Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 14443. (Read 26609810 times)

I'll point out just one: delayed access to leading edge mining hardware. A jus primae noctis of sorts, imposed by the lord to the commoners.

Alright, point them out.

Andreas has an opinion on this %51 attack debate also.
https://twitter.com/Xentagz/status/967432856745193473

I am convinced.

The invisible hand only works if there are no hidden hand-choppers, like unnaturally high entry barriers to the business or vast discrepancies in the price of energy.

I think it's an English mistake. I read it as "less and less people own homes". Which is true.

Adam Smith was right. Stop trying to control things and everything works out. So there is only one shovel maker? That means their products are functional and their prices are reasonable. The moment either of those stop being the case, someone else will overtake them.

You don't need to be a communist to expect markets to be as efficient as they can be. In fact, market efficiency is not a primary concern in communist utopy. For capitlaists, however, Monopolies and oligopolies are the primary source of market inefficiency.

Nothing personal, and probably not too accurate. All right, I apologise. The point is, although you come from very different places, you can end up arriving at the same point. Big blocks, miner power and progressive irrelevance of the network of users (as in "full nodes").

Core devs can come out and say "We upgrading the btc protocol to keep it safe against Quantum computers so a PoW change is necessary".

Bitmain will have no ground against this. 

If they raised prices a hundredfold from here, and it was still profitable to buy their stuff, then that's fair game.

The market can bear whatever it can bear. Let's not turn into pretend-communists.

And why would you compare me to yogi? That makes no sense.

There can not be soft fork PoW change, it's the hardest of all hard forks.

Keep in mind that no one would more encourage such a change than Jihan Wu. If such thing happen, he will have a ground to a claim BCash is the real Bitcoin, and he knows that claim is false in current situation. I'm afraid he may even really attack Bitcoin just to make some more incentive for PoW change.

IMHO the only thing that can justify PoW change is Quantum computing attack on SHA2, and Cuckoo Cycle is Quantum resistant btw. Doing it now is jumping in the abyss just for the sake of change.

Proof of Stake has coin age to consider, any participant has to first be fully upto date and part of a network for some time in order to then be part of the staking process which even then is randomised not on demand.    Theres only some average rate at which a large holder will stake not that they can force participation.   POS is dangerous if the majority of a crypto currency is liquid on an exchange perhaps, its unlikely to be especially cheap to undermine in this way

I do imagine Proof of stake is going to be part of Ethereum this year as they move to make their transactions cheaper, faster and more efficient.   Vitalik Buterin seems quite focused on avoiding the problems bitcoin transactions had with mining fees and POS is the most viable route ?

Especially if the game is about keeping open competition.

I do care, if they can charge whatever they want for their shovels, to the point of suppressing shoveling when they don't want it to happen.

Monopoly is never good, except for the monopolist. Don't jbreher yourself into a corner.

You can not do it mate, if Quantum breaks SHA256 it will be useless. It's not an option. I don't believe it's realistic, but big boys are pouring a lot of money into it and you never know what the results will be.

People who can't compete always want to change the rules of the game.

I don't care if there is only one shovel maker. Good for them for being successful at what they do.

Also fuck quantum clowns. We would be using them to mine if they were ever to become more than a nerdish fantasy.

IMHO the only thing that can justify PoW change is Quantum computing attack on SHA2, and Cuckoo Cycle is Quantum resistant btw. Doing it now is jumping in the abyss just for the sake of change.

My opinion is that preparing for a soft PoW change would be a good thing. Keywords: preparing and soft.

A monopoly on mining is an evil thing. It keeps decentralization from really taking place. However, changing PoW drastically without a grace period would only alienate the "good" miners - probably ruin them, and piss them off enough to turn them (rightfully) bad.

One way could be to have a PoW that alternates between a few different hash functions - some of which hard to implement on ASICs, probably because of insane RAM requirements although there are alternatives. The alternance should be based on past history; the percentage of SHA-256 blocks could be dynamic, so "good" miners are incentivized to keep their percentage high by maintaining good demeanor. Or there could be a multiple PoW in each block, so that both a SHA-256 proof and some other proof(s) are necessary for validation. Each PoW function should maintain a different difficulty scale, and the difficulties could be combined into some overall metric. Such a system would be highly tweakable, and adapt dynamically.

(EDIT - about "softness". The initial conditions could be 100% ASIC-based, 0% others, as it is now. Then in times of mempool storms, or fork FUD, or whatever, the "others" might be gently pushed up until the situation gets back to normal.)

Any working solution should be designed with game theory in mind, not only the obvious complexity theory. A long check on testnet would be necessary, to figure out at least the complexity part, if not the game theory part.

(Inb4 - Bitcoin is a scam designed to centralize because no digital money can ever blah blah the Joos blah blah gold and silver.)

I've been considering running a mining rig simply for the education it would offer but I'm on the fence knowing that it may not be profitable and also realizing it will likely change drastically in the short term future. I also don't want to buy from jihan with bcash some overpriced, outdated box.
I mean, I seed my torrents properly and I'd prefer to contribute to BTC pools but where to start today?