Is Btcoin becoming centralized?

[ReigningPigs]

As the mining difficulty increases, it becomes harder and harder for individuals to mine, making Bitcoin mining farms the only profitable way to mine. As the mining difficulty increases even more, only mega Bitcoin mining farms can be profitable. This design of the Bitcoin network makes centralization inevitable.

I think it would be fair if everyone hashed on CPUs and GPUs instead of ASICs. Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant, or the network should have a cap on the maximum number of Bitcoins an induvidual miner can mine or something. What do you guys think?

[1714025890]

1714025890

[RichBC]

Mining difficulty increases make it harder for everyone big or small. Profit per TH is governed by the price you pay for the hardware, it's management & maintenance cost and the single most important factor Electricity price.

The only edge that a Farm has is their purchasing Power, earlier and sometimes exclusive access to the latest hardware and of course Electricity prices. An individual with low priced electricity will be able to mine profitably for as long as the largest farms.

Yes many individual miners have pulled out, many more will after the halving, but they will not make as big a crash as when some of the Farms go under. Individual Miners are a resilient and resourceful group and will play a part for a long time to come.

As to fairness I am afraid that this is all about money if Bitcoin was ASIC resistant something else would have been produced...

Rich

[ThunderThomas]

As the mining difficulty increases, it becomes harder and harder for individuals to mine, making Bitcoin mining farms the only profitable way to mine. As the mining difficulty increases even more, only mega Bitcoin mining farms can be profitable. This design of the Bitcoin network makes centralization inevitable.

I think it would be fair if everyone hashed on CPUs and GPUs instead of ASICs. Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant, or the network should have a cap on the maximum number of Bitcoins an induvidual miner can mine or something. What do you guys think?

Yes it is, however it can take years maybe even decades.. With 1 GH why not, but 1 MH.. you are really wasting energy at that point..

[-ck]

Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant

There's no such thing as asic resistant.

[Amph]

don't forgot that every zone in the world have a max electrcity output, so they can't simply add more mienrs forever on the same place, not matter how free space they have

this will cut centralization, unless the same guy control more bitcoin farm around the world, but i don't believe there is a single entity so rich at the moment

[tiggytomb]

Once the rewards drop and the halving occurs who's to say that these huge minng operations will even stick around.  They could move onto another coin, unless the bitcoin price shoots up in price they will need to re-evaluate, so the small miner may have more chance of hittng a block.

[FrostStick]

Bitcoins are designed to become decentralised and this is the way it's going to stay. If there is a flaw in the system I'm sure the devs will fix it soon enough.

[Mickeyb]

Some will argue that Bitcoin is already too decentralized with the mining pools. Others will argue that the users of these pools still have saying as they can switch pools in a matter of minutes if they want to.

I think that Bitcoin is going exactly towards what Satoshi has imagined. Even he has said that one day Bitcoin will be mined by the big data centers and this is slowly happening!

[ReigningPigs]

Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant

There's no such thing as asic resistant.

Litecoin is ASIC resistant, you can only use GPUs, CPUs and similar hardware. You cannot use Application specific chips to mine Litecoin. You can look that up for yourself.

[Starin]

Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant

There's no such thing as asic resistant.

Litecoin is ASIC resistant, you can only use GPUs, CPUs and similar hardware. You cannot use Application specific chips to mine Litecoin. You can look that up for yourself.

There are scrypt asics for well over a year now. Please do some research.

[cloverme]

As the mining difficulty increases, it becomes harder and harder for individuals to mine, making Bitcoin mining farms the only profitable way to mine. As the mining difficulty increases even more, only mega Bitcoin mining farms can be profitable. This design of the Bitcoin network makes centralization inevitable.

I think it would be fair if everyone hashed on CPUs and GPUs instead of ASICs. Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant, or the network should have a cap on the maximum number of Bitcoins an induvidual miner can mine or something. What do you guys think?

It would be nice if there was something to reward the little guy out there, sadly there isn't.  Technically, you can mine and still have the same opportunity to solve a block as a huge megafarm in china, but just with very low probability.  It's highly unlikely any of the core developers will introduce a BIP to change the reward system.  Right now there's no practical fairness in bitcoin mining today, just the fairness of math.

[Abiky]

Maybe sometime in the future, Bitcoin would become ASIC resistant thus rendering it minable by only a CPU or GPU. If Bitcoin would fix this issue (not to mention the block size debate) then it would be a much more decentralized and successful crypto. Even still, it is successful despite these facts and Bitcoin itself is just starting. A few more years and it will improve in both development and adoption. Just my opinion. 

[mwizard]

I think it would be fair if everyone hashed on CPUs and GPUs instead of ASICs. Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant, or the network should have a cap on the maximum number of Bitcoins an induvidual miner can mine or something. What do you guys think?

There seems to be a naive view among some posters that mining should be profitable for someone mining in their spare room or on their PC.  This was never the intention of the bitcoin developers.

From Satoshi on
 Development & Technical Discussion > Post reply ( Re: Scalability and transaction rate )

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

People need to remember Bitcoin was created to provide a way of moving electronic cash without needing to go through a trusted third party, for example a bank.  Mining is not the reason cryptocurrencies exist.

Mining is simply part of making cryptocurrencies possible.  Mining is mainly done in large mining farms using specialist hardware not available to the general public.  Just be thankful that there is still one miner manufacturer (Bitmain) selling an admittedly marginal miner to the general pubic.  

[lumeire]

People need to remember Bitcoin was created to provide a way of moving electronic cash without needing to go through a trusted third party, for example a bank.  Mining is not the reason cryptocurrencies exist.

Mining is simply part of making cryptocurrencies possible.  Mining is mainly done in large mining farms using specialist hardware not available to the general public.  Just be thankful that there is still one miner manufacturer (Bitmain) selling an admittedly marginal miner to the general pubic.  

Without mining being profitable, bitcoin wouldn't have advanced to what is now in the first place. If it won't be profitable for the long term after the halving, more likely, it'll be the start of bitcoin's downfall.

[anonymousx]

Maybe forking the wallet to stake transactions fees in the future will be healthier to earth from this damn mining, nothing is worth ruining the atmosphere even if it was peer to peer currency or the blockchain, that wont exist when we lose earth years later, it should have been POS since the beginning, salut to whoever created POS.

[ReigningPigs]

Maybe forking the wallet to stake transactions fees in the future will be healthier to earth from this damn mining, nothing is worth ruining the atmosphere even if it was peer to peer currency or the blockchain, that wont exist when we lose earth years later, it should have been POS since the beginning, salut to whoever created POS.

Bitcoin will become environmentally friendly soon, because mega-miners will start using solar panels to mine more efficiently. LOL

[BTCish]

It should be more friendly to usual guys to mine bitcoins, like that was with cpus and gpus back in a days, is it possible to change this asic race ?

[superresistant]

Bitcoin should have been ASIC resistant

There's no such thing as asic resistant.

Litecoin is ASIC resistant, you can only use GPUs, CPUs and similar hardware. You cannot use Application specific chips to mine Litecoin. You can look that up for yourself.

There's no such thing as asic resistant.

Bitcoin will become environmentally friendly soon, because mega-miners will start using solar panels to mine more efficiently. LOL

Are you a troll ?

[BTCish]

Maybe we should initiate some kind of vouting about making bitcoin asic proof here in bitcointalk to draw attention to this oppinion of most bitcointalk users, bitcoin community? Maybe some of the devs would start to think about that. I liked those good old days when everyone could mine some coins in home just with a cpu or gpu, easily ordered some more hardware, not beeing afraid of scamy companies. That is additional problem that has been huge lately when the asics came out. If you buy new gpu or cpu , you are close to 0% to get scammed, if you are buying them new, and you have a warranty. That would really help decentralise bitcoin. And another good thing would be that everyone that is mining altcoins would be able to mine btc again, more decentralised power for BTC, less hype about other coins that usually dies and are just pump and dump. Another thing could be that there is some place to register your miners, so that it is possible to put some limitiations for one user hashpower, offcorse it is possible to avoid it a little bit, by attracting friends and family members, but it should help decentralise it more. What do you guys think about making better our good old BTC, but not making 1001 altcoins everyday ?

[RichBC]

Maybe we should initiate some kind of vouting about making bitcoin asic proof here in bitcointalk to draw attention to this oppinion of most bitcointalk users, bitcoin community? Maybe some of the devs would start to think about that. I liked those good old days when everyone could mine some coins in home just with a cpu or gpu, easily ordered some more hardware, not beeing afraid of scamy companies. That is additional problem that has been huge lately when the asics came out. If you buy new gpu or cpu , you are close to 0% to get scammed, if you are buying them new, and you have a warranty. That would really help decentralise bitcoin. And another good thing would be that everyone that is mining altcoins would be able to mine btc again, more decentralised power for BTC, less hype about other coins that usually dies and are just pump and dump. Another thing could be that there is some place to register your miners, so that it is possible to put some limitiations for one user hashpower, offcorse it is possible to avoid it a little bit, by attracting friends and family members, but it should help decentralise it more. What do you guys think about making better our good old BTC, but not making 1001 altcoins everyday ?

You are in a dream World, there is no going back. As has already been said no algorithm is safe against the correct design of an ASIC solution. Also to be successful into the future we need large scale farms to handle the vast number of transactions that will be produced.

Rich