Something that's more interesting than the anonymint noise is the under-appreciated fact that Satoshi believed Bitcoin's profit incentives were so strong that even if an individual accumulated a majority of the hashing power their desire to be profitable in bitcoin terms would be so strong that they wouldn't use that power to attack the network.
Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, but the people who are insisting that Bitcoin mining is too centralized should at least start out making their arguments by acknowledging that position and explaining why they believe it is incorrect.
Yes, but profit based incentives only work if you assume the adversary is motivated by greed. Excepting a major technical failure or something better appearing, the only foes I worry about with respect to bitcoin already own printers - and they aren't afraid to use them!
Inspired to see you understood and/or agreed with my point, despite
"Lol" slandering me in your prior post and not quoting or acknowledging that I had made the same point as you did in the post immediately before yours as follows.
Any way, I think the profit motive crap is total nonsense and I expect he [Satoshi] knew that. The pools don't have any large investment in hardware. Thus they are free to maximize revenue by any paradigm which does so, including collusion and selling out to the banksters who captured the State and the fiat levers. Economics rules, not morals.
Upthread I broke down the argument that the miners who own the hardware are in control. Sorry (in theory and maybe in practice already) the Sybil attack which are the pools is in control.
If you want to convince me that crypto isn't just another paradigm that falls right into the control of the problem we are trying to fix with crypto, then we need that fundamental tenet of decentralized trust.
The power held by the banksters who have captured the government through the
power vacuum of the
Iron Law of Collective Action, is not limited to printing money at the Central Banks. This DEEP STATE has the power to do 9/11, unmask 100s of Tor .onion hidden services, and more saliently to our discussion they can render competition insolvent with regulatory requirements they create with the government they control (i.e. democracy is a lie and a power vacuum, and I was making the analogy that pools are also).
If you want to defeat this paradigm, you are going to have to think more out-of-the-box, because it patently obvious to me they designed Bitcoin.
Regarding my design solution to this problem, once you see my solution you will have an epiphany and realize there are a gamut of choices of what we centralize and what we decentralize, and it is those choices which determine whether the crypto-currency falls into the power vacuum or not.
You can start by showing me some mutual respect, which I will then return in kind. Or not. It won't stop me in either case.
P.S. I seriously have Multiple Sclerosis. If you had any clue what it is like to battle this (
debilitating headaches, dizziness, and chronic fatigure, etc), you might understand why I was incapable of a lot of coding action from 2012 to 2015, until I discovered what appears so far to be a viable treatment a month ago.
His entire argument about the security of multiple confirmations fails in the presence of concentration, since it relies on the premise of an attacker being a price-taker with respect to hash power. If he felt the profit motive of a majority miner were enough to render the system secure, he wouldn't bother with the probabilistic game theory. It is quite clear to me that the later is much stronger than the former.
That is an elegant way of arguing what is the more fundamental tenet or key aspect of Satoshi's contribution and invention, which was my point.
We also have to admit it was likely a ruse to suck us into wetting our ideological underwear and falling into the trap of a centralized public ledger
Digital Kill Switch.
The question then becomes whether or not any technical solution is possible against attackers who have printers and aren't afraid to use them.
There is. I was very skeptical and had basically given up on finding a solution. But it turns out that I was thinking about the problem the wrong way. Paradigm shift epiphanies are like this. And of course the blinded won't believe it until you spell it out for them.
Wouldn't it suck to implement countermeasures against such attackers that not only won't work and also hinder legitimate use or, even worse, make attacks more likely instead of less likely?
Of course. But again I detect that you are likely playing politics and preparing to slander something again which is your past pattern of behavior.
The pools don't have any large investment in hardware. Thus they are free to maximize revenue by any paradigm which does so, including collusion and selling out to the banksters who captured the State and the fiat levers. Economics rules, not morals.
huge inconsistency in logic for someone who claims to be logical. or maybe it's just from someone who lacks comprehension of how Bitcoin incentives work in practice?
so if the pools didn't invest in their hardware, then logically you're referring to pools that aggregate individual mining power. if that is the case, how can pool operators freely collude and sell out to banksters or any other attacker when those same individuals can just as freely yank their power out of the pool and point it elsewhere as we saw in ghash?
Did you completely fail to read
the post I made about pools being a Sybil attack vector?
You have no way of knowing if a Sybil attack in occurring now at the pools. You don't have to see an overt attack.
Did humanity see an attack on their government over the past 80+ years while the DEEP STATE has been festering?
If you were trying to grow Bitcoin into a global centralized ledger, would you reveal your hand too soon and cause the frogs to jump out of the pot? Of course not!
The totalitarianism comes all at once at the end game. You can remain blissfully ignoring that possibility if you want. Most humans cows do and so do frogs that boil in the pot. Bitcoin was designed to suck you into complacency and disbelief in (cognitive dissonance groupthink slander of logical, rational) dissension.
I suggest you retract your pitiful attempts to slander whether I am logical. You won't likely win a logic debate against me. Smooth might, but you are not capable.
so give me some evidence that the USG is performing a Sybil attack on all the pools.
Apparently you don't understand well that a Sybil attack can be not detectable, especially when the power it wields is not yet being fully utilitized in every facet. If I were the DEEP STATE, I would continue to lay the ground work of growing Bitcoin adoption and not disturbing that, while testing and insuring the Sybil attack vector is going to work as planned once Bitcoin reaches the point where they want to turn on the Digital Kill Switch.
also, explain to me how the USG controls Chinese mining pools in Mongolia.
If you don't believe the Chinese leadership is in bed with the Rockefellers on the planned Global Technocracy, then I suggest you watch
Aaron Russo's video explaining about what Nick Rockefeller told him and then do some googling about Nick Rockefeller and China.
But all of your post belies the main point, which is a Sybil attack hole exists. And we should close that hole.all i hear is a bunch of FUD.
You have not refuted the economics and technical points that indicate that a Sybil attack vector exists with the pools.
You have chosen to remain a frog boiling in the pot, because the former double-digit pools have been dissolved into single-digit pools, but you can not prove that there are not multiple single-digit pools that are owned by the same entity.
You can choose to remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that a Sybil attack is possible (and likely because of the economics of pools which I had explained in the link I provided to you) and perhaps already occurring (in testing and lie-in-wait mode).
You are just being disingenuous now.
2. i think that the majority of ppl in this world want to be honest and wish to live in a society that has order. no one wants to live in chaos. everybody loses. in order for society to continue to progress and evolve, order, dependability, and a semblance of honesty is needed. thus, in a system with so much potential to do good, like Bitcoin, the overwhelming desire is for participants to want to do what makes the system thrive. to the extent that cheating, dishonesty, and colluding erodes confidence and threatens that goal, most participants will avoid those activities.
That is the same faith we put into a top-down democracy. Fact is a power vacuum sucks in those who can maximize the exploitation of the power vacuum.
You are violating the fundamental tenet of Satoshi's white paper which is decentralized trust, meaning we don't have to trust that people are honest.
you fail to comprehend what i was saying. the above is simply an observation of mine on human behavior which i think is valid.
Can you not read? Try again to read above. I didn't fail to comprehend your point, I was disagreeing with it. Can you not comprehend the logical distinction between not comprehending and disagreeing? That is a category (a.k.a. taxonomy) logic error.
B-listers (or I suspect C-lister in this case) have such poor logic and rationality, it is almost pointless to try to argue with you, because you can't even recognize your illogic.
Satoshi's brilliance was that he designed what appears to be a rock solid system that allows it's participants to fulfill their desired behaviors w/o fear of widespread cheating.
Precisely that is the fundamental tenet I am referring to upthread where I am thinking about the "one CPU, one vote" and the probabilistic math of Proof-of-Work, but I am arguing that it is not immune to centralization and thus it is an (intentional or not) ruse that is very ideologically compelling.
the incentives programmed into Bitcoin align with their desired behaviors and in fact fosters them.
Subsequent (to yours quoted) posts by myself, inca, and smooth (at least and many others else where such as the Skycoin thread) had argued that the mutual profit motive is not sufficient.
the need for trust is removed for the early adopters.
That was the ideology but the reality is that it ain't so.
bootstrappers like me saw this brilliance and have invested accordingly
Cognitive bias.
and each day that goes by that the protocol doesn't get hacked or that a miner or a cabal of miners fails to perform a 51% is evidence that the system is getting stronger and stronger and more resilient.
How did that work out in the past with governments that get stronger and bigger and then always implode. As Warren Buffet says, "when the tide goes out, we know who wasn't wearing underwear".
How did that work out for the quants and the derivative bombs that finally exploded. Etc, etc.
I think you need to read some of Nicholas Taleb's books on Blackswans, Anti-fragility, etc..
Or simply the common due diligence statement, "past performance is no guarantee of future performance".
what's quite obvious is that more and more deep pocketed investors are climbing onboard
Indeed. Bitcoin is succeeding. And the DEEP STATE is I am sure quite thrilled.
which makes it much harder for gvts or any bad actor to interfere. we're experiencing a growing economy.
That does not logically follow, when the bad guys are the government. They will regulate later. Regulation won't kill Bitcoin at that stage when it is already mature. It can enable the Digital Kill Switch where they can turn off your number if they don't like you (i.e. prevent political free speech, expropriate wealth via the ruse of unconstitutional directly apportioned taxation, etc).
You are blacksliding because there doesn't appear to be any solution the fact that pools become concentrated due to the variance cost to them not. It is pure economics.
what centralization? i see the charts decentralizing. and the proof in the pudding is that there are still no 51% attacks despite your FUD and Bitcoin keeps on growing. and ghash has been reduced to a shadow of itself.
I have already addressed this point.
all i hear is a bunch of FUD.
You have not refuted the economics and technical points that indicate that a Sybil attack vector exists with the pools.
You have chosen to remain a frog boiling in the pot, because the former double-digit pools have been dissolved into single-digit pools, but you can not prove that there are not multiple single-digit pools that are owned by the same entity.
You can choose to remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that a Sybil attack is possible (and likely because of the economics of pools which I had explained in the link I provided to you) and perhaps already occurring (in testing and lie-in-wait mode).
You are just being disingenuous now.
actually, i submit the onus is upon you to prove that the Sybil attacks are occurring especially since we haven't seen any evidence to that fact. w/o it you are just a troll and Bitcoin continues to gain more acceptance.
Repeating yourself redundantly doesn't make your illogic any less so.
I will simply quote myself again above since you clearly refuse to address what I wrote. Asserting that the onus is on me to prove that something that can't be detected is disingenuous. You are not arguing the point, rather just trying to cover your ears and say "nanana".
Apparently you don't understand well that a Sybil attack can be not detectable, especially when the power it wields is not yet being fully utilitized in every facet. If I were the DEEP STATE, I would continue to lay the ground work of growing Bitcoin adoption and not disturbing that, while testing and insuring the Sybil attack vector is going to work as planned once Bitcoin reaches the point where they want to turn on the Digital Kill Switch.
...
But all of your post belies the main point, which is a Sybil attack hole exists. And we should close that hole.
