..

[ibittunes]

At 8 Bil market cap it's unlikely any 'billionaire' would devote that much dough to attacking the nodes. The mega-billionaires aren't dumb, now some billionaire aires are dumb as wood, but their fortunes aren't that big compared to the new mega-billionaires today.

The next value growth bubble will put btc into the 80 bil market cap, and at that point its beyond one nuts reach no matter how rich, he would be better off trying to just urinate in the ocean and see if his volume has any effect.

[jjc326]

I think it's just like Congress in the US.  No one will do anything about it until it becomes a major problem, and by then it would be too late.  Some of the ideas people have just won't happen while there is a chance of a 51% attack.  For instance, all these people saying, oh BTC could become a world currency reserve...well no government is going to do that when there is a chance it could be destroyed for a relatively small amount of money.  There's a reason why Fort Knox is so heavily guarded.

[BitcoinMillionaire]

At 8 Bil market cap it's unlikely any 'billionaire' would devote that much dough to attacking the nodes. The mega-billionaires aren't dumb, now some billionaire aires are dumb as wood, but their fortunes aren't that big compared to the new mega-billionaires today.

The next value growth bubble will put btc into the 80 bil market cap, and at that point its beyond one nuts reach no matter how rich, he would be better off trying to just urinate in the ocean and see if his volume has any effect.

Ha, but you don't actually have to have 8 billion to move bitcoin. That's just the market cap. It doesn't actually mean that 8 billion have been 'put' into bitcoin! Even a measly 2 million could easily move the market a lot. Just take a look at the depths graphs!

[QuestionAuthority]

Why do you seem to think nothing is being done about it...

Because the devs don't know what to do. Bitcoin is proving to not be decentralized or trustless. Mining pools are necessary because no one will invest money into mining for the benefit of Bitcoin without the reward. Even without any single pool gaining a majority share of the network (51% is not required) damage can be done. It can be fixed (forked) but the cost in consumer confidence will be devastating. This is really the issue and it's being ignored.

Other trust issues revolve around an evil actor (govt, competing business) that could make multiple pool operators an offer that's too good to refuse. What would happen if I bought the the three largest pools away from the current operators? What would my share of the network security system be? There are multiple ways that Bitcoin has developed into a trust system just like the banking and finance industry. Mining is only one of them. Convenient thin clients are concentrating the full nodes into fewer hands every day. Eventually electricity and equipment costs will keep all but the seriously motivated from burning a 24/7 node. Cloud nodes are a solution but who is really in control of the network then? Bitcoin developers are an elite group of highly educated coders that are maintaining a C++ language (how you can tell Satoshi was not in finance, probably should have been Cobol) that few coders even bother learning. Just like most coders don't know how to code PostScript most wouldn't know the first thing about Bitcoin. It's the specialized knowledge base that makes the small group of developers another point of trust centralization. It's kind of funny that Bitcoin has developed into exactly the thing that it was invented to overcome.

[tss]

10% attack can happen every 1 in 10 times.  so just sit back and watch. business as usual.

[phillipsjk]

10% attack can happen every 1 in 10 times.  so just sit back and watch. business as usual.

For a chain of 1 blocks, yes. The Original Bitcoin whitepaper lays out the probability that 10% of the hash-power will win chains of block races (z= number of blocks-1).

Code:

q=0.1
z=0 P=1.0000000
z=1 P=0.2045873
z=2 P=0.0509779
z=3 P=0.0131722
z=4 P=0.0034552
z=5 P=0.0009137
z=6 P=0.0002428
z=7 P=0.0000647
z=8 P=0.0000173
z=9 P=0.0000046
z=10 P=0.0000012

So 10% of the hash-power has a 20% chance of getting two blocks in a row, 5% chance of getting 3, 1.3% chance of getting 4. and a 0.3% chance of getting 5 (for food labeling they would just call it "0%").

[ajareselde]

At 8 Bil market cap it's unlikely any 'billionaire' would devote that much dough to attacking the nodes. The mega-billionaires aren't dumb, now some billionaire aires are dumb as wood, but their fortunes aren't that big compared to the new mega-billionaires today.

The next value growth bubble will put btc into the 80 bil market cap, and at that point its beyond one nuts reach no matter how rich, he would be better off trying to just urinate in the ocean and see if his volume has any effect.

I would love to see your explanation on how bitcoin is going to become 80 billion market cap.
The thing is that even current 8 billion cap. is pure BS, no chance in hell you could even pull out 1 bilion (cashout).
The main reason big fishes are not playing with bitcoin is because its a one sided when ure talking about huge amounts, 1 way in , no way out

[galbros]

Why do you seem to think nothing is being done about it...

Because the devs don't know what to do. Bitcoin is proving to not be decentralized or trustless. Mining pools are necessary because no one will invest money into mining for the benefit of Bitcoin without the reward. Even without any single pool gaining a majority share of the network (51% is not required) damage can be done. It can be fixed (forked) but the cost in consumer confidence will be devastating. This is really the issue and it's being ignored.

Other trust issues revolve around an evil actor...

This is really well done.  What do you think of the solution proposed by Hacking, Distributed the two phase proof of work?

[QuestionAuthority]

Why do you seem to think nothing is being done about it...

Because the devs don't know what to do. Bitcoin is proving to not be decentralized or trustless. Mining pools are necessary because no one will invest money into mining for the benefit of Bitcoin without the reward. Even without any single pool gaining a majority share of the network (51% is not required) damage can be done. It can be fixed (forked) but the cost in consumer confidence will be devastating. This is really the issue and it's being ignored.

Other trust issues revolve around an evil actor...

This is really well done.  What do you think of the solution proposed by Hacking, Distributed the two phase proof of work?

On the surface 2P-PoW seems like a reasonable solution, as does P2Pool. The problem isn't that solutions exist it's that no one in charge of the code is willing to change anything. I suppose I should amend my first sentence above to read, "Because the devs don't know what to do, don't like any solution for fear of breaking Bitcoin so they are unwilling to do anything". The problem with Bitcoin is it was written by a bad coder.  The code doesn't make it easy to determine overall architecture at a glance, explicit block structure is missing in places, goto statements and logic flow issues. It's a mess that makes it difficult to change anything without breaking something. This is essentially keeping anyone from changing it.

[smooth]

Why do you seem to think nothing is being done about it...

Because the devs don't know what to do. Bitcoin is proving to not be decentralized or trustless. Mining pools are necessary because no one will invest money into mining for the benefit of Bitcoin without the reward. Even without any single pool gaining a majority share of the network (51% is not required) damage can be done. It can be fixed (forked) but the cost in consumer confidence will be devastating. This is really the issue and it's being ignored.

Other trust issues revolve around an evil actor...

This is really well done.  What do you think of the solution proposed by Hacking, Distributed the two phase proof of work?

On the surface 2P-PoW seems like a reasonable solution, as does P2Pool. The problem isn't that solutions exist it's that no one in charge of the code is willing to change anything. I suppose I should amend my first sentence above to read, "Because the devs don't know what to do, don't like any solution for fear of breaking Bitcoin so they are unwilling to do anything". The problem with Bitcoin is it was written by a bad coder.  The code doesn't make it easy to determine overall architecture at a glance, explicit block structure is missing in places, goto statements and logic flow issues. It's a mess that makes it difficult to change anything without breaking something. This is essentially keeping anyone from changing it.

The main fundamental problem with 2P-PoW and all of these non-outsourcable solutions is that they just lead to huge mining farms, which is even more centralized. A lot of the ghash.io hash rate is already in house, as are other huge farms. (KnC etc.) Together those might already be 51%+, and are certainly large enough for some other forms of misbehavior. This just increases the incentives to build such huge farms.

There are other problems with that particular proposal but until the fundamental problem (not enforcing actual decentralization, only decentralization away from large pools, but toward what?) is solved somehow, those don't really matter

[smooth]

Bury that head, Mr. Ostrich.

I don't deny it is a problem I just don't see a good solution. All of the ideas that have been proposed seem like they might do more harm than good, or perhaps do nothing despite large investment to implement and deploy.

It may require a Satoshi-level breakthrough.