The Extreme Flaws Of Bitcoin

[RealBitcoin]

Upon my analysis and experience in the bitcoin ecosystem, I have discovered the flaws of Bitcoin, and I would like to hear your opinions about it:


1) Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

This is the biggest flaw that I can imagine. It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU. However the SHA mining alhorithm is not ASIC resistant and when ASICs became widespread, mining was centralized. This is not particularly bad because mining will either way get more efficient.

What is bad is that the nodes are not incentivized, and as mining is centralized. So that only the miners will be nodes in the future and hardly anyone will run a full node. Now because of this we cannot hardfork because the node count will shrink more and more. This really fucked up the entire bitcoin system, how can such fatal flaw not be obvious to satoshi?

2) Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

As explained above, because of this mining gets centralized very fast. It will either centralize, but this way its too fast, and it's now in 1 political zone, which threatens bitcoin's existence.

The real problem is if we did as you suggest then users would run their node only for transactions
and as soon as it is broadcasted and within a block, they would just shut down that node.

The real discussion by the OP is about having 24/7 full nodes that help distribute the security and
risk through global decentralization which is encouraged by directly incentivizing the transaction node
users. Miners are doing their jobs 24/7 and not intermittently. Nodes should be doing their jobs 24/7
as well, like guards on distant mountains keeping watch of their territory.

Average joe users do not need to nor should run full nodes, it is beyond their capabilities, but
full nodes should be incentivized in some way to encourage new capable people into the full
node field, so we can get the Bitcoin node network from 5,000 to around 50,000+.

An increase in legitimate 24/7 full nodes distributed worldwide is the goal.

My Solution:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1730728.0

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[arulbero]

1) Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

This is the biggest flaw that I can imagine. It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU. However the SHA mining alhorithm is not ASIC resistant and when ASICs became widespread, mining was centralized. This is not particularly bad because mining will either way get more efficient.

What is bad is that the nodes are not incentivized, and as mining is centralized. So that only the miners will be nodes in the future and hardly anyone will run a full node. Now because of this we cannot hardfork because the node count will shrink more and more. This really fucked up the entire bitcoin system, how can such fatal flaw not be obvious to satoshi?

If you receive many payment, it's an incentive for you to run a full node. Why should it be free? If you want to be 100% sure about your payment and check yourself for it, why should you be paid by network to do it?  

From http://www.coindesk.com/how-to-save-bitcoins-node-network-from-centralization/ :

“There are only as many nodes on the Bitcoin network as there is demand to perform independent and trustless validation of transactions.”

The node count is a function of the demand for trustless transaction validation versus the cost of running a node. As such, I’d posit that node count is also dependent upon the value being stored and transacted by bitcoin users.

While some claim that running a node today is purely altruistic, there are incentives for doing so:

Investment: If you’re highly invested in bitcoin, you may wish to support the network in order to protect that investment.
    
Performance: It is orders of magnitude faster to query a local copy of the blockchain as opposed to querying blockchain data services over the Internet.
    
Permissionlessness and censorship resistance: By receiving and sending transactions from your own node, no one has the power to stop you from doing so.
    
Privacy: If you’re querying other nodes or services about blockchain data, they can use those queries to try to deanonymize you.
    
Trustlessness: Owning a copy of the ledger that you have validated yourself means you don’t have to trust a third party to be honest about the state of the ledger.

Every payment processor/merchant gains advantage from running a full node, that means thousands of node in the world.

[amaclin]

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

[TransaDox]

It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.

This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.

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.

(Sauce)

The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.

The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.

[Fuserleer]

It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.

This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.

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.

(Sauce)

The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.

The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.

And that is where I disagree with Satoshi...if that really was his intention, then he designed Bitcoin to centralize over time.

I've been working on a centralization resistant consensus algorithm for around 3 years now and its ready for prime time.   It gets rid of the wasteful scourge that is mining, and replaces it with a lightweight, efficient, low barrier to entry, node incentivizing algorithm instead called EVEI.

[Morbid]

imho the biggest flaw is the fact that satoshi (whoever it might be) could still possess private keys to the 1kk wallet. its a sort of a trojan horse so to speak. we might never find out, but once that wallet moves..

[AgentofCoin]

It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.

This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.

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.

(Sauce)

The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.

The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.

First of all, that quote from Satoshi is predicting the centralization of Mining Pools and Mining Farms
in the future and not the centralization and loss of non-mining nodes. The burden he is referring to is the
difficulty increase in mining, not hardware capabilities. Satoshi does not address the question asked by the OP.

Because his original design was 1 CPU = 1 Vote, and he was blinded by that higher goal, he disregarded the
inevitable separation of the two systems (mining & non-mining nodes) due to different factors and thus failed
to design and account for a corresponding system to "incentive" the "transaction nodes" so to ensure a large
enough network for a truly attack resistant and globally decentralization verification network.

Your answer to the OP is essentially Satoshi designed a decentralized network only as a gimmick and intended to
make a centralized attack prone network within 3 years. Either you are correct and we are attempting to remedy this,
or you are wrong and reading more into Satoshi's words than even he knew at the time.

Your answer to the OP lacks imagination and assumes stagnation.

[cpfreeplz]

imho the biggest flaw is the fact that satoshi (whoever it might be) could still possess private keys to the 1kk wallet. its a sort of a trojan horse so to speak. we might never find out, but once that wallet moves..

Everyone says that, but what is the wallet address or wallet addresses?

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

Lots of altcoins claim to be asic-resistant. I don't know if there is any fact to that (or only stating that the current asics won't be able to mine).

[progmax]

keep a full node requires resources. Volume and fast hard drive. Good internet connection.
So it would be good to get some reward for it.

Just too bad that we're going to centralization.
I think Satoshi gave us this technology, but we need to improve it.

[Fuserleer]

imho the biggest flaw is the fact that satoshi (whoever it might be) could still possess private keys to the 1kk wallet. its a sort of a trojan horse so to speak. we might never find out, but once that wallet moves..

Everyone says that, but what is the wallet address or wallet addresses?

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

Lots of altcoins claim to be asic-resistant. I don't know if there is any fact to that (or only stating that the current asics won't be able to mine).

ASIC resistance depends purely on the algorithm in play and its design.   You can't just make a blanket statement that there is no such thing as ASIC-resistance unless you know details of all algorithms past present and future.

For example, a "data hard" consensus algorithm, should there ever be such a thing, would be very ASIC resistant providing that the data set required changed for each consensus round.  The bottleneck then becomes IO.

ASICs are good at number crunching, not number fetching

[stdset]

and when ASICs became widespread, mining was centralized

Large mining pools appeared not because ASICs became widespread, it happened long before. It's not ASICs what makes people grouping in pools, it's that their share of total hashpower is too small.
Imagine a million of miners having equal hashpower mining Bitcoin (doesn't matter they use CPUs, GPUs, ASICs or some 'alienware'), it's still only ~144 blocks which they mine together in 24 hours. Individual miner still has only about 5% chance of finding a block in a year. That's why miners unite in pools. And they started doing so long before ASICs.
Today mining is more decentralised than it was before ASICs were introduced, when some pools (like Deepbit, BTCGuild) were dominating (each at its time), having around 50% and even more of total hashpower.

[xizmax]

imho the biggest flaw is the fact that satoshi (whoever it might be) could still possess private keys to the 1kk wallet. its a sort of a trojan horse so to speak. we might never find out, but once that wallet moves..

Everyone says that, but what is the wallet address or wallet addresses?

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

Lots of altcoins claim to be asic-resistant. I don't know if there is any fact to that (or only stating that the current asics won't be able to mine).

ASIC resistance depends purely on the algorithm in play and its design.   You can't just make a blanket statement that there is no such thing as ASIC-resistance unless you know details of all algorithms past present and future.

For example, a "data hard" consensus algorithm, should there ever be such a thing, would be very ASIC resistant providing that the data set required changed for each consensus round.  The bottleneck then becomes IO.

ASICs are good at number crunching, not number fetching

True.
However, I see "ASIC resistance" used more as a blanket term for the phrase "Is it more cost effective to mine my coin using general hardware as opposed to making an 'Application Specific Integrated Circuit', whatever that 'circuit' may be" and its variants. That is, a purely economic term. Of course, if you subscribe to the supposition that a "specific circuit" will always be better than a "general circuit" for the specific case it is designed for.

[TransaDox]

True.
However, I see "ASIC resistance" used more as a blanket term for the phrase "Is it more cost effective to mine my coin using general hardware as opposed to making an 'Application Specific Integrated Circuit', whatever that 'circuit' may be" and its variants. That is, a purely economic term. Of course, if you subscribe to the supposition that a "specific circuit" will always be better than a "general circuit" for the specific case it is designed for.

Cost has nothing to do with it. The meaning is established. ASICS scale by parallelism. If an algorithm is atomic and memory light then ASICS are a good choice. They only have a fixed number of gates and creating memory out of those gates uses a lot of them.

As an example. The current hash calculation needs only the hash states and a simple counter for the on-chip memory which can then be applied to a non-changing memory of transactions-a constant, if you will. This can easily be scaled to multiple hash calculations in parallel on a single memory list of transactions.

If, instead of a counter, the hash was calculated on a varying number of transactions (1 then 2 then 3 and so on) then this is not the case. Scaling up the hash alone yields the same hash if the transaction list is constant and in order to calculate the hash for each (1,2,3...) transaction lists would require a huge amount of resources which the ASIC is unlikely to have. This method would be ASIC resistant.

[Velkro]

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

Agree to both reply's.
There is no such thing possible as asic-resistance, because people will always find way to bypass this anti-asic mechanism whatever that would be.
To the first point of 0 reward from running full node. There is reward, safe bitcoin network. You will see that when need arise, people will massively put new full nodes on their own expenses. Why? To secure bitcoin because they are either invested or admiring bitcoin technology.

[tromp]

ASICs are good at number crunching, not number fetching

DRAM is quite fetching :-)

[RealBitcoin]

It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.

This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.

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.

(Sauce)

The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.

The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.

Yea so basically in 10 years bitcoin will become a government supervized, central bank mining and node hosted currency with fractional reserve lending system patch integrated in 5 years. Good job folks!

It was a basic assumption of satoshi that mining will remain decentralized since he assumed that 1 miner will be 1 node, and everyone will mine on his PC with the CPU.

This is incorrect. Satoshi had this to say on the subject.

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.

(Sauce)

The scenarios are playing out as expected with an end game of a cartel of miners, users with web wallets and the occasional hipster running their own full node.

The idea of economic incentives for full nodes is an attempt for already committed early adopters, to squeeze a few crumbs from the miners' table in the face of the inevitable. In the end, most full nodes will be run by the miners so it is a zero-sum game.

First of all, that quote from Satoshi is predicting the centralization of Mining Pools and Mining Farms
in the future and not the centralization and loss of non-mining nodes. The burden he is referring to is the
difficulty increase in mining, not hardware capabilities. Satoshi does not address the question asked by the OP.

Because his original design was 1 CPU = 1 Vote, and he was blinded by that higher goal, he disregarded the
inevitable separation of the two systems (mining & non-mining nodes) due to different factors and thus failed
to design and account for a corresponding system to "incentive" the "transaction nodes" so to ensure a large
enough network for a truly attack resistant and globally decentralization verification network.

Your answer to the OP is essentially Satoshi designed a decentralized network only as a gimmick and intended to
make a centralized attack prone network within 3 years. Either you are correct and we are attempting to remedy this,
or you are wrong and reading more into Satoshi's words than even he knew at the time.

Your answer to the OP lacks imagination and assumes stagnation.

And this sucks a lot, perhaps in a few years I will have to switch to Litecoin or something,because this is very bad.

and when ASICs became widespread, mining was centralized

Large mining pools appeared not because ASICs became widespread, it happened long before. It's not ASICs what makes people grouping in pools, it's that their share of total hashpower is too small.
Imagine a million of miners having equal hashpower mining Bitcoin (doesn't matter they use CPUs, GPUs, ASICs or some 'alienware'), it's still only ~144 blocks which they mine together in 24 hours. Individual miner still has only about 5% chance of finding a block in a year. That's why miners unite in pools. And they started doing so long before ASICs.
Today mining is more decentralised than it was before ASICs were introduced, when some pools (like Deepbit, BTCGuild) were dominating (each at its time), having around 50% and even more of total hashpower.

But why is the majority of miners in Communist China?

Certainly private property will be very respected there when you have collectivized farming lol.

[RealBitcoin]

Nodes don't get rewards from Mining

They do get rewards. But the reward is zero. One should do more useful work for more reward.

Bitcoin mining is not ASIC resistant

There is no such thing as asic-resistance.

Agree to both reply's.
There is no such thing possible as asic-resistance, because people will always find way to bypass this anti-asic mechanism whatever that would be.
To the first point of 0 reward from running full node. There is reward, safe bitcoin network. You will see that when need arise, people will massively put new full nodes on their own expenses. Why? To secure bitcoin because they are either invested or admiring bitcoin technology.

Bullshit, that is again the "common good" fallacy. People will never act for the best of the group's interest on their own.

People always act on their own self interest.

Why should I setup a full node that would cost like 100$/month with VPS, internet, electrucity, etc, when other people can do it?

Everyone thinks like that, and then nobody does it, except a few punks, but I doubt Bitcoin can sustainably survive on a few punks's altruism.

It should have had an incentivized node system, hey not a lot, perhaps give 1% of the mining profit to the nodes, it's not a big deal, but better then 0.

Every payment processor/merchant gains advantage from running a full node, that means thousands of node in the world.

Nonsense,  people can just verify their transaction through 10 different random SPV nodes, that should be as accurate as a full node.

Besides if in the future some transaction verification system becomes available, then it's fucked.

Nodes will have 0 incentive to run, and the netwok will collapse.

[amaclin]

Why should I setup a full node that would cost like 100$/month with VPS, internet, electrucity, etc, when other people can do it?

You should not (unless you have reasons to do it)

I doubt Bitcoin can sustainably survive on a few punks's altruism.

It will not survive. Leave it.

[xizmax]

True.
However, I see "ASIC resistance" used more as a blanket term for the phrase "Is it more cost effective to mine my coin using general hardware as opposed to making an 'Application Specific Integrated Circuit', whatever that 'circuit' may be" and its variants. That is, a purely economic term. Of course, if you subscribe to the supposition that a "specific circuit" will always be better than a "general circuit" for the specific case it is designed for.

Cost has nothing to do with it. The meaning is established. ASICS scale by parallelism. If an algorithm is atomic and memory light then ASICS are a good choice. They only have a fixed number of gates and creating memory out of those gates uses a lot of them.

As an example. The current hash calculation needs only the hash states and a simple counter for the on-chip memory which can then be applied to a non-changing memory of transactions-a constant, if you will. This can easily be scaled to multiple hash calculations in parallel on a single memory list of transactions.

If, instead of a counter, the hash was calculated on a varying number of transactions (1 then 2 then 3 and so on) then this is not the case. Scaling up the hash alone yields the same hash if the transaction list is constant and in order to calculate the hash for each (1,2,3...) transaction lists would require a huge amount of resources which the ASIC is unlikely to have. This method would be ASIC resistant.

I disagree, the decision to build specific hardware is a purely economic one - as it has been in all industries so far.
If a one percent increase in performance over generalized hardware is a cost effective move, specific hardware will be designed and built.

[DumbFruit]

It is not true that there is no such thing as ASIC-resistance.

Algorithms can be formulated that are not simple to manufacture ASICs for, like the Cuckoo Cycle. The reasoning goes that the more difficult it is to make an ASIC, the less of an advantage it will have against general consumer-grade computers. On the flipside, the complication raises the barrier to entry of competing ASIC manufacturers, thereby potentially centralizing the ASIC suppliers.

More importantly, it misses the forest for the trees. ASICs are not the core reason for centralization of mining, it doesn't even appear to be a significant factor. The most significant cause is comparative advantage in energy costs, which is just as advantageous even if you had an ASIC-proof algorithm.

While it's strictly true that running a node is not rewarded, rewarding them would not aid in decentralization. After all, it's trivial to run more than one node in a centralized manner, and a reward would only encourage that behavior.

Centralization is evidence that operating a node is non-trivial and that centralization offers a significant advantage and reward.

Ideally, we would like to see the cost of mining exceed the block reward in order to drive out centralized high-overhead competitors, while the charitable miners remain, while simultaneously hoping that the Work is high enough to secure the blockchain. When the problem is phrased like that, it's apparent that ASIC-resistance and node reward won't get you there.

In order for this to happen, casual users must be willing and able to operate a mining node while investing trivial time and resources to do so. In this regard, ASIC-resistance could be useful because it could negate the need to purchase specialized hardware. On the other hand consumer-grade ASICs could potentially make POW easier to offload from their devices. Regardless, just like they aren't the most significant factor leading to mining centralization, ASICs are not the most significant reason nodes are not trivial to operate.

The elephant in the room is the size of the blockchain. For a casual user, it's slow and tedious to download and verify, and it takes up enough space to be annoying. There is also the problem that the software is still not settled and prone to potentially consensus breaking behavior, meaning a node cannot be left to run without any user intervention.

1.) Running a node and mining should be unprofitable.
    a.) Mining should be done charitably.
        a.) Providing work should be trivial and easy to get started.
            a.) Bitcoin's consensus code needs to be settled indefinitely.
            b.) The blockchain needs to become easier and cheaper to download.
        b.) Some sort of religion. (Lottery?)

ASIC-resistance, higher inflation, POW substitutes, and larger block sizes have all been proposed as ways to achieve a higher quantity of decentralized nodes. ASIC-resistance is at best an incomplete solution. The rest make the problem worse.

That's my 2 cents, anyway.