They can only force soft-forks, hard-forks are ignored by full-nodes and clients.  An attempted forced-hard fork results in hostile miners forming an alt-coin with no users.  The limiting factor is soft-forks are quite flexible and can do a lot, some of which could be undesirable.


the nuclear big-red-button option of tweaking the PoW hash is a meta threat to miners that they dont quite have the upper hand - if they abuse it, or get too crazily centralised - people would worst case be willing to push it.

Probably thats a MAD argument that keeps miners somewhat sensible as if that button is pushed they are sitting on $500m of scrap electronics with a low scrap parts salvage value.


Outside of spam limits which could be protocol enforced, its caveat emptor, you shouldnt put money into a chain unless there is some assurance that security & bitcoin protocol knowledgeable people have audited it.  People could certify chains (like sign them - "my name is blah and I'm a security researcher with reputation and I and my buddies audited this code and its good") or wallets could etc.  Its good and a feature that people can opt to use uncertified chains.  You want a situation where there is real open possibility for technical innovation & competition in chain features.

You also want no central control so no chains can get black listed.

Adam

I thought you said you didnt do ad-hominems to troll and fan reaction?  Just a few posts back too.  

Decorum!

Stuff like that is why bitcointroll.org is redirecting here.  Also it pushes out more tech focussed people who want some civility and dont have the USENET flame war developed rhinoceros hide and egos to say "fuck you too" and keep talking.

What the tvbcof said seemed pretty reasoned to me, and if you read it neutrally, not to be calling Gavin names, just talking about hypothetical conflicts of interest, independence etc.  

I share his view about balance of power helping also, eg you can see that Microsoft & Apple are both pretty world domination evil corporations.  And yet the growth of apple's market penetration of OSX has weakened eithers ability to execute on their rent-seeking actions.  Thats a pretty conventional understanding of the real-world.

Adam

For conflict freedom to occur (and I think its an interesting and useful objective) bitcoin perhaps needs to be simplified and frozen, maybe moved to a formally provable specification rather than code as definition.  Soft-forks could be prevented by consensus rule if we were convinced of perfect correctness.  

Hard-forks are harder to foist on people because they require a near absolute majority whereas soft-forks are a bit more miner influenceable.

If we had an extension mechanism that doesnt touch core once setup, the core becomes that bit closer to freezable & formal specifiable refactor becoming possible.  If we have the possibility for live-betas we are more likely to be able to get to formal specification as definition.  (Thats a hard-fork for sure).

Another aspect of conflict freedom (other than freezing and forcing change to be hard-fork) is to enable permissionless innovation - then there's no conflict, people who want to try things can go try them without lobbying for changes to bitcoin.  Also good.

Adam

Sure hoping 2015 is the year (and earlier in better than later!) they get the bitcoin ETF operational.  I know lots of semi-technical or even technical people who'd really like to invest in bitcoin that cant handle or dont want the risk of the technical management of coins and so have held off buying for purely that reason.

Adam

I'm not sure if you know but people who can code in bitcoin core receive frequent lucrative offers (eg like $500k) to code altcoins.  Devs all received them, and rejected them.  The only people who took such money was Peter Todd (I think busy at $250/hr), however as I understand it he only takes that work with the caveat that he can work on decentralising bitcoin or other tech that is mutually useful to bitcoin.   A few of these guys have almost no bitcoins or spent them trying to do startups or such things.  I think thats a pretty clear evidence of intent to do the right thing.  They have more fealty to bitcoin as a concept and doing the right thing than putting food on their table.  And also disdain for ethics of pump & dump business models that have victims at the bottom of the pyramid.

You can view that while in theory some one could fork bitcoin if Gavin went nutso on something really bad (or was blackmailed into doing something dodgy) or something, that the community could fork the code.  However in practice there is also realistically a shortage of people with the skill set to maintain and create security patches for a fork, so while the desire to do it would be real, the number of devs is a problem.

As Greg mentions here thats something we thought was important to improve - train more core devs - so there is more decentralisation.  http://www.coindesk.com/gregory-maxwell-went-bitcoin-skeptic-core-developer/

Secondly basically there isnt anything thats going to happen in the core that a consensus of this group of people dont agree to.  And they listen to feedback and want to keep the social contract and understand that contract.  In fact their view is ideally its impossible for them to not keep the social contract (for their own personal safety as well as desired outcome) because the bitcoin network is really controlled by the economic majority.  Thats kind of what cant be evil is about, an attempt to replicate that type of thinking into a corporate structure to fail-safe it.  Not even miners can fork the protocol if no full nodes nor users like the change.  That effect holds companies honest to bitcoin ethos - companies are dead in the water without developers.  As I said our company was founded by core developers.  And we actually view it as a feature that if we all disagreed vehemently with a strategy the company would have a problem - like a technical inability to do the thing we disagreed with.

Its actually in the companies interest to do the right thing as a company also, in terms of fiduciary responsibility because something bad for bitcoin ethos will likely be rejected by the bitcoin user & business community.

You might imagine given the shortage any core developer could walk out and get  job the next day.  Even outside of bitcoin its a pretty uber-geek architect level crowd in terms of employability.  But right now the only hope of doing something might be Peter Todd (however he's pretty rabidly pro-decentralisation, pro-anonymity (eg stealth addresses etc), anti-censorship (work on proof of publication and end-to-end policy full node only exploration with tree-chains idea) etc so I doubt he'd be interested to do something bad for users), or perhaps Mike Hearn (who sort of floated the idea of red-lists though I'm not sure how serious he was).  However I dont think Mike did a lot of core development in years, more working on java wallet library and apps.

Sidechains may also be good for that - an escape valve - people who want to do crazy stuff, can go do it in a sidechain, that no one (who cares about bitcoin ethos features) would use.  Vs try to coerce legally or otherwise developers into subverting bitcoin itself at its core where there's no choice left, and bitcoin risks destruction.

In summary yes we thought about this stuff, and outside of some disagreement that sidechains create more risk than they remove (I say they remove risk, because bitcoin is exposed to offchain risk & monetary shocks from eg mtgoxings, such that sidechains are a clear improvement over offchain economically), I'd imagine we're in violent agreement on the ethos of bitcoin and whats are the important aspects of idealised bitcoin features & ethos.

Feel free to suggest protocol improvements.  Eg other ways to firewall features (eg hardened vm per feature inside core) or whatever.

Adam

Yep.  Bitcoin has a lot to offer, and some of those things are not possible for the legacy systems to mimic.  Particularly sound money, no counter-party risk, irreversable transactions (seizing and freezing basically prevent that outside of paper cash, though even that is partly relying on fungibility laws or it could have reversibility problems).  Smart-contracts that are strengthened by no counter-party risk and irreversibility are one of the most interesting advantages I think.  Without irreversibility and no freezability a "smart-contract" isnt smart, its just an electronic contract and we already have those.  Ultimately if you combine it all you could rearchitect the financial system to largely remove systemic risk, add competition legacy systems cant react to (they intrinsically need their governance costs).  This is why people gave us $21mil.  Bitcoin all-in is a big deal.  Sound-money is cool, but its only part of the picture.

Even if bitcoin transactions ended up costing more than headline fees for some transaction types, but it would still be worth it because of those features, the legacy system has higher costs, its just those are appearing in other places or disguised in the price.  The dispute resolution cost and auditors and governance and separate of duties and systemic risk and strong relevance of credit rating create an environment that must charge higher fees, and can charge much higher fees on top because of the barrier to entry to obtaining a corporate credit rating and reputation.  With bitcoin technology the product has the credit-rating, and is subject to real-time audit like bitcoins real-time assay.

A good day to buy more bitcoins.  Its cheap at the price and most do not understand this potential.  Its like 1990s internet tech stocks.

Adam

I guess you mean:


I guess the response from myself and GMaxwell kind of drifted off the topic of your question.

Sidechains are not a proprietary technology.  Everything is FOSS, open IP.  And we invested a fair bit of mental energy and legal review already into making sure it stays that way, even if blockstream management were someone replaced or blackmailed; to imagine yourself or a company a perpetual lifetime role is naive, and we've seen it before eg digicash patents got sold by the investors when they went bankrupt to some company that sat on them, preventing people who wanted to innovate using ecash.  We're all anti-patent and want to avoid that kind of crap creeping into bitcoin.  I have some first hand knowledge that some companies are patenting things related to bitcoin, and probably much more I dont know about.  I suppose someone could search patent db though filing is a long slow process.  At ZKS where I was working on our ToR-precursor and ecash, back in 1999-2001, Austin tried to buy digicash patent and making it available in the public domain, we failed to buy it sadly.  John Gilmore was our advisor and he'd helped cook up an open patent license GNU like scheme.

Its not our softfork - its a softfork to enable a generic extension mechanism.  We have no monopoly (and wouldnt want one) on use of the op code.  Our only defence is meritocracy - if we build better, more secure sidechains and people prefer to use them.  We wont be getting the fees off the sidechain either because those go to miners.  If we have the technical edge and people use our stuff that seems sort of fair enough to me.

Personally I guarantee I trust each and everyone of our team more than J Random web2.0 startup CEO.  What do those guys want?  To make a profit.  Would they stop at sabotaging bitcoin to get there?  I doubt it.  Some of the bitcoin web2.0 startup guys are cool and bitcoin enthused.  But they're getting patents some of them, and not all of them will survive.  Crappy things the less cool startup CEOs might try eg the red-ilist or other things so sucky I wouldnt even describe them for fear it'd give people ideas that they lack the technical competence to design.

I do get where you're coming from, in the past I was the guy holding people to account eg PGP incorporated when they were busy trying to include key escrow into PGP ostensibly for corporate data access.  (I imagine people selling stingrays tell themselves something also).  Partly due to my efforts that was never included in the open-pgp IETF spec.

Sidechains are just a mechanism to extend bitcoin.  The interesting thing is the extension not the chain.  If a better way to do it materialises great.  If some sidechain innovations are so cool and well validated from $1b resting on them for a year that it allows bitcoin core to merge them fantastic.  Actually Pieter Wuille views that as the best way to view the utility of sidechains, to enable longer and live validation of things that could then go into bitcoin where that'd be difficult to impossible to gain that confidence on directly.

There can also however be one-size fits-all limits.  Some extensions are mutually incompatible, or too risky though interesting (eg snark contracts, zerocash) unless a way to contain the risk in chain is found.  Also you can get some new scaling possibilities by having chains with different blocksizes.  Its more decentralised and safer to have a small bitcoin main block and a medium sized sidechain block, than introduce a large main bitcoin block as there is an escape route and choice.  You can within limits get your cake and eat it.

Adam

Actually not even.  The podcast is on a completely different topic: a response to Vitalik Buterin's bitcoin maximalism assertion (its pretty funny everyone is too polite to accuse Vitalik of ether maximalism given the percentage of the premine he owns).  

I encourage you (or others) to read David Krawisz article http://bitcoinist.net/the-two-ideologies-in-bitcoin/ he is quite knowledgeable about economics and able to reason.  He draws a conclusion that is a little different to what most are assuming: that it is investors that drive bitcoins price & network effect, and transactional usage follows; rather than the assumption many make that it is the usage that drives intrinsic value & network effect.  I am not sure about that - maybe its a bit of both, but its an interesting and well reasoned argument, that is somewhat reassuring - we're not fully beholden to the success of people like bitpay trying to integrate merchants and the success of those merchants in having people pay in bitcoin etc. if Krawisz is to some extent right.

Adam

I can see the argument.  But wouldnt that have effects on main chain also?  Wouldnt it be more prone to technical and policy / moral hazard failure?

You can view all the off-chain transactions (must be > 90% offchain) that are based on trust, governance and audit as also part of the economic system.  Prime example Mtgox.  Dont get much bigger than that $500m loss.

I think the economic system is at greater risk the longer this offchain model persists.  One of the motivations of some of the people interested in sidechains is to increase transaction volume, smart-contract capabilities to have the tools to migrate the security critical parts of the trust & governance aspects onto the chain - ie replace that trust and governance (which is prone to human failure) with smart-contracts (which are less so).

Its also kind of embarrassing and stupid given that the point of bitcoin smart-contracts is to avoid that risk!  Sort of because of tx volume, missing a few features and largely transaction volume limits, reinventing the mistakes of the past centuries early banking governance failures, with young people with no banking experience running $500m exchanges with basically no separation of duty and probably dumb security also.  Thats also a bad idea for inviting regulation - regulators are trying to protect users from losing money.

You can directly see that people are running scared of losing their money in anything that they are trusting with bitcoin.  Eg delays for wire transfers to clear because they dont want to leave money on exchanges with uncertain governance and security competence.  Thats not good for bitcoin either.

I think sidechains are a net win if its a choice between offchain or on sidechain.  Even if some people are focussed on slow velocity investment, the people that do want them, those transactions will go somewhere and offchain will be it until someone works to solve it.

Feel free to help also.  We're doing plumbing at this stage.  Early adopters could see uptake as people move to on(side)chain offerings in preference to offchain.

Adam

Well yes I have, to save time, you talk too much  Now if you focussed on constructively and impassively analysing the technology and implications, maybe it'd progress faster?


That is not realistically practical, that is exactly what motivated sidechains as an extension mechanism.
So you wont be against the idea of an extension mechanism per se, just the next bit:


You know, not that I am concretely proposing it, but one could shift the reward as a consensus rule into a singleton sidechain.  Or some proportion of it.  (Simple enough to do: use a peg transaction in the coinbase, and make it a sidechain consensus rule that this be the case).  That might address your incentive concern.

Secondly bitcoin transaction fees will need to surpass subsidy soon enough.  At that point there is little difference.

Bitcoin main needs to plan for that day anyway.

The incentive protection for bitcoin is not absolute: it just raises the cost.  If someone can commit a bigger theft (via double-spending etc) they can pay for the lost mining during their failed double-spends before success.  Bitcoin is already vulnerable to the same pattern of attack, and at times we've had the bad situation of near 50% miners, and certainly 2-3 miners that are overwhelming, and yet it doesnt happen.  Clearly there is meta-incentive at work.  It works because the honest majority want it to work, and miners particularly collectively have $500m+ of equipment at risk.


Another possibility to think about is some people talk about litecoin or whatever as backup plan to bitcoin in case of centralisation or catastrophic bug.  Well a sidechain can fulfil that kind of role also.


Yep.


I posted the article http://bitcoinist.net/the-two-ideologies-in-bitcoin/ which came before the podcast and covers more topics & is clearer IMO.

Adam

There was also https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=831527.0

This one is arguably in the wrong thread (speculation between gold & bitcoin?) but whatever.

Adam

actually I wasnt assuming you had an agenda, or at least I couldnt figure out what it might be.

My agenda is simple: bitcoin is awesome, and I want to defend and improve it.


I presume by philosophy you mean stasis vs change?  I read your view to be stasis.  Nothing about bitcoin must change ever (other than bug fixes).  Maybe thats over simplifying.  Or maybe your arguments are shifting or dancing around to prod people into extending the argument (sorry thats the impression you give at times).

The sequence I saw was people trying to pressure bitcoin core to make changes to support their various ideas and pet projects.  And bitcoin core not being able to accommodate them due to resources, and significantly risk.

My pet project that caused me to notice the risk of change clearly, was homomorphic encrypted values, which I thought were pretty cool as they completely hide transaction values and are still validatable.     https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305791.0  (They do nothing about hiding which address is paying which, thats harder and takes zerocash which has to much novel crypto to deploy on main IMO).

And actually the earlier one was committed transactions which try to prevent transaction censorship even in the face of miners with dangerously high hashrate.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206303.15 (there's a so far unresolved problem with that, but if it could be made to work, thats pretty cool in my book also).

So I suppose one example for your philosophy question is would you be against the above two changes being in bitcoin?  One improves privacy and the other improves decentralisation properties.  I presume most people on bitcointalk like those properties.  How about cypherdoc?

Next realise there's basically zero chance of those going in, and I approve of that.  Its too risky, and what we need even more than cool features to improve bitcoin, is to not lose everyones bitcoins (including cypherdocs hoard, which I am very happy he has, good for him).  i dont but thats my fault for not installing the alpha client when Satoshi emailed me about it in Jan 2009.  I bought a few but I guess my buy in price average is close to current.  I still think bitcoin is the coolest thing and has awesome potential.

And another example is how do we do bitcoin protocol upgrades.  There are limitations to live upgrades, some things are not soft-forkable also.  We'd have lower risk if we could have a live beta.  That was the first proposed use for one-way pegs (precursor to GMaxwell et al two-way peg).  Presumably you'd think a one-way peg for the purposes of software upgrade could be good - lower risk of failure during bug fixes and software modularisation.

An example is its hard to fully fix malleability which causes problems in some scenarios.

Maybe also zerocash itself.  Kind of risky bleeding edge crypto, but really good privacy.  I would be against that going into main due to the novel crypto risk unless it was somehow constrained to those opting in to it.
But that kind of sucks, people who want it cant use it.  You and I and everyone is censoring their desired feature.  Thats not permissionless innovation.  But we are justified because of the risks in fact.  A securely firewallable extension mechanism enables permissionless innovation.  Otherwise you just see more feature coins.


I am not sure if you are aware sidechains are nearly possible with zero changes to bitcoin.  Its already programable via the script language.  It may even be doable with zero changes with some chained contorted big script to validate compact SPV proofs.

Anyway its not like blockstream even existed when a bunch of core devs got excited about the possibility of improving on the above situations with a generic extension mechanism so I encourage you to separate out arguments about risk or imagined intent of blockstream from concerns about the change.  eg pretend the change is just that group of developers, same people who've been coding bitcoin for years.  (Blockstream basically is that group of developers, but thats a separate discussion!)

Note also the 51% takes all coins risk depends on the peg script.  Its possible to limit that problem and place the risk on the people doing the arbitrage or transfers by forcing the person returning coins to put up a bounty in main-chain bitcoins equal to the exchange which they forfeit if their transfer is proven fraudulent by a chosen % of the sidechain.  There can also be caps and time-adaptive delays (longer for more bitcoin).  Its a programming language, the op_spv is just an opcode to simplify the coding of one part of it, validating the compact-proofs.

Hopefully we got past the misinterpretation of Konrad Graf's article, to see that the discount is for time-preference only, and the security firewall will work fine against a malicious or dud sidechain; caveat emptor, and look at the credibility of people writing wallets, chains and cryptocurrency.

If you dont put your coins into a chain they are not at risk.  Why would you want to censor someones ability to have zerocash, homomorphic value, faster transactions, more TPS, native share/color support, snark contracts?  Wouldnt those be good things for bitcoin?  I personally thought it'd be pretty cool to see a new wave of bitcoin centric innovation.

Also I dont think even statis vs change captures the situation.  If you like stasis, keep your coins on bitcoin main; if others like cool features they can use them on chains that support them.  Why is this a conflict?

Adam

Yeah no axe to grind, or hidden motive, I just mean a better gold because its electronically transferable, instantly assayable, harder to seize.  There was a famous economist who commented that bitcoin in his view ought to longer term start to track gold price because they fulfil potentially similar functions, and bitcoin is better in multiple areas.

I was inferring from cypherdocs earlier rejection of change (to eg support more tx/sec or other features that an extension mechanism would allow) that he prefers even the hoarding/large investor with few transactions type of bitcoin use over actual trade.

Thats also why I forwarded the link to David Krawisz's article as he argues that it is investors that drive network effect, and trade is following; rather than value driven by trade.

Another alternative future is where an altcoin grows due to offering easier extensibility than bitcoin.  That maybe moderately unlikely given bitcoins network effect and huge lead, but its perhaps a risk.  I think those are the main things to consider in a tradeoff analysis.

Adam

ps I edited the subject field.  Actually I am not sure why this is in the "gold up" thread.

I read a few dozen pages some weeks back, so I think I got a fair flavour of the substantive arguments mixed in now and then.  Others seemed to be doing an excellent job of injecting logic and signal so I left it at that.

But I am not convinced you are trying to be persuaded, maybe more enjoying the protracted heated discussion

Adam

ps it only takes a second to trim quotes - the thread'd easier to read if you also would trim!

Uh I see I spoke too soon.  Seemingly the cypherdoc vs world sub-thread is still raging  (Wasnt reading thread for some weeks).

I think cypherdoc's skill is to be the right balance of adhominem, unexplained dismissive & occasional logic to cultivate a continuous flame war.  Otherwise called trolling I guess, easily recognisable form of entertainment for anyone who enjoyed USENET news flame wars of yore!  Flame wars are fun and all but I prefer constructive discussion.  Cypherdocs a clever fellow, I'm sure he has the smarts to hold a pure logic conversation if he chose.  Just the inner-troll is having too much fun trolling.

Anyway thats my view of whats going on.

Adam

ps and for the love of Mike trim quotes!

Thought cypherdoc might like this article by Daniel Krawisz

http://bitcoinist.net/the-two-ideologies-in-bitcoin/

I am sort of imagining it as what underlies his arguments that he doesnt like sidechains.

I think cypherdoc likely still mistaken (and Krawisz as ever makes interesting informed economic arguments).

If nothing else for those who view bitcoin as gold2.0 (and I do myself) then its in our interest actually that there not be code churn on bitcoin-core to add micro-payments, fancy contracts etc etc it's better to fix all the bugs, refactor and freeze the code.  Put the code churn onto other chains.  But having the other chains be non-bitcoin denominated detracts from bitcoin.  Hence... sidechains.

Further if extra features can go into sidechains, perhaps along the way bitcoin could do things to reduce centralisation reduce blocksize, and get rid of extraneous existing code complexity by refactoring some things off into a more featureful sidechain.

btw I read Krawisz as more saying investment utility is the predominant driver of bitcoin adoption, transactional uses secondary.

Anyway just some thoughts, not trying to reanimate the sub-thread.

Adam

Yes.  And the second part (sybil resistant BGP solution) is maybe not as critical - ie if we imagine that Satoshi didnt find that solution, or it were broken unexpectedly, could we repair bitcoin and have it still work, just not as elegantly/securely whatever?

I think the answer is probably yes: use a conventional identity based BGP solution (of which there are existing eg Lamport himself in the original paper up to 1/3 malicious players) and work-around the identity problem by copying what i2p did for its identities from 1998 or  the nymservers  (pseudonymous mixmaster related mail service) did - require hashcash to create identities.  You might need to tune some stuff - eg the identities must be timestamped, time-limited use etc but probably you could make that work.  Doesnt seem so removed from how bitcoin sybil resistant BGP works even so maybe thats how Satoshi arrived at it.

The former question though decentralised secure inflation control, people who were trying to figure this out in 1997/1998 were mostly aiming for $-adjusted zero inflation which isnt possible without exeternal price feeds which are not decenralised/machine-measurable.

Adam

Yes thats true.  The hypothetical what-if/question is - is the positive (stabalising) feedback loop between price and gold production useful to mimic also.  I argue that dual difficulty retargetting may go towards achieving that (see the other thread)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=907157.msg9973992#msg9973992


Adam

Its a pair of long-term hypothetical what-ifs, as I disclaimed not proposing anything, though its interesting to observe that if there was enough motivation and self-interest, there are things the bitcoin super-majority could hypothetically do.  Some people find confidence from long-term possibilities that bitcoin can technically and even economically adapt without violating its social contract.  (Otherwise these people reject bitcoin because of projected hypothetical end-game problems).

A) could volatility be damped by dual-retargetting (difficulty & reward/block) and

B) could electrical cost be reduced if security subsidy overshot or reached scaling limits (shortage of reasonable power).  

Massive electrical demands can create economies of scale, where politically connected people can get power.

We might see government wealth funds holding bitcoin (if thats not already the case) and/or governments taking strategic mining positions (possibly small loss making with subsidised power) within a few years - who knows!  If your country (or company, bank etc) depends on the secure operation and decentralisation you may want to participate to counter-act centralisation power-grabs from other countries.

Bitcoin is a better gold, and gold served as the predominant world currency for 6000 years.  The current debt based fractional fiat currency has its own seemingly inherent limitations.  Who knows, maybe it'll happen that bitcoin continues to grow in this kind of role.

Adam

Bitcoin already includes some damping measures: eg difficulty retarget is capped at 4x up or 4x down.

This is another hypothetical damping measure, depending on the parameters.  You could eg split the retargetting 50:50 (geometrically) between reward and difficulty. 

As such that doesnt affect miners as the net-effect is the same: lets say difficulty was about to go up by the maximum 4x, then geometric mean is 2x difficulty and 1/2 supply.  To a miner its net neutral if they get 6.25 coins at difficult 1 trillion vs vs 12.5 coins at difficulty 2 trillion.  However it adjusts the supply reactive to rapid difficulty adjustments which damps price swings (volatility).  And that is good for miners if miners like predictability.

As it is bitcoin mining is a kind of derivative on bitcoin price: its sort of slim-to-mildly profitable for the various efficiency operators, so there is a sort of keep the mine operating maintenance mode, and then if bitcoin price spikes by 2x and sustains, then it takes a three months for new equipment to be produced.  Old equipment could be turned back on if the price change makes it break-even again, and longer term that could be a good thing for stability, but currently moore's law catchup is too fast so that old equipment becomes quite obsolete within a year perhaps.

(And bitcoin-mining with a few asics has so far is looking like a small loss making for me and probably many other hobby miners due to electrical cost and my lack of economies of scale).

Adam