Bitcoin Forum

Seeing that bitcoin has long been impossible to mine on a regular computer began to ponder the question of why the development team does not seek to switch to another algorithm to stop the mining of coins by large corporations and return to the canons that bequeathed Satoshi. It may be worth switching to the pos algorithm, you will not need to spend a huge amount of electricity and investors will be able to receive passive income for storing coins. There will also be no need to be afraid of the quantum computer. Interested in everyone's opinion.

it is impossible to mine bitcoin without investing a large amount of money and no matter what alogirthm it switches to, in the end that large amount of money will be required because there are A LOT of people mining bitcoin hence the difficulty will always be high and consequently you need to have a higher hashrate => invest more money.

because unlike shitcoins, in bitcoin we don't want to fool people into thinking if they could mine it with a cheap computer (that translates into having a low difficulty and hashrate) then the coin is a good and "decentralized" one!

nobody is stopping you to buy a ton of ASICs and become a "large corporation that mines bitcoin". so i don't see any issues there. it is just that YOU don't want to make that kind of commitment and others do and you blame them for that kind of investment!

PoS is the weakest with lots of issues.

why should anybody be paid money out of thin air for just owning money?

if quantum computers were capable of breaking anything you would have a lot more to worry about than just the mining algorithm that bitcoin uses...

OP, research POS. It will basically change Bitcoin's incentive model, and a mere suggestion of a change to POS is already laughable.

The fact Bitcoin is mined at industrial scale with ASICs makes its network the safest one. This is much better than it would have been if everyone could have been able to mine it. Actually the price also reflect this.

There's probably a (small?) loss in decentralisation, but overall this is very good. So it will not be charged.

As said, nobody force you mine, nobody force you choose Bitcoin... I'll add that all CPU mined coins in the last 2 years were unprofitable to mine. So...why would we doom Bitcoin?

Well, let's say some mining pool has taken over 51% of the network and can now manage your state as it wants, for example, change the chain that you have 0 coins, what do you say? Ethereum is not in vain switching to the pos algorithm, since it is impossible to do this on it .

Because there is no need to do this, and PoS is never the answer. The free market forces alone are fixing this, mining is meant to become rare and few people will bother doing it anymore, so its not like you can't and large corps can, soon they too will quit. If anything, only the hobbyists that don't mind losing money, will remain as the last miners, and those smaller operations with free energy such as those with renewable sources.

As you can see, everything is in your own misconceptions. Did you ever thought people would live of mining bitcoin? The mining phase was meant to end, bitcoin is about the coin, not about living of it. Once minted you use them, like you would any other coin.

Nearly all coins have been minted, around 18million of 21, and the reminder will come in the span of the next hundred years, with each one coming slower and slower, which is why mining has to become unprofitable and unattractive.

Bitcoin is entering maturity, and you need to do absolutely nothing to "fix" that. Those who claim it, are either misguided or mistaken.

Contrary to some's belief, it's actually good that bitcoin mining is not "ASIC-proof".

Miners are incentivized to establish large contracts with electricity companies, allowing the network to be secured by the cheapest electricity at very large amounts.

This means that no one player can easily dominate the network.

Any POW algorithm will eventually follow the same path towards ASIC production and mining concentration because of the massive economic incentives involved. It's comparable to a heated arms race.

You could hard fork to new algorithms often -- bricking existing ASIC miners each time -- but this has security implications. Industrial miners won't be willing to risk securing a network where their operation could be rendered worthless overnight. The network would be limited to much lower hash rates, exposing it to 51% attack risks.


The double spending problem hasn't been adequately solved in POS. There is no perfect solution to the problems you're bringing up. Every approach to decentralized consensus has trade-offs.

It's hard to imagine that with how the mining ecosystem is pretty good at self-regulation to kick out bad actors. Larger miners can simply pool their share together to make sure the safety of the network and their own financial incentives are ensured. It's pretty safe to say that the time and money needed to perform such an attack on Bitcoin is useless at this point in time.

EOS is POS too, where some exchanges (Bitfinex was one of them) have already abused their voting rights. Ethereum will be a similar toy because of how most of the coins are held by centralized exchanges. People just like POS for its staking aspect, while everything else of negative nature is discarded because that's not of interest to them.  ::)

this is why ethereum has delayed so much on POS, and is backtracking towards a hybrid POW-POS system. it's a much harder problem to solve than vlad zamfir and the others working on casper had imagined, especially when considering the economic/political forces around a complete removal of POW incentives. that's got contentious fork written all over it, even with the backing of vitalik. it's potentially a much worse version of the ethereum classic fork because miners are strongly incentivized to back the POW fork.

thankfully, they aren't as reckless as some bitcoiners make them out to be. they obviously don't want that. hybrid POW-POS at least retains mining incentives. as an added bonus for traders and investors, the hybrid POS incentives create massive pump potential. just look at DASH's historical chart.

well there is no such thing as "ASIC-proof". this was a term invented by altcoins that wanted to have an excuse to advertise and then pump themselves. they first started exaggerating bitcoin being mined by ASICs situation and then fooled people into thinking their algorithm can not be optimized by using ASICs.

what they call "ASIC-proof" is actually "SHA256-ASIC-proof", in other words it can not be mined by the same ASICs that bitcoin uses but new ASICs can be created to mine that particular algorithm.

Not "safe", but "secure" from a transaction finality standpoint. One confirmation in the Bitcoin blockchain is equivalent to more confirmations in the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.


Big loss if compared to a perfect scenario that there was ASIC resistance/no pools. Thank the community full nodes for validating everything.

Thank you for the correction, indeed, it's the most secure network.

About the decentralisation, while I don't deny the big help of the full nodes, I expect the miners be smart enough and don't weaken the network (i.e. use multiple pools to keep the decentralisation), since any other move would be bad business. (again, it's better that we also have the full nodes).

Will the new algorithm make mining more profitable? That's the most important question for me

Hashrate and high difficulty in PoW is the bread and butter of preventing a 51% attack. This is one of the features of BTC and why there is so much trust in it compared to other alts

as a matter of fact that is a very interesting question. and i believe the answer is no. the profit should theoretically stay the same no matter what the algorithm is.

think of it this way, all those who are mining bitcoin with current algorithm are going to continue mining bitcoin with new algorithm. so the reward (1800BTC/day) is still going to be distributed among the same number of miners with nearly the same share of the hashrate.
in short term we may see differences during that transition but the end result is the same!

at the end of the day unless you have an actual algorithm to propose and argue about merits of that mining algorithm and convince the rest of the network that the benefits are more than the dangers of a hard fork, there is no point talking about hypothetical algorithms that might be better!
so far we had thousands of altcoins with dozens of mining algorithms. i still don't see anything that doesn't have more flaws than what bitcoin uses.

More profitable how? There are only 21 million coins to mine. Make mining more efficient maybe? But what's more efficient than ASICs?

The dream of everyone!
Buy 100 coins, power up your laptop and earn money without doing anything!
What could be better, we could feed the whole of Afric with this....until the basic laws of economy start kicking in and you will receive a passive income of 0.0002 cents because everyone will be doing it.

How many time does it have to be posted or told here so everyone can understand?
If there is money to be made people will start doing it being it staking or hashing, the income per person decreases and ver time those that have higher cost will drop out or the reward will be close to zero for everyone at which point 99% will stop doing it.
There is no magical algorithm that will make everyone earn with zero effort and at the same time earn something meaningful.


The revenue, not the profit!
The total reward will stay the same, what might change would be the costs and nobody could anticipate how this will be in the first stage.

But at one point things will eventually arrive at the same point we're now, where you buy a mining gear or video card or cpu that will make ROI in 5-6 months and it will all depend on your costs.
If for instance, we turn to a cpu dedicated algo in the first days the reward will be enormous for a single cpu, then draw by the money people will strat buy cpu power in cloud, the reward will slowly drop, server farms will gain the edge over home miners who can't afford to keep the pace and....we will indeed end at step one.
So yeah,  nothing will change in the long run.

ASICs mean a more centralized world of BTC where a few manufacturers and a few pools control all the income.  What is so great about that?  Satoshi designed it so anyone could mine and anyone could earn BTC.

They don't "control all the income." The only power miners have is to decide which transactions to publish. They are rationally incentivized by block rewards to do so honestly rather than to censor or reorg out transactions.

That's how Bitcoin is supposed to work, and that's how it still works today.

Satoshi's lack of foresight about the proliferation of ASICs and mining pools ≠ adequate reason to change Bitcoin's design. It's not broken; don't try to fix it.

pools cant change the main rules. they would get their blocks rejected. they can only choose what transactions get included or excluded.
in short they could black list certain transactions formats or addresses, but not change the rules
try to learn about the risks before trying to pretend a algo change is needed. it just seems like your real intention is a 'get rich quick for free' option.. the flaw in that, which others have also noted is that if there was a get rich quick for free, everyone would be doing it and the end result is no one wins. thus coming back to your original problem. where you will ned to actually do something to get something. which is part of life


cpu mining any better? oh wait you hear the cries that 'AMD and Intel own mining'
GPU mining any better? oh wait you hear the cries that 'AMDati, Nvidia and Intel own mining'
no matter what mining is done. ther will always be cries blaming the hardware manufacturer for being king.

PoS mining.. oh wait you hear the cries where people pool/syndicate their funds into stake and that raises the minimal stake threshold to then not let the little people have a chance.

in short no matter what people try, if there is profit to b made people will try anything and everything to get more. leaving some people with less

in case you don't know "pools" created before ASICs because they have nothing to do with ASICs. a mining pool is simply a "place" where individual miners go to to share the work and share the reward. it doesn't matter with what you are doing the work, with an ASIC, a super computer or a decrepit Pentium II pc.

now you are just putting words in Satoshi's mouth!
Satoshi designed bitcoin so that everyone could use bitcoin, how they acquire it is on themselves. bitcoin is not some sort of charity money give away to give money to the poor for free or easy!

I don't know what Satoshi designed it to be, but he didn't expect "mining" to be a specialized industry. Maybe if he did, he would be embracing it. ASIC-resistance, or the path to more efficiency of work, would be pointless.


Yes! By the non-mining full nodes validating everything in the network.

thirdprize, full nodes order blocks from the miners, if they're invalid, they will be rejected. All the miner's work will then be wasted.

If a mining pool controlled 51% of the network, they will be able to put through a fake transaction from one address to another. This will pass validation as there is no double spend, no block errors and the nonce is valid. Eventually, by controlling 51% of the network, they will be able to produce the longest chain, thus making it technically valid.

Of course, the community can choose to thwart this by opting for a fork before the affected block, but this is another topic entirely.

If it gets easy to mine bitcoins on a PC,bitcoin will lose it's most valuable feature-it's scarcity.
If you are such a big fan of the POS algorithm,just buy and HODL one of the altcoins that use POS algorithm.
No need to try to advocate bitcoin core changing it's algorithm(POW vs.POS is a pretty old topic).It won't happen anyway.We can't just change what works.

that's not how bitcoin works!
it doesn't matter how much hashrate you own, even if you control 100% of it you still can not insert an invalid (fake) transaction in the actual blockchain that everyone else stores because it simply will be rejected right away by the rest of the network and you will be on your own, alone on a chain that you and you only think is valid.

What people use to mine won't actually matter because of difficulty adjustments.


I have never understood this reasoning. People with more resources will be able to do whatever they're doing right now no matter what miners are in use. Miners running ASIC farms would just run PC/GPU farms instead. You could also just as easily buy an ASIC miner like you would have a mining PC, so it's not like there's an insurmountable barrier to mining.

It's also worth noting that it would be theoretically cheaper to attack Bitcoin if non-specialized hardware were viable. ASICs turn into bricks after being used in a successful attack (assuming Bitcoin dies), whereas PCs/GPUs would retain their value. Either way, it's best to simply leave things alone, especially because there are no problems to address in the first place.

Yeah? Probably I missed this part ...
What about the 3 billion who didn't have money for a computer in 2009?
Even if we would still be in the CPU era people who can only afford a refurbished first-generation i3 would still mine 1/10 of what a i9k can.
So? What would have really changed?

You had 2000$ for a top computer, you have 2000$ for an s17 nothing has changed.

Or we could gpu mining..
The ones with 10k$ will mine with the latest video cards, the poor will mine with the onboard card.
What difference will it make?
Stick to the shitcoins that give you coins for tapping once a day on your smartphone and keep wondering why they are valued at zero.


I see a new trend here, Satoshi is on his way to becoming Jesus.
He is freeing us from the banks, he will lead us to the promised land, he turns water into wine, electricity into money...
And of course, he will get rid of poverty!


 

Newbies are either misinformed by trolls, or haven't done the proper research. Plus when the trolls get to them first, it's hard for the newbies to believe that they're wrong.

Switching to proof of stake is not a good idea in my opinion. It's such an easy way to earn mining reward and  will likely be unsustainable in the long-run.. Another problem people hardly talk about concerning PoS is the issue of privacy. Staker would need lots of coins, right? And many will likely give out the private information before purchasing lots of coins. What if you are required in the future to reveal what the coin is meant for. There are other disadvantages of proof of stake that are usually ignored.

It doesn't need to be "our opinion". Bitcoin switching to Proof of Stake is out of the question, and the mere mention of it is already laughable.

@Wind_Fury
I'm going prove you wrong. By admitting I'm wrong. Haha.

@pooya87
Thanks for calling out the error. I hope to understand better now. :)