Hi all,
I was wondering if I could get some feedback on an idea that popped up, mining related.
I'm going to ask to make some assumptions here. The idea is that, by grouping miners, the mining process is distributed, effectively raising the amount of transactions per second. Grouping in this case is not the same as a pool, each miner in each group still would aim for his own profit. Also note that it's not about splitting the network, the P2P network remains intact, it's about distributing mining capacity.
Suppose that it would be possible to group all current Bitcoin miners (say, a protocol groups the current population of miners into two groups, group 1(g1) and group 2 (g2)), like Kademlia but with two buckets (could be more if the number of miners increase, but let's stick to two for now). Each group mines specific transactions (transactions are labelled 1 (t1) or 2 (t2) (t1s go to g1, etc)), and the same protocol also ensures that both groups can submit their found block simultaneously without creating a fork. I'm aware that's not really possible in Bitcoin's current blockchain implementation, but my question is about the grouping of miners, would that be a no-go from a centralization perspective? Thanks.
Um, okay, hold on;
If a miner is mining by itself, its solo mining, which is a no go.
If a miner is grouped with others miners and then is pointed to mining, that is a pool.
When you take x miners and you group them, you centralize those x miners.
So let me see if i understand what you are suggesting;
The BTC transaction that are not yet confirmed are put in a pool, and then groups of miners would submit their blocks, but not the same blocks as the other group. They would all simultaneously try to generate blocks, on the same chain. And all pools can submit blocks simultaneously, without creating a fork. ?
If i understood correctly, then this is my answer;
That is already, exactly how it works.
So if you want to decentralize, you'll want to make more, smaller pools instead of less, bigger pools. This is where the community is at, at the moment. The problem is that new users flock to the bigger pools, because thats a innate human response (survival) even if its a bad choice (for them, for everyone, except the pool they give their hashrate to).
