Topic: The Biggist Threat To Decentralized Crypto-Currency And The Bitcoin Ideology - page 2. (Read 3683 times)

You speak of GPU miners as though they would be making big money today if it were not for FPGAs and ASICs.

The reality is that back in the day CPU miners were complaining in the same way that people who can afford to buy expensive GPU cards had an unfair advantage and were taking away the decentralization of Bitcoin. That anyone should be able to just turn on their money and start making money.

Back then, the investment in a $1,000-$2,000 graphics card may net you $1,500 to $2,000 worth of bitcoins. Sometimes people lost money on mining.

Then FPGAs come along and outpace the GPUs. These cost more and the return is slightly more because the Bitcoin price has gone up a bit more. Then ASICs come along and they cost more and the return is again slightly more because the Bitcoin price has gone up a bit more. But the percentage has remained fairly constant no matter which hardware has been used.

But the thing here is, there is a large chasm between the fastest hardware available today for mining and the next level (quantum computing).

We are in the early adopter phase of ASICs. Several companies are working to mass produce these by the hundreds of thousands.

In the future you will be able to order an ASIC at a much lower cost and have it shipped out within days. Hell, just before quantum computing comes out you may be able to go to your local Best Buy or Walmart and buy a Bitcoin ASIC miner next to the roku boxes.

The more people that are able to use these ASICs will mean that the difficulty will be higher and the payout will not be as high as it is today, but the price will be higher so more than likely there may be a return similar to what people have received before. But the key is that they will become even more decentralized. There is no "next" technology to pool money for like the ASICs that will give you an advantage over everyone else.

If you are a physics major your best way forward would be to look into quantum computing and focus on that because I guarantee that once Bitcoin takes off, the sprint will be to be the first to come online with a quantum miner. But the technological leap will be years in between so we will be able to enjoy cheap ASICs for quite some time.

They key to the faster technologies is that the faster they are, the more secure Bitcoin will be, and the worries of a 51% attack by any outside entity will be a thing of the past.

Thanks, I appreciate the support!

Thanks for the advice, I know your trying to help and I appreciate it a lot. If you read a little closer you might see that I already understood most of what you advised.

Thanks, +1 for you. Thats the first reply to one of my posts that I can respect.

This too

You SERIOUSLY need to spend much more time in the Economics/Politics section of this forum. You have a lot to learn. This was a very long and very thought out post, and you should be proud of it, but there are just so many misconceptions in it regarding the way people and markets work that it would take for ever to address them all. Sorry.

The easiest solution to your problem are the pass through shares and mining pools available for sale on one of the bitcoin stock exchanges. You can be a part of a mining pool or gain a share in a mining company for a very small investment and when you have enough you will be allowed to vote on the key issues for that security.

If you look at the distribution of blocks right now it is clear that their is a fairly good distribution of mining power. Unfortunately your late arrival to the game makes it impractical for you to start mining without a significant capital investment. As you said this is the way of the world and if you want to get exposure to mining their are still ways to do it, just not through direct personal investment.

Hello fellow MineCoinians,

      I am a true believer in the pure and honest morality of freedom and even though I am fairly new to the crypto-currency community I am very excited about the ultimate potential of the BTCitcoin ideology. Though I hold no religious theology as true and absolute, I do believe that man has, over the eons, collected a great deal of wisdom and that wisdom is most often found in the various religious text of history. One of the most quoted religious phrases from the hebrew and christian bible is that 'money is the root of all evil.' You most likely have heard this phrase many times before, but that phrase does not exist. What is actually written is that 'the LOVE of money is the root of all evil.' It is this fragment of ancestrial wisdom that I wish to bring to light so as to address the logic behind my assertion. Decentralization, the very foundation of the Bitcoin ideology, is at serious risk of annialation.

      First and foremost I want to be honest about what brought me to this moment in my life. I am a college student studing for a double major (computer enginering and physics) and working towards an eventual PHD. Because of past mistakes I have serious financial trouble so holding a job wouldn't be worth it after creditors and uncle Sam take their cut from my paycheck. I was searching online for a way to make an income that would not take to much time away from my studies when I came across bitcointalk.org. I immediately downloaded and installed bitcoin-qt and the bitminter client and fired up my GTX690. After some days passed it became apparent that it was going to take awhile to make very much money at all so I started to research my options. This research of course revealed the world of FPGA mining rigs and the latest holy grail of miners... the ASICs rig. At that point I became very discouraged, not so much because FPGA and ASICs hardware was too expensive and out of reach, but that FPGA and ASICs hardware was too expensive and out of reach for me in my situation. This fact is the critical link that enduced my awarness of the major point I wish to make in this article.

     I did alot of brainstorming trying to figure out a way to improve my situation and I came to one inevitable conclusion, I cannot do it alone. The best option I could imagine was to set up a special mining pool just for raising funds to build/purchase an ASICs mining farm soley to provide all the mining participants in the pool with their own ASICs rigs. This is another key to my argument, as I conducted my research on mining pools I became highly aware of the negative impact that a scarce supply of ASIC mining hardware will have.

     There will always be disparity between classes in wealth, thats just the nature of life. Bitcoin mining has offered a more level playing field because with careful planning and proper financial structuring an individual could start a small mining venture and grow that effort and diligence into operating rigs that have a respectful hashrates. ASICs technology threatens the balance that has exists untile now because it is disruptive to this level playing field. Those who can afford to pay a premium to adopt ASICs hardware early have such a massive hashing advantage that even the advantages of the best FPGA setup will rapidly evaporate as difficulty levels rise at a sudo exponential rate. This leaves the FPGA miners scrambling for extra FPGA units and trying to squeeze out every last drop of effency from their FPGA setup. The run on ASICs and FPGAs raises their prices and causes an increasingly diminished supply of ASICS and FPGA units.

     GPU miners tend to be the types of people that have limited resources, dual purposing by using their rigs for example; gaming and mining, or are trying to earn enough coin to upgrade to better mining rigs. Humble GPU mining can still be (to an ever decreasing extent) vaible for some miners and a few short months ago had pretty decent hashrates but not for much longer. The GPU miners are rapidly being left out in the deep, cold emptiness of crypto-mining space with warp drives that are failing because of a quantum shift in the alternate laws of mining physics.

     GPU miners are further disparaged by the scarcity and rising prices of FPGA and new ASIC hardware.  GPU miners generally cannot afford or cannot aquire the hardware to upgrade. This furthers the class divide between GPU miners and those who can afford to pay a premium and adopt ASICs hardware early and the FPGA miners who are able to keep up and eventually transition to ASICs hardware. By the time the few remaining GPU miners are able to upgrade, many of them may never be able to catch up, mostly due to the hardware requirements making mining feasible have continued to increase at a sudo exponential rate without their participation. To further the STAR TREK analogy, these straggling GPU miners will be droped from the warp conduit simply because they ran out of antimatter while trying to catch up to bigger, faster and more advanced starships leaving them disparagingly adrift forever in the sameness of space as the disenfranchised GPU miners that preceded them.

     This is the type of situation that has historically given rise to desperate levels of poverty in ordinary societies, it is simple economics coupled with human self protectionism. A digital future is our worlds destiny and whether or not bitcoin will survive far into that future is irrelevant, but the conduct of the bitcoin community will greatly influence the nature of humanities destiny within that future and is instrumental in laying the foundation for what kind of society humanities future is built on. So how we, the bitcoin community, behave during this transitional shift has profound significance for the quality of life of future generations. The question I pose to you is this; are we, at this profound and criticle moment in history, going to perpetuate the blind sins of the past because of short sighted self preservationizm and greed or are we going to create a revolution in the human condition for the benifit of all of man.

     The core principle of Bitcoin ideology is the decentralization of currency, and for what pupose? We all know the answer to this question. It is because we all know the evil that men drunk with power will do to his very own blood let alone what he would do to you. But what do you think it means if crypto-coin mining becomes just another resource that only rich corporations can afford to harvest? How different do you think that this situation will be from the way things are now, or the way things have always been? Once a viable crypto-currency is embedded into a culture it becomes no different than any other essential resource and is subject to the same jurisdictions. If crypto-mining is only available to an elite group of wealthy individuals, then it becomes subject to the concerns of the elite. History shows us that elitist tend to be unfair, greedy self preservationist who are susceptible to and often the very architects of political pressure. Ask yourself this question and answer yourself honestly. If you had invested years of your life mining a substantial amount of bitcoin wealth and suddenly you find yourself faced with the decision to either protect the principles behind Bitcoins Ideology and loosing all the wealth you had worked so long to acquire or forsaking the ideology of Bitcoin and keeping all your acquired wealth, minus some taxes and fees, knowing that you'll likely live well the rest of your life, what would YOU do? Again, history shows what most people would do, its a simple matter of self preservationizm. This is why decentralization is so critical.
    
     I think we all agree that we do not want the situation to get to that point, but that is the course it is presently taking and only together can we stop this decent of such a noble endeavor. So what is it that we can do? In many respects the solution is simple in concept, its the execution thats more challenging. The hardest element to overcome is at the core of the human instinct to survive, and that is the instinct of self preservation. This instinct is of course very strong and because human beings are intellectual creatures this instinct is often triggered when our ideas or sense of self are in intellectual danger even though our bodies or lifes may not be. This is the major cause of human irrational behavior. So for the sole sake of logic it stands to reason that if smaller and smaller groups continue to control larger and larger portions of a finite pool of resources then you either must exponentially increase the quantity of the reasources or you must equalize the method of gathering the resources to a broader group of people. Fortunately in this case the resource is a fabrication of man.

     So with that being said, lets open this up for discussion...  I release it to the floor...

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The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. McCoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home