Bitcoin - we have a problem.

[DeathAndTaxes]

ASICMiner has ~ 1/4 of global hashing power it is simply not possible for them to double transaction times by shutting down.  Also how often (as a % of uptime) has ASICMiner shutdown (as in hashing power down to 0.0 MH/s)?

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[Peter Lambert]

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.

What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

[rovchris]

ASICMiner has ~ 1/4 of global hashing power it is simply not possible for them to double transaction times by shutting down.  Also how often (as a % of uptime) has ASICMiner shutdown (as in hashing power down to 0.0 MH/s)?

It does not have to go down to 0 MH/s - just look at the charts they publish - It looks like a mountain range which is not the sign of a stable infrastructure if anything the swings have increased in size and become more erratic. I guarantee they do not have a disaster recovery site which given their position is really quite astonishing.

There is not one central bank that controls 1/4 of the global money supply! Yet it is OK for one company to control 1/4 of the bitcoin money supply. What happens when another corporation controls another 1/4 or 1/3.

What guarantees are there that they will stop at 1/4 - their word? What is stopping them going to 45% or 65% - People will just argue when the time comes "it is safer that way" less chance of a 51% attack. A 51% attack is not the issue any longer there is a far bigger problem - the State.

Since I created this post the game has changed somewhat and Governments are now looking to interfere - California's cease and desist order against the Bitcoin Foundation - that is just the start. When they only have to shut down a few big operations then what will happen. The network would grind to halt overnight with the difficulty stuck at some astronomical level everyone would just give up. The time to mine 2016 blocks at 10th/s with the difficulty at a few hundred million would take years for the difficulty to readjust. Who is going to wait weeks for a transaction to be processed?

[rovchris]

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.

What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.
[/quote]

The issue is this - there will be no small pools because they will have all closed down as everyone has moved to the bigger ones. Who is going to keep running a mining pool with sufficient infrastructure to cope with the load if one of the bigger ones goes down and 99% of the time have no miners using it? They are not going to pay ongoing hosting costs if there is no revenue being generated.

I disagree about mining solo - Very few people will burn insane amounts of electricity for months on end with NO guarantee of solving a block - hence the reason mining pools came into existence. There may be a hardcore minority of around 10% that might but the rest will not.

[rovchris]

They can all go solo any time they please and we're not short of ASIC manufacturers. It would be a conspiracy theorists wet dream for all that lot to get shut down at once.

Either I am missing something or I was totally right with my previous post You are not mining any cryptocurrency are you?

Not atm, working on getting the power costs down first. Why do you think those USB doohickys sold so well, folks expect to make a profit on an exponentially climbing difficulty curve? Clean coins might be one use but mostly folks want to add a little protection to their investments.

EDIT: And the point on bank bailouts is null, the western world isn't the whole world. Bitcoin is.

The USB devices will NEVER pay for themselves let alone make any money. Use a mining calculator it will be show you this. Since the last difficulty adjustment the network hash rate has gone from around 140 to 180 ths - this represents a 25% increase in difficulty at the next change which mining calculators can not predict - they were working on an average 13% increase.

The bank bailouts did not just impact on the western world it had a global impact.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It does not have to go down to 0 MH/s - just look at the charts they publish - It looks like a mountain range which is not the sign of a stable infrastructure if anything the swings have increased in size and become more erratic.

Well it does.  Your bogus claim was transaction times doubling.  That would require them to have 50% of network hashing power AND have that hashing power goes to 0.0 MH/s.  Anything less wouldn't be a doubling.  Actually with the network exceeding difficulty by about 10% it would require more like a 60% drop in network hashrate to double transactions.

I guarantee they do not have a disaster recovery site which given their position is really quite astonishing.

How exactly would you have a disaster recovery site.  Build double the hashing capacity and leave half of it offline forever?  Yeah that will work.

Since I created this post the game has changed somewhat and Governments are now looking to interfere - California's cease and desist order against the Bitcoin Foundation - that is just the start. When they only have to shut down a few big operations then what will happen.

What large operations would they shutdown?  Mining operations in foreign countries?  Mining pools (which would quickly be replaced by other mining pools)?

[Transisto]

ASICMiner has ~ 1/4 of global hashing power it is simply not possible for them to double transaction times by shutting down.  Also how often (as a % of uptime) has ASICMiner shutdown (as in hashing power down to 0.0 MH/s)?

It does not have to go down to 0 MH/s - just look at the charts they publish - It looks like a mountain range which is not the sign of a stable infrastructure if anything the swings have increased in size and become more erratic. I guarantee they do not have a disaster recovery site which given their position is really quite astonishing.

There is not one central bank that controls 1/4 of the global money supply! Yet it is OK for one company to control 1/4 of the bitcoin money supply. What happens when another corporation controls another 1/4 or 1/3.

What guarantees are there that they will stop at 1/4 - their word? What is stopping them going to 45% or 65% - People will just argue when the time comes "it is safer that way" less chance of a 51% attack. A 51% attack is not the issue any longer there is a far bigger problem - the State.

Since I created this post the game has changed somewhat and Governments are now looking to interfere - California's cease and desist order against the Bitcoin Foundation - that is just the start. When they only have to shut down a few big operations then what will happen. The network would grind to halt overnight with the difficulty stuck at some astronomical level everyone would just give up. The time to mine 2016 blocks at 10th/s with the difficulty at a few hundred million would take years for the difficulty to readjust. Who is going to wait weeks for a transaction to be processed?

AsicMiner currently has ~35ths while the network is 200th,   You say half of this being down is causing problems ?

If AM goes down I'll have to wait 10.9 minutes per transaction instead of 10 ,,,  Big effing deal ! (BTW: I'm so unlucky I have to wait on average 40 min per block when it's an important transaction)

With 4-5 Company who'll be shipping ASICs do you really think this is going to be a problem in the long term ?

What's securing the network the most is not decentralization of mining, It's the greed provided by the block reward.
I wouldn't be to worried if AM temporarily had 60% of hashrate,  They would NOT double-spend,,, because $$$.

If 50BTC goes down, do you think miners will wait for it to come back ? Falling-back to solo or switching pools is near instantaneous.

[DPoS]

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.


What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

The issue is this - there will be no small pools because they will have all closed down as everyone has moved to the bigger ones. Who is going to keep running a mining pool with sufficient infrastructure to cope with the load if one of the bigger ones goes down and 99% of the time have no miners using it? They are not going to pay ongoing hosting costs if there is no revenue being generated.

I disagree about mining solo - Very few people will burn insane amounts of electricity for months on end with NO guarantee of solving a block - hence the reason mining pools came into existence. There may be a hardcore minority of around 10% that might but the rest will not.

You are really tipping the FUD scale with your last prose.   With the kncminers you get 400 Gh at 1000W.  at .15 kWh that is $3.60 a day.  How is that insane costs?

And I am not expert on mining pools, but if a mining pools is mostly created by people joining it and not some datacenter then there isn't a lot of costs to organize a pool either.  It isn't like there is tons of data usage

On the other side of the coin, other countries have different ROI than an American.  Some countries with pisspoor currency that get electricity at a decent rate for their locality make a huge gain on the conversion to $$.  So that is one of the many many reasons that btc is going through its trial by fire for price discovery now.

Have a little more faith, or just jump ship.  I will take my chances buying up all the clearance sale ASIC miners and cheap btc and see what happens in the next year or two.  

Getting involved using btc in commerce will always help.  

BTC has many facets... so it is not really a one topic conversation.  There has never been anything like btc so we'll see how this distruptive tech will pan out

[rovchris]

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.


What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

The issue is this - there will be no small pools because they will have all closed down as everyone has moved to the bigger ones. Who is going to keep running a mining pool with sufficient infrastructure to cope with the load if one of the bigger ones goes down and 99% of the time have no miners using it? They are not going to pay ongoing hosting costs if there is no revenue being generated.

I disagree about mining solo - Very few people will burn insane amounts of electricity for months on end with NO guarantee of solving a block - hence the reason mining pools came into existence. There may be a hardcore minority of around 10% that might but the rest will not.

You are really tipping the FUD scale with your last prose.   With the kncminers you get 400 Gh at 1000W.  at .15 kWh that is $3.60 a day.  How is that insane costs?

And I am not expert on mining pools, but if a mining pools is mostly created by people joining it and not some datacenter then there isn't a lot of costs to organize a pool either.  It isn't like there is tons of data usage

On the other side of the coin, other countries have different ROI than an American.  Some countries with pisspoor currency that get electricity at a decent rate for their locality make a huge gain on the conversion to $$.  So that is one of the many many reasons that btc is going through its trial by fire for price discovery now.

Have a little more faith, or just jump ship.  I will take my chances buying up all the clearance sale ASIC miners and cheap btc and see what happens in the next year or two.  

Getting involved using btc in commerce will always help.  

BTC has many facets... so it is not really a one topic conversation.  There has never been anything like btc so we'll see how this distruptive tech will pan out

You guys talk like these are actual real products that you can buy next day. They are far from it.

Try and buy an AVALON 60ghs miner - you can not as they have stopped manufacture and only sell chips which then leaves you to manufacture your own circuit board.

Try and get anything from BFL delivered before the year 2015

KNCMiner do not have anything that even works and no guaranteed delivery date - they have just said these are the specs.  What happens if they do a BFL and find out they actually use three or four times the power they stated and deliver a year late? The difficulty will be so high then you a 400ghs miner could well be redundant.

Mining pools require servers to log,  validate and calculate the payouts of the shares submitted by the miners - The amount of bandwidth is not the issue it is the databases, web severs, application servers that require data centre space if you want any kind of reliability.

I do not live in America and electricity is becoming more expensive every day due to green taxation and other factors. 1000w is a large amount of electricity and I can guarantee that they will have to revise that figure when it gets closer to them delivering a product. So far every ASIC manufacturer has overstated and under delivered.

[DPoS]

If ASICMiner gets to the point of having 50% of the total hashing power, and are then shut down by the government, the only thing that will happen is that for <2 weeks transactions will take 20 minutes to confirm instead of 10. Not that big of a deal, really.


What would happen in the event of the major mining pools being shut down as well?

If governments go for Bitcoins which as I said is increasingly likely for example the State of California issuing a cease and desist order against the foundation and numerous other operations - admittedly it was quite clumsy on their part as they obviously do not understand the technology - but it will not be long before they get their heads around it. When then they launch their assault it will not just be one operation they go for.

The point I am making is centralisation is going to be the downfall of bitcoins because it is easy to shut down a few big operations as opposed to hundreds of thousands of individual miners.

I find it hard to understand why people can not see this happening - each difficulty rise the smaller mining pools are loosing significant hashing power as people point their rigs at the large pools (btcguild etc etc.). A couple more increases and they will be dead - just further centralising the network.

Look at BTCMine.com that use to have a hash rate of around 300ghs now it is around 100 -120ghs - 15 days to solve a block. People will just not wait that long for a payout.

If there are no large mining pools people will just stop mining as they will not wait 6 months to solve a block solo.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

Actually if the network hashrate was cut in half there would be 20 minute blocks for up to 4 weeks, since it will take twice as long to get to the difficulty adjustment.

There are still plenty of miners around, if some of the big pools get shut down the miners will just switch pools, which is fairly easy, or just mine solo. There will be some people who keep mining at a loss to help move the network forward to the retargeting.

The issue is this - there will be no small pools because they will have all closed down as everyone has moved to the bigger ones. Who is going to keep running a mining pool with sufficient infrastructure to cope with the load if one of the bigger ones goes down and 99% of the time have no miners using it? They are not going to pay ongoing hosting costs if there is no revenue being generated.

I disagree about mining solo - Very few people will burn insane amounts of electricity for months on end with NO guarantee of solving a block - hence the reason mining pools came into existence. There may be a hardcore minority of around 10% that might but the rest will not.

You are really tipping the FUD scale with your last prose.   With the kncminers you get 400 Gh at 1000W.  at .15 kWh that is $3.60 a day.  How is that insane costs?

And I am not expert on mining pools, but if a mining pools is mostly created by people joining it and not some datacenter then there isn't a lot of costs to organize a pool either.  It isn't like there is tons of data usage

On the other side of the coin, other countries have different ROI than an American.  Some countries with pisspoor currency that get electricity at a decent rate for their locality make a huge gain on the conversion to $$.  So that is one of the many many reasons that btc is going through its trial by fire for price discovery now.

Have a little more faith, or just jump ship.  I will take my chances buying up all the clearance sale ASIC miners and cheap btc and see what happens in the next year or two.  

Getting involved using btc in commerce will always help.  

BTC has many facets... so it is not really a one topic conversation.  There has never been anything like btc so we'll see how this distruptive tech will pan out

You guys talk like these are actual real products that you can buy next day. They are far from it.

Try and buy an AVALON 60ghs miner - you can not as they have stopped manufacture and only sell chips which then leaves you to manufacture your own circuit board.

Try and get anything from BFL delivered before the year 2015

KNCMiner do not have anything that even works and no guaranteed delivery date - they have just said these are the specs.  What happens if they do a BFL and find out they actually use three or four times the power they stated and deliver a year late? The difficulty will be so high then you a 400ghs miner could well be redundant.

Mining pools require servers to log,  validate and calculate the payouts of the shares submitted by the miners - The amount of bandwidth is not the issue it is the databases, web severs, application servers that require data centre space if you want any kind of reliability.

I do not live in America and electricity is becoming more expensive every day due to green taxation and other factors. 1000w is a large amount of electricity and I can guarantee that they will have to revise that figure when it gets closer to them delivering a product. So far every ASIC manufacturer has overstated and under delivered.

The other part, since I did say there are way too many parts to talk about, is that if you can't mine for whatever reason, then focus on selling things/services in btc to the miners.

A large part of the FUD community only see things as 'I can't mine for easy btc' instead of the other heavy lifting.

And before you say it is too risy to sell things in btc because of the price swings. well that means you dont have faith and are a dumper at heart.  And the miners have to have faith too right? if btc dies then asicminer dies too

[rovchris]

It does not have to go down to 0 MH/s - just look at the charts they publish - It looks like a mountain range which is not the sign of a stable infrastructure if anything the swings have increased in size and become more erratic.

Well it does.  Your bogus claim was transaction times doubling.  That would require them to have 50% of network hashing power AND have that hashing power goes to 0.0 MH/s.  Anything less wouldn't be a doubling.  Actually with the network exceeding difficulty by about 10% it would require more like a 60% drop in network hashrate to double transactions.

I guarantee they do not have a disaster recovery site which given their position is really quite astonishing.

Since I created this post the game has changed somewhat and Governments are now looking to interfere - California's cease and desist order against the Bitcoin Foundation - that is just the start. When they only have to shut down a few big operations then what will happen.

What large operations would they shutdown?  Mining operations in foreign countries?  Mining pools (which would quickly be replaced by other mining pools)?

Well from reading information on your website that you were the CEO of

https://fastcash4bitcoins.com/index.aspx

Your business was closed down by the "The Virginia Corporation Commission" so there is one to add to your list.

How exactly would you have a disaster recovery site.  Build double the hashing capacity and leave half of it offline forever?  Yeah that will work.

What kind of response is that? When you are generating 3600 bitcoins a day and have a 1/4 of the entire Global network you have a responsibility to maintain it. I do not see why you do not understand this.

This is exactly what existing financial institutions do and respectable businesses.


The USA Government is not the only one that would act against bitcoins any government will when they realise they are loosing control of the money supply - Do you think they are just going to say oh well it was good while it lasted?

[rovchris]

The other part, since I did say there are way too many parts to talk about, is that if you can't mine for whatever reason, then focus on selling things/services in btc to the miners.

A large part of the FUD community only see things as 'I can't mine for easy btc' instead of the other heavy lifting.

And before you say it is too risy to sell things in btc because of the price swings. well that means you dont have faith and are a dumper at heart.  And the miners have to have faith too right? if btc dies then asicminer dies too

Ok then please explain to me in simple terms what the difference is between Central Banks having a monopoly on creating money and a few large corporations / companies controlling the Bitcoin money supply?

Read some of the stuff Satoshi has said about why he created Bitcoins in the first place.

It is not about easy money for miners it was about redressing the balance and removing the levers of money creation away from government and banks and everyone here is happy to just hand it straight over to corporations. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

[DPoS]

The other part, since I did say there are way too many parts to talk about, is that if you can't mine for whatever reason, then focus on selling things/services in btc to the miners.

A large part of the FUD community only see things as 'I can't mine for easy btc' instead of the other heavy lifting.

And before you say it is too risy to sell things in btc because of the price swings. well that means you dont have faith and are a dumper at heart.  And the miners have to have faith too right? if btc dies then asicminer dies too

Ok then please explain to me in simple terms what the difference is between Central Banks having a monopoly on creating money and a few large corporations / companies controlling the Bitcoin money supply?

Read some of the stuff Satoshi has said about why he created Bitcoins in the first place.

It is not about easy money for miners it was about redressing the balance and removing the levers of money creation away from government and banks and everyone here is happy to just hand it straight over to corporations. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

you are a bit scatter on logic so it is tough to pull back your targets and then show you why you are missing.

Central Banks create fiat with nothing backing it to prevent inflation on their whim. Then they adjust interest rates and also have a huge hand in velocity. That is nothing like you are comparing to someone who goes and mines most of the gold out of a finite amount

You then jump to the transaction times..  I see values all over the place with people rejecting your math about asicminer going offline. 
 

[Rassah]

Rovchris, please stop being a whiny bitch. Pools are not central mining powerhouses. If one goes does, all miners will switch to another one. If the second and third go down, they will solo mine. This is typically set by default in mining software. There are plenty of smaller pools that aren't going anywhere, that will become large pools should the larger ones are taken down. For example, Eligius used to be a really big pool, but people quit it for personal reasons. Other small pools became big instead. Worst case scenario, there's always P2Pool. You can't take that down.
Also, if you have to ask what is the difference between a central bank money creating monopoly, and a centralized mining operation, then you really don't understand an enormously important aspect of Bitcoin. It has to do with clients, not miners.

[rovchris]

Rovchris, please stop being a whiny bitch. Pools are not central mining powerhouses. If one goes does, all miners will switch to another one. If the second and third go down, they will solo mine. This is typically set by default in mining software. There are plenty of smaller pools that aren't going anywhere, that will become large pools should the larger ones are taken down. For example, Eligius used to be a really big pool, but people quit it for personal reasons. Other small pools became big instead. Worst case scenario, there's always P2Pool. You can't take that down.
Also, if you have to ask what is the difference between a central bank money creating monopoly, and a centralized mining operation, then you really don't understand an enormously important aspect of Bitcoin. It has to do with clients, not miners.

You obviously have never mined a bitcoin in your life.

OK Rassah what is the total number of bitcoin mining pools?

Well here is a list of the top 20 pools

1   BTC Guild   424 (21.03%)
2    ASICMiner   366 (18.15%)
3   50 BTC   324 (16.07%)
4   slush - mining.bitcoin.cz   230 (11.41%)
5   Eligius   73 (3.62%)
5   Bitminter   73 (3.62%)
7   Eclipse Mining pool   71 (3.52%)
8    Discus Fish   54 (2.68%)
9   ozcoin   36 (1.79%)
10   Horrible Horrendous Terrible Tremendous Mining Pool   31 (1.54%)
11   Deepbit   21 (1.04%)
12   Bitparking Merged Mining Pool   19 (0.94%)
12    ST Mining Corp   19 (0.94%)
14   Polmine   15 (0.74%)
15   p2pool   8 (0.40%)
16   btcmp.com   5 (0.25%)
17   Ecki   3 (0.15%)
17   Triplemining   3 (0.15%)
19   MaxBTC   2 (0.10%)
20   BTCmine.com   1 (0.05%)

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

Please note to get into this list you only have to solve 1 block that is how few bitcoin mining pools are left.

So where are all these other pools that you keep talking about?

BTCMine.com has now dropped to 90gh/s when these pools are no longer solving blocks they will close down - do you UNDERSTAND this.

Also, if you have to ask what is the difference between a central bank money creating monopoly, and a centralized mining operation, then you really don't understand an enormously important aspect of Bitcoin. It has to do with clients, not miners.

You did not state what the difference is because you can not is why. All the clients do is relay transactions - they do not process transactions or generate coins so you do not understand a massive aspect of Bitcoins - The miners are the most important aspect of bitcoins.

The issue with p2ppool is ASIC miners will not work on them

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90658.0

[rovchris]

The other part, since I did say there are way too many parts to talk about, is that if you can't mine for whatever reason, then focus on selling things/services in btc to the miners.

A large part of the FUD community only see things as 'I can't mine for easy btc' instead of the other heavy lifting.

And before you say it is too risy to sell things in btc because of the price swings. well that means you dont have faith and are a dumper at heart.  And the miners have to have faith too right? if btc dies then asicminer dies too

Ok then please explain to me in simple terms what the difference is between Central Banks having a monopoly on creating money and a few large corporations / companies controlling the Bitcoin money supply?

Read some of the stuff Satoshi has said about why he created Bitcoins in the first place.

It is not about easy money for miners it was about redressing the balance and removing the levers of money creation away from government and banks and everyone here is happy to just hand it straight over to corporations. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

you are a bit scatter on logic so it is tough to pull back your targets and then show you why you are missing.

Central Banks create fiat with nothing backing it to prevent inflation on their whim. Then they adjust interest rates and also have a huge hand in velocity. That is nothing like you are comparing to someone who goes and mines most of the gold out of a finite amount

You then jump to the transaction times..  I see values all over the place with people rejecting your math about asicminer going offline.  

There are multiple issues that need to be discussed.

There is nothing backing FIAT accept peoples faith in it - exactly the same as Bitcoins - they are backed by nothing but peoples faith.

The upper limit of bitcoins can be changed. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153330.0

The point I am making is there are some issues with Bitcoin that need to be discussed.

When you are mining there is this thing called "work time" which tells you how long since the last block was solved on the Network - if you actually mined you would know that is easy to identify when ASICminer is having issues as you would see this value increase dramatically.

There is nothing wrong with the maths - if you actually read my post it said -

ASICMiner has some problem at the moment and because they are so large it has impacted the entire network. If another big mining pool goes down we may be looking at 40 mins between blocks maybe even longer

ASICMiner and another big mining pool is the key thing here so the real problem is people just do not read the posts

[rovchris]

...
Why do you think those USB doohickys sold so well, folks expect to make a profit on an exponentially climbing difficulty curve?
...

The USB devices will NEVER pay for themselves let alone make any money. Use a mining calculator it will be show you this.
...

Hmm, stupid or just trolling?

Maybe you should educate yourself first - read what people say who actually mine bitcoins

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=245772.0

And you will see the conclusive answer is no.

[Rassah]

You obviously have never mined a bitcoin in your life.

If you don't count my mining from May 2011 to June 2013, then yes, I never mined.

OK Rassah what is the total number of bitcoin mining pools?

Well here is a list of the top 20 pools

1   BTC Guild   424 (21.03%)
2    ASICMiner   366 (18.15%)
3   50 BTC   324 (16.07%)
4   slush - mining.bitcoin.cz   230 (11.41%)
5   Eligius   73 (3.62%)
5   Bitminter   73 (3.62%)
7   Eclipse Mining pool   71 (3.52%)
8    Discus Fish   54 (2.68%)
9   ozcoin   36 (1.79%)
10   Horrible Horrendous Terrible Tremendous Mining Pool   31 (1.54%)
11   Deepbit   21 (1.04%)
12   Bitparking Merged Mining Pool   19 (0.94%)
12    ST Mining Corp   19 (0.94%)
14   Polmine   15 (0.74%)
15   p2pool   8 (0.40%)
16   btcmp.com   5 (0.25%)
17   Ecki   3 (0.15%)
17   Triplemining   3 (0.15%)
19   MaxBTC   2 (0.10%)
20   BTCmine.com   1 (0.05%)

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

Please note to get into this list you only have to solve 1 block that is how few bitcoin mining pools are left.

So where are all these other pools that you keep talking about?

Thank you for sort of proving my point that pools come and go, and their power changes with the miner's changing whims. Deepbit, Eclipse, and Eligius used to be really big pools. 50BTC didn't even exist until somewhat recently, and many other pools there are very new, too. Miners control hashing power, not pools, and if the top 15 on that list are taken down, or do something scammy, the bottom 5, or any new ones, will take their place as the top mining pools. And by the way, since pools go down all the time, it's customary for miners to set their mining software to switch to other pools, or solo-mine, when they lose a connection to a pool. So, if some pool is taken down suddenly, Bitcoin users probably won't even notice a change in confirmation times.

BTCMine.com has now dropped to 90gh/s when these pools are no longer solving blocks they will close down - do you UNDERSTAND this.

I do, you don't. Pools START by not solving any blocks, and trying to entice miners to join them. It costs almost nothing to run a pool, until you get a lot of connections and mining power pointed at you, so these pools could run indefinitely, waiting for miners to join.

Also, if you have to ask what is the difference between a central bank money creating monopoly, and a centralized mining operation, then you really don't understand an enormously important aspect of Bitcoin. It has to do with clients, not miners.

You did not state what the difference is because you can not is why. All the clients do is relay transactions - they do not process transactions or generate coins so you do not understand a massive aspect of Bitcoins - The miners are the most important aspect of bitcoins.

Totally wrong, so I'll explain it to you. The clients/nodes do the work of verifying transactions to make sure they are following all the rules. Clients make sure that coins that were recorded in the blockchain are not double-spent, that coins are legit and not created out of thin air, that coins are following correct difficulty requirements, and that there are no more than 21M coins. If a transaction is sent that breaks any of those rules, it is the clients that reject it and stop it from propagating on the network before miners even hear about it. Miners just verify the transactions same as clients, and store it in a safe database. So if miners change some fundamental rule, such as mining strange transactions, or trying to increase the coin limit, their blocks will be rejected by all the clients, and their mined coins will be useless.

The issue with p2ppool is ASIC miners will not work on them

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90658.0

Check the date. That's an article from a year ago. P2Pool has been patched and upgraded many times since then, now supports Stratum, and can be used with Avalon and BFL (though Avalon is still buggy).

[old c coder]

I see. Like when a nuclear power station goes offline rather than a couple of wind turbines.

How long does it take to adjust then?

2 weeks at 10 min per block, so it takes 30 min for each block difficulty wont be adjusted downwards for 6 weeks. It's an issue at the mo because we're in the transition from off the shelf hardware to dedicated hardware and ASICminer happens to be leading that transition. When more ASIC manufacturers have products ready for immediate sale and difficulty levels out its unlikely to be a major issue but it will be a rough ride upto that point as hardware prices will need to establish a predictable ROI time.

And as was pointed out, there is a large variation in the "time to solve", but perhaps if the 2 weeks to adjust were modified to something akin to a Kalman filter, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
one might be able to shorten the "time to change the difficulty" to a very short window?

I see times to solve of one minute or less to over 30 minutes regularly, just watching
http://blockchain.info/

I don't know what the average is but I would imagine that the code might be able to "Kalman filter" the difficulty "on the fly", i.e. every block if the block was solved in less than 10 minutes, and at the 10 minuute mark if no solution arrives. One would hope that the mean time to solution wouldn't "hunt" or wildly oscillate, but would damp down quickly.

This would then be able to correct for large swing in network hashing power very quickly.

The only issue, other than actually writing and testing the code, would be how to synchronise all the bitcoinds and bitcoinqts that will calculate a new difficulty on their bitcoin clocks and the last blocks time. I don't know what happens now at the two week magic moment, or is it a block count number? Changing the difficulty "mid block" would seem to be similar to a new best block kind of signal to those who are mining. If a miner solves first at a higher difficulty than the "corrected" difficulty, so what? It's still valid, it would seem to me.

Just idle thoughts from a old coder that would like to see BTC's ranks swell by making the windows version (bitcoin-qt.exe) more palatable to the masses, that are not geeks. I would like bitcoin-qt to be everything it still is, but look more like http://blockchain.info/, i.e. show the liveliness  of the BTC network. It doesn't have to be musical, though it could be, like http://www.listentobitcoin.com/

I sometimes run a modified version of bitcoind in -printtoconsole mode, where the printf()s are "corrected" to a DOS <=80 character length, or other tricks with \r & \n. It is interesting to watch bitcoind side by side with http://blockchain.info/ and see them both showing the transactions as they are coming in, and the new blocks.

Now if I could capture that and display it in bitcoin-qt...?

I'm the one who offered the splash screen change to try and keep it on "top" and animate it a little during the long VerifyDB() time, and the move the wallet.dat file anywhere change.

Ron

[rovchris]

I see. Like when a nuclear power station goes offline rather than a couple of wind turbines.

How long does it take to adjust then?

2 weeks at 10 min per block, so it takes 30 min for each block difficulty wont be adjusted downwards for 6 weeks. It's an issue at the mo because we're in the transition from off the shelf hardware to dedicated hardware and ASICminer happens to be leading that transition. When more ASIC manufacturers have products ready for immediate sale and difficulty levels out its unlikely to be a major issue but it will be a rough ride upto that point as hardware prices will need to establish a predictable ROI time.

And as was pointed out, there is a large variation in the "time to solve", but perhaps if the 2 weeks to adjust were modified to something akin to a Kalman filter, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
one might be able to shorten the "time to change the difficulty" to a very short window?

I see times to solve of one minute or less to over 30 minutes regularly, just watching
http://blockchain.info/

I don't know what the average is but I would imagine that the code might be able to "Kalman filter" the difficulty "on the fly", i.e. every block if the block was solved in less than 10 minutes, and at the 10 minuute mark if no solution arrives. One would hope that the mean time to solution wouldn't "hunt" or wildly oscillate, but would damp down quickly.

This would then be able to correct for large swing in network hashing power very quickly.

The only issue, other than actually writing and testing the code, would be how to synchronise all the bitcoinds and bitcoinqts that will calculate a new difficulty on their bitcoin clocks and the last blocks time. I don't know what happens now at the two week magic moment, or is it a block count number? Changing the difficulty "mid block" would seem to be similar to a new best block kind of signal to those who are mining. If a miner solves first at a higher difficulty than the "corrected" difficulty, so what? It's still valid, it would seem to me.

Just idle thoughts from a old coder that would like to see BTC's ranks swell by making the windows version (bitcoin-qt.exe) more palatable to the masses, that are not geeks. I would like bitcoin-qt to be everything it still is, but look more like http://blockchain.info/, i.e. show the liveliness  of the BTC network. It doesn't have to be musical, though it could be, like http://www.listentobitcoin.com/

I sometimes run a modified version of bitcoind in -printtoconsole mode, where the printf()s are "corrected" to a DOS <=80 character length, or other tricks with \r & \n. It is interesting to watch bitcoind side by side with http://blockchain.info/ and see them both showing the transactions as they are coming in, and the new blocks.

Now if I could capture that and display it in bitcoin-qt...?

I'm the one who offered the splash screen change to try and keep it on "top" and animate it a little during the long VerifyDB() time, and the move the wallet.dat file anywhere change.

Ron

I had to google Kalman filter as I had no idea what it was - it made for some interesting reading even though it is some pretty hardcore mathematics!

What applications were you writing that you are even aware of it, I would be quite interested to know.

The change at the moment is simply done on the block count every 2016 blocks I believe.

I also totally agree about bitcoin-qt more friendly for the masses - have you looked into the "signing" of messages yet? There is absolutely no way the man on the street is ever going to get their head around that - it is far to "geek" to be completely honest.

It makes a pleasant change to actually have some interesting ideas posted that can address some of the issues.