to increase their dominance. and as such get closer to a possible 51% attack(should they have malicious intent ofcourse)
hero member
Activity: 770
Merit: 566
fractally
March 11, 2016, 01:22:12 PM
#1
I am interested in what the Bitcoin community thinks about the impact of mining pools. 

If it were possible to design a proof of work system that effectively eliminated the ability to pool mining would that be an improvement or not?

Pros:
  More Independent Producers / Decentralization
  Harder to censor
  Increase profits for large miners (less competition from small miners)
  More profits mean lower costs and lower transaction fees

Cons:
  Higher variance would exclude some small miners
  Excluded miners will lead to slightly lower difficulty for the same mining reward

Any other pro's and cons?

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