Topic: Solutions to get rid of cartels (Read 306 times)

no matter what/how you change/modify the mining algo. there will always be a way of gaming the system

EG
if it was a PoS.. lets say 100k individuals staked. .. 20 pools(managers/top guys) could simply make 10k stake each(200k) 3.3% of the time a pool get a block and 0.00033% of the time a individual wins a block
EG
if it was a PoH(harddrive).. lets say 100k individuals had nodes. .. 20 pools(managers/top guys) could simply buy 10k raspberry Pi's each(200k) 3.3% of the time a pool get a block and 0.00033% of the time a individual wins a block

they can as they are getting the rwards more often then use the profits to buy more nodes/stake and increase their % of the pie, diluting the chances of the individuals

forget ever thinking that there can be a "1 note 1 cpu 1 vote" situation because there will always be a way to pool resources

...
pool cartels are not a problem. because although a certain reddit group shouts out propaganda about such. the real problem is everyone is relying on one github source for bitcoin rules.. this is the central point of failure of bitcoin.
yes the nodes are then distributed. but the decisions of rule changes exist in only one github repo. and any other repo that wants to have a public vote on a different/better/positive roadmap usualy gets treated as an opposition rather than a decentralised democratic choice. and thus the single central point of failure github repo team then try everything they can to treat anything that threatens thier dominance as an altcoin. rather than a consensus challenge.

there is no such thing as asic-resistant.
there are coins that can not be mined with the current existing ASICs but there is nothing stopping a mining company to start manufacturing new ASICs compatible with them.

That may be one of the unresolved issues, and it should be necessary to develop as soon as possible in order to be better in the future.

The reason why this problem arises is because of the program or code that is being used by bitcoin. To solve this kind of problem we have to modify or to make changes on the code on which is very troublesome since we need to have a consensus and we will be calling all bitcoin miners and holders including exchanges and others to approve such proposal. But during the consensus conflicting  ideas occurred and cause a split among the community.

I think that is not possible. Miners help make each transactions go through. They are the ones that solve it. The system has no way of finding out if its one miner or many miners working along with each other to solve a block. So i've hear from my friends who are mining, its hard to solve a block all by yourself. You can but its difficult. So i guess the reason why people would team up.

As far as I know, the system can not determine how many operations a particular network node is performing. It is difficult to regulate.

If regular people cant mine anymore then thats not the problem of the cartels neither pools! Its theirs! Why would the other two will care anyway if their work is being done systematically.

Do you think that limiting the work per hour will really aid the problem that you are describing? Have you considered the consequence of this rule? It will limit the way we will earn the blocks and thus our ROI's will also get hampered badly.

As mentioned by @mocacinno some of the people might find blocks with single miner while some of them might not be lucky enough to do it with 100's! Considering that luck facto and after implementing your rule of "limited-work" per hour you will slow down the process even further and might just hit the block after few years or so. This will kill the whole process. Also, it could relay a stress call over the small cartels and miners when the transaction output will be higher. Then increased fees will be the next thing to cool down the whole process and much more consequences like that may happen in the future!

Thanks for the explanation. I won't lie I read it 4 times and its still complicated to me, but I was hoping for an explanation like this so I can start further research. Thank you

ok well that makes sense. I'm no programmer so I didn't know it was impossible to track nodes...

This isn't as easy as it seems because tracking the work done by a miner on the node is not easy, if it's not impossible, and without these miners transactions would not go through.

Nobody the network doesn't know how much work one miner or a pool of miners does...(obviously, the pool can make a more or less accurate estimation about the work done by it's members because they allow people to submit shares at a much lower difficulty to estimate their hashrate). This is information that isn't broadcasted to the network. Only when a miner finds a block whose sha256d hash of the header is under the current target, it is broadcasted.
Given a certain difficulty, the amount of hashrate a miner (or pool) has just determines the odds of him finding a valid block header.
The network's hashrate you see in (for example) bitcoin core's information is just an estimation based on the difficulty and the number of blocks found during the last 24? hours.

In other words: there is no way to limit the amount of work... A person with a single S9 can have a lucky streak and find 3 or 4 blocks in a year, while a person with 100 S9's can have a dry spell and doesn't find a block at all during a year...

Blocks can be broadcasted using different nodes, so if a pool wants to hide their identity, they can use a new coinbase address for every block, don't add identifying information to the blocks they're solving and use a new node for every block they broadcast. This way nobody will be able to tie a block to a pool, and nobody will be able to estimate the pool's hashrate.

EDIT: the text in green was added after i suddenly realised the OP was talking about pool mining, and the pool operators will have a rather good estimation about their user's hashrate... They just don't have to share this information with anybody else if they don't want to...

I'm kind of new to crypto, but i have a question.

I know that mining cartels are a huge problem, so much so that regular people can't mine anymore.

I was wondering why can't they introduce some kind of limit of how much work one node can do per hour? Wouldn't that massively aid the problem?

I'm no programmer, so I'd really appreciate hearing thoughts about what solutions people are coming up with to solve this problem. Is it unsolvable??