Bitcoin is anything but decentralized, as it runs on top of:

Centralized ISPs

Centralized energy

Now mining is becoming centralized more and more by big players

Most Bitcoin services and exchanges are private, centralized entities.


We have a long way to go to say the least. We must decentralize it all, though I think Bitcoin itself is the catalyst for this to actually happen.

Well, you can't. That is the beauty of Bitcoin is that no one has the authority to reverse transactions or destroy coins in accounts that are not your own.

So, OP, if you create something great and world changing that you profit from, are you going to get all of your earnings in cash and burn it? Or be totally fine if your own community locked down your bank account because they thought you made too much from your own invention?

Its the same for every American whether you are from here or not. Immigrants have nothing to do with it, its the simple fact that the banker oligarchs are gutting the middle and lower classes and destroying the planet. Your view is not backed up by any relevant data whatsoever.

Lets also keep in mind, America was founded by people who were originally immigrants...

As an investment, don't do it. You will never make any return over just buying and holding BTC. Even altcoins arn't as profitable as one might think unless that coin happens to get a massive pump. I've gotten stuck with a pile of coins I couldn't sell before because liquidity dried up.

That said, its just an expensive hobby for anyone without access to thousands of Dollars and the manufacturing price for the miners.

A bank traditionally is simply an entity that loans capital for a percentage. What you are trying to start is a managed multi-currency hedge fund.

Neither of these things is inherently bad. But what I would want to know before investing is what your trading track record is. Can you provide any trade history to prove your effectiveness at managing a fund? I could Google you, but the burden of proof is on you, not us.

You gave these idiots $100k? You really do belong with them Gauge

Just give it some time, it can take a bit for a payout to show up once shares are confirmed depending on how much hashpower you are running.

Through my own research on this subject, here are the ones I am aware of:

P2Pool FrontEndExtended

P2Pool Node Status

And Norgans above  

Beta or not, I will definitely be deploying some nodes for this when the public release is ready 

Most never thought it would break the price of gold, but it did. I think $10,000 isn't out of vision for sure.

It depends on a lot of things in the world both on and offline, but the core of it is if demand is suddenly spiked to the available Bitcoin supply. With Bitcoin being fairly illiquid, it doesn't take much to move the price around. A big surge of interest will quickly zap the supply side, and once the price ball gets rolling back upward most tend to hang on unless getting out of a previous market position leading to a much higher price to try and liberate those coins from holders.

The source of such big and sudden interest? I think when fiat currencies really start catching fire (along with associated stocks, bonds, funds, etc), the only place to go will be Bitcoin as the only sound economic system in place. This is happening worldwide, and so is Bitcoin. We could see the perfect windfall, and current owners of coveted Bitcoin will win big. Wealth transfer will come full circle from the now panicking banking bigwigs trying to save their portfolios from the ravages of economic policy gone awry.

The Bitcoin Foundation is just a special interest group with known criminals in their ranks, passing itself off as some kind of official Bitcoin entity, which it is NOT. They are now actively damaging Bitcoin and its reputation. Time to help it die.

However in that round of resignations after promoting a possible sex offender at the top, I would say their credibility is on fire.

This hurts my brain.

Nice one OP, I completely agree. I had already decided to push my business (link in sig) to the direction of deploying P2Pool nodes for Bitcoin and others. P2Pool provides some financial incentive, but the other half is the corresponding Bitcoin Core node which is equally important to maintain the global blockchain.

I think much of the problem with P2Pool is that it is still too small and too few reliable nodes. Latency also matters a lot, and really you don't know if the node is just someones extra computer at home, or a professionally hosted server with a business grade Internet pipe. Nodes need to also be geographically close.

So, Seattle area miners, here is our first! (Lots of work going on to update our site, node front ends, etc, a work in progress  ) The plan is to deploy several across the US as a professional pool providor using P2Pool instead of centralized servers (as I don't trust them either! Getting burned by coinex.sw was the last time I mined on a central server).

http://seattle.blockburner.net:9332/static/   Looking at a fee of 1.5%, any donations will be split 50/50 with the P2Pool devs.  (only a single Cube is mining on it from Montana, so the hashrate looks erratic, but if you want to help us test out our server, please do!)


Didn't intend this to be a shameless plug however, centralization of mining and pools is bad, and we need to fix that.



You can use Stratum proxy to get around that usually http://mining.bitcoin.cz/mining-proxy-howto

Or Multiminer can also do this (running an ASICMiner Cube on my P2Pool node above, which uses Getwork by default)

There is a definite glut, perpetrated by the likes of KnC and others building mega-farms.

Keep in mind the miners you pay for are retail, the bigger miners are able to get volume on theirs, or in the case of manufacture themselves get the absolute bottom line on hardware.


Looking at the charts though, it seems hashrate is starting to drop off a bit. Daily growth is below 1%, and diff rise has been lower the past few cycles and is decelerating. Not to say the trend will stay that way, but something to watch.

At a point there is market saturation, and in mining there is no reason to add more asics as a large farm when all you are really doing is making your own farm and everyone eases less profitable. Many of the future ASIC purchases will just be replacing older gear with more efficient gear. Hashrate and power per chip won't be increasing so sharply either going into 28nm and below. Each generation will give less and less benefit at increasing NRE to design and produce them. Even manufacturers are able to output only so many chips creating a natural market barrier to how many can be put in service at one time.

We would need 2x the hashpower right now to double difficulty again, which would be at this point an insane amount of new deployments. I see this being very unlikely as mining profit is already highly unfavorable, even for large farms that also need their own custom high-energy data centers to build and maintain around them. I think we'll see the network start evening out, if not now then soon, which makes profit projections less volatile with a stable-ish difficulty.

The network will still continue to grow, just not at nearly the pace it has been as these thresholds are reached.

Buy coins for now, get back into mining when the market conditions are favorable if mining as a profit venture.

What funds war is money, and through all of banking history, governments have borrowed from wealth elites to fund them as wars are ludicrously expensive. These elites have funded both sides of wars, for profit and/or other selfish ends.

This in turn started the rise of the mega-bankers that quickly realized lending to governments is much more profitable than to common people, and enabled them to manipulate the economy and political structures as well. War is in their best interest, as countries find themselves fast indebted to the banks which at that point have total control over them.

In a Bitcoin world, no government or bank can simply print new money into existence endlessly to fund a war. Since Bitcoin is finite and cannot be debased this way, government needs direct financial support from the common people to do basically anything, as their balances are also then finite. We would vote directly for government actions through our direct funding of such initiatives. The US Government could care less in this regard because our votes don't matter, and they can have as much money created as they desire to fuel the war machine. They don't need the taxpayer to bomb other countries that have done nothing directly to us.

I think of you and I had to directly fund a war with our own money to have one, there would be virtually no war. If there was a war, it would be very short as that funding only goes so far. Going to war would then have to be the result of a profound threat to the state where war is the only option and the majority of people agree.

I don't believe Bitcoin can solve all of the worlds problems, but the fundamental change to our monetary system out of the hands of greedy, war driven bankers would be an excellent start to rid the world of suffering.

Not much of a story I suppose for me. A good friend of mine made note of it to me (knowing my tech ninja status in my circles), though I did remember seeing something about Bitcoin a few years earlier on some tech website. Back then it was just a little known garage project. But, I was into Bitcoin hook line and sinker after that, forming Blockburner as a Bitcoin business in the realm of mining and infrastructure realizing quickly the potential of blockchain technology and it being the cutting edge kind of business I had been looking to start my entire life as a would-be entrepreneur of little success.

The end of the story is that Bitcoin did renew my overall purpose in life which had become lost to me sometime prior as a generic datacenter tech rotting away in a server filled corporate dungeon. So for that, my friend/partner has my eternal gratitude for getting me on an exciting new path.

Hello coiners!

Some of you may recognize Blockburner from our past project to develop a Scrypt FPGA. Ultimately the project fell through, but undeterred I kept moving onward.

After some time and trying a few things, ultimately the direction I want Blockburner to take is in deployment of distributed blockchain technologies and solving problems with open source.

We started mining a few months ago, however as a smaller player it is now overwhelmingly evident there is no sense investing in mining hardware as long as large hardware makers dominate the network. The network hash rate needs no more help rising astronomically.

What absolutely does need more development and decentralization are mining pools as well as Bitcoin Core nodes, which I think we can all agree are much too centralized by private, closed source players. This is an area I believe Blockburner could do well in attacking.

Blockburner

Founded in Montana as an LLC, June 13, 2013

Blockburner is designed as an open source company that deploys distributed applications based on blockchain technologies. The present focus is on the Bitcoin network.

Project

Deployment of a P2Pool network beginning in Montana, eventually across the US.

Deployment of corresponding Bitcoin Core node servers.

Network

Pool node hardware would be hosted by various datacenters (ours and/or third party). Initial deployment target is the Montana State University datacenter in Bozeman, MT.

Hardware would be built using open hardware standards (Open Compute) as much as possible, utilizing 100% open source software (likely Ubuntu 12.04, P2Pool, Bitcoin Core). The hardware would comprise of clusters using low-cost components utilizing Apache Mesos, Hadoop, or other distributed computing platforms. This is also meant to be an exercise in parallel computing infrastructure and its application to Bitcoin and other blockchains. With such a network in place Blockburner would have much flexibility in supporting many networks directly with high availability service nodes. This network would also be useful for scientific computing and other distributed projects.

___

Really these are not difficult concepts in practice, as all of the hardware and software required already exists. I myself am an experienced datacenter tech and computer junkie with the necessary skills to carry this out.
___

Community Q & A


As with the last project, I felt it foolhardy to initiate any kind of business in this space without asking the community its thoughts and concerns as a gauge of interest and need. This project will be no different-

I think much of the issue with P2Pool is the availability of nodes, as network latency does have a direct effect particularly if your hashrate is on the low side. Existing nodes seem to have sloppy uptimes, as such the incentive to use the P2Pool network is low compared to private central pool servers. So-

1. Do you think mining and pool centralization is a problem? Why or why not?

2. If a reliable (high availability) node was in your area, would you switch to P2Pool? How about other networks, such as Litecoin?

3. What other factors would increase your interest in distributed mining over private mining?

4. Would you be interested in investing in such a network as a shareholder? What kind of return or benefits would you expect or want from such an investment? (revenue share from the pools profits, for example)

5. Are there other node services you would find useful or think are needed overall?

Thank you in advance to anyone willing to give me some insight.

Vires in Numeris

Operatr

Just get a USB miner, invest the rest into Bitcoin itself. You'll never make a profit going big or small at the moment, so you might as well limit the size of what is a pretty poor investment as far as the mining gear goes.

At this point mining is just an expensive hobby unless you have millions of dollars and ASIC manufacturing access.

The difficulty is rising so quickly, and the miners retail price so expensive, profit is all but guaranteed impossible for small timers.

Since Bitcoins are valuated in Dollars primarily, you have to think of buying a miner as an investment. Lets say a 1 Th unit for a $3000 price, which would be about 6.5 BTC bought outright on an exchange. Buying a miner is a bet that the machine will generate more BTC than was invested in its operational lifetime. This lifetime is dependent on the difficulty and hardware life. As it stands, mining profits would be quickly mining at a loss against the energy consumed, only producing say, 3 BTC before profits are minuscule. Assuming BTC doubles in price for this example, you would break even on your fiat investment, but lose out on the value increase overall as you would have had 6.5 BTC instead valued at $6000. In this case just buying and holding BTC at the current market price when the BTC was purchased would have been a much better investment.

Until the difficulty flattens and/or equipment becomes much cheaper, profitability in mining will be mighty difficult.

 

Selling a pre-order for vaporware on Ebay that commands a 10% inflation due to Ebay/PayPal's ridiculous fees...

Good luck.