Bitcoin Forum

Lets assume bitcoin has 1 billion users in the future... would it be possible to mine on every device connected to the network, but just use a tiny amount of cpu time to save battery on a smartphone for example ??

With every device mining just 50mh and 1 billion users the hashrate would be higher then now.

To avoid big miners the mining revard could be split equally among all network partipiciants.

Is it complete bullshit ? Or is this somehow possible ? ;D

It is possible but be completely pointless since each participantt would be getting a few satoshis which would be worthless unless the price goes up a lot.

Also, unless they can figure out how to make small, low power and low heat chips, it would say through the battery quickly, literally burn a hole in your pocket, and destroy the life of your battery since heat destroys lithium ion batteries.

Hm I think 10 years from now even a smartphone cpu will calculate 50mh with under 1% cpu usage. So there would be almost no battery drain.

The reward is not intended to earn big amounts of money , but just compansate your energy consumption.

It's not completely pointless at all! If sufficiently many users are willing to run a microminer at a small monetary loss, then it becomes practically impossible to run a commercial mining farm. I think we're quite far away from that scenario, but it's a theoretical possibility. I hope that eventually a hundred million people will care enough about decentralisation, and in that case it might happen.

Unless they were mining for spending on microtransactions. But Bitcoin's PoW hash is too favorable to ASICs versus CPUs to make this viable as you say only a few satoshis in relative hashrate.


You astutely describe my design for eliminating commercial mining. But I don't rely on them caring about decentralization.

So what incentive do you have in mind?

My white paper will be published.

I think of 21Inc.  Why?  Maybe free phones and laptop equipment that has the ability to run just the same or better than off the shelf components, except its given away freely. The terms and conditions of giving away would mandate that whenever plugged in it would run a mining program subroutine to mine for BTC.  That would eventually allow the devices, if used steadily to incrementally mine btc to be collected and perhaps distributed to the users of the phones, the employees of the phone company (in this case, 21inc), and the ability to pay vertical companies, such as quallcomm or intel to provide the chips for said subsidized phones.

Yes, it is possible if you change the mining method. Mining with bandwidth is a good idea for that.

If you can market it as a lottery, it may work.  If a billion people spend 10 $/month (on average; richer people spend more, poorer people less) for mining with the tiny chance of 1 in 20000 per year to win a block that pays them a million $, then commercial mining would mine at a loss, but people may still have the incentive to do that.  Especially if you tell them that these 10 $ are for a good purpose (to keep their Bitcoins safe).  This would also eliminate the need for mining pools.

Not sure if this works out, though.  Say half of the cost would be necessary to run a full node (otherwise you don't get decentralization) and the other half would be maintaining costs and electricity to run the hashing asics.  Any variation of prices for electricity or on the price of low power asics can mean that commercial miners make some profit (because they would only have the costs for the asics).  And 5$/month for a full node may not be enough.

You've got one aspect of it. Of course Bitcoin's full node requirements are too onerous as you point out. If they aren't full nodes then you really don't have decentralization.

I designed Cuckoo Cycle to be a low-power PoW that spends the majority of runtime waiting
for random memory access latency (almost like Proof-of-Wait).

https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo offers several bounties for disproving its claims of being an ideal memory bound PoW.

It could easily run on smartphones while they charge overnight, with no fear of overheating.

The more people are able to mine (including botnets that will still be vastly outnumbered) and willing to do so at a loss, the less commercial mining can survive.

Bitcoin would have to introduce an alternative PoW very slowly;
p*CPU + (1-p)*ASIC where p rises from 0 to 1 (or 0.5) over many years.

Hi tromp. Remember me? AnonyMint.

Sure. Who could forget:-?

No, as it will centralize it into the hands of tier-1 providers, network operators, etc. It also doesn't secure a blockchain like cryptographic PoW does.

Damn I thought I was flying below the radar.  :-X

IMO the key to total decentralisation would be a mining revard system which pays equal reward to each miner, no matter how much hash the miner contributes. Of course there should be a minimum hashrate to get rewards.

This would kill the arms race, but I dont think its possible.

i dont say its anarkik idea but sure its very low rules of hieraquy that the world usually does rules i mean same equal pwoer for every one in number? seems a bit fuzzy.

Complete decentralisation:

* Single transaction blocks
* Sending a transaction produces a block
* Only you can mine blocks you produce

There are a number of problems with this, but that is one way to have complete decentralisation.

No, centralization is impossible if you use a wifi mesh network like netsukuku, you can use your full speed of your wi-fi 150 or 300 Mbps to mine coins without limitation and providers.

Yes, also a good idea is to mine with a fixed small hashrate.

This is just the sort of discussion I've been  hoping for. Decentralisation is a requisite, IMO and I'm extremely excited by the work being done here.

I'll ease myself in slowly, so to speak  ;D

I think we need to think outside of just the game theory for incentives. You can spot the almost religious fervour by phrases such as rational miners. Whilst there is some merit in the ideas, people are not rational - as Nash finally accepted after he had done his stint in a mental institution. If game theory did work as taught then advertising wouldn't work and open source software would be an ideal mental exercise.

Participation is a strong driver. You can see this is MMORPG (different kind of game threory  ;) ) and the demand for online games against real people. What if
a) all clients were miners and
b) The incentive for running a full node was the ability to send and receive transactions at almost zero cost.

Hang on though. Didn't we already have that a while ago?
Yes we did until the block chain file got too big and to mine you had to have warehouses full of specialist machinery.

I'm very excited that we are talking about the mining being on every client again - where it needs to be. That means that everyone is a miner and everyone can put transactions on the block chain. I'm not interested in the mining for new coins, only in the ability to place transactions in the block chain.

If we can separeate the new coins generation from the inclusion in the block chain or make mining a reality on resource restricted platforms, then from there, we get to single transactions in a block which makes the current block war moot and seconds for confirmations given enough client connections.

The trouble is, how do you deal with the block reward? If the difficulty adjusts due to hash rate, then it is possible that a low power machine would be unable to send a transaction (since they must be mined by the sender).

One solution would be to make the block reward a parameter (which is proportional to difficulty) such that even weak miners can still mine their own transaction by specifying a tiny reward.

I think it depends.
If mining for new coins must remain an intensive operation and transaction mining can be split out into a simpler, easier operation even for something like Raspberry Pis, then the miners keep the rewards as it is. The clients' reward is zero transaction costs and convenient transactions. The pre-requisit of that participation is they mine transactions even if they cannot generate new coins.

If they cannot be split, then it is a harder problem and reduced mining difficulty all round is probably the only way forward unless there are other ideas. I have read about a few of those and like the ideas being floated here.

I don't think you can split it, so there needs to be a way for the sender to select their difficulty/block reward at send time, while also making sure that global difficulty adjusts correctly... maybe you make sender's difficulty = global difficulty at 1.0 coins of block reward, and have it be proportional for all other block reward values.

Obviously chain selection then has to follow the chain with the most work done, rather than simply the longest.

You are getting closer to my design. But you are still missing far too many radical epiphanies to realize how to crack the nut.

I'm not thinking about your design tbh - just random ideas that I've been mulling over for a while :)

Of course, complete decentralization is possible. However, the interested parts need to agree in protecting the network, or as we are seeing with bitcoin, there will be always a risk of someone or a group trying to take over

The reward is the transaction fee. This is the same scenario for the future of miners when the 21mil has been reached and there are no more blocks to mine. It could even be a relationship between the fee and the difficulty so that low hash power devices process low fee transactions while mining warehouses get the higher fee transactions. What it shouldn't be is that the higher the fee, the less you get ignored!

The purpose is to not exclude any clients from participating in verifying transactions for inclusion in the block chain and using low resource clients as a sort of load sharing scheme for the transactions so even if miners do concentrate on high paying fees, there is probably a few clients nearby that will take anything if they are not busy. The engineering goal is for the network to still function as a payment system in the absence of dedicated infrastructure such as miners. I'm not necessarily proposing that dedicated hardware cannot profit more, just that numbers of clients dictate the operational health, stability and speed of the network transactions not an elite group of resource rich entities with a high barrier to entry into the club.

Can you expand on your earlier statement:
* Only you can mine blocks you produce

I was thinking more outside the bitcoin 'box' as it were, since this would be a huge change. The trouble still lies with the difficulty - if you and only you can mine your own blocks, then it must be possible to send (and therefore mine) a transaction within, say 1 second, which means very low difficulty. This is incompatible with network security.

Did I miss a release?  Just checking...  I'd love to hear your ideas on this.  

I don't why simply leaving the coinbase TX outside of the to-hash-for-POW bit would be a problem.  This would make pools a lot harder to run..  so if that were your goal..  

thanks --  f_t_d

Well, that would mean that anyone could simply modify a valid block and send the coinbase to themselves, creating an infinite number of forks.

A ha.  Yes thank you Monsterer.  Broadcasting that newly found block would be.. lets say, a delicate affair.  I've been going around in circles on this topic.  Now I see again what the spreadcoin guys were up to and various others with this addition into PoW hash of a nonce signed by the coinbase key.  Makes pools a bitch but doesn't make distribution of a new block such a bitch.  However I am still looking for TPTB_think_they_need_war_but_really_dont's input  on this one, or anybody else's really. 

If you want to get rid of pools, make it so that only the sender of a transaction can mine that transaction (this relies on there being 1 transaction blocks).

There used to be a thing called P2Pool, a peer to peer mining pool, no idea what happened to it though.

Thanks!  Have you taken a look at the spreadcoin implementation thereof?  Or heard of any others? 

It still exists, you can find it here: http://p2pool.in/

Speed will be a big problem here. So long as bitcoin is being used often there will constantly be a problem of the previous block not being able to propagate the network before the next one is found creating all kinds of security and technical problems.

Depends on how you organise your concensus. If you just have a plain chain, then yes, it would be orphan hell.. but if you move to a tree, or a DAG things become much more tenable.

This is an interesting idea; certainly gets rid of mempool issues too doesn't it :D  and TX relaying incentivization.  And TX fees, well sorta. 
However, totally impractical for a normal-use coin.  Might be interesting to see what happened though are you planning to start one to see? 

What do you think about just making it so that the miner of a block must have the coinbase private key?  Doesn't that get rid of pools?   

Yes, that would enforce the condition that only you can mine your own blocks. I don't think it's totally impractical, necessarily. What makes you say that?

A couple of reasons .  One is that if there were ever more than a TX per 20 seconds or so, then this becomes too fast.. block times of one per 20 seconds have issues from what I hear.  And what if the number of TX increases?  There are no fees if you always mine your own TX.  Perhaps a balance would be reached as people simply won't be able to use the network so will stop trying to submit their TXs.   Anyway at this point there are too many people trying, the difficulty is high.. and if I want to submit a TX it becomes "run your computer for a month and there's a 50% chance your TX goes through".  That is not totally impossible to use but I called impractical because I'm spoiled :P  

As to enforcing that only you can mine your own blocks, this would still allow trusted pools, that is, pools where participants are honest (and don't try to cheat the pool).  In some sense, the possiblility of a trustless pool as bitcoin offers is a feature and not a bug.  What do you think?

Such a system would not have regular block intervals, for sure, and indeed it would be a requirement that a sent transaction not become orphaned, otherwise you would have to manually resend transactions if you weren't quick enough.

You might design it to have no fees, because the spam protection is built in, but there are also blockchain storage costs to consider.

Difficulty wise, what if you can set your own difficulty for the transactions you mine (with proportional block reward)?

A trusted pool, as you put it, would own your private keys and would essentially be an online wallet with none of the security of even blockchain.info.

I was thinking that because you always mine your own TX, any fees you include: go back to you :) 


Hmm that's another interesting idea :)  I guess in the end there will be a network-wide difficulty-per-satoshi-reward, so it might not change all that much. 


I was thinking more like 20 friends get together and agree that if any one of them finds a block they share the proceeds proportionally to everyone's hash rate.  Not that they would use this kind of thing to store any personal funds.  To check the hash rate they all show regularly "shares" which prove they are mining to some coinbase or another.  If anyone mines a block and grabs the funds for themselves without saying anything, the others will be able to see that cheating occured.  They won't be able to get the money back for distributing to their pool of course but they can at least see what happened. 

Cheers and thanks  --  funkenstein_the_dwarf 

the mining will be not decentrilized into several low power hash phones its to be used by clouds and big miner farms of PH for future into the development of HW

An excellent point! In that case, storage fees would be burned by the sender, thereby reducing supply.


Yes, this is possible. Not entirely sure it would be scalable to the extent pools in bitcoin are, tho.

For the largest amount of decentralization we'd want to distribute to people rather than hardware so if we could find a method that can differentiate people from automation we could have better decentralization.  Web programmers have a similar problem and they invented captchas to solve this problem.  For https://raiblocks.net/ we're distributing 100% through a captcha hoping this is a more egalitarian way to distribute rather than skewing toward enthusiasts.

This can never work over the long run.  It will fail for the same reason that all socialist/communist schemes fail - hashrate costs resources.  If you create a system where resource/productivity investment is not rewarded based on a free-market curve, investment in resources and productivity lags behind he efficient frontier and generally declines until everyone is poor.  Attempting to "fix" that problem by setting an arbitrary minimum resource investment (presumably decided by some central committee) will forestall the ultimate failure of the system, but not prevent it.  Committees setting arbitrary investment/production quotas have historically proven to be horrendously unreliable market price setting mechanisms.

>
   

Lol, you know that captchas are inherently broken right?  I can always build a decaptcha service if the product is worthwhile.  Granted captchas have their use as script kiddie deterrents but they don't work for things like Ticketmaster and they certainly wouldn't work for securing a currency. 

The Sybil problem is not solvable.  There is no way to distinguish and individual person -  dna, fingerprints, etc. can all be forged in tests or manipulated by testers. 

The Sybil problem is giving a voting stake to an inherently unlimited resource e.g. a pseudonymous identity.  The key is to not give votes to an unlimited resource i.e. give votes to proof of work or stake.  With RaiBlocks the only way to forge a vote would be to have the private key of an account with a balance.

Mining is profitable because the miner is rewarded for every created block by the assignment of a certain amount of coins (fiat coins, transaction fees). The rewards therefore consist in (a) a direct financial gain that is (b) more or less proportional to the number of mined coins. If we were able to build an incentive scheme for mining that acts in an indirect manner and doesn’t generate profit on its own, we might be able to put an end to commercial mining and decentralize the blockchain.

To that end, we could leverage transaction fees in a completely different way than most existing cryptocurrencies do. Instead of allowing the miner to collect the fees paid by other users as a financial reward, we should shift the focus on the transaction fees that a miner has to pay when making a transaction himself. Let’s assume that each newly created address must pay a fixed percentage of the transferred amount to get his transaction acknowledged by the chain. This constitutes a financial burden that we can lower by a certain rate, every time a valid block is mined by the given address. Hence, after mining a couple of blocks, the address will benefit from very low transaction fees.

With such a scheme, users who want to actively use their address for sending payments have a strong incentive to mine blocks, even though they don’t receive any direct reward by creating the block itself. On the other hand, the system doesn’t offer any business opportunity for commercial miners who are seeking profit out of mining. The only possible thing they might try is creating and selling accounts with low transaction fees to new users. But since accounts can only be transferred by revealing the corresponding private key, such transactions will always be very risky.

Another twist to the system would please to users who stand on the receiving side of the transactions, like merchants. In addition to lowering the fees as a reward for every mined block, we could introduce an increasing fee discount linked to the receiver's address. So, when a sender wants to pay money to a receiver, he will end up paying the standard fee * sender's discount * receiver's discount. Both discounts will grow with every block created by the miner.

The drawback of the described incentive mechanism is the fact that due to the lack of professional miners it would need a lot of active users to reach the current hash rate of Bitcoin. Furthermore, every user would need to have a realistic chance of getting some discounts by mining on a regular PC or smartphone for some time. With the current block time of Bitcoin it's impossible to realise such a system for more than maybe a few 1000 users.

It will never be possible just think about it, those who have the big mines are the one centralized mines in the world, then how can you hope for anything else?

Last year I finally got around to writing up the system I was alluding to in this old thread. It proposes creating a new consensus mechanism inspired by the core values of bitcoin but solving the major problems inherent in the current bitcoin concensus model:

* centralisation of mining
* transaction throughput
* confirmation times

The key to solving the problem is to create a trustless, total order for all transactions in a system where every user is the only person who can mine their own transactions.

The paper is a draft with all the proofs missing and there is still an open question related to the claim that miners are incentivised to include uncle references. With that said, I think it could inspire some debate and maybe be useful in general. In any case, I think it's better to share this work even in it's current incomplete state than to let it vanish into obscurity.

https://github.com/wildbunny/docs/blob/master/T.E.T.O-draft.pdf

Cheers, Paul.

Maybe the PoW function should be made as simple as possible, so that ASICs can be devised for it very easily.
The design of such ASIC could be open sourced - removing the barrier of entry, ensuring a level playing field.
Then, every device on the planet can easily be fitted with these ASICs and the overhead of doing would be negligible for HW manufacturer.
I do not think it would be necessary to reward miner in a heavily decentralized scenario (say, > 100M miners) - the fact that you would get secure transactions for the cost of the energy you spend seems to be enough of incentive.
Then, I also believe that any user node should (must) be a mining node.
That is, it should not be possible to use the system without contributing to mining.

Hence, removing the competition for ASIC manufacturers. Open sourced does not mean that they will follow that design in their ASIC.
Uhh. No. There is definitely some overhead to this. It isn't possible for you to fit an ASIC chip into your phone together with your CPU. The hashpower is negligible too.
No rewards=Lesser people having incentive to mine = easily attacked. You cannot assume that there would be 100Million miners at any time. If you can fit it into a phone, the will be very insignificant due to the low TDP design.
No No No. If every node IS a mining node, everyone would have to fork out their resources to the network. If I have a phone and I want to use Bitcoin, do I have to risk overheating my phone just to use it? The idea is frankly impossible.

150pcs of A3233-q48 are fitted in a 1TH/s Avalon Miner.
See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=523309.0
Cost per unit is ca 0.1 USD
Consumption is about 5 watts

So it seems that if each user/miner would be equipped with one chip, the number of users/miners necessary to achieve the same hash power as of today would be 5000000 TH/s * 150 = 750 millions.  That is much less than the number of facebook users !

Do remember to factor in: the additional cost of miniaturizing the chips such that the performance of the phone is not affected, the heat output is eliminated, every company in the world is willing to redesign their board. Honestly, if you were to launch a phone with this feature, the only people that may even be interested (not necessarily buying) in it are hardcore Bitcoin enthusiast. It simply doesn't make sense for manufacturers to do this especially if they don't gain anything, neither do most people that is using the phone.
Nice. Divide that by 750 and that might be 1/2 of the Bitcoin users.

Yeah I forgot this: In comparison, a phone's battery is about 3000mAH.

BM1387 ASIC inside the Antminer S9: 189 pcs per unit, each unit 14 TH/s
So, each BM1387 is capable of ca 0.07 TH/s, consumption roughly 5 watts as well
To achieve the current 5.000.000 TH/s, you would need 71 millions of those.
Assume 50% mobile users with one chip, and 50% desktop users with two chips, that means a completely fully decentralized network of roughly 50 millions users.
The issues would seem to be more on the network bandwidth / latency etc side than on the ASIC side I believe.

i will give it a read.

I see some good ideas here. remember that many great things nowadays were considered impossible many many years ago

The BM1387 ASIC chip is capable of ca 0.07 TH/s and consumes roughly 5 watts.
You would need some 70 millions of those installed to match the current total network hash rate.  No need for billions or users.

Phone and PC/laptop manufacturers could add an ASIC to their boards for example.
Or dongles could be made (possibly combining OTP generation with mining killing two birds with one stone...).
Quite honestly the "price" to pay (ie device + energy costs) is well worth it !

I believe that the major issue would be rather on the network bandwidth / latency side of things.
I do not know if bitcoin has been designed with such a heavily decentralized mining in mind.

1 small thing, what about the full blockchain size of 120gb + does it need to be installed on my phone to mine?
Otherwise, with 2 billions of phone's sold world wide the is a potention in it  8)

You can either prune the chain or use a pool.  I don't see this as a major issue.

Honestly, I don't know why you have refused to listen to my comments on this. No phone or laptop will ever be able to support this. The power consumption is way too high. Less than an hour of mining and your battery will be drained.

What do you think ASIC chips are? LEGOS? Do you seriously think that anyone can smack a big ASIC chip into a device with a LOW TDP design in mind? The price for the design could very well cost more than several HUNDRED thousands and the phone would each cost more than $100 extra and not everyone would use it. Honestly, no one would buy it.

Its not. Why the hell would it be? Decentralised mining will NEVER be realistic.

Read this paper (which discusses the technique), comment, lets talk about it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1992827.0

I gave you an example of a good commercial existing chip to explain that there is no need for billions of users.
That chip is using 14nm technology (and is less than 20mm2 btw), so by far not the most optimized thing that could be achieved with the most recent technologies.
We are not far from the 2.5watts of USB2.0 for example, which opens the door for simple mining using USB dongles.
You can also be quite certain that big players could design faster/smaller/more efficient chips.

It looks to me like completely decentralized mining is within reach.  Laptops consuming 50 watts for example could easily accomodate 5 watts overhead.

So, the question is more about the network related issues, and the underlying bitcoin mining protocol requirements.

It has existed since years ago. Gekkoscience do have a USB miner that outputs 20+ GH or so.
Why would they? If consumers do not want it, they wouldn't think of implementing it. It really seems like you are underestimating the additional cost and benefit of companies actually doing this. Its really pointless to put a single chip into a device.
Alright fine. Then how about the cooling? How about the cost of companies actually purchasing chips to stuff it into their device which 50% of the users wouldn't use?

It's not within reach. Even if you were to implement chips in the device which every Bitcoin user is using, it would hardly match the current hashpower that most farms have. Furthermore, the hashpower will not be constant, it will fluctuate ALOT and Bitcoin will experience slow block times at certain time of the day. Anyway, it is rather hard for the protocol to be changed such that only those who mine can use Bitcoin.

Ah! I wasn't aware of that.  Thanks for the pointer.
It looks like with some effort, a USB 2.0 dongle could reach 0.5 TH/s (consuming 2.5 watts)
That is, 1.8 KWH / month (assuming 24h/24h operations - unrealistic!), that is roughly 4 USD energy costs per month - less than your bank fees!
If such a dongle was available, it is likely that many bitcoin (and other alts!) users would purchase and use it, as it guanrantees their own security (ie protection against 51% attacks / other forms or attacks...), this would decentralize mining effectively.
Let us suppose that such a dongle would sell for 20 USD, profit 5 USD.
When motherboard manufacturers will realize that they can get enter this market easily by providing it on board, at cost 10 USD, profit 2 USD, they will do...

So the question is: how to lower the barrier of entry to mining and make it affordable for the masses.

If the (current) bitcoin protocol has been foreseen to cope with tenths of millions of miners, that should work and is only a question of time.