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September 12, 2013, 07:04:45 AM |
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This ought only be desirable for distributing minted coins, not for securing the blockchain / processing transactions.
Separate in your mind the actual securing of blockchains, presumably paid for by transaction fees, and the problem of who to give all the coins to initially when the coins are created.
The problem with that though is miners are insanely greedy, they want more than 100% of all the money ever created.
Not just all the coins minted, but, on top of all that, also transaction fees too!
That is an insane expense. Its like looking to hire some mercenaries to defend your nation and being told they'll do it but only for all of the nation's money plus taxes too on top of that.
The result, in some of the most lucrative cases, is that miners have priced themselves out of the business. Any sensible currency-issuer is going to avoid using miners at all because miners are totally insane about how much they are supposedly "worth".
It costs pretty much nothing to mine DeVCoins merged alongside bitcoin and other merged coins for example, yet still you see miners posting that only getting 10% of all coins ever minted is not enough for them!
That is pathetic. The net result is that even with merged mining it is hard to get enough mining to actually secure a chain. So not only are miners insanely expensive, they don't even adequately secure the chains they are mining anyway, even if you give them 100% of all coins mined plus transaction fees, like most of the scrypt coins lately for example, they not only do not adequately secure the chain they even actively damage it (driving it up to high difficulty and abandoning it there for example).
In effect miners are turning out not only to not be worth their pay but even to actually be active enemies, the paying of whom merely pays them to arm themselves up as more-dangerous attackers than they were before you paid them. So they have become like blackmailers in a way, if you don't pay them they attack you or just blatantly leave you vulnerable to attack, if you do pay them they just keep wanting more without become any less of a gang of thugs.
Thus the whole model is starting to look suspect, when you imagine it is intended that there be many separate non-merged chains. Which is maybe the error: the real security model for blockchains is that the entire world outside of those mining bitcoins have no-where near enough hashing power to possibly be a threat at all. That is, the model is, the (THE, not "a") blockchain or merged family of blackchains has such an insanely huge amount of hashing power that it can out=hash the rest of the universe many times over.
Yet even when you do merge alongside bitcoin, still if you look at the difficulties of all the merged mines coins you will see that some have less than half the difficulty of bitcoin.
The non merged chains of course are really pathetically weak. a lot of them are still using GPUs, some are even still using CPUs. They are crazy-vulnerable, they are trying in effect to do "security by worthlessness", being worth so little that they basically aren't worth the trouble of programming FPGAs or making ASICs to attack them. They are, in essence, toys.
-MarkM-
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