Would a fork to SHA-3 be usefull because of the destroyed mining market?

[Gyrsur]

It's obvious more than 50 percent of the Bitcoin hashpower is in the hands of chinese operators. in the last weeks/months the situation escalated because of the near halving event.

Should we consider a fork to SHA-3 even if the price will crash to double or maybe single digits afterwards?

[achow101]

It's obvious more than 50 percent of the Bitcoin hashpower is in the hands of chinese operators. in the last week the the situation escalated because of the near halving event.

Why is it a problem that the hash power is in a group of people's hands? Just because those people are in the same group does not mean that they are working with each other to create some evil plan.

Should we consider a fork to SHA-3 even if the price will crash to double or maybe single digits afterwards?

No, because that fork would no longer be secure. Forks trigger with miners, and the miners would not want to fork to something that would render all of their equipment obsolete. Then that fork would be reliant on a much much smaller hashrate as the new miners would be mining with GPUs or CPUs. Or if they did agree, then in the months before hand (because such a hard fork would need to be announced and planned way ahead of time) they would work on getting equipment set up so that when the fork does happen, there is essentially no difference in their stake of hash power. The only difference would be that other users would then be able to join and mine as well and the entry barrier would be lower.

IMO the only good reason to move to another algorithm would be if that algorithm was quantum resistant and that SHA256 was determined to be unsafe. That would be if a vulnerability was discovered in SHA256 which would give people unfair advantages in mining, e.g. preimage attacks or hash collisions.

[theymos]

I don't think that the security impact would be catastrophic. All we need is for the hashrate of legitimate miners to be greater than any likely attacker, and I think that this would become the case only a day or two after the PoW change, as soon as ordinary people start mining again in decent numbers.

But I don't think that there's any actual value in switching the PoW algorithm right now. It's likely that any new algorithm will get ASICs again in less than 6 months. (And if ASICs can be avoided - a very difficult task -, then the network will instead probably become dominated by botnets, and I don't know that it's good to rely on botnet operators for security. Though perhaps botnets would tend to be less centralized than ASICs, at least.) IMO it's better to stick with "the devil you know" unless the current miners actually abuse their position. But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

[Gyrsur]

IMO it's better to stick with "the devil you know" unless the current miners actually abuse their position. But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

nice!  

thanks theymos!

[Jet Cash]

If America stopped trying to destroy China, Russia, Eastern Europe and the Arabs, and concentrated on expanding the US economy, then they could overtake the Chinese miners ( amongst other things).

[mezzomix]

But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

Does a blockchain fork of ~3 (>= 75% of the hashpower) miners but without a supermajority (95%) of the users qualify as abuse?!  

[tromp]

IMO it's better to stick with "the devil you know" unless the current miners actually abuse their position. But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

It doesn't have to be one or the other.

You can choose to half the influence of existing miners by adopting a second PoW,
which could be memory-bound rather than compute-bound.
With each type of PoW independently targetting a 20 min interval you maintain a 10 min average.

While botnets would contribute to the memory-bound PoW and overall decentralization,
I would not expect them to dominate, especially if GPUs sport much better performance than CPUs.

[fronti]

But if the majority of current miners do abuse their position, then a PoW change is immediately warranted.

Does a blockchain fork of ~3 (>= 75% of the hashpower) miners but without a supermajority (95%) of the users qualify as abuse?!  

and you are perhaps not sure if these are 3 miners  (as persons/opinions/minds) or the 3 mining pools are managed by one person..
we did not know much about the diversity of the "miners"..
This is, in my opinion, the problem. We need more influence from more different persons even it is then more complicate to get consensus

[Gyrsur]

the only way to kick this chinese majority out of the game is to increase the importance of low ping times during mining somehow. then you have they by their balls.

but how?

this means you should have the majority of full nodes in other parts of the world and let the chinese blocks be often to late so they will be rejected then because they are obsolet.

somwhow in this way maybe it will work.

[gmaxwell]

I shake my head in sadness at how hard decentralized things are to reason about.

On these days I wish we'd all switched to speaking lojban.

"Low ping times"-- what does that mean?  A ping time has a destination.  Low ping times to _what_?   Miners in china do not have high cosmically absolute ping time, no such thing exists-- the idea that it does is an artifact of centralized thinking.  They may have high ping times to _you_, but they have low ping times to each other. From their perspective it is you, someone far from china, which has the high ping time.

What is the concrete effect of this?  In the Bitcoin consensus you need to have low latency towards the greatest mass of cooperating hash-power. Amplifying the importance of low delay, e.g. by decreasing the interblock interval, would increase the profitability of operations geographically near that center of mess and decrease it elsewhere.

Exactly the opposite effect you hope to achieve.

[Come-from-Beyond]

It's obvious more than 50 percent of the Bitcoin hashpower is in the hands of chinese operators. in the last weeks/months the situation escalated because of the near halving event.

Should we consider a fork to SHA-3 even if the price will crash to double or maybe single digits afterwards?

NSA claims that SHA-256 is insecure - https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/02/08/nsa-switches-to-quantum-resistant-cryptography/. So is double SHA-256 (my opinion). In other words we should consider a fork to any other hashing function with 384+ bits in a hash.

[tromp]

NSA claims that SHA-256 is insecure - https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/02/08/nsa-switches-to-quantum-resistant-cryptography/. So is double SHA-256 (my opinion).

It's not the hash function that's quantum vulnerable.

It's the Hashcash proof-of-work, which gives us the huge unstructured search space
that Grover's algorithm is designed for.

In other words we should consider a fork to any other hashing function with 384+ bits in a hash.

Swapping out one hash function in Hashcash for another doesn't help.

You need to go beyond Hashcash to be quantum resistant.

[Come-from-Beyond]

NSA claims that SHA-256 is insecure - https://www.deepdotweb.com/2016/02/08/nsa-switches-to-quantum-resistant-cryptography/. So is double SHA-256 (my opinion).

It's not the hash function that's quantum vulnerable.

It's the Hashcash proof-of-work, which gives us the huge unstructured search space
that Grover's algorithm is designed for.

In other words we should consider a fork to any other hashing function with 384+ bits in a hash.

Swapping out one hash function in Hashcash for another doesn't help.

You need to go beyond Hashcash to be quantum resistant.

That's right, but it's a too sophisticated topic to discuss here, I point to the fact that 128-bit search space (for any 256-bit hash function) is too small from NSA's point of view. And Bitcoin should switch from SHA-256 anyway.

[Gyrsur]

What is the concrete effect of this?  In the Bitcoin consensus you need to have low latency towards the greatest mass of cooperating hash-power. Amplifying the importance of low delay, e.g. by decreasing the interblock interval, would increase the profitability of operations geographically near that center of mess and decrease it elsewhere.

Exactly the opposite effect you hope to achieve.

really nice if it is true! than the situation is more worse than I expected. what will you do against it?

I mean what targets are reached in 7 years?

mass adoption --> negative
decentralisation --> negative
more fair wealth distribution --> negative

oh I forgot to mention this Bilderberg Satoshi Round Table inner circle meeting!  

with bullshit preachers like Ver.

EDIT: I was a bit unfair because with technology alone mankind is not able to solve social issues.

[johnyj]

Change POW is suicide because of the existing of arbitraging

As soon as the Pow changed, mining cost will crash to much lower level than exchange rate, then people will mine coins and immediately sell for a huge profit, or borrow coins to sell on exchanges and mine them back for a huge profit, eventually the exchange rate will crash to the mining cost

Of course if no coins can be mined in future, that change might be possible, but the miners will get mining income from fees, so it should basically follow the same pattern

[sloopy]

What is the concrete effect of this?  In the Bitcoin consensus you need to have low latency towards the greatest mass of cooperating hash-power. Amplifying the importance of low delay, e.g. by decreasing the interblock interval, would increase the profitability of operations geographically near that center of mess and decrease it elsewhere.

Exactly the opposite effect you hope to achieve.

really nice if it is true! than the situation is more worse than I expected. what will you do against it?

I mean what targets are reached in 7 years?

mass adoption --> negative
decentralisation --> negative
more fair wealth distribution --> negative

oh I forgot to mention this Bilderberg Satoshi Round Table inner circle meeting!  

with bullshit preachers like Ver.

EDIT: I was a bit unfair because with technology alone mankind is not able to solve social issues.

I do not think the powers which control bitcoin want the things you listed and it is a problem with bitcoin today. The ongoing block arguments have taken so much of the great mind's time for whatever reasons.

Mass Adoption
Decentralization
fair wealth distribution

Consider this, a new form of pow will never be dropped in a day with the mainstream media reporting to everyone run to your pc now, download makebitcoin.exe and by some unique ID everyone has a fair shot to accumulate coin. If that was possible you would gain mass adoption and decentralization. Granted there are many caveats, but it would be there in a much larger way than it has been. Giving everyone who knows the term bitcoin today an opportunity to become a level playing field would grant those things, along with other issues, but I think most would agree those are the priorities, along with a safe and secure client.

Bitcoin is already controlled by whales pushing price, china controlling the mining, and like it or not core controlling the code.

How long before the same people who control those aspects now would control those same aspects again after such an event?
Would the Joe sixpacks immediately sell their coins for the low prices bitcoin would see for a year, two, or more before recovering from such an event? It would recover, the price always recovers. The concept is too hardened not to recover.

Low income people will only ever be able to take advantage of low fees, but poor people cannot trade bitcoin, hell most people cannot trade bitcoin and make money. It is a collective who move the markets.

True fair wealth distribution will not happen, but man it would certainly provide a window to the status quo. Would it make the world a better place? I think it would for many people on a small scale, for a while, but not the end game, not the next 200 years.

I do wish the bitcoin elite could see that the inequalities of the haves versus the have nots are not always due to work ethic, or in simpler terms, people that are not just as intelligent and morally sound. There are many people who would do great things with an equal opportunity to do so, and more people doing great things is much better than more bitcoin being taken from more people and dropped int he hands of few, or the people who were lucky enough to learn about the project in 2010 - 2012.

I do not agree with a pure socialistic outlook, and I do not agree with handouts. I think everyone should earn what they have, but I also believe at some point in the far distant future we will learn to see what people can achieve with education moving forward at 14 or 40. The people who have and care will learn that it isn't always about someone's past actions, or money they inherited, but future actions and potential they possess which will open the floodgates. It is the future where bitcoin will become what I think most people want, not the people who already have and simply want more.

Do not get me wrong. I know there have been years of work put in by many people and I would never insinuate those people do not deserve their rewards, but in a system where it is easy enough to recognize people have plenty shouldn't we consider what paying it forward in bitcoin would be like?

Imagine taking someone who knows nothing about cryptography but years of experience in another field and the drive that equals your peers and teaching them. Maybe some other areas suffer for a while as this base of people is being built and unleashed. A true global core of deserving people being taught by pioneers rather than a group of investors, programmers, and people who were lucky continuing to push one or three agendas.

That would be yet another defining characteristic which could change the world for the better and I think could be the best to come of all. Teaching the bitcoin universe to fish. It doesn't take long to weed out the lazy, greedy, people who are only in it for themselves.

Unfortunately, then bitcoin elite wouldn't be so elite, so obviously, they will not allow such to happen.
The largest pools bitmain, f2pool, etc will continue to make more money than they could ever need, the programmers will continue to talk down their nose to struggling students, and the whales along with the corporations will continue to manipulate the markets.

If someone wanted to make a real change with bitcoin they would have to create a plan to move beyond the school yard antics, high school bullying, and using Daddy's money to make more money, they would have to look at what it would take to actually provide skills and opportunities real people can see as a possibility today, tomorrow, and that would be the goal going forward. Not giving money to people, giving opportunity.

Bitcoin cannot be destroyed. It can be made better or worse, but it will not be stopped. What choices can you make to bring more people in who care about it having a bigger impact on the world?