Does anyone agree or disagree with this presumption of mine?
Of course I disagree with it, otherwise I wouldn't own any Bitcoin. The marginal cost over time of Bitcoin shows an ever increasing percent being energy costs. This means sha256d will likely be commoditized. There is no Chinese monopoly after that happens.
r0ach I like you, but you wrote nonsense.
Amazing to me that you still don't understand why Satoshi's design will always centralize.
One crucial point you are not getting your mind wrapped around, is that the need to set a block size to control the level of transaction fees earned, is a power vacuum that forces an oligarchy to take control over the mining. ArticMine and I had explained that in great detail. I also I summarized that point again in the "Bitcoin IS basically DESTROYED" thread.
Orthogonal to the prior paragraph, you also don't seem to understand that commoditization and leveling the access to ASICs can't stop the centralization and concentration of Bitcoin mining into an eventual oligarchy of a dozen or so ASIC mining farms. Even if we assume that ASIC mining farms in China don't enjoy an unfair advantage due to ostensibly receiving State subsidized cheap (or free) electricity due to corruption, the centralization of Satoshi's profitable proof-of-work design remains inexorable and unavoidable (and regardless of geographical location of its occurrence). I had already explained why in great technical detail in the
my decentralization and your "Satoshi didn't solve the BGP" threads, and here follows an incomplete summary quoted from the "Bitcoin IS basically DESTROYED" thread:
Most of these Chinese mining firms are pools, so like most pools that are extremely big, if they get too big, miners will hop to a different one.
It isn't just the pools that are the problem, but that the mining farms are large and concentrating the 51+% amongst a few oligarchs. This will only grow more centralized over time, because TPTB_need_war explained in his technical analysis, that profitable proof-of-work always accrues over time to maximum economies-of-scale. There are several reasons for that including propagation advantages of being the first to win more blocks, so don't waste hashrate mining on the wrong fork for a short period, which over time gradually depletes the other miners of relative profits. It is more complex than that. You need to read his entire analysis to understand.
From the beginning, this has always been a possibility: A banker who can effectively create unlimited fiat money can easily acquire all the mining infrastructure and control the network hash power (Of course he don't need to do so through one single entity, it will look like that many people control the mining infrastructure, but when a vote happens people will discover that over 90% of hash power is controlled by a few entity and can go against majority of people's will)
PoW method is vulnerable to large capital taking over. This is the nature of PoW, so some people have suggested to use a PoW+PoS hybrid model for the future mining, but without major hash power, how do you implement this change into the network? Why miners should give up their dominance power today? It seems only a fork or re-design of a new coin can start afresh
There are several technical factors you need to take into account. For example, the greater the hashrate (of the pool if not solo mining), the more often the miner is mining on the block that won't be orphaned. The propagation delay of block announcements (or any group with 33+% of the hashrate colluding to delay block announcements, which was explained the research paper
Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable), means that those with more hashrate are more profitable given the same unitized hardware and electricity costs. Ditto that every miner (or pool) has the same cost of validation regardless of their hashrate. This means that even if everything is fair and equal, naturally over time the mining will centralize to an oligarchy. This is a property of profitable proof-of-work and there is nothing that can be done to fix it.
TPTB_need_war made an entire thread about this to discuss it in detail. The flaws of proof-of-stake are also discussed
in that thread and I urge Minecache and others not to turn this thread into a PoS vs. PoW discussion. Bring the PoS vs. PoW debate over to that other thread, other such thread if you want to debate that.
What TPTB_need_war concluded is that the only design that can remain economically decentralized is UNprofitable proof-of-work. This means that every spender would send some PoW share with each transaction. The details are complex and it can't work the same as Satoshi's design. Most of the details are already explained in various posts that TPTB_need_war has made spread out over many different threads. But he is not implementing this design right now, because he is busy on the other programming priorities I mentioned.
Any way, there is no solution to that will remain immune to the fact that humans are manipulated like a herd when it comes to politics. And they are lazy. And they are easily duped by the elite. So even if TPTB_need_war implements his solution, it is likely that the people will still end up sending their PoW shares to an oligarchy of "pools" even though unprofitable PoW means no one gains by using a pool. People are just dumb. But we might have a fighting chance with this redesign of Satoshi's flawed design. Many people have criticized this UNprofitable PoW thinking it won't work because there is not the proper incentives and Nash equilibirum. TPTB_need_war says they are wrong and he will eventually publish a whitepaper to better explain all the details.
I don't know where we will end up with all this. But my guess is the elite will win and the people will lose. But some people are working on hard. Please don't disrespect TPTB_need_war. His is working as furiously as he can, and no one helps him. Maybe one day he will get some assistance and be recognized for his efforts. But he doesn't care! He is doing what he is doing as a labor of love and because he loves the challenge.
Of course, China being the top producers of Bitcoin isn't even a Bitcoin problem in the first place. It's a symptom of China controlling manufacturing for everything on earth as corporations use their slaves for global labor arbitrage.
China being the current location of the centralization and concentration of Bitcoin mining is irrelevant to the point that profitable proof-of-work will always centralize into an oligarchy and thus offers us no long-term advantage to remove the evils and risks we normally have with fiat. The powers-that-be will be able to enforce capital controls even more effectively on Bitcoin transactions with the oligarchy control over mining, as compared to cash fiat transactions. So don't assume your Bitcoin can't be confiscated by the government. With control over the protocol with the oligarchy on mining, the powers-that-be can do what ever they wish. If the masses who are using Bitcoin don't stop using Bitcoin, then no one will be able to stop the-powers-that-be from doing what they want to Bitcoin's protocol given the oligarchy control over mining. No rational person is arguing that Bitcoin will stop functioning or that the price will collapse to 0 (although the chance of that happen does exist but quite small chance), but rather we are saying that
Bitcoin as a decentralized asset which could be relied on as being impervious to control by any one, is "basically destroyed". All the clueless n00bs (or disingenuous trolls) who build strawmen arguments accusing of us saying that Bitcoin is destroyed and won't function, are just inane arguments which deflect the focus away from our factual point about the aspect of Bitcoin that is actually destroyed.
What Europe typically did in the past was cancel the fiat currency quite often, as way to force the existing cash under mattresses to come back to the banks for exchanging to the newly issued currency, wherein the State could confiscate most of it. At least we always had gold as a money that the government couldn't cancel, but now the pervasive "Big T false flag" police state spreading all over the globe means one can't even transport gold any more without it at great risk of being confiscated under the false allegation of money laundering or terrorism.
We are headed into a clusterfucked world. I sure hope you all stop deluding yourselves.
