Bitcoin Forum

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Wow, yes.

PoW mining is the problem, See this thread too:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770591.0

https://i.imgur.com/9Z7iYtU.png

Success Council is a scam organization that wants nothing other than your money. They market themselves as a way to "protect your money", sound familiar? Yeah, it's the same service banks offered in the earliest days of banking. They are not even the first PoW trolls.

These clowns are implying Bitcoin's SHA256 security isn't already good enough. This guy says Bitcoin holders pay for mining through inflation, but that's not what's happening. Without the miners, the bitcoin network has ZERO security and we all lose our coins anyway.

Basically this clown thinks he is smarter than Satoshi, if he really is there's nothing stopping him from creating his own altcoin that will be superior. So why doesn't he do that? Because he's full of shit.

In breif--Mining will become cheaper and cheaper, Asics will become more efficient, People will use solar, wind or whatever, you will see. If BTC needs to change it will, otherwise people will work around it. Money talks here.

You may like this discussion below, from someone similar to yourself advertising BitsharesX as they want people to throw money into it like they have.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770591.0


I remember earlier this year when there where around 300 coins and Infinitecoin was 7th not because it was anything special, simply because it had billions of coins and a very tiny amount worth.

My not so technical opinion ( By the way I do not believe the consensus algorithm alone is holding BTC back, as it is giving it another layer of security so its a trade off many people seem to prefer. $470USD per coin from something that bootstrapped itself from nothing is not something to laugh about, lets see what the next 5 yrs bring us)

Usually people tend to move towards the money and if they have enough invested into it there goal is to keep it working, Gavin is very well aware of POS and DPOS and I am betting they have already discussed it numerous times.


As you said -- If the amount of Miners and the amount of buyers are causing the price to halt where it is now because of the equal pressure either-way then what your saying is a shift in either way will send the coin up or down. Hmmm I don't think this is the only thing relating to the price, but it definitely is a factor. But I believe when the rewards drop in 1.5 years this will shift the balance and if what your saying is still true the price should keep rising from then on.

In regards to Decentralization, I do not believe there will be 1 warehouse full of mining equipment I believe there will be hundreds of independent data centers mining away with Solar, or wind generated power maybe even asics that VERY little power , they will also become cheaper bringing more people into the game. But I am also curious to see what the future holds, but money talks and so far BTC is the big brother with MANY shareholders ,very smart savy investors and very smart tech heads, if BTC needs to change it will, and if it doesn't it wont. Resources will just get cheaper, Solar, wind, as well as very efficient asics, i believe asic power may hit a plateau and the energy to run the asic will just become more and more efficient

There are alternatives to PoW mining, I don't think he's saying stop mining, but PoW mining needs to go. There's several superior alternatives.

Speculation is the reason. IMO. Not many are coming into bitcoin as users right now. They are trying to get rich speculating. Growth comes from utility not from hope.

It's pretty hard to grow when PoW transfers hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bitcoin eco-system, into the pockets of hardware vendors and electric company. Also, the worst thing is even if Bitcoin does manage to grow, the leeching effect of PoW will grow too.

This PoW algorithm is not only for security, but also for distribution and adoption. While the time scale may be non-optimum, I believe the logic is sound. I don't think Satoshi anticipated it would catch on so quickly. The reward rate halves, but the time between halvings maybe should have halved as well.

what I do not understand is why people(not sure you are one of them OP) who seem to LOVE other consensus algos and other coins which they happen to be invested in, come and even bother to post in BTCtalk and try to tell people to about this new coin and why that consensus is better, why would you even bother coming back here if you believe you have found a better solution or a superior algo coin why not just enjoy your idea and speak among other people who share your ideas.

This is obviously going to reduce significantly, in fact Half by 50% in 1.5 yrs and again in 4yrs and so on......... SO it will grow, it seems to be working pretty good, only 4 years ago it was a few cents. Lets wait and see ;)

By the way the incentives is for protection and it is also what attracts thousands to this eco system.

I think Satoshi was/is betting that humanity would figure out the transition to crypto one way or another. Deception has overwhelmed truth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0) for a long time in our society, but the dawn of the information age has been rapidly flipping that dynamic on its head.

The tide is coming in now, as it always does. This will be remembered as the decade in which the masters of deception* were buried beneath their crumbling Sandcastle of Lies.

*banksters and their polit puppet pals

I don't disagree with you guys at all. Bitcoin is disrupting payments world wide, and I don't know how this is going to play out. But I do think that people using bitcoin for payments is a more powerful idea than trading financial instruments that have little connection to any "real" economy.

did you invest in asics bro? ;)

Hm... why do you think PoW is one of bitcoins greatest strengths? It feels stupid to pay miners 1.6 M bucks per day for burning electricity. It was a great invention back in 2009 but now  we can all see its a flaw that might kill bitcoin. Especially when the difficulty is high enough so only big players will be able to profit from mining thus recentralizing the network to a few mining data centers

uh oh.

the DPoS bait and switch.


"would have got away with with it too if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

what I'm saying if you don't understand is that this would, (DPoS would) work if it was literally, the year 1984.

not to be confused with the satirical police state that was aptly defined in the novel "1984" by George Orwell, which was really a "fleshed out"  version of "animal farm" by the same author, and may or may not hold significant parallels to a an alternate dimension of 2014 (or near enough) in which there was significantly impaired decentralized information dynamics (for this or that reason)

I'm actually saying ( to be very clear) if the calendar year date was 1984 (in this reality) , DPoS would be completely viable.

but what makes me personally sad is that it is not 1984 it is in fact 2014, on the upside the fax machine has made amazing technological strides..

Great. Let us know when you invent a source of infinite free energy. Until then electricity - and therefore mining (= securing the network) - costs money.

http://d2tq98mqfjyz2l.cloudfront.net/image_cache/1252455467559038.jpeg

The answer is NO.

In the past the creation of BTC was overcomed by the adoption rate. It will happen also now, even with a much higher price since the rate of adoption is much higher also. But the price of bitcoin has to wait that the adoption catches up.

Too many people are impatient. We don't need to have a multiplication x10 of the price every year. It would be insane.

The reason it preety simple.  The short term and mid term price of bitcoin has largely been driven by momentum, right now the momentum is going the wrong direction which is too be expected given the massive surge in btc price over the past couple of years.  Also which more merchants accepting bitcoin and coverting into fiat it has the effect of buyers selling their bitcoin which is creating downward pressure, as btc because mainstream more people will buy and we will see the price swing the other direction.

That is correct. The new phenomenon that we have is the increase of adoption by merchants. As long as there is bitcoin spending it creates a downward pressure because the full economic cycles of the bitcoins economy don't exist already (most of the bitcoins used in purchases are converted into fiat and not used to buy new merchandise or pay employees). But as the price of bitcoin goes down, purchases slow down until some equilibrium is reached.

No.

The amount of money being spent on mining will be roughly equal to the selling price of new Bitcoins produced. The Bitcoin price drives the level of mining activity, not the other way round. Difficulty has little impact on Bitcoin price. In the last six months, Bitcoin difficulty has gone to the moon as huge mining farms have been built. Bitcoin price has gone nowhere.

Well lemme quote some smart comrade from this Forum on this subject:

I agree, pow is a great strength.

But wait a minute.  We're not paying them to "burn electricty" we're paying them to find the next block and reify a set of transactions.  There's a very real need for this.  How else do you resolve disputes about who sent what to whom?

Give a little more time.

It will soon explode.

The miners are not "burning" electricity. They are using the electricity to perform mathematical calculations that prevent people from spending the same money twice. This is not unlike how banks power their computer systems to keep track of account holders' balances

Except Bitcoin already spends more on electricity, than VISA. But processes 0.001% of the amount of transactions VISA does.

I read through the white paper quickly and have a few issues with the way it works, how do you determine that all 100 delegates are unique, your assuming that their is never a bad actor or collusion, this would have the same issue as Bitcoin if it had a higher marketcap more centralization of the 100 delegates. I think the white-paper needs more scenarios of attackers trying to compromise the system. Since you only need 51% vote you only need 51 delegates to agree on something? What if each delegate actually controls 2 delegates, then 26 people need to agree on something?

While I agree with the issue of centralization in regards to ASIC's, it does make mining Bitcoin something not most can do. I think Satoshi truly intended for 1 CPU = 1 Vote or maybe he predicted this.

If you think about traditional metal mining operations that's similar too how they run anyway, its largely inaccessible to produce large amounts of precious metal unless you have a huge amount of money to invest on equipment, land etc.

No, there is just too many variable to be considered when trying to predict or speculate on the price of Bitcoin.  The more you learn the more you realize that Bitcoin is unpredictable .

Agree, the comparison isn't valid.  It's a lot like saying comparing a candle to a steam engine and saying, "look the candle uses way less energy".  It totally obfuscates the fact that the candle isn't anywhere near as powerful or robust or even in the same class of object.  The candle is fine for what it does, the steam engine is fine for what it does.  But comparing them on energy use is crazy.  It misses the fact that the steam engine can power a locotomotive train whereas the candle can power ..., well the candle can't really power anything but it can light up your room.

Each full Bitcoin node keeps track of enough data to detect spending the same money twice. At the current transaction volume, that's a background job on a PC. That's all the compute power needed for accounting. All those racks of ASIC machines are doing no accounting whatsoever. Attached to an ASIC farm is some modest PC doing the block chain work.

Its not, but man that was a funny comeback. 

I concur with most here:  NOPE the video was a DPOS commercial (links in the description gave it away), if you want to read my full thoughts on this then goto youtube.

I guess you dont know that much about mining. Due to economies of scale, mining is no longer viable for individuals. Its the same reason you buy milk at the supermarket and not a milkman who delivers it fresh to your door everyday. Basically, the only companies making a profit in mining at this point are the hardware manufacturers themselves. Theres no fruit left on the tree that individuals can reach.

Personally, I dont have a problem with it as it all makes the network more secure.

There is 2 reasons Bitcoin price is not exploding. Problem one, there is no real demand for the coin. there is no one going out to specifically buy bitcoin because they "NEED" or "WANT" them. There is no product that can be purchased with only bitcoins, there are no products that have discounts if you buy them with bitcoins. There is no security structure put in place to secure the demand for the bitcoin.

Without a true demand for bitcoin and no real attempt by the developers to create anything more than a tradable market value for the coin, places like Amazon, Dell and other retailers/manufactures are dumping coins every 2 weeks, thus killing the value for the coin.

As soon as the developers realize people dont care about developer view of faster transaction and people dont care about anonymity the faster they will realize they need more for their coins future.

How to define demand in idiot terms

 Imagine yourself just a regular person, what reason do you have to exchange your cash for BTC just to buy a computer from dell.If both are offered as a payment method, what real reason is there to trade your CASH for BTC just to buy a computer from dell or anything off of Amazon. There is no reason, the cost is not less, it does not take less time. It actually takes an extra set of steps to get BTC. Now what happens if you have both payment methods, but buying with BTC is 10% or more less than buying with cash, or what happens when there is a product that can only be purchased by BTC. what reason do you have now to exchange your cash for BTC? And then ask tyoursef what happens when people have to buy BTC with cash, what does that do to the value of BTC??

Now do you understand the definition of demand and how it helps BTC?

I don't see how it makes the network more secure. The hashrate figure is not the only parameter of measuring security of the network. The number of participants in that hashrate is no less significant. Security of Bitcoin network is better in one aspect but worse in another, which balances it to about the same it was a couple of years ago when people used GPUs to mine.

Yes, please, compare the VISA's carbon footprint ( all workers + all offices + all "tools") with miners one.

Lies and FUD everywhere. My btcs are securer with PoW , and if you had any, you'd think so too.

Hope bitcoin will rise sky high...  :D

OK, FUD patrol checking in.

"Control four chip manufacturers then you could control 90% of [ASIC chip] production". 90% of ADDITIONAL production, maybe. You still would need to produce > 50% of all hashing capacity that already exists. And you need to hope no other chip designs/manufacturers emerge (since SHA2 hashing isn't a terribly difficult task, that requires a leap of faith. Good luck blowing your $400 million on that gamble.

"By controlling two mining pools you could get more than 50% of the network" Mining pools with 50% can censor transaction but they cannot double spend unless they first take that mining capacity offline (to mine a private fork of the blockchain). Do a Google search for

"Downplaying statistically possible double-spending risks" (http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/08/18/downplaying-statistically-possible-double-spending-risks/) for more on why pools with > 50% are not the same as having your own equipment that exceeds 50% .

"Control one dozen or two dozen mining centers you could get 50%" Again ... that's a $200 million (or more) investment. If the intention is to have just censorship power then maybe that's feasible. Otherwise what is needed for this hashing capacity to be used to double spend is to take it offline and begin mining a private fork. Just like with pools, taking this action would be something noticeable before the damage is done (six confirmations on a much slower fork have passed) seriously lessening the chances of a double spending attack using this method causing serious harm to the big players (who presumable are monitoring the rate of block solving or have hotwallets or other withdrawal limits that woudl protect from such an attack).

Cool story though.

He said Satoshi solved the Byzantine General's problem - he didn't. We don't believe it is unsolvable, we know it is. It's been mathematically proven. Satoshi made a mechanism that made it reliable if no one got > 50% of the deciding nodes, based on probability. But the Byzantine Generals' problem has always been based on probability, so this isn't a "mathematical" solution, just possibly a "practical" one. He then goes on to say "solving the centralization problem should be a cake-walk compared to that." Why? I would say that was the hard problem all along. If you can guarantee decentralization, "solving" the generals' problem is the easy part.

On the contrary, if it had actually caught on more quickly, we wouldn't be having this problem. Obviously, the demand for it actually hasn't met the rate that it is being mined, or the price would still be going up.  Your solution, though, doesn't seem to be off.

The price will find a balance between adoption and reward. Just because it's going down doesn't mean it's a technical problem. When the price drops far enough, the $ value entering the market will == 25 BTC/10 minutes. This too shall pass.

25 BTC/10 minutes isn't a dollar value, it's a ratio of bitcoins-to-time

== is a boolean operator in programming languages which returns true or false.  As far as I can tell:

'the $ value entering the market will' == '25 BTC/10 mintues' returns FALSE (those strings aren't equivalent)

I think you meant =, which just indicates assertion of equivalence in common parlance.

Do you really not understand? Or do you just want to argue semantics? The exact meaning of == depends on the language, as does =. Considering your "=" changes meaning with context, I assume you're just increasing your post count.

I sorta can't wait until I drop this primedice signature because I'm so god damn tired of people giving me this "increasing my post count" bullshit.  I'll be as pedantic as I feel like being and I do love to argue semantics.

Can you really give me a language where '==' is not a boolean truth value operator?  Can you name me a language where '=' is not an assignment operator?

Cheers!

Pascal, Ada, Google Go, etc. etc.

Uh, cool list.  I don't write in any of those langauges.  Can you tell me what '==' and '=' does mean in Pascal/Ada/Google Go/etc/etc?

If '==' and '=' are not operators in this language, then that is not an example of a language where '==' and '=' mean something than boolean evaluation and assignment (respectively).  Note I didn't say these exist in all languages, I claimed that these were the meanings in langauges in which they do exist.

Cheers!

Sounds like a central banker making a case for raising rates. I thought bitcoin's killer app was the inability for arbitrary rule changes. The issuance especially, must be set in stone. You're not going to change the rules without hurting some stakeholders. Who decides which stakeholders win and which ones lose?

The price of gold hasn't been going up fast enough, lets ban gold mining cuz it uses energy and hurts gold holders' profits.=

I advise that you spend more time understanding distributed systems and in particular distributed agreement.
Byzantine generals is solvable depending on the synchrony of the system and the number of honest nodes vs. dishonest nodes.
It is provably solvable in a system with 3k+1 honest nodes. If you assume an entirely asynchronous system you will not be able to guarantee termination (see Fischer Lynch and Patterson FLP85 for an explanation why you need some degree of synchrony in a system to be able to reach consensus) unless you employ the help of an oracle.
There are three kinds of oracles: Failure detectors, clocks, and randomization.

The Byzantine Generals is not based on probability. What you want to say is that bitcoin uses probabilistic consensus (it converges towards a probability of 1 of agreeing).
By definition if you want to have distributed agreement where each node has a vote (i.e there is no leader) a majority is always required if you want to prevent partitioning (two partitions agreeing on something different).


As for the link by OP: Lets summarize that video as "Omg, my bitcoins are not worth 100k USD a coin! lets change the code so they are"

Sure, the cooperate mining is the main reason.
Back in the old days, people who mine believe in the technology and refuse to sell at low price.
Cooperate miners will sell at any price because they must pay huge bills for electricity, Internet and maintenance.

I try not to be a grammar Nazi, but are you doing that on purpose?


From what I've read, he did not intend for one CPU to equal one vote.

This linked Pascal tutorial explains what '=' does mean in Pascal.

http://pascal-programming.info/lesson4.php

Wrong:

If x := 20 then x := x + 1; {the underlined character must be excluded}

Correct:

If x = 20 then x := x + 1; {only an equal sign is used for comparison}

Glad I can help you get your post count.

You really do like semantics. How about I give you languages where = is more than an assignment operator? How about a language where = and == are both boolean operators, but with different meanings depending on operand data types?

wait, what about pointing a gun at a couple people costs $200 million?
also, are you aware that the cost of one F-15 fighter jet is $30 million?

You cant just point a gun. You need an army to take and defend the mining farm. (basically a government). Of course this would destroy bitcoin and so the only people to profit is the banking/ government partnership. The degree to which the mining is decentralized and the speed with which you could render the attack useless is the defense against such a hostile government of coalition of.

The inflation schedule is a non-negotiable. Are you suggesting that we change the 21 million coin cap, or change the halving-every-four-years schedule? Because if we're keeping those rules the same, then the value of new bitcoins created must be <number of coins> * <bitcoin price> per year. No change of consensus algorithm will change this.

 And since we will have so many millions, or billions of dollars worth worth of new coins mined in a year, the equivalent value will be invested to mine them until the cost of production becomes only marginally profitable. Whether this means spending money on large mining data centers, or funding millions of sybil nodes to influence a voting system, it will happen either way, because if there's money to be made mining, everyone will do it until it becomes unprofitable.

Also, I disagree that the $650M is supposed to "purchase decentralisation". What it's really purchasing, if anything, is security. In the context of bitcoin, we can measure security by the amount it would cost an attacker to mount a 51% attack. Right now, that's ~1800 BTC per day, or nearly $1M/day.

The more the cost of BTC rises, we can expect the expenditure by miners to rise equivilently, which in turn makes an attack even more expensive. By this definition, there is no such thing as getting the same security for a cheaper cost, because it's the cost itself that defines the level of security.