Bitcoin Forum

Does it not benefit Bitcoin as a whole to have individuals involved in the mining process and to enhance the "community feeling"?
Impose something like 500 GH/s per user, per IP or in some way get rid of the greedy industrial mining companies that are ruining what Bitcoin should be.

How on earth would you enforce that?

Scout's honor

I am by no means qualified to answer my question nor do I know if it is possible but I feel that with the introduction of ASICs (greedy companies wanting to make a buck) and the Industrial Mining (greedy companies to wanting to make a buck) it's all going south.
I may be completely wrong but without everybody being afforded equal opportunity to be involved it will never be as great as it should/could be.
To me the appeal was being part of something that was controlled by nobody... Surprise surprise big business has taken over.

Mining is what gave Bitcoin its early boost, but now most Bitcoin users care about mining bitcoins about as much as they care about working at a bank or panning for gold.

Either way, there is no way to limit someone's hash rate.

You are the greedy person. You want to get a bigger portion of bitcoins without doing anything to earn that bigger portion.

Everyone has an equal opportunity to mine bitcoins. There is nothing and nobody stopping you. The amount of bitcoins you mine is proportional to the amount of money and effort you put into it, whether you are a poor person with a graphics card or a person with a warehouse full of miners.

I agree it should remain the hands of millions but it went to a few select pools very quickly. Miners found a better way to profit and so pools were formed.

What big business has taken over bitcoin? How is bitcoin 'going south'?

Everybody had the chance to take the plunge and invest in ASICs when the opportunity to pre-order came about with no idea whether you'd a/ see the hardware and b/ ever hit your ROI. People took risks and it paid off for some and not for others, like pretty much everything in crypto (cex, altcoins, IPOs, hashlets etc)

I imagine the risk is far greater for the farms, as I can only imagine what their hardware cost and what their electricity bills are like

500ghs is like $2 a day btw, not only is it impossible it'd drive miners away in their droves

no need for this, that is why there is halvings.

That's contrary to the whole principle of bitcoin.

As long as the ASIC is accessible to everybody, it is a fair game. You will not make money if your electricity price is too high.

The biggest threat to BTC is the centralization of pools.

The Core Devs could release a Bitcoin Core that utilised CPU only cryptography, the Big Asic mining farms would be destroyed of course, Pools wouldn't lose out, there'd be some disruption at first, but the network would quickly alter the difficulty before things settled down,  but it would put Bitcoin mining back into the hands of the little guy.

Until the huge CPU farms come online and this would also push forward newer technology. Then what? Ban CPU mining? What after that? Slide rule mining? Once all the geeks jump online with those slide rules will you ask to ban that?

That will never happen, and even if it did, it still wouldn't fix anything. Rather than warehouses full of ASIC miners, you would see warehouses full of CPU miners.

FYI, the higher the hash rate the more the bitcoin is secure..

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To eliminate industrial mining, we just need faster halving. Once every 2 years instead of 4 years....

Exactly.

But at least the CPUs are useful after the difficulty gets to high.  With ASICs... what can you do with them when their profitable life has expired?

Repeat after me: There is ALWAYS a way to make an ASIC out of any mining algorithm you come up with. The only reason there may not be ASICs for a different algorithm at the moment is there's no money in it.

Then keep changing the algorithm... every few weeks or so, it would force everything to be CPU and then everybody could have a fair chance again.
Owh but wait, FPGAs could be re-programmed, on the fly perhaps. Hmmm.
Better idea, drop the idea of mining. Its just not the way to make money folks.
Just a contest for the super rich.

How is changing the algorithm after someone purchases an ASIC fair?  Just because you don't make any money mining doesn't mean nobody should.

Now that's a great idea! Eliminate all verification and security from the blockchain. Anybody can create any transaction they want, and they'll all be included in the new "fair" blockchain.

I find its not fair that some guys can never fuck hot girls .... ::)

so lets make a law that limit how many times a girl can fuck a guy... hence girls will have to fuck many guys if they want active sex lives....

What do you think?

FPGAs were a nice middle-ground and some of them had vanitygen patches for them, so at least they could operate in a vanitygen pool after they'd otherwise turn into a paperweight (I think vanitygen pools are dead, now, but unsure). They could do other things with the right scripts, but their time was very short-lived in mining so've gone right back to obscurity.

The only way to really stop ASICs at this point, I'd think, is to create a meta-algorithm coin which mandates different ASIC-resistant algorithms for mining be used for each successive block where difficulty is reset each block. -So maybe it's Groestl, Scrypt, Scrypt-N, etc, etc, etc, and then it repeats. Software exists which switches kernels on the fly for multi-coin mining in multi-pools where the pool can actually issue the command to switch kernels for a new coin. It may also be possible to get away with a CPU coin this way and allow it to scale without ASIC farms coming in. ASIC farms would have to be constantly switching pools and polling all of them (which a pool could disallow) to see if they should switch back to the algo-switching pool. I don't think it's unlikely to ever show up in a future coin, but it's definitely not something coming to Bitcoin.

You can just declare a coin is GPU/CPU one. Whenever it is threatened by ASIC, change the algorithm.

Can you change the algorithm in a decentralized way, or do you have to have a person that is in charge of the currency?

The declaration can be made when the coin is created. The change can be made by dev after community discussion.

Having a person in charge is not feasible. If the community consists of hundreds of millions of people, how do they have a discussion? How are the dev's actions mandated and controlled by the community? How does the community elect a new dev if the current dev quits?

If you make mining to tricky by constantly switching things to suit individuals then the whole currency would be worthless...
No one would bother mining them so no transactions could be processed...

I dont think its good idea to limit hashing power, its easily abused and difficulty would drop a lot..

That will never happen, and even if it did, it still wouldn't fix anything. Rather than warehouses full of ASIC miners, you would see warehouses full of CPU miners.
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True, where do we draw the line, what's allowed / not allowed.


Slide rule mining made me chuckle  ;D

Why not make bitcoin multi-algo like myriad coin, then everyone will have a chance for the share..

Everyone does have a chance for a share.

Minning cap at say 5th/s per ip adress?
Up or down of the cap depending on difficulty?

That is not possible.

then we have to wait for the halving on january 2016 to see some farms closing, or maybe in 2020...who knows!!!
if the price stays at 300 to 400usd some big players will shut down for sure
we may see a negative difficulty too
....

I agree with


and


First off, life is always unfair, as shown by the second quote.

Second off, everyone has equal chance.  Mining is perfectly linear.  If you use 1 terahash at home (I have 4 S3's, perfectly reasonable home setup, plus a bit to give me just over 2 tera) you make 0.0139 BTC/24 hours.  You don't pay extra rent for your miner, since it lives at home, and you pay for electricity.  You'll be buying miners at resellers cost.

Bump it up, you now have 10 tera.  Still doable at home, you may be pushing it.  If you're lucky you can find some group buys to get a good deal on miners. 0.139 BTC/24 hours.

100 tera.  If you're doing this at home, you better install some more electric panels.  There's going to be some renovation costs, maybe you'll make room in the basement or garage.  Regardless, rent can still be free, but for how much electricity you're pulling you may pay more for residential rates unless you can work out a deal.  Buying this many miners, you can start buying direct from manufacturer, and get a good bulk deal. Solo mining also becomes viable at this scale. 1.39 BTC/24 hours

1000 tera (1 peta).  No way can you fit this farm at home, you better rent out a place.  Not quite at the scale required to build a factory... You could rent space in a data center.  That will now give you a big rent cost, as well as electricity cost, as well as the time spent to maintain it all.  At this scale, you could probably make your own warehouse, but then you have the big up front initial costs to get things going. You'll probably need to start pulling in investors. Here, you can make deals with manufacturers to buy miners in bulk.  Or, if you really want, you can look into buying chips and making your own miners. ~14 BTC/24 hours.

10 peta.  This is where you need to build your own farm.  You're going to need a large initial investment, to create a space to hold all your miners.  You start getting a few economies of scale, but you also have extra costs.  You have your rent to pay, you have electricity (can probably get industrial rates, so it may be a bit cheaper), you have cooling, perhaps even security to watch this place.  At least, at this scale, you can buy miners in huge bulk, and getting chips to make your own miners is a very viable option. ~140 btc/24 hours

100 peta (ignoring the fact this is ~1/3 of total network....) You better have a giant factory dedicated to mining.  Perhaps even a few around the world.  Build them in cold climates, beside power plants.  You can buy your electricity straight from the source, probably down at ~$0.03/kwh.  Cooling will be huge, rent won't be an issue since these are probably factories you own.  Security would be a huge factor here, if not live guards, you'd need some cameras and motion detectors.  No manufacturer can keep up with your demand, you better buy your own chips and make your own miners.  If you have this much money, you could even start designing your own chips. You'll be making over a thousand bitcoins every day.

Which of these scales is "best"?  Who knows.  Each one has it's own pros and cons.  I'm happy with my home setup.  The only thing that matters when buying miners is the dollars/gigahash price, as well as the watts/gigahash for longevity.

As opposed to greedy individuals wanting to make a buck!?!?!

sorry folks, just because someone else has more resources than me and/or is willing to take a bigger risk by investing in more mining power than I doesn't mean that it's unfair.

Changing the protocol so that it break ASIC mining or has folks forever chasing a changing mechanism would hurt individual miners like me more than a big company because I don't have the resources to keep replacing my miners every few months where a big company probably could

The only way you could ever completely remove the incentive for people to invest heavily in bitcoin mining and become big would be to remove all of the value from mining

that would certainly shut down those greedy companies wanting to make a buck real fast

There is no way, not now not with current tech than you can enforce people to limit hashpower. While your idea is right and I really like it and I wish it to happen there is no way for it to work, sadly.