stop blaming miners

[jonald_fyookball]

Why are people blaming miners for anything ?  Bitcoin is based on mining. 

Mining centralization is based on electricity and manufacturing costs . not related or correlated to blocksize.

Miners are the ones securing the network, so its their decision how to vote with their hashpower.  Developers can write code
but they can't force anyone to use it.  And if you don't like the coin that the miners are mining, you
are free to use another coin.

[Carlton Banks]

no jonald

Mining centralisation is entirely a result of the companies selling miners taking advantage of their specialist manufacturer status. It's too expensive for a regular entrepreneurs to compete with these outfits, and even if they could, they need access to another limited resource: processor fabrication plants (which is also a politicised just oligopoly like the Bitcoin miner business is)


Miners aren't to blame, the mining monopolists are. The only way to break that monopoly is to change the technology so that the mining market becomes easy to enter. We must change the PoW algorithm to something that can't be easily made into a specialist processor, to lower the barrier to entry in the mining market.

[thecrazy1]

no jonald

Mining centralisation is entirely a result of the companies selling miners taking advantage of their specialist manufacturer status. It's too expensive for a regular entrepreneurs to compete with these outfits, and even if they could, they need access to another limited resource: processor fabrication plants (which is also a politicised just oligopoly like the Bitcoin miner business is)


Miners aren't to blame, the mining monopolists are. The only way to break that monopoly is to change the technology so that the mining market becomes easy to enter. We must change the PoW algorithm to something that can't be easily made into a specialist processor, to lower the barrier to entry in the mining market.

Yes that is one way to look at it, another way is that you want to change the rules of the game because you can no longer win with those rules. Till the time you were winning, rules were fine. Miners have made the biggest investment in the bitcoin system, they secured the network when required and now you simply decide to set all their investments and hard work to zero.

[Carlton Banks]

Explain how the miners aren't abusing their position when they threaten to fork the network away from the people who are doing the real work on this project: the development team

[Senor.Bla]

Everybody thinks he is doing the most important part. And what brought us here is capitalism in its purest form.
A change of POW will only result in a new race. It will not be about who can make the fastest specialized processor, but maybe about who can make and run the most individual processors. People will always find a way to centralize.

[Lauda]

Stop spamming the board with your bullshit.

-snip-
And if you don't like the coin that the miners are mining, you are free to use another coin.

If anything is going to happen in this consensus based system, then it is the users firing the malicious miners. They are supposed to be working towards, and in support of, consensus. They are not supposed to be doing whatever their greed leads them to do (this includes the BTU lobbying).

[thecrazy1]

Explain how the miners aren't abusing their position when they threaten to fork the network away from the people who are doing the real work on this project: the development team

ok, to clarify at this point I no longer care so BU or BTC or WTF, all are the same at this point,just different people trying to abuse bitcoin to fulfill their own interest. As per the bitcoin protocol, the miners are allowed to take the decision, and choose what chain they want to mine, if they prefer the BU chain and it becomes the longest chain then that is the bitcoin chain. This is the basic mining system, and from their point of view they are respecting the protocol. Now if you look at the core development team, they are ones who are abusing their position by pushing segwit/lightening network when clearly it has no majority support and it is a conflict of interest due to them being part of Blockstream.

[seradj0]

Stop spamming the board with your bullshit.

-snip-
And if you don't like the coin that the miners are mining, you are free to use another coin.

If anything is going to happen in this consensus based system, then it is the users firing the malicious miners. They are supposed to be working towards, and in support of, consensus. They are not supposed to be doing whatever their greed leads them to do (this includes the BTU lobbying).

well said
seems miner are looking for fast money and don't care about the value of BTC or cryptocurrency

[leopard2]

no jonald

Mining centralisation is entirely a result of the companies selling miners taking advantage of their specialist manufacturer status. It's too expensive for a regular entrepreneurs to compete with these outfits, and even if they could, they need access to another limited resource: processor fabrication plants (which is also a politicised just oligopoly like the Bitcoin miner business is)


Miners aren't to blame, the mining monopolists are. The only way to break that monopoly is to change the technology so that the mining market becomes easy to enter. We must change the PoW algorithm to something that can't be easily made into a specialist processor, to lower the barrier to entry in the mining market.

Hear, hear. Then read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1841200.0

[European Central Bank]

A change of POW will only result in a new race.

but whoever takes up that new race will be fully aware that they'll be kicked to the kerb if they wilfully go against the interests of the majority bitcoin users. if it happens once, it can happen again and they'd better know that.

all they'll have to do is check the smoking ruins that were the chinese cartels.

[thecrazy1]

They are supposed to be working towards, and in support of, consensus.

ok, curious to know from where does this rule come from?
I thought users take the decision independently and then based on those decisions consensus is formed, never knew the consensus was formed first and then users need to support the consensus.
Are we now making everything up as we go,  POW/ consensus system/ what next?

[Senor.Bla]

A change of POW will only result in a new race.

but whoever takes up that new race will be fully aware that they'll be kicked to the kerb if they wilfully go against the interests of the majority bitcoin users. if it happens once, it can happen again and they'd better know that.

all they'll have to do is check the smoking ruins that were the chinese cartels.

So they will be more ruthless and try to gain a bigger profit while they can. Destroying Bitcoin in the process. Maybe they also would try to hide it better to have a longer run.

[European Central Bank]

So they will be more ruthless and try to gain a bigger profit while they can. Destroying Bitcoin in the process. Maybe they also would try to hide it better to have a longer run.

that would be another set of morons setting their investment on fire. or they could take the lesson from the first time around, accommodate what those millions of people who are paying them actually want and then make bank forever.

[Carlton Banks]

They are supposed to be working towards, and in support of, consensus.

ok, curious to know from where does this rule come from?
I thought users take the decision independently and then based on those decisions consensus is formed, never knew the consensus was formed first and then users need to support the consensus.
Are we now making everything up as we go,  POW/ consensus system/ what next?

Ok, which is it, and what's the difference?

"users take the decision independently" and "making everything up as we go" are just positive and negative ways of expressing the exact same fact: users (nodes) are in charge, not miners or developers.

Furthermore, the whole point of these forum discussions is to explore the ideas of independent users making their decisions about what they want from Bitcoin. That includes both ideas you do and do not like.

So, your meta-discussion angle is a bit bizarre: we're talking independently, right now (or at least we were until this diversion), about what we each separately think. That is the process that gradually evolves into what each Bitcoin user decides to support in Bitcoin. Problem?

[jubalix]

miners are already feeling the effects, if compromise is not reached they will have lots of bricks and debt

[franky1]

but whoever takes up that new race will be fully aware that they'll be kicked to the kerb if they wilfully go against the interests of blockstream. if it happens once, it can happen again and they'd better know that.

FTFY

[Holliday]

blockstream

Life must be so simple when you don't need valid arguments, just a bogeyman.

[iamnotback]

Re: stop blaming miners

Why are people blaming miners for anything ?  Bitcoin is based on mining.  

...

Miners are the ones securing the network, so its their decision how to vote with their hashpower.

That is all fine and dandy until they collude together in a 51% attack to change the protocol.

Satoshi designed the system to be immutable (or die, i.e. a poison pill protection). That means when miners attack it with a HF, then it ideologically dies for many of the hardcore Bitcoiners because the 21 million coin limit is no longer surely going to protected. Miners have every economic incentive to mine more than 21 million coins.

The miners are demonstrating they can organize a 51% attack and are swallowing the poison pill. They are likely destroying their investment sunk costs by demonstrating that the 21 million coin limit can be subverted (whether they promise not to is entirely irrelevant). Unless a new class of Bitcoiners will prefer Bitcoin over altcoins for other reasons (what the heck would those reasons be when Bitcoin can't do instant transactions, can't do blockchain apps well, can't do on chain anonymity well, etc), even though Bitcoin loses its immutability that imparted it special status from Satoshi.

Appears to me that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to either be replaced by something better or die. Bitcoin was the pot-of-gold he put out to incentivize the free market to find a better mouse trap than he could accomplish. It was a masterful strategy.

The miners made the mistake of not realizing this and so now they are stuck in a quagmire which has no solution. There is nothing they can do which won't destroy their ability to recover their sunk costs (and they probably deserve it any way, because apparently they are too stupid to realize and I intuitively expect they are likely involved in some corruption). One the clones of myself wrote about this back in 2015 (<---click this because I can't quote from that locked thread easily) when having a discussion with BU's core developer Andrew Stone (alias @thezerg) and the alleged HashFast scammer @cypherdorc, and the linked discussion warned everyone that it was impossible for Bitcoin to scale decentralized.

Andrew Stone admits it was those interactions which caused them to start Bitcoin Unlimited, ignoring all my warnings (not be truculent but so now they are getting precisely what they deserve for being stupid and defiant).

Here is another sample of the interactions which I can more easily quote:

The problem with Bitcoin is that so many people didn't get on the train.  So now they hope it will fail so they can board a new train -- Monero, Etherium, whatever.  And they go onto these forums concern trolling as if they are actually Bitcoin proponents.  But suck it up. There is no other train available to you -- the next train will have exclusive membership and will actually be a rocketship (think Apple ipay) deployed simultaneously onto millions of POS, default installation in your phone, automatically connected with checking accounts for several major banks etc.

It is the analogous  non-choice that we will be offered with the one-world reserve currency:

1. US dollar reserve currency hegemony over the world
2. One-world reserve currency with every nation sending a representative

These two choices are framed as being different, but in reality they are the same outcome. In both cases, the global bankster cartel is in control.

Ditto Bitcoin.

Any way, I support moving forward using Bitcoin to destroy existing banking systems and government issued currencies, and moving the world to a global digital currency (albeit I assert ultimately controlled by the banksters). Because the alternative is no better (as you point out) and at least by moving forward we bring more capital into crypto-currency (including altcoin experiments).

I agree with you there will not be another train in terms of scaling a crypto-currency to the masses before 2033. Bitcoin has this locked up already.

I do believe it may be possible to identify a market that is large but not the (lower 50% of the power-law distributed wealth curve) masses which Bitcoin can not reach and which an altcoin can. I am 80% sure about this. I don't care if the other attempts have fallen short. That doesn't rule out someone with appropriate insight creating one that hits the sweet spot. And the goal is not to topple Bitcoin (let the lower 50% have their pacifier to suck on). My thesis has been the upper 0.1% are going down with the lower 50% into the NWO. The Knowledge Age will rise up and take over by 2033. Let them have their Bitcoin in the interim. Smaller things grow faster. There is exponential growth available to the right altcoin.

[franky1]

blockstream

Life must be so simple when you don't need valid arguments, just a bogeyman.

like blockstream fanboys cannot defend the half promises of segwit that wont be met and the empty temporary bribe gestures, etc.. they instead find their own boogeyman, such as blame the pools for blockstreams removal of reactive pricing(replaced by average) removal of priority(replaced with just pay more) and refusing to expand REAL blocksize(replacing with empty promises of more tx if segwit happens)
yet all the finger pointing can find its way back to blockstream caused events

well when nodes HAD the power to veto. pools had to follow nodes lead or get orphaned.
EG

Code:

2017-01-29 06:59:12 Requesting block 000000000000000000cf208f521de0424677f7a87f2f278a1042f38d159565f5
2017-01-29 06:59:15 ERROR: AcceptBlock: bad-blk-length, size limits failed (code 16)

boom non consensus block dealt with in 3 seconds. drama over
...
but now blockstream used a loophole to give pools the power(going soft).. and if pools dont kiss blockstream ass blockstream can kill the pools.

also segwit(blockstream) wants to widen their loophole(going soft even easier in future) to make it even easier to throw trojans in without node consent/veto.
and again blame pools if anything bad happens or kill pools if they dont do as blockstream say.

if blockstream had any honour. they would see there is resistance and instead of threats of lowering bip9, doing UASF and mining algo changes.. they should honourably re thing and compromise themselves to something the community would accept..
but no its blockstreams road or the cliff

[pixie85]

Since the first ASICs came out we're witnessing a growing centralization of Bitcoin by mining industries. The pools are getting bigger, farms are getting bigger and the equipment is getting more expensive. That's what people are afraid of when looking in the near future. What if in 2 - 3 years it will all be in the hands of 2 big companies that will each have 35% of the network and the rest of us little people will have to accept whatever they come up with?