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This is so awesome.
Sort of like figuring the the number air molecules in a particular breath that were at one time exhaled by Napoleon.
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The only way to get PoS shares is to buy them from an adopter. There are two ways to get PoW coins: buy them or find them yourself. This is key.
. . . Key to your understanding, but misleading to someone who does not appreciate the reality of bitcoin mining. When you say "find them yourself", it means buying shares at a bitcoin cloud mining company, or leasing a mining rig, or buying a bitcoin mining rig and buying electricity to operate and cool it. Return on investment for a miner is only positive because the price of bitcoin has risen on average 10x per year. In the bitcoin coin mining sub-forum, when a new person asks "what miner should I pre-order?", the conventional wisdom response is "just buy bitcoin with the money you would have spent on the miner - you will come out further ahead". I would restate your point, weakening the distinction . . There are two ways to get PoS coins: buy them from an adopter or use your coin stake to certainly earn them yourself. There are two ways to get PoW coins: buy them from an adopter or buy stuff and use that stuff to probably earn them yourself. |
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That being said, I am pleased that no one seems to agree on anything. I guess this means once again that things will just continue as they are (unless something actually breaks).
The thread poll also indicates a skeptical majority. I sent an email message to the bitcoin developer mail list asking for permission to branch the source code on the GitHub repository and begin researching a Proof-of-Stake version of Bitcoin. No comment so far. I noted that I understood that Proof-of-Stake is listed as as a prohibited yet disputed enhancement on the Bitcoin wiki. Prohibited features are those which break the social contract between the Bitcoin developers and Bitcoin users. I am preparing to devote the next year or two at least to the branch. I will create a project in the Project Development sub-forum to transparently track progress. I will keep this thread and poll alive to engage and potentially educate anyone who is not a developer or technical expert. As an indication of my commitment to this Bitcoin improvement project, I am now using my real name and recent photo where possible. I regret postponing my AI research, but the coding decisions I made years ago have stood the test of time, and will endure until I fund them with future bitcoin valuations. |
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The volume in Bitstamp is absolutely anemic. I remember it took a week for me to purchase my initial lot of coins in 2011. It would now similarly take a week to acquire a corresponding position. Either there is nobody in the world in the process of doing it (!) or they are using other methods. Granted, buying a large number of bitcoins takes more cash now than in 2011, and therefore the buyers may be different class of people mainly...
I read somewhere the plausible rumor that whale buyers, e.g. Second Market, solicit from BitPay and Coinbase, because many bitcoin accepting merchants trade bitcoin for fiat as they receive it. |
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Thanks so much for the links which I am bookmarking now for analysis later. I posted a message to the bitcoin developers mail list asking for permission to branch Bitcoin Core for the purpose of researching Proof-of-Stake, while finding its vulnerabilities and fixing them. A public dairy of the research could be published on in the Project Development sub-forum - "Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake Project". |
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Could you please elaborate on the nature to your objections. The public consensus cannot be moved towards Proof-of-Stake unless all objections are reasonably addressed. [/quote] simple, i like it just as it is. thanks. [/quote] I agree with the broad principles of conservatism. They have served my household very well over the decades. Is it that a change has an unknown risk associated with it? And this risk to you is not worth the change I propose despite the assurances of my two arguments? |
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Hi everyone.
I added an opinion poll to the first page, to quantify how you feel about this issue.
The argument I make for the change has two independent points . . .
(1) The existing Bitcoin system of using Proof-of-Work to prevent double spending is wasteful, and growing so 10x worse each year. In about four more years at that rate, governments will take notice of the $100 billion worth of wasted electricity and perhaps ban bitcoin mining in some jurisdictions, using the incandescent light bulb ban as precedent.
(2) The alternative Proof-of-Stake method to prevent double spending can be performed on an ordinary computer, and probably in a few years on a smartphone. Proof-of-Stake allows each of us to expose bitcoins to the network and receive annual 10% dividends. Everything else about bitcoin, in particular the promises made by Satoshi concerning mining rewards and the fixed limit remain unchanged.
If you care one way or the other, please vote.
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Hi guys,
noob here....
I just wanted to ask what am I missing?
I see the prices that they offer for Lease in LeaseRig is about 0.007 BTC/MH/day while for example wafflepool is around 0.0065, 0.0067 and some good days about 0.008...
I see also that the big rigs have even higher prices more than 0.01 BTC/MH/day.
So the way I see it there is no way to make money out of this.
I did a small test with a slow rig from LeaseRig. I paid 0.0036 and I will get back 0.0015...
Am I missing something?
Please look at https://ipominer.com/ for the sorts of new coins that are not yet traded on an exchange. The bet my renters may be making is that some of those coins will gain in value someday when exchange into bitcoin or litecoin is possible. |
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you want to fork bitcoin and call it bitcoin?
Then, if i want to send some coins, which protocol is being used?
Do I have to tell someone , i want to send you bitcoin v1 or v2 ?
how is that going to work?
As Satoshi Nakamoto foresaw, and as last year's blockchain hard fork demonstrated, you carry on as normal. The majority of v2 full nodes will build the longest valid blockchain, and v1 nodes will only create orphans. |
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spin off? is that a fork?
Yes, it is a hard-fork of the blockchain. Not a from-scratch genesis block as used by altcoins. The Proof-of-Stake version of bitcoind would be made to reject as invalid new blocks created by the then-existing Proof-of-Work version. This scenario is worst case. In the best case, public opinion sways the majority of Bitcoin Core developers to embrace Proof-of-Stake and the migration from Proof-of-Stake to Proof-of-Work is handled via long advance notice and simply a new version of Bitcoin Core for download by everyone. This is not quite correct. There is no difference between your "worst case" and your "best case." They are the same thing in both cases. If you attempt to do this SlipperySlope, and win-over some developers to your cause, you could create a PoS spin-off and try to legitimize it. After you launch it, both bitcoin-PoW and bitcoin-PoS would be running side by side; users would control the same % of coins in each system. And then the market would decide which system is legitimate. I expect to see the first spin-offs launched within 6 months. It will be very interesting to watch the experiment unfold. Let me be more clear. In the best case, I would like Proof-of-Stake to be owned by Bitcoin Core developers before it gets turned on. I would help develop, document and test Proof-of-Stake on a Bitcoin sandbox testnet that receives new transactions from the Bitcoin network but does not otherwise interfere with it. |
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SlipperySlope what you say is what Dan Larimer from Invictus started saying months ago.
Bitcoin is an autonomous company which have a negative bottom line. Bitshares, thanks to a variante of PoS, will be a range of several autonomous companies which will make profits and therefore pay dividends to shareholders/owners of the company token. Bitcoin will need to adapt (ie. eliminates PoW) in order to survive.
I get the notion that existing and planned Proof-of-Stake altcoins are a short-term bet that Bitcoin continues its 3.2x annual economic growth, and lifts the value of all altcoins as the public adopts crytocurrencies. Those same altcoins are a long-term bet that Bitcoin keeps Proof-of-Work and thus gets banned in some countries as wasteful allowing those altcoins the opportunity to replace Bitcoin. My mission is with Bitcoin. |
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what you are suggesting is a very dangerous game, i don't like the idea whatsoever, and i'm sorry but you will find a multitude of ugly little me's if this ever gets approval.
Could you please elaborate on the nature to your objections. The public consensus cannot be moved towards Proof-of-Stake unless all objections are reasonably addressed. |
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spin off? is that a fork?
Yes, it is a hard-fork of the blockchain. Not a from-scratch genesis block as used by altcoins. The Proof-of-Stake version of bitcoind would be made to reject as invalid new blocks created by the then-existing Proof-of-Work version. This scenario is worst case. In the best case, public opinion sways the majority of Bitcoin Core developers to embrace Proof-of-Stake and the migration from Proof-of-Stake to Proof-of-Work is handled via long advance notice and simply a new version of Bitcoin Core for download by everyone. |
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With the advent of sidechains and spinoffs, alt-coins will only be successful moving forward to the extent that they can merge blockchains with like-minded communities. If you want MintCoin to have a fighting chance, I think you need to increase your users base and the legitimacy of you blockchain. You can do this by merging with other PoS coins such as NxT or Blackcoin. Alt-coin mergers are coming and only those that form alliances will survive…
I agree with Peter_R regarding altcoins and sidechains, yet hope to allay his concerns about Proof-of-Stake. My notion of a Proof-of-Stake spin-off is to spin-off the Proof-of-Work miners from Bitcoin, which means that we need approximately 24,000 Proof-of-Stake full nodes participating in the Bitcoin Network as non-generating stealth nodes until everyone on our side is at the table - so to speak. I choose 24K because that is three times the number of bitcoind Proof-of-Stake full nodes in the network now. To make the spin-off work, we need the Bitcoin brand and for it to want us. As US President Abraham Lincoln said "In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed." |
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If it's not broke/broken, don't fix it.
Unless there is a major problem, there is no accepted precedent for such a huge change to the Bitcoin code.
The major problem is that the Energy Charter Treaty encourages our respective governments not to permit waste of energy. In perhaps four more years the cost of electric power to operate and cool ASIC mining equipment will exceed $100 billion annually. The precedent is the incandescent light bulb ban. Do we want a bitcoin ban when it can be avoided? The lesser problem is fairness. Why should Proof-of-Work ASIC-operators waste their bitcoin rewards on equipment and power, when those very same rewards can be given to us, the bitcoin holders as annual 10% bitcoin dividends using ordinary computers. I liken the current Proof-of-Work system to a bank protected from robbers by a moat filled with burning paper currency. |
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And in the question of mass adoption PoS wins hands down. ASIC miners will never be widely adopted. It's become a planned obsolesce scheme, at its basis. Those chips are junk and can't be used for anything else once they pass the end of their shelf life. Being able to stake on your tablet or mobile device is going to be the most important factor in destroying the grip mining cartels have on the crypto economy.
Once the staking Android wallet is developed mining is finished. That is the writing on the wall, as I see it.
Ha. I am presently researching whether anyone has a full node bitcoind running on a Linux smartphone. CPU capacity on a multi-core smartphone already exceeds what Proof-of-Stake requires. Likewise for RAM regarding the flagship Android phones now, and ordinary phones in a couple of years. The blockchain is about 20 GB today and could fit on flagship Android phones now. Furthermore, Bitcoin Core developers have plans to prune or otherwise compress the blockchain for the purposes of validation. From my own experience running a full node, network bandwidth is the most precious resource. Propagation of new blocks, and of the entire blockchain for new mobiles entering the network requires much symmetric bandwidth, depending upon the number of permitted peer connections. In a possible world, every smartphone is a Proof-of-Stake full node. There would be billions of them in the Bitcoin Network rather than the less than 10 thousand full nodes nowadays. It is fair that only block-validating, and blockchain-maintaining wallets receive their annual 10% bitcoin dividends. These dividends, given the higher prices for bitcoin that I expect with Proof-of-Stake, would be sufficient to pay for the cellular data bandwidth consumed. Or consider that the full node smartphone client could connect to the network only when WiFi is the connection - and receive a diminished bitcoin dividend in proportion to the time spent securing and maintaining the network, effectively receive annual 5% bitcoin dividends for coins held in the smartphone's full node wallet connected 12 hours each night to the owner's WiFi. |
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Here is infamous mining equipment manufacturer kncminer. This is a single miner in the Unknown pie slice chart whose ambition is to compete with customers still waiting for paid-for equipment. Proof-of-Work manifestly encourages bad behavior.
It also encourages competition. This sort of bad behavior only exists in a monopoly and may be actionable. Certainly such bad behavior will not be forgotten, excused, nor forgiven. Here is some competition - the 5GH/s bitcoin miner from Butterfly Labs.  According to the mining profitability calculator at https://tradeblock.com/mining/ and assuming you get electric power at only $0.03 per KwH, then every month you mine with this ASIC you lose money. They are still for sale. ASICs are designed for obsolescence. And the established industry business model is pre-order which invites fraud. |
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You can write a wall of text and that will not make your statement less false: "named slices" are not some entities which are hard to control, they are simple pools run on a few servers. Those servers serve thousands of real miners, people that invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their equipment, people that spend electricity, people that are real flash and blood of bitcoin network. "Named slices" can go up or down in their network percentage at the whim of the miners, and that already happened several times through the life of the bitcoin. And it will happen again, those names that we see on that chart will probably not be there in a year or two. Those handful of servers each pool consists of provide healthy competition for their services to the miners, if that was not a case we would not have 0-fee-pools we have today, and if any of them ever starts to misbehave it will go down in hours. There's no reason we should worry about "named slices" as you call them, they are by far most easily controllable part of the bitcoin community.
Ok. Less text and more pictures. Here is MegaBigPower, located in Washington State. He is a single miner in the Unknown pie slice chart whose ambition is to control 10% of total Bitcoin hashing power.  Here is infamous mining equipment manufacturer kncminer. This is a single miner in the Unknown pie slice chart whose ambition is to compete with customers still waiting for paid-for equipment. Proof-of-Work manifestly encourages bad behavior.  |
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Look at the following pie chart from Blockchain.info . In the Unknown pie slice are private datacenters and ASIC manufacturers that are large enough to keep the 1% typical pool fee for themselves. Suppose there are four very large datacenters in there. Count the named pie slices and add say 4 for the private datacenters in Unknown and get 12.
Those 12 miners control Proof-of-Work Bitcoin mining.
Wrong, these "named slices" are not miners, they are public pools with thousands miners contributing to each one. The second those miners sense their pools get bribed to destroy bitcoin, their source of income, they would switch to non-corrupted one. Instantly, within a day. With each month passing and more and more money being poured in mining hardware the chances that hardware being obsoleted by some external bribing attempt are diminishing rapidly. No, you are wrong and here is why. These "named slices" plus a few private datacenters are the miners, only they execute a few instances of bitcoind. The numerous ASIC owners execute cgminer or another program that adheres to the stratum protocol which is not a part of the Bitcoin Network and was never envisioned by Satoshi.An ideal you might be thinking about is P2Pool for Bitcoin. Only in this sort of pool does each participant actually execute an instance of bitcoind, and the pool exists to share the solved block rewards fairly among them. Note that P2Pool does not appear in the named entities on the market share pie chart. Why? Because the ASIC operators find it more convenient not to be miners and delegate that most important aspect to the few big pool operators. As core developer Greg Maxwell said in a thread suggesting a revival of Bitcoin P2Pool . . . . . .
We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to. The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool— who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't— who has a financial interest to the tune of— say— >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people— including you— overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.
. . .
Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.
In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.
If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread— then I think progress could be made.
. . .
Here are Bitcoin network statistics showing the number of bitcoind instances - and few of these actually have generation turned on because it wastes resources if they have only minuscule chance of finding a block. Note how few nodes there are compared with the number of bitcoin wallets. With Proof-of-Stake, each wallet owner would be highly motivated to join the Bitcoin network to receive their 10% annual dividend on the amount exposed to the network. credit: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/ |
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Here is the Number of transactions excluding popular addresses chart from blockchain.info, which has duration of 180 days on a Log10 chart with a 7-day moving average to smooth out the day-of-week variation. Note that the rightmost data points suggest a trend upwards and yet the price chart does trend upwards yet with that strength. Interesting . . .  |
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