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[DeathAndTaxes]

I don't think decentralized means what you think it means.  Gold mining is far more decentralized than printing USD for example.  Is the gold supply not decentralized because every single person without skill or resources can't just dig a hole in their backyard and find gold?

Also the "everyone should solo mine" & "everyone should only use the largest 3 pools" is a false dichotomy.  What about p2pool? using smaller pools? spreading hashing power over multiple pools (it actually reduces variance)? solomine (if you understand the risks and the huge volatility in payment)?

Mining will become more and more specialized over time.  Like ANYTHING in the world to be competitive it will require more resources, capital, and skill.   Would you say webhosting is decentralized?  Is it still decentralized even though starting and operating a datacenter is beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of the planet?

Regarding ASICs, the technology exist, period.  The "good miners" not using ASICs doesn't prevent "bad miners" (govt, attackers, banks, etc) from using them.  I mean it isn't like as long as all legit miners pretend away ASICs they can't still be used to attack Bitcoin.  Using the most efficient equipment available is the only way to prevent "bad guys" from being able to cheat and force them to engage in an expensive battle of brute force.  Today lets say it takes $30M in GPUs (total cost not just GPU cost) to 51% the network, thus the network is safe unless an attacker is willing to spend tens of millions right? Of course not.  Nobody looking to spend millions would use GPU, they would spend $2M to $3M, build enough ASICs to 99% attack the network and kill Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.  Now when the network is protected by $30M in ASICs an attacker could still 51% the network but they can't do it "on the cheap" by using superior technology.

[AmDD]

A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.

[Digigami]

Ok, didn't read all of it.. but the short story is that unless you have massive amounts of hashing power, there is absolutely no point in even trying solo mining.

Take for example, say you have a single 5970 GPU, at aprox 700mh/sec. At current difficulty it will take on average the better part of a year to mine a block yourself. If you are particularly unlucky, you could mine for over 2 years and never mine a block yourself. Wasting all that electricity and time over nothing. However, if you direct that 700mh/sec towards a pool which is large enough to mine blocks regularly, you will see a small but steady income from your portion of the pools blocks.

Not many people do solo mining anymore because it is not feasible. Not many encourage or are willing to show you how to solo mine because we know that in almost every case it is pointless.  One of the largest mining operations I know of, Gigavps could probably mine solo and still make a reasonable amount of coins. For whatever reason he still mines on pools. I would suspect this is to reduce variance, but that is simply a guess..

Back when I started it made sense to solo mine, as pools were young and small, and the total network hash rate had not grown to the point where I with 8 GPU's running could still mine a block once or twice a week. Those days are long behind us now. Maybe if you are one of the lucky first few to fire up an ASIC device you could do solo before the next difficulty adjustment, but not for long once others are running similar gear.

Finally, if you really really really want to solo mine..

setup bitcoind, follow https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_bitcoind
be sure to setup the RPC username and password.

setup your mining program as you would for a pool, but instead of pointing it to a remote pool, set your url to 127.0.0.1 and username/password the same as your RPC setup for bitcoind.

essentially once bitcoind is up and running consider it your "solo pool"

HTH

[chrisLG]

A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.

Actually I don't think that is true. Telling someone that mining is less profitable than just using the money to buy bitcoin and hold it is most likely fairly good advice:

(a) Depending on your electricity costs mining with GPU is almost everywhere a money losing operation.

(b) Telling someone to buy FPGA for about 0.72 USD / MHash/s (current BFL Single) is no good advice either with the looming release of ASICS that will turn all FPGA into very expensive paperweights. Even a BFL Single (with a very attractive MHash/s per USD ratio) will take about six months to pay for it (when considering electricity at .24€/KWh). And this is all considering the current reward. After the drop to 25 BTC/Block everything looks even worse.

(c) Promoting an investment in ASICs is also not very sound advice. Nobody knows for sure when they will be delivered, what the difficulty will be after they are delivered and whether they will be delivered at all.


Disclaimer: I am currently mining with about 1.4 GHash/s but I'm pretty sure it is going to not have a positive return on investment -- or at least a very risky investment.

[Mike Hearn]

You can sign up to p2pool to solve this problem. P2pool is not like a regular pool. It doesn't have the same centralization problems other pools have.

[Luno]

Don't worry Mr. Skydiver, help with getting your rig up and running has always been hard to get, People are helpful on specific questions, but there is also some frowning against more competition, Like asking a fellow goldminer if he knows a good spot around here. There 3-4 guides around the net on setting up a miner and pointing it to a local port with bitcoinqt running as server. If you want turnkey, boot with Bamt from an usb stick, it's really well optimised, - for pool mining. solomining is now, with standard sized GPU setup around a 60 day wait average before you find a block of 50BTC. You don't have auto reboot and email notifications with gui-miner running solo, very usefull if want to share your free time with women also.

[casascius]

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. P2Pool brings together all of the advantages of pool mining and all of the advantages of solo mining except for one: it requires that each miner maintain a fully functioning bitcoind, which for many adds a great deal of complexity and resource burden.  This can, should, and will change as Bitcoin evolves to stop needing the whole block chain and relying instead on a much smaller "meta tree" (or similar construct).  Right now, a big advantage to join a pool is that you can just download a live CD or bootable USB stick and be up and running quickly.  When it changes so P2Pool can work the same way, so will the distribution of mining power.

2. In my opinion, the most likely reason that so much hash power ignores the call to avoid centralized pools is that the hash power is one or a few botnets whose operators, for whatever reason, choose to use particular pool(s) as a business decision and consider decentralization a lower priority.  Remember that botnet mining is exempt from the normal economic laws that incentivize keeping expenses less than revenues, because botnet mining always shifts the economic burden to others.  So, botnet mining will continue to thrive and grow even as normal miners give up and quit due to diminishing rewards, not to mention nagging wives unappreciative of a hot and noisy and pretty much unusable room in the home.  Meanwhile, running p2pool on a botnet is more resource intensive, which represents a real threat to the health of a botnet, and therefore clearly a business decision a botnet operator is far less likely to make.

3. Most arguments that connect "greed" with rogue mining tend to come from a belief that miners somehow stand to benefit from taking over the network, as evidenced by seasonal rants by newbies who come and point out we overlooked the "fact" that all a few bad guys have to do is conspire to take over the network and then get rich off of stealing coins or from counterfeit bitcoins.  If you're actually aware that's not how it works, you should explicitly acknowledge that if you want your argument to be taken seriously.

[dancupid]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

[dancupid]

Leave your stupid profit-oriented jibberish for those who care for profit and profit only. This forum is full of fucking retards like you, who's
attempts at being smart do nothing but drown already hard to find useful info in a sea of bullshits. People like you fail to realise the essentials.

I was just describing how it works - I don't mine myself. It's just how it is. That's how Bitcoin is.
Not sure what answer you are looking for since what you want is not the same as Bitcoin.
Try betterCoin - I've heard they've got something better.

[chrisLG]

Try betterCoin - I've heard they've got something better.

Lol.

[Stephen Gornick]

"Greed" as in "Let me buy devices (thus support their further development) which are so powerful that anyone not using them is out of race."

Those damn GPU miners are making CPU mining unprofitable.  As a result only the greedy who buy devices which are so powerful (GPUs) will be able to remain in the race.  The Bitcoin project will collapse as a result.

Oh wait, ... that would have been what you are saying with that same line of thought back around December 2010.

I suspect when "halving day" and/or ASIC shipments arrives there will be a lot of anger towards "Bitcoin".  There are a lot of people that invested a lot of money, sweat and tears into their rigs and when the time comes to put GPUs down (likely in about fifty days) there will be a lot of posts from pissed off people sharing their disgust.

Bitcoin doesn't exist to distribute currency to miners.  Bitcoin exists because the alternative is a debt-based fiat that benefits the banksters and the governments that they buy.

Bitcoin is as decentralized as it needs to be, otherwise we would be talking past-tense about it.

[gmaxwell]

2. In my opinion, the most likely reason that so much hash power ignores the call to avoid centralized pools is that the hash power is one or a few botnets whose operators, for whatever reason, choose to use particular pool(s) as a business decision and consider decentralization a lower priority.  

I've seen fairly little evidence that the botnets are especially big factors (especially since many of the pools will block them when discovered), though they're something of a factor.

There are a great deal of other factors though.  Mining is— once established— passive income. As long as their GPU keeps spitting out coin many people are not in a rush to mess with what works.

There also has been (and continues) to be a widespread misunderstanding of mining: a lot of people fervently believe that mining is like a race: the fastest wins almost always, and they expect a non-linear increase in returns from being in the biggest pool.

Some of the larger pools have used tools like google adwords to promote themselves in the past too— with high fees that smaller pools an decenteralized services can't collect they can afford more marketing and polishing work.

This subject is a concern— but we're much better off now than where we were a year ago.  And the concerns are somewhat overstating the risk. Miners can and do switch pools pretty quickly (e.g. automatically), and more recently developed miners like BFGminer have checks which can automatically detect some kinds of pool treachery. "no one here or anywhere else can prove me that dozens of computers contributing more than 51% of network processing power is better", doesn't of pols is not the same as "dozens of computers contributing more than 51% of network processing power"

[kjj]

You are an abrasive prick.  Don't worry, that just means you'll fit in well here.

First, pools don't have much hashing power.  The mining is still done by regular folks.  Also, the operators of the bigger pools tend to be true believers, very interested in the continued success of the bitcoin project.  If that changes, the people using their services will switch.

Second, solo mining is like buying lottery tickets.  For most people, it gives no return on investment.

Third, p2pool.

Fourth, that dude that was having problems with solo mining setup should have been asking for help with the specific mining software that he was using, or using different software, maybe something with a more active user community that would have been willing to help him figure it out.

Fifth, did you even read Eleuthria's reply to your question about the minimum payout?

[kjj]

First, pools don't have much hashing power.  The mining is still done by regular folks.

And?

Also, the operators of the bigger pools tend to be true believers, very interested in the continued success of the bitcoin project.  If that changes, the people using their services will switch.

Pool operators are humans, most with families. I hope you are aware what I'm trying to say.

Second, solo mining is like buying lottery tickets.  For most people, it gives no return on investment.

I don't see the investment if all it takes to start mining is to install easy to use software on a machine one is using anyway.

Third, p2pool.

Does not solve anything, really. Just compromise those few hundreds which are contributing 51% or more.

Fourth, that dude that was having problems with solo mining setup should have been asking for help with the specific mining software that he was using, or using different software, maybe something with a more active user community that would have been willing to help him figure it out.

What about maybe hundreds of people that found that same post and gave up themselves, seeing no answer for months?

Fifth, did you even read Eleuthria's reply to your question about the minimum payout?

Yes. Check my reply to his post.

I'm fully aware of your paranoia, yes.  Thing is, it doesn't matter how or why a pool would be compromised.  Pool users would react to the compromise itself.

The easy to use software is already installed.  Open your bitcoin.conf and put in generate=1 (or gen=1, or whatever, been a long time) and you are solo mining.

You seem to have no limit to the width of the circle of insiders that you consider to be critical to the safety of the system.  You say that a dozen pool operators could be attacked, and when I point out a way to widen the circle to hundreds, you say that 51% of them could be attacked.  Why not take it to the end and say that if everyone was solo mining, 51% of us could be attacked?

E has good reasons for not doing dust payouts, and as someone that has been keeping track of the blockchain size for a while, I thank him, for all of us.  If you, or anyone else, doesn't like his policies that he sets for his service, you can fuck off and find one more suited to your desires.

[Severian]

Ordinary people, those supposed to embrace Bitcoin as soon as possible, should be encouraged to become users AND solo miners.

I encourage you to solo mine. Go for it! Report back with your results.

Thanks for reading.

You're quite welcome.

[Shadow383]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

I don't think you understand variance.
Darts at a dartboard. Someone mining on a 0% fee PPS pool and someone mining solo will tend towards exactly the same reward regardless of the long-term trajectory of difficulty. The variance is huge of course but claiming that solo mining is somehow less profitable is bullshit of the highest order.

[ildubbioso]

You have nothing interesting to say

My arguments will be taken seriously by anyone smart enough to grasp the current Bitcoin state

Most of you posting here are bigger Bitcoin enemies than all govs and bankers combined

This forum is full of fucking retards like you

I have never used it, but you've convinced me to try the ignore button. Let's try this. . . 

[Severian]

You missed the point of this whole thread. How much Bitcoins each miner earns should be ... no, MUST be secondary to integrity of Bitcoin network.

You miss the whole point of Bitcoin. The profitability of being a miner IS integral to the security and integrity of the network. The profit motive, and its ignorant cousin greed, were built into the protocol for a reason: to attract people who will add hashing power to the blockchain, no matter their intentions.

Even if the network is compromised/dominated, that eventuality was addressed in the original white paper:

If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The protocol was designed to make it so expensive to be greedy that even the greedy and shortsighted would be forced to be honest eventually. Will it work? No idea. I'm willing to take a risk on it as its a better idea than others that have been offered up.

[Severian]

holly grail

That's this chick:

https://twitter.com/Azsunyx

If Bitcoin freaks you out, perhaps you should just stick with Wells Fargo.

[Serith]

OP knows too much about Bitcoin for just 14 days of learning, I speculate it's Matthew N. Wright.

[gmaxwell]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

Wow. I'm really disappointed to see this misinformation still being promoted. It is completely untrue.  It's perfectly possible to solo mine and solve a block with your very first hash operation— just unlikely.   Assuming an idealized zero latency zero fee pool your expected return is the same either way.  With real pools its somewhat lower compared to a well maintained local node solo mining (although that may be something of a stretch, the reference client has some scalability / stability issues that make maintaining it harder than should be, but we're working on that).

Sequential trials of N months each isnt the right way to think about this. There are sequential trials— but they're happening billions of times a second, one for each hash operation.   A better mental model is to imagining forking off 2 million copies of the universe, a million solo mining, and a million pool mining. After any span of time the average of each of the groups would be the same (minnus pool fees and stales from latency to the pool, and differential maintenance quality in each), but the distribution would be different: in each of the pool universes you'd have a similar amount of coins, while in the solo universes some of you would have nothing, some would have the expected, some would have an enormous amount more than expected, but the over expected would match up with the under expected and the result is the expected average.

Or you you can think about it as choosing between two lotteries to play, one has a 1/1000 odds and pays out $0.98 (2% fee) for each win, and the other has a 1/1000000 odds and pays out $1000 for each win. Playing the lotteries cost the same, and you can play them thousands of times a day. Sometime in the future the relative odds will change but the payouts will stay matched. Which lottery do you prefer to play?     If not getting $.98 right away would make you die of dehydration then the pool is a clear win... otherwise it just depends on your relative risk tolerance and how you value your time. If the risk reduction and time savings doesn't justify the pools fees and hazard to bitcoin security (even if just theoretical: FUD hurts bitcoin too) for you then you should prefer to solo-mine.  (Or P2Pool!)

Difficulty changes don't make a bit of difference in this.  If you instead think about hash rate in terms of percentage of the total you can pretty much ignore the difficulty changes entirely.  

[Luke-Jr]

The new ASIC-needed getblocktemplate mining protocol is intentionally designed to be decentralized, moving the block creation back from the mining pools into the individual miners.
Mining with GBT enables doing several automated security security audits of pools in realtime, and the same level of control for miners who are willing to run a local bitcoind instance.
Furthermore, ASICs are available to any consumer who wants to buy one, at more than reasonable prices as low as $150 - about as cheap as the average GPU.

On the other hand, there is currently a major problem of centralization on software for Bitcoin nodes and wallets.
This is also being dealt with, but at a slower pace. Hopefully the new Bitcoin Foundation will help move things along quicker: I imagine once Bitcoin-Qt and/or bitcoind reach 1.0, Bitcoin will be bigger and people will have more time for multiple independent implementations.

[kjj]

Solo mining is pointless because of Moore's law - if you are mining off a single GPU the rate of technological change will outstrip your ability to get the 50btc  bounty even once. You can calculate it today based on the equipment you have today at the current difficultly - it will report in the next year you may get 50btc if you are lucky (based on today's values). But during the next year the difficulty will increase and processing power will increase so it will take you 3 years and then 10 and then 50 years.  You may as well buy lottery tickets.
As a solo minor you will be forever chasing it, because of the increasing difficulty and the relative decreasing power of your hardware.

Wow. I'm really disappointed to see this misinformation still being promoted. It is completely untrue.  It's perfectly possible to solo mine and solve a block with your very first hash operation— just unlikely.   Assuming an idealized zero latency zero fee pool your expected return is the same either way.  With real pools its somewhat lower compared to a well maintained local node solo mining (although that may be something of a stretch, the reference client has some scalability / stability issues that make maintaining it harder than should be, but we're working on that).

I didn't read it like that at all.

An "average" CPU is about 4 times as powerful today as it was 4 years ago (2 doublings), but the difficulty is 3 million times higher.  That means an average of 30,000,000 minutes between blocks for a typical CPU, or about 14 years.  What fraction of 14 year old CPUs do you suppose are still running today?

The typical payout for CPU mining is zero, over the entire lifetime of the CPU, even though some people might get lucky.

[DoomDumas]

Solo mining, is it now comparable to go in western america, find a river and search for gold with a large metal plate, trying to filter some mini gold nuggets from the sand out of that river ?  Like if we're still in the klondike era ?

I think you get the image !

[markm]

This is silly.

It is far from true that mining will be centralised among beverage drinkers, with only drinkers of coffee using coffee-warmers.

Some ingenious tea-drinkers will find ways to adapt coffee-warmers for the purpose of warming tea, and drinkers of hot chocolate, ovaltine, mulled hot cider and other hot beverages will be inspired to attempt adapting them to the warming of their beverages also.

Now if you are asserting that the number of drinkers of hot beverages in the world is far from sufficient to match the mining power of various NSA cyber-centres, Wall Street datacentres, massively merged mining establishments and so on and so on, I'd like to see a few numbers put on your projections.

Or do you maybe consider a coffeewarmer for every hot beverage drinker simply another free hashingbot for the botnetters?

I paid more each for a couple of second-hand 5870s than a coffee-warmer is going to cost me. So the move to ASIC seems like a move toward making it less expensive, not more expensive, for average beverage-drinkers to obtain computers and equip those computers to mine cryptocoins...

-MarkM-

EDIT: p2pool is probably worth mentioning again too.

[cunicula]

I don't think decentralized means what you think it means.  Gold mining is far more decentralized than printing USD for example.  Is the gold supply not decentralized because every single person without skill or resources can't just dig a hole in their backyard and find gold?

The OP is pointing out that decentralization is related to returns-to-scale.

If the minting technology has increasing, but exhaustible, returns-to-scale, then it will tend towards oligopoly. This is the current status of proof-of-work.

If the minting technology has unlimited increasing returns-to-scale, then it will tend towards monopoly (full centralization). It is unclear if this will be true of proof-of-work in the long run.

Oligopoly is not that worrisome, monopoly is more concerning.

There are alternatives which, in the long-run, may not exhibit increasing returns at all (see PPC coin). If you are really worried about this issue, then take your investment elsewhere.

[cunicula]

You missed the point of this whole thread. How much Bitcoins each miner earns should be ... no, MUST be secondary to integrity of Bitcoin network.

You miss the whole point of Bitcoin. The profitability of being a miner IS integral to the security and integrity of the network.

This is a severe flaw, not a feature. It can be avoided with better design. For one attempt, see PPC coin.

[kjj]

You missed the point of this whole thread. How much Bitcoins each miner earns should be ... no, MUST be secondary to integrity of Bitcoin network.

You miss the whole point of Bitcoin. The profitability of being a miner IS integral to the security and integrity of the network.

This is a severe flaw, not a feature. It can be avoided with better design. For one attempt, see PPC coin.

LOL, yeah, checkpointcoin for the win.

P.S.  Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate.

[LoupGaroux]

subby- let's get the basics out of the way first, shall we? Kiss my ass. Your arrogant, ill-informed, pseudo-intellectual horseshit is nothing more than the drooling of an amateur Atlas. 88 posts and you are already willing to prostitute yourself with sig ads? You are a classic little bootlick aren't you?

1. Essentially nobody agrees with you. You have seized on one tangential argument, made it poorly and turned into a mouth breathing simpleton about it. Who cares about your thoughts on the matter?

2. Your open hostility and irrational potty mouth does nothing to enhance your worth as a agent provocateur for whatever cause you seem to want to spout. Nobody can hear your voice through the silliness.

3. You are utterly clueless about the nature of the best here. With the possible exception of 3 very noble souls who banked at unfathomable levels in the early adopter phase, nobody here gives fuck-all concern about the network. Nobody cares about the security of the beast, nobody wants to see anything. The only real purpose for bitcoin is to create pretend businesses that speculate in making more bitcoins out of nothing at all, and buying drugs on Silk Road. Beyond that everyone is too broke, stoned, or on the run with their ill-gotten gains to worry about the fucking network. It's a lot like a whorehouse in that respect... if you aren't the guy playing the piano you are either fucking or getting fucked, ain't no middle ground. And since very few whorehouses care at all about the network... you will end up being ignored by everyone. Especially because you think you should be a dick about it.

4. And if it is really all that important to you to come here and try the same tired foolishness, why not do it under your RealSolid/CoinHunter/DoucheBag handle? Why all the effort to create a new identity and whip up 88 worthless posts in two weeks?

[cunicula]

P.S.  Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate.

The system tends to oligopoly if the risk-adjusted rate of return on investment increases as more is invested. This is true in solo mining, but not in pooled mining or PPC coin's version of proof-of-stake.

You are saying that if people reinvest minting earnings in minting assets, then their share in total minting assets will grow over time. Okay, but of course that is equally true in proof-of-work as well.

Is there a logical argument supporting your views that I should be aware of?

[cunicula]

You may as well buy lottery tickets.

Wow. I'm really disappointed to see this misinformation still being promoted. It is completely untrue.

Where is the fallacy here? Solo mining is to pool mining as being paid in lottery tickets is to being paid in cash.
A perfectly valid analogy.

[kjj]

P.S.  Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate.

The system tends to oligopoly if the risk-adjusted rate of return on investment increases as more is invested. This is true in solo mining, but not in pooled mining or PPC coin's version of proof-of-stake.

You are saying that if people reinvest minting earnings in minting assets, then their share in total minting assets will grow over time. Okay, but of course that is equally true in proof-of-work as well.

Is there a logical argument supporting your views that I should be aware of?

How about the logical argument that I said, instead of the one the nonsense that you imagined me saying?  I'll repeat it for you, and highlight a key point.  "Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate."

[cunicula]

How about the logical argument that I said, instead of the one the nonsense that you imagined me saying?  I'll repeat it for you, and highlight a key point.  "Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate."

So proof-of-work mining has capital costs and electricity costs. Proof-of-stake mining only has capital costs. Can you make a logical argument why this would matter?

Hint: Consult an economics textbook. It doesn't matter. All that matters is whether returns-to-scale are decreasing, constant, or increasing.
 

[Luke-Jr]

Proof-of-stake (at least all existing attempts I know of) also allows miners to use it for attacks in parallel to the legitimate blockchain. That is, there is no cost to attempt to fork the blockchain. Incentively speaking, this means rational miners should mine every chain that does not hurt them personally.

[cunicula]

Proof-of-stake (at least all existing attempts I know of) also allows miners to use it for attacks in parallel to the legitimate blockchain. That is, there is no cost to attempt to fork the blockchain. Incentively speaking, this means rational miners should mine every chain that does not hurt them personally.

Yes, this is true and unfortunate. PPC coin is a pure proof-of-stake system. Attacks are costless. Miners should extend any and every fork they see.

I argued for a mixed proof-of-stake/proof-of-work system based on coin age in the proof of stake wiki.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

Attack attempts would cause output losses under a mixed system.
 
I hope that PPC coin will eventually move to a mixed system, but who knows.

 

[kjj]

How about the logical argument that I said, instead of the one the nonsense that you imagined me saying?  I'll repeat it for you, and highlight a key point.  "Proof-of-stake tends towards oligopoly/monopoly because stake has no ongoing cost and tends to accumulate."

So proof-of-work mining has capital costs and electricity costs. Proof-of-stake mining only has capital costs. Can you make a logical argument why this would matter?

Hint: Consult an economics textbook. It doesn't matter. All that matters is whether returns-to-scale are decreasing, constant, or increasing.

Because there is no cost.  You make the investment once, and then benefit forever.  Your hybrid system has this same flaw, an investment in stake multiplies your apparent work for all eternity.  In POS, the returns-to-scale in stake is infinite.

I note that the length of your wiki page on POS has grown rather large and convoluted as you keep trying to throw different crutches into the system to prop up first the fundamental flaws, and then the secondary flaws created by the earlier crutches, and then tertiary, etc...

The source code for bitcoin is freely available, all of the functions for creating and verifying signatures exist already, there is room in the header to add a signature field, and none of your rules look particularly hard to implement.  Go ahead and create your altcoin, exactly the way you want it, so that you can prove to all of us that we are wrong about your ideas.  I'll bet you 1 BTC that someone like artforz will totally pwn your chain and have a near absolute, but still unstoppable, monopoly on generation within a week.

[kjj]

Sigh. I'm done with this 'discussion'. If you would like me to educate you further, send BTC to 1BQj536K9UdKexLbYvPvstc1awt8ZvJrBQ.

Meh.  I've read most of your thousand or so posts; I don't think I can take any more "education" without puking.  Very much looking forward to the launch of cuniculacoin though.

[Hawkix]

No one replied about making ASICs sort of access point to Bitcoin network. I had no time to elaborate yesterday, it was late here,
but today I'll try to sum my opinions on the matter. Keep in mind I might make serious errors here - 2 weeks is not enough time to
learn tinny but probably important details.

Pros:

1. Much bigger target customer base would drop price of ASIC access points - manufacturers can go with smaller profits per unit.
2. Very easy to set up - hook up few cables and you're ready to go.
3. Noticably increased strength of network - even the weakest node would be contributing at least few GHash/s.
4. No dependencies on pools - each and all devices are solo and only solo miners.
5. Wallet is not bound to device - usage of USB sticks as hardware wallets would allow anyone to use any device, regardless of location.

Cons:

1. Hackable? 

I probably understand what you intend to achieve, but it will not work. You cannot restrict users on doing whatever they want, the system must work even if anyone can hack the device etc. In current Bitcoin, once you can find hash difficult enough, it is valid, regardless if you find it on Pentium II, an array of ASICS, broke the SHA256 or have a monkey which can type in good nonce.

In addition, once the only-ASICs got popular and you will have tens of thousands of users, they will stop mining, because they will not want to wait year for their found block. Its human behavior to be greedy and unpatient .. if you cannot "feed them "regularly", they will abandon the idea.

[wachtwoord]

It's irrelevant if few thousands who are mining for profit and profit only, completely ignoring any other aspect of Bitcoin including
long-term integrity of network and thus their own BTCs, will quit.

The beauty is that the greed of the few will benefit the many because their goals are streamlined. It is what some of us refer to as the free market

[gmaxwell]

adjusted just to get more profit, like what idiot slush is doing with Stratum protocol
while at the same time pissing on GBT.

Slush is both intelligent and thoughtful and cares about what happens with Bitcoin. I've never seen him do anything for a quick buck.  Your unkind words here are unjustified and just make you look foolish.

[casascius]

adjusted just to get more profit, like what idiot slush is doing with Stratum protocol
while at the same time pissing on GBT.

Slush is both intelligent and thoughtful and cares about what happens with Bitcoin. I've never seen him do anything for a quick buck.  Your unkind words here are unjustified and just make you look foolish.

You can not hide the fact - at least not from me - that you and your beloved slush are nothing but average inteligent
humans. Just because you both are super inteligent in one or few areas does not mean you are super inteligent beings.

If you're smart, you should notice that the fact I'm being rude, impolite or whatever does not affect the fact I'm right.

In case you wonder why I'm behaving like I do, well - I think most of you should be kicked in the ass for being stupid
enough to come up with idea of pools and other "briliant" stuff which degraded health of Bitcoin big time already. Since
I can't kick you in the ass over the Internet ... Seriously, I don't feel like being nice with most of you here is right way
for as long as you don't detach from mostly bullshits you're preoccupied with and zoom-out quite a bit. And than more.

All clear now?

I understood the part where you told him he's of average intelligence because everyone's of average intelligence, and then the part where we're all stupid for creating something (even though that's impossible if everyone is of average intelligence).  But I lost you at the "most of you here is right way for as long as you don't detach from mostly bullshits" part.

[markm]

You seem to have completely derailed your own thread now.

I am now having difficulty finding out what the problem is.

People can CPU mine still no problem, that is part of the beauty of merged mining.

Anyone who feels their chance of finding a BTC, NMC, DVC, IXC, I0C or even CLC block is too small can add GRP to their merged mining mix so that even if they are only using some ancient CPU and thus have what seems to them a too low chance of finding a block of the higher difficulty chains can nonetheless find GRP blocks quite regularly.

If "too many people" do that, I am sure more chains can be added so that the impatient folk who insist on finding blocks relatively often can still do so.

Furthermore the crap about folk who made thousands not being an incentive is silly too, because just as those thousands were mined easily due to the stupidity, ignorance, lack of foresight, lack of vision, lack of confidence, lack of entrepeneurial spirit and so on and so forth of the masses upon masses of people who failed to discover cryptocoin technology had been invented or, even having discovered that fact, failed to mine any, the exact same things are currently causing the exact same results currently.

That is: the same reasons people gave themselves or had thrust upon them by circumstance for not picking up virtually free thousands upon thousands of bitcoins a few years ago continue to apply right now to e.g. GRouPcoins.

So as long as you deliberately fail to pick up thousands of almost free groupcoins right now, you sound pretty idiotic complaining about not having picked up thousands of almost free bitcoins a few years ago.

If you start thinking of more stupid lame excuses like "but bitcoins are worth more than groupcoins" you will just sound like all the losers who made the same lame excuses ("but dollars are worth more than bitcoins!", "but ounces of gold are worth more than bitcoins!" etc) a years ago.

You are a deliberate, by deliberate aforethought and intent, loser, You have no-one but yourself to blame if you continue to deliberately lose.

-MarkM-

[Digigami]

@ markm - Is that what you wrote targeted at me? I ask because I can't find myself in those lines of text, sorry.

You seem to have completely derailed your own thread now.
..
..

This is your thread is it not? Seems pretty clear to me whom he was talking to.

[Digigami]

Did I asked you anything?

*ask

and no.. I was just making sure you knew markm was in fact calling you the idiot here.

Have something to say on-topic?

And what exactly is on-topic in this thread again? I will admit I am having a hard time wading through all the nonsense.

[finway]

Topic was "Current state of Bitcoin". I'm upgrading it right now to "Current state of Bitcoin = Compromised on all levels!".

I've tried almost every rc edition,and i didn't find it compromised.

[markm]

It is centralised to the point where bitcoin is more than 51% of all blockchain currency both in value and in hashing power, which is a massive compromise of the basic concept of decentralisation.

Original poster, are you contributing to that by failing to mine the alt coins that are so low in difficulty that even with a single not very recent generation CPU you can pick up blocks several times per day still?

-MarkM-