n00b question: is BTC infrastructure *really* 100% decentralized?

nmat

hero member

Activity: 602

Merit: 502

Quote from: conspirosphere.tk on October 18, 2011, 11:51:33 AM

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

It could be harmed if a malicious user controls more than 50% of the computation power. The decentralization exists, but I doubt that it will scale... Anyway, we have more important things to worry about right now. Here is a nice wiki reading: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses

kokjo

legendary

Activity: 1050

Merit: 1000

You are WRONG!

Quote from: conspirosphere.tk on October 18, 2011, 11:51:33 AM

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

miners connect to pools. and pools broadcast, a solved block.

the only centralized parts are exchanges, mining pool, and forums. each can be replaced by some p2p-type of system.
exchanges: person-2-person.
mining pools: p2pool, or solo mining.
forums: well we can always make more of them.

you would have to assassinat all bitcoin users, to make it stop.

Gabi

legendary

Activity: 1148

Merit: 1008

If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat

Yes, it's 100% decentralized.

Of course that doesn't stop us from having some centralized things like exchanges or mining pools. But they aren't required. You can solo mine, you can exchange bitcoins with anyone you want without using the exchanges and so on.

Quote

Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

To the pool server. You can start a pool and then people would connect to you, that's all.

You can solo mine of course. But since the average user would have to wait months to find a block, we all use pools Cheesy

deepceleron

legendary

Activity: 1512

Merit: 1036

About the only thing centralized is information about Bitcoin. When this forum was down, one quickly recognized the concentration of information here about mining software, pools, tech support, trading, etc.

tysat

legendary

Activity: 966

Merit: 1004

Keep it real

Yes it is 100% decentralized, there's no one thing you could remove to take down bitcoin. It would involve taking down a lot of nodes/pools/etc to hurt bitcoin badly.

conspirosphere.tk

legendary

Activity: 2352

Merit: 1064

Bitcoin is antisemitic

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

Topic: n00b question: is BTC infrastructure *really* 100% decentralized? (Read 776 times)

Topic: n00b question: is BTC infrastructure really 100% decentralized? (Read 776 times)