Nice... looks like the topping up of mining hashrate came to an halt. It's a good thing. The mining market is oversaturated with miners that want to get their share of the reward and while bitcoin became quite the non-green tech because of it, this is maybe a sign that miners will think more carefully about this goldrush thing.
I mean all this talk about miners being underpaid, that we need higher fees and all. The only problem is that too many miners take part. Each taking away a reward share from all others. Raising fees will only mean more miners until it is saturated again.
If half the miners would stop then the other half would earn double the reward.
It's a market. No need to artifically raise rewards. There is no right on buying a miner and earning a certain return. Miners should calculate carefully before such a buy.
Though I think it is a sweet news for every miner mining now.
I'm turning on my s1s and s3s, time to mine with dropping difficulty. I gotta milk out every bit of this difficulty drop. Perhaps the difficulty has peaked and it'll slowly fall and rise again. For one of the first times. THis is soo interesting and i'll have to monitor this so I can tell my kids that I witnessed bitcoin difficulty fluctuation. :p
This sums up the points I have made in other posts perfectly. The biggest flaw in Bitcoin is
powering a trust & confidence network by
human greed. Eventually left to it's own devices, it will consume itself with self-interest. This is because their are many different views on the right course of action so we have no consensus. We have no real stewardship when it comes comes to proper action.
With that said, I really don't have a better answer then keep doing this until the network fully centralizes or use the "nuclear option" to force change. Take S1 and S3 (no offense to the OP) but they really have no place on the network at this difficulty, but in his defense, he purchases them and have every right to mine with them for his own speculative purposes.
The only thing we can hope for is for the network to shake out more hobby miners until the majority is mining by professional miners and they are being very deliberate in the deployment of new mining hardware with some reasoning behind new capacity. But in the end it comes to my final thesis. The network will be run by the ASIC chip manufacturers in the end for the most part and each purchase is just fueling that outcome. You can see this evidence by the fact all the Chip Makers run their own mining operation privately with or without retail sales to the public at large.
I wonder what you wanted to say? That you welcome centralization or seeing it as a problem at which point we would have to change something?
I mean you are right that the network is something you surely can't name decentralized. The worst thing for me is that satoshi awaited this from the start. I only can assume he thought that the companies would not meddle with the network at one point because the potential profits coming from that could never outweight the profits they would get from mining. Beside that it looks like a central point of attack vector.
Though even POS is no solution. The whales rule there too. There is no real decentralization yet because of the reward.
I wonder if it will be a problem at one point.
Well, for some centralization of development of bitcoin protocol looks like a problem at the current point in time. Decentralization is left with nodes and with the userbase. Both groups have some form of power. Nodes by being able to chose which blocks to forward, though that does not help when miners connect to nodes that forward and maybe reach over 50% that way, and the userbase who theoretically has the choice to fork when they want.
Well, I think interesting times we bitcoiners live in, we have at least.
I feel like Yoda got me here.
