Very nice breakdown ltcguy..

..

Why not just not pay uncle blocks ? I assume the reason ETH is made out of thin air to pay the uncle miners is so that normal miners don't have to share their reward and therefore be incentivised not to include the uncles.

When you publish a block you do not know if it will be an uncle. You think it will be the next block on the main chain. Miners will include uncle blocks anyway as using GHOST their branch will be heavier and more lightly to become the main chain. They will not include uncles of rival chains. makes sense.

So, I don't see why you need to pay a reward for uncle blocks at all when it seems to complicate mining incentives unnecessarily ?   

Trying to have this very discussion in the Technical forum..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1430548.0

I think that trying to compete as a standard miner, with the current miners, isn't going to work..

An efficient bitcoin mining chip, installed in every Android phone, coupled with seamless pool integration so that it all 'just works', may be the only way to overcome the current situation..

A billion mining chips controlled by the users vs the current miners would be a good match up.

.. we'd need a billion users though.. 

Or would a million be enough ? Not up on chip speeds, can anyone enlighten ?

Ho hum.. just talking to myself here..  

How about this :

Make it so that the miner's centralised hash power can't compete with the masses.

..

There are 1 billion android phones out there.

If Android phones (unsure if Apple would jump onboard with this..) started to come out with heat efficient, low power, mining chips and excellent low-bandwidth mining pool integration, would that help..

I'm not up on how powerful a small SHA256 chip is at the moment.. Can someone who knows chip in.. ?

Do 1 billion times that number amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy bitcoin miner's world ?

If so, the pool operators, would make their cut (and if using the original OP scheme there could be many of them), but the Hashing would be left to the users..

So not a lot of action here..

Has anyone got any other ideas about how to combat Mining Centralisation.. ?

Because trying to get the miners to fork bitcoin in a way that will make mining less profitable, as some have stated.. isn't going to happen..

When these are your out-goings :


( Taken from the latest blog post https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/01/07/2394/ )

..It is impossible that they are shutting the forums down due to financial reasons. Certainly not because of a pissy $300 a month.

There is obviously more to it. Just don't know what..

..

ps.. That is some serious cash they are burning through..

I agree.

And to make more miners take part, I am saying you need to let more miners onto the main chain.

Mining as part of a pool is not the same as mining as an individual entity.

One is trust free, one is not.

So, DumbFruit's astute comments about everyone merging into one massive mining pool so as to maximise profits, I think, has some caveats.

In the system described in the OP, a mining operation that manages to get on the main chain once a day, gets paid every block. AND doesn't need to trust anybody.

That is why the EXTRA incentive I mention, up to 1% IF you are at 144x difficulty, is small.

Just enough for an individual mining operation to do it, thereby allowing more miners on chain, but not enough to entice you away from your trust free mining setup, to become a pooled miner.

No. There is no 250btc reward for level 10 miners. There is just the same block reward for everyone.

The 'levels' are all relative to each other.

Level 10 miners make 10 times more than level 1 miners. But there is only the usual 25btc per block to share.

If all the miners are level 10 difficulty, they all make the same, just as if they were all at level 1.

Ah.. I now see what you are saying..

The extra 1%..

I'm not so sure mining operations would give up their independence so easily, for what would probably be much less than 1% increase in revenue.  ( you need to be 144x difficulty for that )

At twice difficulty you would only make 0.014% more. Hardly worth jumping ship for.

If you removed that extra incentive, a miner would make the same whether they went for harder blocks or not. Whether they split up or not. But you couldn't tell.

Would miners still go for less blocks, harder blocks, if they made the same amount? If it were just for the health of the network. Doubtful..

??

It's not profitable for individual miners to split up. Big or small.

hmm.. sorry.. not sure I get what you are saying..

Yes - I am assuming the last 144 miners are different entities. Or at least would like to be. Since :

Using this system, finding 10 blocks at Level 1, is less profitable than finding 1 block at Level 10.

Therefore, I would say that all miners would try and find as few blocks as possible per day, and make each block as hard as possible.

So there would be no point to a miner splitting himself up and trying to find blocks as separate users. He makes more as one miner, finding one block, than as many finding many.

Blocksize is the 1st issue.

That's not what this post is about. There are lots of people saying lots of things, and eventually, something will happen and this issue will be fixed. Of that I have no doubt.

But there is another issue. One that does not seem to have any, let alone many solutions being put forward.

That is the issue of mining centralisation.

From a 'technical' point of view is there anything that can be done ? (There has been discussion of this before, but not for a while.. thought we could revisit /re-examine)

Well.. How about this :

Currently miners are incentivised to mine every block. The more blocks they find the more they get paid. Simple.

Therefore, a miner is happiest if he is paid every block.

This doesn't leave much/any room on the blockchain for smaller miners, who may through cunning and guile become bigger actors if allowed to continue. They can only continue by joining pools, and boom!, we start seeing centralisation again.

What we need is a chain that actually doesn't incentivise miners to find every block.. can this be done ?

Well - P2Pool had a nice solution. It allowed miners to increase their individual difficulty, so they were actually looking for even harder blocks, and when they found those, they would be paid EXTRA (proportionally to their extra work).

In blockchain terms you could do this :

1) Every block that is found also includes a field (greater than 1) that is the extra proportional difficulty a miner chooses for his block. So if you have an individual difficulty of 2, your blocks are twice as difficult as a regular block. So a miner that was finding a block every 10 blocks, would now find one every 20.

2) Every block that is found, pays the last 144 miners (1 day's worth - could be more). Proportionally based on the individual difficulties. So a block that is twice as hard gets paid twice as much as a block that is normal difficulty. There are still only 25btc (or whatever) per block, but that amount is divided up. All the difficulties are proportional to each other.

3) A Miner makes EVEN MORE for finding a harder block. Say up to  1% if he chooses a difficulty of 144. (This is to be decided)

The point is, that now, miners need only find 1 block per day, and they will still be paid every block.

AND - if they are looking for harder blocks they will actually make slightly more, but not a lot more. So they are incentivised to do it. Why not.

This way there is lots of room on the chain, for lots of miners. In a perfect world, 144.

From there, new miners may rise, and be able to survive, in the dog-eat-dog blockchain-miner's world.  

I like.

I was wondering, will this explode the size of the UTXO set ?

As in, will there be more outputs than inputs generated per txn ? Since normally you spend multiple inputs for just 1 output (+ change)

Now you would be using multiple inputs to fulfil the requests, but there are multiple outputs too..

 

Core devs rock. Period.

But there is a difference between attacking and disagreeing with.

That distinction seems to have been lost somewhere.. and it's an important one.

LOL..

'.. Look - I've told you already.. The needle you're looking for is in that haystack!.. Now GGOOO!. FFOOOOLL!!!'

..

Why you always so angry CIYAM.. ? You were'nt always this way.. way back when.. 

You really should learn to stop posting in threads that annoy you. Live longer.

It's obvious to anyone with half a brain jstolfi has a deep understanding of Bitcoin, and he is making some valid points. (Plus I like his clear un-emotional posts.. ) 

Eh.. !?

You're such a dickhead TPTB.. 'moments of clarity drowning in an ocean of arrogant shit..' - That's you that is.

..

@monsterer - LOVING your in-depth attacks/analysis of POS frameworks, and your study of this new DAGcoin/IOTA direction for POW chains. Keep it up!   

Maybe he is encoding 'data' into the output amounts..

hmm.. I like innovation as much as the next man.. but..

Having been to the website, there is nothing there that explains anything ?

All they say is how wonderful Microcash is, but not how it's done..

They do not explain how they can manage such massive through put, or how their 'Instant' txns work. Other than some wiffle-waffle (please correct me if you have some actual algorithms you wish to make public) they have not shown us anything.

That's not a good sign.. 

There have been a lot of posts about how anyone who tries to publish a POS coin is breaking some-laws some-where. (Looking at you 'Land of the Free')

Anyway, if you do want to publish a POS coin, how about this way :

To be ultra careful/paranoid, instead of you personally giving out shares in the company (which is all an ICO/IPO is), you get a Smart contract on the Ethereum network, to run the whole IPO/ICO/whatever for you.

You create a Contract that listens out for payments. Along with each payment there is also a public key for their account on the POS chain. The code for the coin will need to be written and released already.

After a certain amount of time, the Contract creates the genesis block, using all the public keys it has acquired, and giving out coins in the right proportions given how much each individual gave.

Everyone has access to the Genesis block, and away you go.

Now, there is a contract on the Ethereum network with a whole load of Ether sitting in it's account. What to do with that ?

1) The creator may simply want the ether to be sent to him, but that may cause legal 'issues'. Although it could be classed as a payment for 'work done'. (Ha! A Smart Contract paying a Human.. or maybe another Smart Contract..)

2) You could burn them. Give yourself a stake in the company by default, and simply trash any money that is generated in the ICO.

3) You could send it all to different charities.

4 ) Or the ether needs to be spent, legally, on services. Which only the contract can do. As the creator of the contract, you can tell the contract who is eligible for this. This would need to be done beforehand, as once live, the contract has no trapdoor.. (Maybe a website host, security audit, etc etc.. all via the ethereum network)

..

I would say that the contract itself is the one who is in charge. Not you.

Thoughts ?

Brilliant.

Well played.

Sure, but again, this only applies to someone who has never connected before and who doesn't know anyone on the network AND who has downloaded a version of the software that has no valid checkpoints in it.


Bit harsh.. There are many other benefits to a decentralised system, that 'needing-one-32-byte-checkpoint-at-first-logon' doesn't screw up.