Topic: Point to mining with 500khash/s ? Does it help or hurt the network? (Read 4646 times)

In a sense, you are right. The difficulty is just an artificial construct to maintain a more or less constant block generation rate. However, the thing that is beneficial to the network is (honest) hashing power, and more hashing power will result indirectly in higher difficulty.

Now THAT is interesting.  Thanks for the clarification.

Actually, no.  It's not possible to "counterfit" bitcoins, nor to exceed the designed creation rate.  That's a little oversimplified, but in practice it's impossible

The blockchain could be overhelmed by any attacker that can outhash the whole of the honest network, and for as long as the attacker is willing to keep it up, the attacker could (under the right conditions) rewrite the most recent block or prevent transactions from being processed.  To rewrite farther back into the blockchain history requires significantly more hashing power than the whole of the honest network.  To rewrite as far back as the 100 block requirement to spend 'new' coins would require orders of magnitude more power than the whole of the honest network.  Which is why the system doesn't let new block rewards be spent until they are 100 blocks deep.  If such an attack were to occur, the most recent blocks might get overwritten and their rewards taken by the attacker, and teh attacker would be able to retake coins that he recently owned and spent; but at least the number of people affected would be limited to very few and the rest of the network would recover without much fuss.  However, anyone with that much hashing power is better off to hash honestly for the future block rewards than try to reverse recent ones to take rewards away from honest miners.  And if this is ever done, the addresses of the attacker would be widely known, because the evidence would be right there in the blockchain.

If an attacker has a majority of the network hashing power there are a few things they could do, but the goal is to make it so prohibitively expensive that if they did that it would just make more sense to straight up mine for coins.

Is it correct to restate "overwhelm the blockchain" as:
The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to create tons of Bitcoins, potentially exceeding the designed creation rate which difficulty regulates by brute force computation.
Or is there something else about the blockchain which could be overwhelmed by brute force?  Thanks.

The difficulty is a relative metric that tells us how powerful the network hashing power is over a two week period.  The harder the hashing is, the more difficult it becomes for an attacker to overwelm the blockchain by brute force computation.

Yes.

Can someone explain how difficulty relates to cryptographic strength of the chain?  I thought difficulty was an artificial construct with no bearing on the chain, simply designed to maintain a constant rate of bitcoin production despite massive computational power.  Difficulty just makes the hashes less likely to be found, right?  Does that make the block chain stronger?

With my assumption, it seems that mining pools make it hard for the little guy to compete, centralizing the Bitcoin generation in the hands of the few, which seems against the decentralized goal of Bitcoin as a whole.

Anyway, if Steve Gibson can get lucky enough to get 50 BTC with a Core i7, then I can get lucky enough to get 50 BTC with my GTX460.  I just have to be patient.

I am.  I have one of those and I never even though to attempt it.

I'm mining with my eeePC 701 at 200khash/s, impressed ? :p (with other computers, all CPU mining)

Any miners are good for the community, because the point of it all is to get the maximum cryptographic security possible for the blockchain for the lowest cost possible.  These two contradictory goals result in the balance that the difficulty reflects, and therefore the difficulty always reflects the greatest amount of security that the network is collectively willing to pay for.  Big miners simply do the heavy lifting because they have found some way to gain efficiency slightly by economy of scale.  If those large miners didn't exist, the difficulty would most certainly be lower, and therefore the blockchain more suseptable to takeover by overwelming computational force.

Are big miners really good for the community in general? Aren't they who make the difficulty for the little guy with a not so recent machine be so absurd? How would the landscape be if there weren't massive miners in the network?

This is already taken care of.  The IRC channel is no longer critical for bootstrapping, as the vanilla client has a built-in list of persistent node addresses to try if it cannot reach IRC, and the network permits node discovery.  If you block IRC and try it, you will find that bootstrapping takes much longer, but it does not fail.

It helps in the sense that "many copies keep data safe" in the event of a direct blockchain attack, such as a virus moving across the Internet attacking Windows machines, but not Linux machines, or vis-versa.

A modified client that can be triggered to turn on generations automaticly by some defined signal might be a good modification to have.

Hmm, ok just my philosophy day I guess..

My thoughts where that a larger distributed network of nodes is more resilient to disturbances.

With more nodes you get more connections and it matters less if one or the other is shut down.

Also it might make it easier for new nodes to find connections (right now the nodes connect via an IRC channel, which is a potential single-point-of-failure).

In the case that some large organization with resources decide to try to get rid of bitcoin, they are likely to attack that point.

This is what happened to wikileaks, their central server was shutdown. But since the data was replicated on so many sites, it was easy to recreate the server somewhere else.

This is very similar to how bitcoin works, remember that each node (even the ones not mining) keeps a full record of all blocks ever made and a notice of the latest owner of each coin.

This database buildup takes a few hours and some cpu initially, but then it is quite low on both network traffic and cpu power.

How does just leaving the client run, without generating, help the network? I don't understand how it strengthens anything if I'm not generating?

Anyway, I've been convinced by the damage to the environment argument. I'm not going to run my miner most of the time, even if I could get a massive 2.2 bitcoin a year via a pool. (I was in slush's pool for a bit. I stopped when I finally mined the minimum 0.01 to get something showing up in my wallet.) The other reason I won't be mining most of the time is that the fan noise can be really annoying.

One way to help strengthen the network is to just leave your client up without generating, that way, you strengthen the network connectivity, which would be more useful than generating in a crisis!

If your machine is going to be on "anyway" this will draw neglectable power as a bonus.

On average, according to alloscomp, 500khash would give you about on average 0.6 bitcents a day or about 2.20 bitcoins for a total year.

Maybe some form of donations could be done, basically paying people with no gpu off to not mine but just keep their nodes up?

In the long run, it doesn't matter much how any of us here might imagine the "optimal end-game" might look like.  Reality doesn't care what we might think, but it does care about economics.  If pool mining is the most efficient way of doing things, then it is here to stay and will dominate forevermore.  But it's not the most efficient way of doing things, because pool mining must charge fees to cover group expenses as well as the risk of a fraudulent exploit of the system.  So pool mining will only appeal to those willing to lose those small amounts for non-economic reasons.  Even if pools dominate in the future, their continuing existence depends on satisfying their contributers, and so they really don't have any more control over the system than anyone else.  For as soon as the contributers get a credible report that they are being used to manipulate the network, or for any other underhanded activity, those contributers will simply stop contributing.  Some will mine alone, some will join other pools, and some will simply quit; but the power available to a pool operator will drop to zero shortly after it is misused only once.

I can't foresee myself joining any pool, ever.  Mostly because; if a malicious computer geek wanted to steal the bitcoin wallet.dat files from a lot of people all at once, how would he build up his target group?  Answer: start or steal a pool, and your target demographic will simply tell you who they are.

I tend to think that dedicated miners will have more computational power than the entire rest of the Internet, which would make the chance of volunteer takeover low. But if this is not the case, I can easily imagine a network dominated by volunteers. There are a lot of people who compute for @home projects, and it's in the interest of fee-charging pools to spread propaganda about how mining helps "keep your money secure". It's not even altruistic from the perspective of these miners, since they believe it will help a system they rely on.

Beyond efficiency, volunteer mining frequently also centralizes control with pools and gives some power to people (the miners) who don't really understand Bitcoin. It moves us away from my picture of the optimal end-game: a few hundred private, competent, for-profit miners operating outside of a pool.

Economics.  The altruistic motive to help defend the blockchain, in a crisis or otherwise, cannot continue beyond the willingness or resources of the altruistic individual.  Excepting such a crisis, the userbase willing to mine at an ongoing loss is always going to be a vanishingly small percentage.

A few people won't hurt, but lots of people will. It's a bad trend. I want to discourage it before efficient miners are pushed out of the market by huge pools of inefficient miners, which I consider entirely possible.

Why do you think this isn't likely?

Not at all. Yes, it COULD help, but given how bleak the likelihood of them finding a block is within a reasonable amount of time for the power expended, it approaches minimal usefulness, and is essentially zero. It's far better to avoid wasting the energy to begin with, and to avoid the wear on the poor CPU.

Are you serious?  More efficient miners are going to be pushed out of the market by a few guys running miners on old laptops at a loss?

Honestly, Theymos; do you make up b.s. for fun?

It does help, simply because they could find a block.  Like raindrops form a river, every little contribution strengthens the blockchain a little.  If we look at it like you are, then we should stop all this other wasteful searching and just look in the last place we would have!

It definitely doesn't help, until they find a block, given the difficulty that is nearly impossible.

It hurts because it can potentially increase difficulty for miners that are mining much more efficiently. If a lot of people do this, efficient miners may be pushed out of the market.

You will gain 2.2 btc by year, in a pool (and less with difficulty increase). It helps the network a bit, but this is not significant for now, because an equivalent to the total hashing power can be obtained with botnet or amazon services for example.

I does help the network, but whether it's worthwhile is up to you.  As far as efficiency, a laptop cpu is going to be terrible.

If you find a block, congrats, you strengthened the network!

Until you do (which is incredibly unlikely), you are just wasting electricity.

I'd stop generating  just because you're wasting electricity, and that's not good for the environment.

Anyway, I've got about 500khash/s on my little old laptop. I realise that the chances of me finding a block are probably basically zero. The question is, does it help or hurt the network having me generate? Or is it pointless?

I don't mind, the 'lectricity is free for me. (Not interested in getting another computer, or anything, I'm only staying here a couple more months at the most.)