Topic: To stop centralization, you need to cap the Difficulty, not the Blocksize !!! (Read 2753 times)

this is where luke is wrong.

difficulty is not based on total network hashrate of all miners hash combined. but on the time a miner can solve a block.

and it has been proven many times that MANY miners can make a block around 10 minutes. with a few varients of seconds between each
EG 6 of the top 20 pools REGULARLY make blocks around 10 minutes

so even if a few miners dropped off wont cause any issues at all. because miners can still make blocks in the same time period as always.

the debate of lukes should not be about the reward halving causing miners to drop out to cause prolonged time of blocksolving. which someone like him (a pool owner) should know all about. but instead its should be about (i think its his hidden reasoning) making it slightly easier to mine to give the little guys a chance to get some profits instead of the remaining big guys leaping forward with less competition and getting more rewards more often.

to me doing a hardfork purely for difficulty is stupid. because within a few weeks the difficulty would go up again. and thus its a waste of code and hard forking just for such a temporary measure of letting his little pool have a slight betterchance of profit for a couple weeks.

his proposal has nothing to do with blocktimes.
because if all the top 6 pools can make blocks in 10 minutes. give or take a few seconds.. then if 3 dropped out there are still 3 big pools making blocks in 10 minutes. thus less competition and thus the remaining 3 will solve more blocks between them rather then sharing between 6.

That isn't 100% true. If lets say you mine in AntPool, and they vote for a decision you don't want. What do you do? Simple. Switch! Lots of pools out there and surely one will suit your needs?

In the light of Luke Jr's proposal to adjust difficulty on block halving, this thread has become relevant again.

Probably.
Ethereum has a 10 second block time which causes many orphans, but I think they are called Uncles and it's still possible to get a block reward from them.

If we cap the difficulty, the network will no longer be scalable, we will have blocks every few minutes instead of 10.

But, there are many Alt coins where the average time to find a block is close to 1 second. Do they have high orphan rate ?

if you cap Difficulty there is no cap on how fast blocks will be solved

you could get in a situation that blocks take ~1 second to solve.

orphen rate would go sky high.

no way.

Please read this...

It completely new things how to cap difficulty and how it could prevent some miners take 51% attack. If some one explain that would be more helpful. Thanks in advance.

So, in simple terms, you can not just mine and sell. You need to mine, hold and sell.

Before bitcoins had value, miners spent money mining worthless bitcoins. Once bitcoins had value, the value of the mined bitcoins were still less than the cost to mine them.

Holding bitcoins has been very profitable for some people, including the miners that mined at a loss.

How come CPU mining be unprofitable for those who mined then and sold later ?

wont the diff have to be capped at a very low number to do that?

That is a myth. The "average joe" has never been able to make a decent (if any) profit from mining. Even when CPU mining dominated, people generally mined at a loss.

But the higher the difficulty goes the more seure the networks becomes because of the technology rush. 

I think a big problem with bitcoin is the average joe cannot mine succesfully like before though.

By capping you only hurt the system even more, the big miners have not just one machine churning on the blocks, but a vast array of miners all working, if the cap is installed all they have to do is make smaller clusters and gain even more control.

If you want to cap, you should make it a lottery as to which miner, regardless it's hashing power will get a reward, so there is no certain ROI for the big mining rigs, just the basement miners will be happy enough to set up a rig and maybe never get a reward but still contribute to a decentralised world of wonder! But the mathematics will probably prove me wrong there too, because chances for a big mining rig to win the reward will still be greater than the hobby miners..

If you cap the difficulty, you cap the security of the main chain, you cap the cost of a 51% attack.

Capping the difficulty does not affect hash power. The amount a miner earns is determined by their fraction of the total hash power. Big or small, a miner will still increase their earnings by increasing their hash power.

If the difficulty is capped you would basically limit the mining market and the development of it, it would be a regulation that stagnates free competition for mining. This alone could have disasterous consequences. Think about your proposition again and try later, because this one simply doesn't compute.

If we capped the difficulty too low, wouldn't we end up with a lot more than 1 block every 10 minutes? I thought that's why the difficulty moved around.