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[BurtW]

@Burt that's a hell of a lot of words and sentences to say "because". Try and fit some actual content into your posts please, you're wasting space in the debate if you're going to take up that much space to say "No need to argue"

In this thread you have made many many posts proposing a change to the PoW algorithm that will never happen.  So who is posting a lot of words to no end?  Who is it again that is wasting space arguing the same points over and over on dozens of threads?  There is no need to argue.  Bitcoin is what it is.  You can accept that or not.  You are the one wasting your time and "wasting space" arguing with the BU crowd.  Don't you ever just get tired of it all?  Especially when it is all so totally pointless?  Just buy some BTC, watch it appreciate over time, hold it till you need the value back, and relax.

[1715097232]

1715097232

[BurtW]

If we change PoW, we change who the miners are. Don't you like that idea? I do

We all like ideas that are never, ever, ever going to happen.

[Carlton Banks]

Burt, you keep saying "it'll never happen". Explain why, instead of repeating-repeating-repeating like a brainwashing propagandist

[BurtW]

Burt, you keep saying "it'll never happen". Explain why, instead of repeating-repeating-repeating like a brainwashing propagandist

Don't need or want to.  I have already expressed that it is my opinion.  My opinion it just that and it does not matter one bit.  If any of this shit happens I will be wrong and you can come back and gloat all you want.  Later dude.

[jonald_fyookball]

Burt, you keep saying "it'll never happen". Explain why, instead of repeating-repeating-repeating like a brainwashing propagandist

Don't need or want to.  I have already expressed that it is my opinion.  My opinion it just that and it does not matter one bit.  If any of this shit happens I will be wrong and you can come back and gloat all you want.  Later dude.

Carlton is loony.  Not sure why he thinks something 10x as radical would get consensus when the community couldn't even agree on a 2mb block. lolz.

[Carlton Banks]

So no reasoning against what I'm propounding, and refusing to explain what reasoning lies behind saying "because" over and over again?

......except "people didn't want x, therefore people will never choose y"? Curious arguing, gentlemen

[franky1]

If we change PoW, we change who the miners are. Don't you like that idea? I do

if PoW changes.. then it is just backdating security of bitcoin temporarily and in a few months the pools will be back where they are at the top but this time with a new asic/machine to make block creation more efficient than 'solo mining'.

EG if it went to a 1node 1 vote.. pools will simply make an asic/machine that acts like several clustered nodes syndicated together.

end result is just a couple months of drama until things are in the same position as now.

edit: (couple seconds running scenarios in my head)
infact less than a couple months. because the time it would take to get majority node acceptance of a new mining algo/difficulty/hashing rule..
pools would have the time to design the efficient solution to be ontop right when it activates.. thus solving nothing

[pedrog]

If we change PoW, we change who the miners are. Don't you like that idea? I do

if PoW changes.. then it is just backdating security of bitcoin temporarily and in a few months the pools will be back where they are at the top but this time with a new asic/machine to make block creation more efficient than 'solo mining'.

EG if it went to a 1node 1 vote.. pools will simply make an asic/machine that acts like several clustered nodes syndicated together.

end result is just a couple months of drama until things are in the same position as now.

edit: (couple seconds running scenarios in my head)
infact less than a couple months. because the time it would take to get majority node acceptance of a new mining algo/difficulty/hashing rule..
pools would have the time to design the efficient solution to be ontop right when it activates.. thus solving nothing

I don't think it's that simple, this may cause irreparable damage to bitcoin, plus who will trust the chain that is not backed by millions of dollars in hardware and development?

[bitbunnny]

This could be just another cathastrophic annoucement made for creating panic among users but with no real background. And the result could be like with ETF, so nothing worth mentioning.
I simply don't think miners would go for it and waist their time.

[dinofelis]

So no reasoning against what I'm propounding, and refusing to explain what reasoning lies behind saying "because" over and over again?

I told you already: because ANY hard fork that is not 95% consensus will make 2 coins, of which the one "leaving" is the alt coin, and because the large majority of miners wants to keep 1MB blocks and transaction scarcity, because the fees are needed to pay for the PoW in the future.

Miners have to follow the market in a hard fork, at least, if the PoW algorithm is the same so that they have the right hardware.  But for that to happen, a hard fork is needed first.  Now, the thing going for bitcoin is its brand name, so nobody is going to fork off without being able to get the brand name ; and miners are not going to help him.  For the current miners, status quo is best, so they will keep with status quo and keep the brand name as long as they can.  Any forking, with alternative mining, with PoS or whatever, will be an alt coin without the reassuring security and continuity of what the current miners are continuing to make.  Most users will keep using the old system, and the "real" bitcoin.  

So it is essentially impossible to hardfork and get the bitcoin brand name without the current miners.  Yes, you can create your alt coin and see what it does in the market.  For a PoS fork, you ONLY have to write new code.  For an alternative PoW fork, you have to have sufficient PoW in the new algorithm available to garantee the security of your altcoin if it pretends to be a bitcoin fork, which is near to impossible.

This is why it won't happen, until bitcoin's brand name is essentially eroded.  However, when that is the case, why forking, and not using another crypto that has the features you want all together ?  

[Bergmann_Christoph]

Too simplistic gentlemen


And it's being discussed here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0


I am strongly in favour of switching the PoW hashing algorithm to Keccak, CuckooCycle, Equihash, or whatever has the best balance of proven hash algorithm & difficulty  to develop an ASIC. And I think it should be done before any BU hardfork, any miners unhappy with that should've thought realistically that this day would come.


ASICs begone. The CPU mining revolution will be beautiful, Satoshi warned against the development of sole-purpose SHA256 hashing ASIC processors, and today we can see why.



All Bitcoiners will mine BTC with their regular PC again. Let's do it.

Do it! You'll have fun with being broken by Ethereum-Miners, China government supercomputers, NSA supercomputers, Botnets. If you want a way for Bitcoin to fall in the hands of government, then a PoW change is a nice idea.

[iamnotback]

Fact is the Miners will not agree with segwit because it is designed to bankrupt them by moving almost all transactions offline.
This will bankrupt the miners and put them out of business.

This new PoW proposal, at least is admitting their goal is to put the ASICS guys out of work.
You can bet any hard fork with a new PoW is going to have Segwit already activated so LN can be used immediately.
(Funny Core is not afraid of this Hard Fork.)  

Blockstream/segwit/LN supporters are dirty as can be, but at least they are consistently dirty.  

Funny thing is , you also are putting the less than 30% mining pools that supported segwit out of business.
They have no choice now but to join BTU, or be discarded with the other asics miners by your new PoW Algo.

I figured that is why they won't prioritize malleability fix and why they need unlimited block sizes. But unlimited block sizes is a power vacuum that awards a mining cartel.

Also changing the PoW algorithm means someone might secretly have an ASIC advantage already, or someone might get one before everyone else and use it to attack the network.

I don't think the token holders will agree to a PoW algorithm change. Core will be defeating themselves.

Thus we have a standoff. Neither side can compromise because there is no compromise that works for both sides. Core wants massive scaling but with centralized LN hubs for their bankster friends. BTU wants limited scaling at what ever their mining cartel can handle on chain. Neither are decentralized.

It is a clusterfuck. I bought ETH. LTC and XMR are other options.

[iamnotback]

"The decision will be made by the miners"


That's right Burt, but not nuanced enough

Incorrect.

If we refuse to buy BTU tokens which appear in their blocks, then their mining power is useless if they can't sell their mined tokens. We the token holders can choose to honor 1MB limit protocol.

However, given many users can't get their transactions into 1MB, I would say BTU might win. But I have no confidence in BTU's technical competence, thus I may not want their tokens.

The miners can split between those who honor only 1MB blocks and those who honor larger blocks. Thus the coinbase minted in the BTU protocol are not spendable (do not exist) on the BTC protocol blockchain.

But there is an issue of difficulty attacks:

What I suspect will happen is that we'll eventually get a block larger than 1 MB in the blockchain and Core will adapt their codebase to permit its users track the most-work chain.  In other words, there will likely be no split--just an anticlimactic network upgrade to larger blocks.  In such a case, who wins the bet?  Or is the bet only valid in the case where there is a persistent split?

It's absurd to think that there is not a single miner who will continue operating under the old network rules -- and that's all that it takes to create a persistent split.

It's seemingly this very lack of critical thought that leads to BU not being able to make even minor changes to the client without introducing bugs and vulnerabilities.

Alright: how about a small side bet for us little fish?  I bet you 1 BTC that--should the most-work blockchain include a single block larger than 1 MB--that no minority chain will make it beyond 2100 blocks (~2 weeks and the length of a difficulty adjustment) without either a difficulty reset or a change in the proof-of-work algorithm.

BTU appears to be ready to actually attack we the token holders. Fucking amazing. Very careless. Happy I hedged by selling some BTC.

[dinofelis]

None of all this is going to happen.  Miners want small blocks and a fighting fee market.  The cartel you are talking about with large blocks only sets in with such incredibly large blocks, that they are out of the question in the next few years ; if you want a mining cartel, the telephone between mining pool bosses is a much more useful device than multi-GB blocks that saturate small miner's network links and most of the user nodes.

Bitcoin is already centralized, or on the brink of being cartel-centralized.  Come on.  5 guys have more than 50% of hash rate under their control.  10 guys, more than 75%.  The only thing that keeps bitcoin still "decentralized" over these guys, is their mutual understanding that they shouldn't show public agreement ; and maybe their egos.  This is why they fight or mimick to fight.

I love that mining pool that dedicated 75% of its hash rate to BU, when BU said that they would fork at 75% hash rate.  Giving 75% to BU is the perfect move to do if you want status quo.  BU rises, you lower ; BU lowers, you rise. 

Miners want status quo.  All of them.  So they mimick divergence in opinion, which makes you believe bitcoin is still decentralized over 10 guys that can't agree.

[Amph]

but this is like saying fuck off to million of dollars invested in mining by chinese, i don't think they will ever agree

And segwit supporting BitFury won't be too happy either.

It makes no difference, the ASIC miners should have seen this coming.

If they don't do what the majority of users want, and choose a foolish hard fork instead, then that's just a risk of the business they're in. I won't be crying for them, the miners have behaved like a cartel.

And if Bitfury really wanted to be responsible to the Bitcoin network, they could have sold chips or miners to the public, which they only ever did with their early 55nm mining ASIC chips. They have themselves to blame, their strategy could have been much better.

The only thing a POW change will achieve is a temporary reset to a level playing field.
People start building their own mining farms.
Normal users will have little chance of solving a block on their own, so they join a mining pool.
The economics of low electricity cost and real estate space gives some farms an advantage.
It becomes economically viable to design a specialised computer to be more efficient at the task at hand.
A new mining oligarchy forms as a result.

this new algo, have the potential to be anti-asic, in the sense that the cost of asic would be too high to develop one tooe arly with current bitcoin value, therefore could put a layer for gpu mining again and a better distribution

unless chinese have already plenty of gpu to mine this with, they will probably be left behind here, not to mention that resetting the network is dangerous, for 51% anyway....

[Carlton Banks]

If any of you can explain why 95% of users of Bitcoin would not (given enough time) accept a fork where they can:

• Take back control from ASIC miners
• Become the new miners, with their regular CPUs
• Activate Segwit

....then I'd be interested to hear it. Keep it short gentlemen, it's almost as if you believe writing dozens of paragraphs saying "it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen..." is a substitute for an actual reason Who are you trying to convince, us, or yourselves

[kiklo]

Take back control from ASIC miners
Destroy BTC Security During Switch, leaving it at the Mercy of Botnets (Causing a Market crash)

Become the new miners, with their regular CPUs
Destroy BTC Security During Switch, leaving it at the Mercy of Botnets (Causing a Market crash)

Activate Segwit
Giving Future Control of BTC directly to Blockstream/Bankers/LN Permanently


 


FYI:
#1 reason not to Switch BTC's PoW is because you Segwit Paid Shills want everyone too. 

[dinofelis]

If any of you can explain why 95% of users of Bitcoin would not (given enough time) accept a fork where they can:

• Take back control from ASIC miners
• Become the new miners, with their regular CPUs
• Activate Segwit

....then I'd be interested to hear it. Keep it short gentlemen, it's almost as if you believe writing dozens of paragraphs saying "it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen... it's not gonna happen..." is a substitute for an actual reason Who are you trying to convince, us, or yourselves

By far the simplest thing to do would be to implement Proof of Stake.  No more miners.  Bitcoin's holders certifying their transactions by themselves.  If there's something able to "save bitcoin", it would be a passage to Proof of Stake.  It has problems too, but at the moment, less than Proof of Work.  Proof of work was good to distribute coins.  But bitcoin is sufficiently distributed right now, and proof of work is not distributing it any more, and is the MOST HORRIBLE WAY thinkable to cryptographically secure a ledger.  Proof of work is OK to burn seigniorage.  To waste "unfair gains".  

To switch to Proof of stake, there ONLY needs to be written the code.  It is secure from the start, because only stake holders can cryptographically SIGN blocks.  No "attackers" can do anything.  Much, much, much less insecure than PoW.  So just any dev team could write the code to have a PoS bitcoin fork.  No need for miners of the new kind.  No fall of bitcoin security.  PoS is intrinsically secure and nodes take back the power they left to miners in PoW.

But it will not happen.  Because in order to do so, you have to LAUNCH AN ALT COIN.  And the bitcoin brand name is the only thing that gives bitcoin value.  So if "switching to an alt coin" was what bitcoin users need to do, THEY ALREADY CAN DO SO, alt coins exist.

Bitcoin users stick to bitcoin because it is called bitcoin, and that's it.  If it is not called bitcoin, they won't value it.  Making a proof of stake fork of bitcoin,  OR JUST ANY OTHER FORK that doesn't TAKE AWAY the current miners from bitcoin, is NOT GOING TO WORK, simply because as long as a majority of the current miners is going to CONTINUE MINING the way they do, THAT will be bitcoin, and THAT is what bitcoiners will value.

Because if they didn't, they would have switched to an altcoin already.  They didn't (yet).

TL;DR: there's no point in inventing a new altcoin to save bitcoin.  As long as a majority of the current miners continue to make bitcoin's chain like they do now, that's bitcoin.  In as much as bitcoiners want to stay with the brand of bitcoin, they will stick to that.  And in as much as they wanted to switch to an altcoin, they can already, more than choice enough.

[kiklo]

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-scaling-voorhees-says-algo-change-absurd-and-reckless

Bitcoin Scaling: Voorhees Says Algo Change “Absurd” And “Reckless”

ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees has hit out at suggestions that changing Bitcoin’s algorithm is an effective way of resolving its scaling problem.

In a tweet on Monday, Voorhees branded the idea as “the most absurd and reckless thing I've heard in the scaling debate.”

“[Threats and blackmail] is [sic] not a legit option. It's the height of foolishness and desperation, the last bastion of a tribe unwilling to put egos down,” he added in response to another poster.

Bitcoin businesses such as ShapeShift, which profits from fees generated by exchanging cryptocurrencies, have a vested interest in block size expansion, which would allow their user base to grow and transact more efficiently.

Bitcoin’s famous names remain heavily divided over changing Bitcoin’s proof-of-work algorithm. Over the weekend, Core developer Peter Todd suggested doing so would be “a good backup plan,” while fellow developer Greg Maxwell stated on Reddit that “no one who works on regularly on core has said anything about POW changes [as far as I know].”

Todd subsequently added that such an action is “a high-risk move” and would be “best to only do that if an attack actually happens,” while reiterating that Bitcoin Unlimited did not constitute an example of such an “attack.”

 

[hv_]

OP should rename this thread:

Do I trust my bitcoin miners at all. Or what security we have from PoW ?


We've learned that only PoW is really safe <-> expensive. If you want different things / less safe  -> go altcoin .