Topic: To stop centralization, you need to cap the Difficulty, not the Blocksize !!! - page 2. (Read 2851 times)

Or quite the contrary - it will become more centralized. You know, the 'home miners' will be the first to get out, because they are the least cost-effective, and only large mining farms with bleeding-edge hardware and cheap electricity will stay...

Anonymity at its best.

This. If you can solve the identity verification problem required to do what franky1 is proposing, you've also made Bitcoin obsolete.

This is not possible, because the pool will change its mining address to hide identity.

the solution to it is not capping the difficulty or keeping the blocksize low..

if you really want to help decentralisation. its simple.. when a pool solves a block, it cant submit a new block for atleast 2 blocks.. thus giving the opportunity for other pools to solve.

that way for every 3 blocks there are 3 different pools that solved it. rather then just 1 solving all 3 blocks

they're right tho, you can't mess around with difficulty directly, it should be sort of sacred like the max amount of bitcoins.
Touch one of the pillars of bitcoin, and it will all come tumbling down.

cheers

For the wrong cause...

For once we agree.

 

I'm not sure what you are talking about either but we were considering a scenario with 1 node in which case that one node is free to change the protocol rules at will.

And yes, anyone with a brain will understand nodes are more important than miners: they're the one who run the P2P protocol. Security is pretty much useless without a big enough distribution of nodes so that the rules of the game can't be modified.

If there's only two nodes running the system it doesn't matter if there's a quadrillion miners "securing" it, the rules can be changed at will which makes the whole system worthless.

wut? you're talking about an hypothetical scenario of a 51% attack, i'm talking about miners as a many pool and farm, not a single entity that dictate everything

your scenario will not happen unless bitcoin is already dead, miners have no reason to double spend at all,

and no, nodes are not more important than miners, without miners no more coins will be issued, and we will not have bitcoin at all

1 thing, it's not the decentralization aspect that keeps the bitcoin network safe, is the reward itself, that prevent it from being unsecure

Pools don't control anything.... the miners in them do.

As I understand it, it is not the pools who vote, but the miners inside the pool, right? I mean, a miner in one pool can vote distinct that other miners in the same pool?

 

No problem about security other than arbitrarily double spending, issuing 100,000,000 coins for themselves, etc, etc. You realise ONE node has the ability to totally rewrite the protocol.

Mining is without doubt second to nodes in terms of importance:
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/measuring-decentralization/

You didn't explain up front that you were also proposing to change the block rewards. Nonetheless this changes nothing. "big hash power" is MORE efficient than small home miners, not less as implied by your "resource hungry" comment. The relationship doesn't change just because we change the pacing of block rewards or the size of the rewards. Home-based miners will lose money trying to mine 1 BTC blocks as easily as they can now mining 25 BTC blocks, with small-scale inefficient setups.

You are asking the impossible when you call for decentralization by protocol changes. As it stands the success of bitcoin means that there is big money in mining/securing the network. Because there is big money involved, there is large incentive to investment a lot of money to be the most efficient miner and mine on a large scale. I don't like that either, but I don't see a solution. It's inherent to the fact that mining bitcoin has become lucrative. The only way to "fix" that would be to destroy the value of mining, which is hardly desirable.

The only real way I can see to fight for decentralization is to maintain low barriers to entry, and equal access to the most efficient bitcoin mining hardware. This means encouraging regulatory and legal scrutiny of mining hardware makers (and their relationships with large miners) to ensure no funny business in the way mining hardware is made available and sold in an equitable manner. (Given this is largely a function of Chinese government/law as things stand, I have no idea how to approach this in practice and the downside risks of such scrutiny.)

aside from the sybil attack there are no other problem about security if there are zero full node, miners are more important

it's probably the reason why there are zero incentive for them, to run one

Capping the difficulty would screw the issuance schedule... this is non sense

Blocktimes might become way too fast. Which causes a lot of orphan blocks and problems related to that. If pool mining was not possible, I agree more home miners would mine indeed.

No. If difficulty is capped, block reward needs to be adjusted accordingly, so that all bitcoins do not get mined faster. Lowering block reward in capping difficulty will de-incentivize big hash power, wich is resource hungry. So, mining will be back to small machines again, if we can take down the difficulty and lower the block reward.

I presume you suggest there is 1 node since 0 pretty much means the system is dead.

So... 1 node servicing all of Bitcoin..mmmmm I wonder what could go wrong 

Capping the difficulty means that blocks would be found faster and faster as hashrate increases, accelerating bitcoin towards the final 21 million coin money supply point much faster than under the current plan. Miners would find blocks faster, but the halvings would come much faster so they'd be getting less and less when they did score a block.

I'm not sure how capping difficulty would change anything. If anything the only miners that could stay mining in such an environment would be the most efficient (of course this is tending to be true today, but would be even more so under these conditions). That would increase centralization of mining, not decrease it.