Bitcoin Forum

here's a totally hypothetical test of your crypto ethics.

if you were sitting tinkering in your garage and came up with a way to mine that was instantly 100-1000x more powerful, what would you do?

would you sell it? 51% the shit out of the blockchain to reshape it how you wanted it? hand the design over in a benevolent manner to everyone? drip feed it onto the market to stop insane distortions?

That's a really interesting question, I've pondered the same question several times actually.

I guess at first I'd use it for myself to gain some coins. I mean who would not?

After that I'm not sure if I'd like to sell it or give it away. I'm leaning towards the 2nd option as this is Crypto after all.

I guess it is a matter of morals and greed that determines what you decide to do. But in all honesty, I'd have no problems with getting 100-1000 BTC for myself before releasing it to the wild.

Use it to mine bitcoins.

I would not do anything that could damage the bitcoin ecosystem and selling would be dangerous if this technology fell into the wrong hands. So I might just use it to mine Bitcoin and other altcoins and get rich with it. And more important: get Segwit activated.

But now the biggest problem would be the confidence that Bitcoin could lose if someone no one knows held most of the mining power from nowhere, having the chance to control the future of the currency. Thus making Bitcoin "less decentralized".

100 - 1000 times more powerful than the latest mining hardware? That is a hell of a hardware man, I think with that, you will need a good internet connection and a 10 cooling fans.  It can mine $2000 to $3000 per week, that is really great, but the thing is, if you hand it over at the market, everyone will be trying to mine bitcoin, demand go down, and obviously,  price will do too.

I will simply mine as much bitcoin as possible with my new powerful mining rig till other find out how I am doing it. But this can also cause sudden crash in market because everyone will notice that I am doing it out of sudden and they may panic due to possible 51% attack on network by me (unknown miner for others).

that's the core of the question. would you really do that? it would instantly drive everyone into a frenzy of panic.

Imo the best solution would be to report it to the devs, because if you have found a way to mine 100-1000 times more faster, than sooner or later someone will find it too and in the end someone will use it with malicious intent. This will result in a huge crash and maybe even fork, so it can only be profitable in a short term. It's possible that the panic will start almost immediately after everyone spot a new powerful miner. In the end, a lot of people will be angry so the person who did it will have a huge target on their back for the rest of their life. So it's better to just mine a few dozens of bitcoins and report it to the devs.

I think that this goes beyond a mining technology. A quantum leap in bitcoin's mining algorithm would probably mean that there is potential to hold the network hostage with only a fraction of the funds that'd be previously needed. In such a hypothetical scenario, a single party would be able to handle bitcoin's network.

Well if that happened to us it will pretty much mean we are rich. I would keep quite a out it and mine like a demon with the new technology and just get rich. I'm sure most of us would do that. Hey maybe it will solve mining fees !! Those fees are getting crazy high man.


Nah I would just stop as soon as I have mined a while lot.

I would make mining profitability very difficult for other miners, because they are killing Bitcoin with their greedy behaviour. I will also target

these spammers and eliminate the influence they are having by sweeping up their attempts to sabotage Bitcoin. The difficulty will go up, but I

will normalize the current situation with Jihan and his friends as long as I can. A 51% attack is stupid, it will just kill trust and then destroy the

experiment.... leaving me with worthless coins.  :(

but if you're flashing that much power simply the possibility of that attack would be enough to get most people screaming. how would you avoid it?

if there was a more efficient way to do things, ofcourse you would use it.

its not as much about personal gains. its also about adding more strength to the network.

all this asicboost crap about some say to temporarily nuke it with segwit, is just opening up the possibility of outsiders using it to compete with less hardware.

its always better for bitcoiners to use it on the mainnet. than to not use it and let some outsider make an alternative chain that overtakes the main chain and then gets introduced as the main chain later.

..

its much like the GPU days. should we have not allowed ATI gpu's to mine because open CL was better than geforce's Kuda
its much like the CPU days. should we have not allowed dual/quad core to mine. because they were better than single core

in my eyes if there is a more efficient way to do things. then everyone should be allowed to do it. to protect the network.
trying to rule it out with cludgy code is not protecting the network. its slowing down the growth of strength of the network due to 'politics'

The answer is obvious, I'd get a way to build these machines massively and sell them. Hashrate increase throughout the network would be my main priority, sending machines to all corners of the world if possible. Handing over the design would be a to-do eventually, or maybe even immediately.

This.  Without the slightest hesitation.

Act discreetly, of course. I believe that in the past there was a bug that allowed some guy to create hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins, but once devs saw this, miners forked the chain and the problem was solved.

first you claimed nashian religion of bitcoin with nash as satoshi
then you claimed you knew all about bitcoin but failed understanding of consensus

now you want to split bitcoin...
you are obviously not interested in bitcoin and just want to disrupt it.
so please either spend 6 months learning bitcoin. or go play with your fiat and stop making bad judgements of bitcoin

looking at Dinos other posts..
its obvious he doesnt know about the network and only wants to split the network many many times to multiply coins so he can get rich before running back to fiat.
guys like this care nothing about bitcoins longevity.

As others have mostly said, use it to mine a few hundred coins and probably report it to the devs. I'm not averse to the idea of getting rich, but I also don't want to destroy Bitcoin and the faith people have in it; perhaps I should just mine a bunch of shitcoins...

Contact the developers and figure out a benevolent way together how we could prepare the network to accept the new technology... after I've mined a few hundred Bitcoins myself to document the process how the method works and prove it's being legit.

I would mine & side with bitcoin core to offset the bitcoin unlimited attempt to achieve a mining monopoly.

If I sold the technology, buyers would sign a contract guaranteeing they mine only for bitcoin core.

There's a chance I would keep it as patented proprietary technology unavailable to the general public.

Intellectual property isn't as valuable as it used to be & there are many cases of copyrighted & patented technology theft.

I would mine and dump so that the other miners would stop wasting electricity on inefficient miners. Then try to promote pos coins. We are all probably going to go extinct if we keep wasting electricity like this.

I would probably keep it a secret until I became very rich :D

Once I have enough money, I would figure out where else I could invest this technology, it wouldn't just be limited to bitcoin mining.

The exponential gains would be enormous, but after I got rich, I would try to figure out how this technology could help humanity...


After being financially set, I would go about trying to better the world

Sneaky bastard  ;D
I think I will do the same thing, though not reporting it back to the devs, it is your invention, why will you dispose it to the devs? You invented something that will make you rich, aren't you fascinated with that. If I did found a way like that, I can make my name bigger than any other bitcoin holders in the world, invest it on company, and maybe, also, make my own company

imagine this though.

imagine you had 14% of the network and could make a 20% efficiency gain of your 14%(bringing you to 16.8)
you could just secretly keep it to yourself..
OR
ask for 3% profit from every competing pool to let them use your tech.
which by everyone using your tech brings you back down to 14%.. but bcause your taking a cut from everyone it all adds up that your still getting equivelent to 17% income while only 14% hash
which when all things are considered makes the entire network 20% stronger because everyones using it and your getting 3% of the network income..

This is a hypothetical doubt even i am having,we have one major mining hardware company and when they release a new technology they would release at a later time and the early advantage always goes to the manufacturer and here in the bitcoin scene having an early advantage means a big difference on how much money you are going to make and if i figure out a leap i would rather take advantage of it rather than releasing to the public atleast for sometime . ;D

Disguise it as a natural part of the network and drip feed it until the technology is uncovered through research and detailed analysis then reveal it and watch the fun ensue :) Or sell it if it's one of those the secret KGB found it and you need a security leverage in case something happens good old insurance.doc.

Technically speaking, if you could reach to the invention of something like this, with just announcing it and getting funded for it, the profit will most likely be more than some mining with it, Anyway it's still a long way in the road.

You're confusing me with Iamnotback.  I tried to convince Iamnotback that Nash couldn't be Satoshi, because Nash was too smart to be Satoshi, he would not have committed so many cryptographic idiocies ; moreover, I'm indeed thinking that bitcoin's demise is the fact that it sticks to gold bug economics (collectibles) and hence will never be Nash ideal money.


I understand perfectly well consensus: it is a Nash equilibrium.  Most bitcoiners however, don't understand consensus, because they don't now much about game theory.  They think that consensus is "the central authority proposes, we all accept, and that's it" or something of the kind.  Consensus is a game-theoretical notion in decentralized systems, called a Nash equilibrium.


I think that someone who doesn't even understand elementary mining dynamics shouldn't tell others what to do ;)

Bitcoin has a broken design beyond repair.  This is why I would like to make something that works better as it was intended, but it is now way, way way too late for bitcoin to adapt, unless forced to.

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No, I think the first thing a crypto SHOULDN'T do if it has the pretension to become a currency, is to offer the possibility to become rich with it by sitting on one's stash.  That's one of the big failures of bitcoin: you can become rich with it.  As such, it is a lost cause for a currency.  With a Nash ideal money, you can't become rich, and that's the beauty of it.  Becoming rich without production of some sort of value is an obvious distortion of optimal allocation of resources, and a good currency is exactly such that it doesn't bring such distortions.  It is *one* of the many failures of bitcoin.

Mind you, I do not think that *everything* in bitcoin is wrong.  The invention of a decentralized consensus system that keeps all actors on an immutable protocol is the outright genius invention of Satoshi.  But he didn't see that himself (or pretended not to see it).