Closer flirting with 11k.
Bob's shovel must be a large one.
Keep at it!

He or she?
It's as likely to be a "she" as a Zionist.

You just build some heavy machinery replay protection trick with each parameter change (or maybe just for the initial one), so the self manufactured crisis makers can fork themselves, or rather fork off, as they wish. Client nodes still know which chain is which.

In other words: you build a loaded toy gun and show the world how it works. Then someone misguided recklessly takes it and makes into a real gun without client node consensus, so they end up in toy world.

Not much of a jokerman diviner myself, but I'd say "likely, but not necessarily".

That's a man of the mountains, he can walk on the clouds.
A manipulator of crowds with the moon in his eyes.

Yes, but actually testing some alternance between PoW methods (one of which is old SHA-2) with variable mix percentages/strategies would make the point that much clearer. Testnet only, at first.

Just predispose the "combination strategy" and "combination factor (PoW#1)" ... "combination factor (PoW#n)" fields, and play with them a little. Then the (0, 1, ... , 0) position is exactly as today. Not to be disruptive, we'll try normalized(0, 1, 0.1, ... , 0) next - or (0, 0.97, 0.03, ... , 0), you know, just for the heck of it. Hm, and let's see what happens by combining them differently. Who's playing "bad guy" for this round of simulations? How many ASIC miners do you have?

The parameters could be tweaked by hand at first, just to get a feel for it. Later on, they could auto-adjust depending on measurable blockchain/mempool metrics. I'll let your gaming fantasy get wild here.

No need to freak out, gentlemen. The parameters on main net are still fixed at normalized(0, 1, 0, 0, ... , 0) = (0, 1, 0, 0, ... , 0). That's plain ol'corn for you. This is only a testnet game, of course. Nice though, eh?

That would really make a point.

Thank you 

Twitter media aren't working well, no suitable MIME type and stuff. I found a link to the full talk on YouTube, but it's almost 1 hour long. Could you provide an approximate time or a YouTube link to the appropriate time?

I'll point out just one: delayed access to leading edge mining hardware. A jus primae noctis of sorts, imposed by the lord to the commoners.

The invisible hand only works if there are no hidden hand-choppers, like unnaturally high entry barriers to the business or vast discrepancies in the price of energy.

Just merited you - even with that fuckface avatar 

You don't need to be a communist to expect markets to be as efficient as they can be. In fact, market efficiency is not a primary concern in communist utopy. For capitalists, however, monopolies and oligopolies are the primary source of market inefficiency.

Nothing personal, and probably not too accurate. All right, I apologise. The point is, although you come from very different places, you can end up arriving at the same point. Big blocks, miner power and progressive irrelevance of the network of users (as in "full nodes").

But but... initial 0%? It's as soft as can be. As long as it doesn't budge from 0%, it's still good ol'bitcoin.

I haven't considered this. It seems a bit far fetched, but not totally out of this world.

Yes, a quantum computing breakout (unlikely for several years to come) would destroy Bitcoin as we know it. Having the necessary machinery for PoW in place could be a safety exit. Just insert Cuckoo Cycle into an "other hashing algos" slot.

That's a good point that I haven't considered fully. Guess I need to read up a bit more.

Buterin would do better to first make sure transactions are irreversible.

Especially if the game is about keeping open competition.

I do care, if they can charge whatever they want for their shovels, to the point of suppressing shoveling when they don't want it to happen.

Monopoly is never good, except for the monopolist. Don't jbreher yourself into a corner.

We're in the same position. Mining has become a hardcore game for big players. It's financially risky and you are subjected to the whims and abuses of people like Jihan. Not to mention the policies of governments. They can't stop bitcoin, but they can stop miners fairly easily, giving the minimum mining farm size of today.

That's another reason why I would love some real decentralization by soft PoW modulation.

A kind of distributed checkpointing? That would be nice, I agree.

However, Bittorrent as a protocol has a lot of back-and-forth chatter, more so if it's trackerless and decentralized (DHT). That's why it just won't play nice with mesh networks like TOR. I don't know anything about the technicals of checkpointing, though. There might be some alternative solutions, but their efficiency needs to be accurately evaluated.

PoS - Those who can prove ownership of coin get more votes.

Short: An established miner has (or can quickly have) lots of coin lying around, so he can steer the voting result more easily than a few hodlers with the same total stake (read: stash).

Longer: Giving each satoshi the same voting weight is a hard problem, possibly unsolvable. What is needed is a hypothetical system of incentives that makes GPU- and CPU- miner owned satoshis as heavy as ASIC-miner owned ones. Is such a system practical to implement? Does it ever exist? I doubt it. That's why PoS is dangerous.

Also, if I'm allowed to dream wildly on future Bitcoin technology development, I would love some kind of blockchain checkpointing to be implemented. This allows ultra-light nodes to have no trust (or very little) when first syncing.

I'd posted my reply about PoW change before reading the posts by Icygreen, flipperish, flynn and others.

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions, but full nodes are too easy to sybyl attack. PoS vote is also dangerous, because established miners have huge availability they could employ to crush GPU- or CPU- friendly functions. That's why we will eventually need to figure out more game theory to have a stable solution.

My opinion is that preparing for a soft PoW change would be a good thing. Keywords: preparing and soft.

A monopoly on mining is an evil thing. It keeps decentralization from really taking place. However, changing PoW drastically without a grace period would only alienate the "good" miners - probably ruin them, and piss them off enough to turn them (rightfully) bad.

One way could be to have a PoW that alternates between a few different hash functions - some of which hard to implement on ASICs, probably because of insane RAM requirements although there are alternatives. The alternance should be based on past history; the percentage of SHA-256 blocks could be dynamic, so "good" miners are incentivized to keep their percentage high by maintaining good demeanor. Or there could be a multiple PoW in each block, so that both a SHA-256 proof and some other proof(s) are necessary for validation. Each PoW function should maintain a different difficulty scale, and the difficulties could be combined into some overall metric. Such a system would be highly tweakable, and adapt dynamically.

(EDIT - about "softness". The initial conditions could be 100% ASIC-based, 0% others, as it is now. Then in times of mempool storms, or fork FUD, or whatever, the "others" might be gently pushed up until the situation gets back to normal.)

Any working solution should be designed with game theory in mind, not only the obvious complexity theory. A long check on testnet would be necessary, to figure out at least the complexity part, if not the game theory part.

(Inb4 - Bitcoin is a scam designed to centralize because no digital money can ever blah blah the Joos blah blah gold and silver.)