That is indeed a good question, how do you prevent currency from being centralized to a few single entity
Gold eventually centralized to a few entities after hundreds of years, so will bitcoin. If one people controlled majority of bitcoins, he has the power to crash its value, just like central banks do with their gold reserve, but what is the motivation? I just read that Canada central bank refused to revalue their gold reserve (still valued at $30+), since they are afraid of causing large amount of sell-off on gold market and crash its price
Topic: when bitcoins max out and miners are paid from fees. (Read 928 times)
They will choose what is the most profitable for them. A Miner would very likely switch to another coin if he just needs to do so.
I disagree with that. A few months ago, mining Litecoins were almost 4 times as much profitable as mining Bitcoins. But still, I didn't noticed any large-scale increase in the Litecoin hash-power.
Well, you can't mine LTC with ASIC. Unless you are talking about the new scrypt asic..
They will choose what is the most profitable for them. A Miner would very likely switch to another coin if he just needs to do so.
I disagree with that. A few months ago, mining Litecoins were almost 4 times as much profitable as mining Bitcoins. But still, I didn't noticed any large-scale increase in the Litecoin hash-power.
They will choose what is the most profitable for them. A Miner would very likely switch to another coin if he just needs to do so.
I disagree with that. A few months ago, mining Litecoins were almost 4 times as much profitable as mining Bitcoins. But still, I didn't noticed any large-scale increase in the Litecoin hash-power.
Maybe by then we would have so many transactions that earning from fees is a lot!
They will choose what is the most profitable for them. A Miner would very likely switch to another coin if he just needs to do so. And bitcoin users will use bitcoin..
No one will be able to control 51% of the Bitcoin, or even 25% of all the coins. Even Satoshi is said to be having a total of only BTC980,000. If someone tries to amass millions of coins, then the exchange rate will increase by 10x-100x and make it impossible to buy more than 1-2 million. Also, a large part of the coins are lost forever, with the percentage calculated at anywhere between 5% and 10%.
What happens if 1 company or person controlls over 90% do miners move to another coin or just use bitcoin?
If one party owns 90% of the network bitcoin is effectively dead, at least as it was intended. It's called a 51% attack.
Some miners mine to support the network and will even keep mining at least for a while when it's no longer profitable, betting the future value will make up for it. The difficulty makes sure it will always balance itself to keep mining a relevant operation if the network isn't completely compromised.
What happens if 1 company or person controlls over 90% do miners move to another coin or just use bitcoin?
If you talking about one pool controlling over 50%, there are enough people who care and swich to different pool.
What happens if 1 company or person controlls over 90% do miners move to another coin or just use bitcoin?
They change to another coin if they want to. Otherwise they'd just stick with bitcoins.Nothing would really happen anyway if someone controlled 90% of the miners unless the one controlling the miners had malicious intentions. It would probably hurt the bitcoin reputation though.
What happens if 1 company or person controlls over 90% do miners move to another coin or just use bitcoin?
Most miners move to coins where it's profitable to mine, so I'd guess they switch (assuming you buy the premise that tx fees alone will not be able to fund a safe, decentralized blockchain, and one person or company's going to swoop in and threaten the coin they're mining by capturing 90% of hashpower). Whether or not they use the coins they mine or use one of the auto-converting pools where the coins are automatically traded to BTC which they'd then use for actual transactions is hard to say, and probably heavily dependent on the fungibility and merchant adoption of the coins. 
They use Bitcoin.
What happens if 1 company or person controlls over 90% do miners move to another coin or just use bitcoin?
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