I wonder about that. I mean I got Musk's flamethrower and it is nice.

Speaking of which, looks like the president signed the "fuck everyone over for $600" law. So bitcoin will now moon again.

I don't like Roger because of his censorship, manipulation and lies.

By that I assume you mean the big Chinese miners. Wasnt the specialization of mining a part of the natural evolution of Bitcoin? There are some people who argue against the POW upgrade because they say they would preferably go with the ASIC miners than the botnet that hackers are known to be using. 

notthematrix: No. Roger Ver doesn't need to sign anything whatsoever. Let me tell you how this works:

Roger either takes the bet, or he doesn't. If he takes the bet there must be some kind of escrow, that will simultaneously prove his ownership of the funds. Who cares if he owns it or not before he accepts the bet? It doesn't matter one bit. He has not accepted anything yet, he has simply expressed interest. Clear terms must be defined before an agreement can be made and this takes time to work out. Have some patience for christ sake.

Most believe Roger will not take the deal, me included. However, the last thing I'm waiting for is for him to sign anything, so please stop repeating yourself, we heard you the first 10 times.

PS: I've received no further communication from Roger at this time.

That is your point of view yes, but what about the rest? Will they follow the people who can secure the network or will they follow the new POW upgrade and take the road less traveled? It will be a hard decision but I think the majority will follow the safer road.

This thread reminds me of Matthew N Wright's pirate Ponzi bet thread, except Matt was stupid enough to accept the bets. At least Ver isn't that stupid.   

@RogerVer, if you don't have 300k BTC, I have more realistic offer for you:

I GIVE YOU 1 BTU, YOU GIVE ME 1 BTC.

Hope you can afford such trade. If not,  please ask your Chinese miners to lend you 1 BTC.

If theres a POW upgrade what will happen to the Chinese miners? Will it be possible for them to continue to mine using the old SHA256 and fork away from the upgraded POW algorithm? I think that would be a losing move for the current developers and the ones behind them.

You can do this at bitfinex.

This is why a gradual phase-in of the new PoW via PoWA is the best option.

Coindance is a bit of a joke, IMO


Why is 1000 blocks relevant? Both Segwit and BU use 2016 block periods for their activation parameters, so the 1000 blocks sample makes zero sense

No, really, once you have a cartel of pools, which is unavoidable with a PoW type income lottery, the network topology doesn't really matter, in *reality* you have a server/client system, where the pools are the collective server of block chain because they are the principal source of the data.  The other nodes in the network are nothing else but proxy servers of this data and ultimately, the clients.

The real P2P nature of the network only made sense if a block could be mined *anywhere* on the network ; if essentially all nodes were also miners.   Then the whole network is at the same time client and server, and the P2P style network is justified.
But if you have a specialized set of nodes that *make* the data, and a *large quantity* of nodes that only *use* the data, then you get an automatic adaptation of the network topology to the reality of the data flow: server/client.

Note that *amongst* the mining pools, the P2P topology still makes sense ; this is why they most probably connect in an almost full mesh, because they don't trust one another (subcartels of selfish miners might form).  But FROM the mining pools to the non-mining nodes, the relationship is not P2P, but is client/server, and hence the optimal network topology adapts to that given.

This, I wholeheartedly agree with. Two years ago core devs were saying mining had almost nothing to do with the core implementation which was a very shortsighted view. The lack of emphasis on the delicate interplay between mining and the reference implementation of the bitcoin network protocol and the block chain was a major setback. Of course one could ask why I didn't get involved then since I was busy hacking on mining code and the answer is a simple one: I don't have any faith in my c++ coding skills so it would have been presumptuous of me to try and hack on bitcoin core.

No, this is unavoidable for ANY form of PoW system in the long run.  It IS already the case BTW: 14 miner pools have essentially all the hash rate.

The reason is not "block size" or whatever.  The reason is the lottery of PoW, and the economies of scale.

Solo mining is not done much any more, because with solo mining, you win ONE BLOCK every two years or so.  That's too much of a lottery.

If you don't want more than 10% income fluctuation (RMS value) in 1 week of your income, it means that you must be part of a team that "wins 100 times" during a week.  As there are 1000 blocks in 1 week, you must hence be part of a pool that has 10% of the total hash rate.  --> there can be only 10 such pools !

Even if you accept larger fluctuations of income, there will at most be a few tens of mining pools.

Now, these mining pools need good network connections, to their miners, and to other mining pools, because every second lost is a second of hash rate lost.  As mining pools don't trust one another, they want to get good links to SEVERAL of their competitors, to avoid the possibility of "selfish mining" which needs variable network delays to get your private block in front of the public block.  

So, AUTOMATICALLY, this ecosystem will evolve towards "a few tens of pools with very good data connections and big data centres".

As an owner of mining gear, you have all interest to be in a big pool ; but you don't want pools the become monopolies, because then they will start eating off your fees.  So as an owner of mining gear, you are going to be such that you want to have "a few big pools".  In order for your mining gear to be efficiently used, you want to be able to have a good data connection to your host pool --> they need good data centres with good connections to all of their miners.

Once that is the case, automatically the above topology follows.  Has not much to do with block size.  Is intrinsic to the PoW system with specialized hardware (ASICS).  It was built into bitcoin from the start.