Topic: Satoshi proposed a gentlemans agreement to postpone GPU mining (2009) (Read 7690 times)

its the ipod era not the wild west lets move on..

its the excavator era not the pickaxe era lets move on..

its 2013 not 2009. lets move on..

mining is not a noob career anymore, its a career for those with experience and financial backing. if you want something that is minable with CPU start churning out prime coins. if you want something that is minable with GPU start churning out litecoins.

don't think that crying that you personally cant mine bitcoin with a CPU, means the world has to sit on their hands purely for your benefit.

thats like saying everyone in the world should equally work for minimum wage, purely because you don't want to step up to the mark and invest in your future.

if you cant afford to mine bitcoins. then earn them the way everyday people earn fiat. sell products, sell services, get employed where the salery is bitcoin. become a consultant/teacher, do meet-ups, open a cafe, clothes shop, anything. the world is your oyster, just don't ask other people to hold back.

The system could act as a miner registration. Of course, how do you ensure and *trust* that 1 person has only registered once? How can that system be distributed and enforced? It's a mystery to me, maybe the answer is you can't...

That system would indeed lower the hashrate, which as I see it and as Satoshi remarked is a good thing, leveling the playing field, etc.

And the total hash-rate would be significantly lower than it is today, which would be a negative implication for sure, although I suppose on the flip-side, it would be harder for an individual to perform a 51% attack, that is, without the use of a botnet (which would then be able to much more eaily perfomr one than it could now).

I think on balance, the system we have now is the better and more secure one.

It's impossible. There's no way to identify a person in a decentralized digital system, not on the spot and definitely not in historic records.

If it was possible, there would be no need for hash-based mining at all, we'd just give each person an equal share of the generated coins and synchronization power.

I proposed an idea earlier related to this.

While Satoshi suggests a gentlemans agreement, I suggest a programmed system which ensures all those interested in mining can mine *up to* a specific hashrate and no more.

This would enable everyone a fair share of the mining pie, while also enforcing security in that no one would be allowed to do a 51% attack as they are only allowed a fixed hashrate for mining.

Let me be clear, I am not sure how this system would actually be created and maintained and there are surely issues with it. However I'd be willing to bet that we could band together and figure something out if we all were to work together on it.

That is very interesting.  I never actually thought about it before.  It's a very Utopian theory on mining, and sharing the wealth.  But he's right, of course.  He was a smart guy, whoever he was.

If everybody on the network had 10M/h each vs if everybody on the network had 100T/h each, or even if everybody had 1h/s.  Everyone would receive exactly the same number of coins in any of those scenarios.

It's only because of greed, and people wanting to get more than their share, that there exists huge gpu farms, and asic's and such.  But if everybody agreed to just use the cpu in their pc, and there were no asic's or gpu's at all.  Then difficulty would be many orders of magnitude smaller than it is now, and most people receive exactly the same amount of coins that they get today.  But WITHOUT having to spend $1000's on dedicated mining hardware, and without wasting tons of electricity and killing the environment.


So maybe all the cpu-only mined coins are more correct than I initially gave them credit for...  They are much more in line with Satoshi's original philosophy.  But they now suffer from the problem of cloud-based virtual farms taking over...

Philosophically and technologically this is a very interesting topic. Of course OP is right, miners would get the same amount of BTC mining with their old GPUs as they would get if everyone switches to asics.

I think it comes down to a very easy concept:

If everyone would share with each other there would be more for everybody because no more resourced would be wasted by fighting for them.

This is the positive aspect of OPs idea, but theres a negative one aswell. Since the miners function as the networks security system by weaving the new transactions securely into the blockchain a gentlemans agreement would severely impact the security of bitcoin. Anyone could launch a 51% attack very easily.

So thats a very slick thing about the bitcoin system: The network integrity is being protected by peoples greed. Since every miner wants a bigger part of the pie an arms race takes place, serving the security and integrity of the network.

While in our established centralized currency system the greed and willingness to get an advantage over others drives things like insider trading, chargeback fraud and credit card theft, in Bitcoin these emotions are funneled into the security and integrity of the system.

So I think this is a genius concept on Nakamotos part, turning the egoism and greed of the peoples to the publics advantage instead of their disadvantage. This might just be a monetary system that works right.

The users are paying the bills. If miners don't want to mine the fork the users find valuable, the users can find other miners. If the users don't value the fork the miners are mining, the miners are screwed (unless they switch to the valuable fork).

The most plausible attack scenario is by an attacker who wishes to damage or destroy Bitcoin. "You're going to hurt confidence in the network" isn't a complicating factor, it's the whole point of the attack.

But whatever the motivation of the attacker, I'm not analyzing here the timeline of the attack and how much the attacker gains at any point in time, and how it changes due to changes in the network. I'm abstracting it all away and referring to it, as a whole, as "what the attacker has to gain by performing the attack". It's either more than what the attack will cost or not, even if we (or even the attacker) don't know exactly which.

I don't want Bitcoin to fail. There is a real problem which could cause it to fail; so I will pursue it until a satisfactory resolution is found, even if I have to deal with uncertainty.

Here you go:

I am somebody so if nobody knows, I don't know either.

If we need to figure it out, it means I don't know what it is.

Well, last time I checked it's the miners that were hashing, and therefore making the rules.
Of course without users the whole thing is pointless, but without the miners have fun forking anything.



That's exactly where you're oversimplifying, because it isn't. If you 51% attack bitcoin, chances are you're going to hurt confidence in the network and therefore the value, thereby changing your expected gain. You're forgetting an important unknown in this equation.

So basically you're chasing a moving target, one for which it's also extremely hard to know whether you're even close to it.



I never said it should be low. I didn't reply either, I pointed out that even though the question might have a theoretical answer it's not in our reach and therefore not very interesting to pursue any further. Of course, the more hashrate the best, there simply is no way to accurately declare the network to be "secure", or "insecure" without resorting to wild guesses and approximations that make the whole exercise pointless.



That's not what I said, as a general thing I try to refrain from using "we should" or "we shouldn't" when it comes to Bitcoin.



Good. So we're on the same page, forgive me but I'm not the kind to dig through histories and I didn't happen to encounter this particular string of words in your previous posts in this thread.

Miners don't make the rules, users (the economic majority) do. That's another misconception.

You seem to be confused.

If X is the network honest hashrate, it will be attacked if the cost for an attacker to obtain X hashrate is less than what he can gain by attacking.

"What he can gain" is fixed. The lower X is, the more likely this condition is to hold and for the network to be attacked. If X is too low we have a problem.

I have defined what "really needed hashrate" means, an argument for the needed hashrate being low is not really a reply.

So because we can't know something with 100% certainty we're supposed to just bury our heads in the sand and not try to analyze, estimate and improve the system?

I am a Bitcoin user, promoter, investor, miner and researcher. I am part of the market. Me analyzing the system and trying to come up with solutions is the market adapting. The market doesn't work by everyone closing their eyes and waiting to see what other people will do.

I said multiple times that I don't know what will happen, so this comment marks the point the debate has degraded so much that I don't have much interest in continuing with it.

If I count correctly there has only been one hardfork and it was merely a bugfix.

You're oversimplifying by forgetting the fact that someone with such hashpower has an incentive not to mess with Bitcoin.
But basically that's my point, there might be such a value (setting aside the added incentives), but it still makes no sense to talk about the network being "secure" or "insecure" since, as you said yourself, you have no idea and no way to know about the threshold.

I don't know, and the "lengthy" discussions are here to prove that a consensus is far from reached.

Why would 3tx/s not be enough with most transactions being off-chain transactions and the chain only used for settlements between account hubs ?
I mean, if you're a miner you'd be tempted to use your voting power to not make too easy to get into a block.

You can speak like you know the future as much as you want, I won't join you.
What happens next isn't our call, it's the miners call.

The day it's harder to get all the pool operators on #bitcoin-dev at the same time you might see that pulling a hardfork might be much harder than what you think.

Lrn to manners, plox.

Hardfork, of course.

Bitcoin is whatever people say it is. Bitcoin has had hard forks but we still call it Bitcoin. And Bitcoin clearly will have more hard forks in the future.


Really needed hashrate = The hashrate below which Bitcoin will be a victim of a >50% attack. We don't know what it is, but it still exists.


Currently there is a limit of 1MB per block. Do you think this will remain forever?
If so, good luck using your outdated version of Bitcoin that cannot scale above 3 transactions per second. (You can use off-chain payments and whatnot but 3 tx/s is still not enough).

If not, then a hardfork will be needed, refuting your "Anything with a hardfork is not Bitcoin!" attitude, but more importantly - what will it be replaced by?
If nothing at all, good luck using your outdated version of Bitcoin that will have nobody hashing for it and be a constant target for hashrate attacks.
If it will be replaced by something... Then that "something" is exactly what we need to figure out.

There is no "really needed" hashrate threshold that you can compare a subjective appreciation to. The question is flawed in itself.


That's your opinion. Mine is that miners will decide what is theirs to decide. If a group of "core developers" or the "foundation" wishes to hardfork its their problem.


There have been quite lengthy discussions about the existence of god too.


As in "magically"? or by a hardfork? The context in which you're answering the question isn't Bitcoin anymore, it's a fork of Bitcoin.

Crumbs, you are quite simply an imbecile, why are you talking about poop, cream cheese and crackers?

You tried to posit that in order to accomodate more users (up to a level matching the banks' current level) would require more (electical) power usage than the banks:

Then you regress on this assertion, by agreeing that the hashrate is not "required", and so that in order to accomodate more users, theoretically, might not even require any more hashrate than we have now, although we both know that practically it will.

Then you agree with me.

Then you talk about cheese and the moon, and then again. I think you have made a total of about 3 analogies in this thread now, of which all three were completely nonsensical and not appropriate for (well, anything) the topic at hand.

I can't believe I even replied to your ramblings. Your ignore light is about to be lit up a little bit brighter  

@Meni Rosenfeld: Thanks.

The possible gap between perceived and real need doesn't contradict what I said.

No. Without massive protocol changes, the market does not have the tools to adapt to this situation. There have been lengthy discussions about this.

Nobody knows exactly how this will happen. But one possibility is that a limit will be placed on the total value that can be transacted per block, and if the resulting network hashrate is perceived to be too low, the limit will be tightened.

Thanks.  If we could only tie in JC into this

Sure :
 - the switch to tx-fees-only happens
 - nothing extremely special happens
 - the market adapts, eventually
 - the network is responsive and secure

The end.

I (honestly) don't understand how the transition from mining-for-bitcoins to mining-for-tx_fees will play out.  Sorta' filed it away under "not the time to think about it, will cross that bridge when we get to it."  Can anyone walk me through a scenario which results in a responsive & secure network?