Miners are your new slave masters

[John Langut]

Now I wonder if it's possible to design a cryptocurrency in such a way that makes frontrunning impossible.

For example, what if transactions have to be processed strictly sequentially?

[freightjoe]

Now I wonder if it's possible to design a cryptocurrency in such a way that makes frontrunning impossible.

For example, what if transactions have to be processed strictly sequentially?

That requires an agreement of what "sequentially" means, which can be problematic. Either one ledger entry is then determined to be the "master" which decides for all others - or everyone needs to synchronize perfectly with the exact same clock.

[spadormie]

Well, I see your point and yeah. Miners are really asking for high fee right now. And those high fee, is so high than our expectation to be. And I believe that it is immoral act for them to do that. I sent money recently for .001 BTC what a shame.

[carlfebz2]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I got your point and I do agree somehow on those words but not totally because miners would really still remain on the strongest crypto which is bitcoin which means they would stay here as long as they can because they are making money on here if they would decide to switch on other coins then its not surprising because they would really do just for the sake of money.

[freightjoe]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I got your point and I do agree somehow on those words but not totally because miners would really still remain on the strongest crypto which is bitcoin which means they would stay here as long as they can because they are making money on here if they would decide to switch on other coins then its not surprising because they would really do just for the sake of money.

But if they are using their dominance to do front-running, they are effectively making money by cheating everyone else. It also means that a powerful group can convince the miners either by arguments or by money to switch their services to an altcoin, then the impact is tremendous and as a Bitcoin holder there is nothing you can do

[John Langut]

Now I wonder if it's possible to design a cryptocurrency in such a way that makes frontrunning impossible.

For example, what if transactions have to be processed strictly sequentially?

That requires an agreement of what "sequentially" means, which can be problematic. Either one ledger entry is then determined to be the "master" which decides for all others - or everyone needs to synchronize perfectly with the exact same clock.

Are you saying it's physically impossible to prevent frontrunning that way?

I've found this article about an alternative method using submarine sends. It's not based on Bitcoin but for Ethereum.

http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/08/28/submarine-seeds/

[FrueGreads]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I don't agree with this. Ultimately the final say is up to the market support. Miners are running a business, so they will stay were the profit is. The market is build on supply and demand, so if we demand bitcoin for example, like is happening right now, miners will stay in bitcoin because it's more expensive, so it gives them more profit. Yes, they might switch to some other coins from time to time (like bcash), but they will only stay there if we start selling our bitcoins and start supporting bcash.
If we don't swap our coins, they will just have to come back. If they don't, then difficulty will adjust to the new hash power, and we will still be fine. If difficulty decreases, then it will be even more profitable to mine BTC, so again, in the end, miner will be where the profit is, and the profit is where the demand is, so we are not slaves.

[freightjoe]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I don't agree with this. Ultimately the final say is up to the market support. Miners are running a business, so they will stay were the profit is. The market is build on supply and demand, so if we demand bitcoin for example, like is happening right now, miners will stay in bitcoin because it's more expensive, so it gives them more profit. Yes, they might switch to some other coins from time to time (like bcash), but they will only stay there if we start selling our bitcoins and start supporting bcash.
If we don't swap our coins, they will just have to come back. If they don't, then difficulty will adjust to the new hash power, and we will still be fine. If difficulty decreases, then it will be even more profitable to mine BTC, so again, in the end, miner will be where the profit is, and the profit is where the demand is, so we are not slaves.

The miners can drive up transaction costs for you without you being able to do anything about it. The Chinese mining farms are becoming so big that you cannot hope to compete yourself.

[carlfebz2]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I got your point and I do agree somehow on those words but not totally because miners would really still remain on the strongest crypto which is bitcoin which means they would stay here as long as they can because they are making money on here if they would decide to switch on other coins then its not surprising because they would really do just for the sake of money.

But if they are using their dominance to do front-running, they are effectively making money by cheating everyone else. It also means that a powerful group can convince the miners either by arguments or by money to switch their services to an altcoin, then the impact is tremendous and as a Bitcoin holder there is nothing you can do

Its not actually cheating since they are giving their legit service on here which is on pushing up transactions in the network.I cant think off that there would be a powerful group that would convinced most of the miners to switch on a particular coin and would leave bitcoin in the air. They wont do such thing because they would really prefer to coin which do have a higher demand and adoption and they would really stick on it.If the thing you said do happen then I cant imagine on the panic it would create.

[freightjoe]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I got your point and I do agree somehow on those words but not totally because miners would really still remain on the strongest crypto which is bitcoin which means they would stay here as long as they can because they are making money on here if they would decide to switch on other coins then its not surprising because they would really do just for the sake of money.

But if they are using their dominance to do front-running, they are effectively making money by cheating everyone else. It also means that a powerful group can convince the miners either by arguments or by money to switch their services to an altcoin, then the impact is tremendous and as a Bitcoin holder there is nothing you can do

Its not actually cheating since they are giving their legit service on here which is on pushing up transactions in the network.I cant think off that there would be a powerful group that would convinced most of the miners to switch on a particular coin and would leave bitcoin in the air. They wont do such thing because they would really prefer to coin which do have a higher demand and adoption and they would really stick on it.If the thing you said do happen then I cant imagine on the panic it would create.

Front-running is not a legit service.

[freightjoe]

You are partially right. We wouldn't be able to sell our coins if miners stopped mining or switched to another altcoin. However, they would switch to another profitable coin. Bitcoin is not worthless because they are many investors who are interested in this technology. Without people who want to buy a specific coin, mining wouldn't be profitable. That's why miners can't completely ignore investors or ordinary users.

Well, the slave owners couldn't ignore the needs of their slaves to get food as otherwise they wouldn't be profitable, but that didn't change that the balance of power was extremely skewed in one specific direction.

[SixOfFive]

Its a bitter truth of crypto-world. Miners do have all the control on every crypto-currency. From developing new coins to confirming a transaction, everything is in miners hand. And the bad part is we can't really help ourselves to get rid of it. Bitcoin miners are taking advantage of it by rising transaction fees day by day.

[Eternu]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

I understand what your trying to say, and part of it is truth and i agree with it. But you are wrong in one thing, if miners didn't have profit from it they would not mine it, as long as there is profit in mining, miners will mine. Probability of miners leaving profitable coin just because... i can't even come up with an idea why they would leave profitable coin. At the end i think we can agree that, for even like miners leaving bitcoin is near impossible.

[illinest]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin.

Stop thinking about "the miners" as a monolithic "they." They are not a single entity, and they are competing against one another. Bitmain's long term interests do not necessarily align with those of Bitfury or BTCC or Kano/CKpool.

If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

This is just due to the difficulty algorithm. But the real problem we are seeing today has less to do with decreased hash rate (though that has an effect) and more to do with network spam.

I think the design accounted for the generic 51% attack; rational miners aren't interested in jeopardizing their long term investment. But if an actor like Bitmain controls a majority (or super majority) of the hash rate, they can afford to continually spam the blockchain and force fees higher, because they themselves are recouping the spam attack costs by mining the blocks.

[szpalata]

Its a bitter truth of crypto-world. Miners do have all the control on every crypto-currency. From developing new coins to confirming a transaction, everything is in miners hand. And the bad part is we can't really help ourselves to get rid of it. Bitcoin miners are taking advantage of it by rising transaction fees day by day.

 i don't know what to say either because these guys are trying to milk the system for cash and we can't all afford those huge fees they are imposing on us by the day. If they are our slave masters then i guess there is the need  for a rebellion against them.

[gentlemand]

A miner will do everything they can to exploit the system provided for them to maximise profit. That's how crypto is designed to operate and that's human nature. The people you should be getting arsey with are the ones who designed the software they're running on that allows it.

And if one set of miners doesn't do it out of the goodness of their heart you can bet another one certainly will.

[hatshepsut93]

When you put your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will control your life.

If the miners decide to switch to another altcoin you cannot sell any of your coins - no matter which coin it is, even Bitcoin. If they reduce their efforts prices to transfer becomes extremely high. If you have a lot of your money in cryptocurrencies, the miners will become your new slave masters

They can't just decided to switch to another altcoins, because they have to mine on the chain with the most rewards to stay profitable - otherwise they will quickly go bankrupt. And if they would switch to other chain, it doesn't mean that it will automatically gain enough boost to its value to make it profitable - users don't care about it, they want security, decentralization, immutability. If the situation was as you described, Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies would die years ago because it would mean that they can't deliver their promises.

[illinest]

A miner will do everything they can to exploit the system provided for them to maximise profit. That's how crypto is designed to operate and that's human nature. The people you should be getting arsey with are the ones who designed the software they're running on that allows it.

You mean Satoshi?

I suppose this is the problem with ASIC-compatible mining. On one-hand, ASICs makes a cryptocurrency more secure because there's no excess capacity that you can rent and use for an attack. If it's profitable to mine, it's online, or will be online soon based on retarget timing.

On the other hand, we're seeing massive centralization of chip-manufacturing. Seemingly no one can compete yet with Bitmain's cheap production capabilities. Accordingly, while hashrate may be irrelevant to Bitcoin's consensus rules, they can do a lot to manipulate perception due to the long length of blocks/time between difficulty retargets.

[gentlemand]

You mean Satoshi?

I suppose this is the problem with ASIC-compatible mining. On one-hand, ASICs makes a cryptocurrency more secure because there's no excess capacity that you can rent and use for an attack. If it's profitable to mine, it's online, or will be online soon based on retarget timing.

On the other hand, we're seeing massive centralization of chip-manufacturing. Seemingly no one can compete yet with Bitmain's cheap production capabilities. Accordingly, while hashrate may be irrelevant to Bitcoin's consensus rules, they can do a lot to manipulate perception due to the long length of blocks/time between difficulty retargets.

Yes, that pesky fella.

I guess this is what happens when your pet is opened up to millions of greedy people. They're going to stretch and test every atom of it. You'd need truly epic oversight to anticipate every future avenue.

[uslfd]

Yes indeed this is a problem. Hence I have also invested in Vertcoin which only enables GPU mining hence it's a lot more decentralised compared to btc
maybe one day people will realise the potential of a coin like vertcoin