Bitcoin is no longer decentralized

[Akka]

... merge the two and submit shares to the pool.  

what is a share here? Arbitary data with hash less then target?
How does the pool check if the share is for valid block ?

Not sure how a regular pool could do this, but P2Pool is quite well explained in the Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool

[1714796077]

1714796077

[1714796077]

1714796077

[1714796077]

1714796077

[1714796077]

1714796077

[1714796077]

1714796077

[1714796077]

1714796077

[ronimacarroni]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

[gollum]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

It becomes a p2p version of SWIFT, maybe not so profitable when mining, but under control of the banking sector.
At that stage they will make more money on bitcoin transaction fees than mining.

[grau]

... merge the two and submit shares to the pool.  

what is a share here? Arbitary data with hash less then target?
How does the pool check if the share is for valid block ?

Not sure how a regular pool could do this, but P2Pool is quite well explained in the Wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool

Yes, I am guilty for asking before researching.

[crumbs]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

[ronimacarroni]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

It becomes a p2p version of SWIFT, maybe not so profitable when mining, but under control of the banking sector.
At that stage they will make more money on bitcoin transaction fees than mining.

what do you mean by transaction fees exactly...
Is it like some in built bitcoin feature or you mean the cost for doing business?

[gmaxwell]

what is a share here? Arbitary data with hash less then target?
How does the pool check if the share is for valid block ?

Same way that pooled mining always works:  You attempt to mine a block, if you produce work which is less than some target set by the pool (which is a much easier bar than the network difficulty) you submit that work to the pool, and they decide if they like it or not, and then credit you based on how many of these shares you return. The shares constitute compelling evidence that you are working on work which is agreeable to the pool.

The pool could demand any level of disclosure and validation that it wants, but it really only needs to check that the coinbase transaction is correct. Any miner could always selectively throw away solutions which have hashes low enough to be valid blocks in order to attack the pool (this is called a withholding attack), so maliciously invalid blocks aren't an additional risk.

P2Pool goes all the way and replaces the pool with a decentralized system, but you don't have to go that far to still remove pools from the business of controlling the Bitcoin consensus algorithm.

[ronimacarroni]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

[gmaxwell]

-Harder to centralize (algorithms that discourage usage of ASIC)

You're just picking on the latest bugaboo there. There is nothing especially centeralizing about ASICs, in fact, when we were using GPU mining there was just a _single_ hardware vendor. We went months in 2011 with no 58xx gpus being available pretty much anywhere in the US.

All proof of work does effectively the same thing: It converts joules to cryptographic signatures that have verifiable scarcity. Differences in proof of work can only move around constant factors in the economics.

-Solution to the exponentially growing blockchain-monster

See section 7 of bitcoin.pdf

My prediction: People who don't understand bitcoin will continue to reinvent it poorly.

One of the most frustrating things about having concerns about Bitcoin's ongoing decentralization level is that half the other people complaining about it are simply confused.

[crumbs]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

[ronimacarroni]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

well no need to be a dick about it.
Anyways what i was saying is that there will be multiple banks that compete with each other.
Unless I there is something I'm missing about the technical aspect of bitcoins?

[crumbs]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

well no need to be a dick about it.
Anyways what i was saying is that there will be multiple banks that compete with each other.
Unless I there is something I'm missing about the technical aspect of bitcoins?

Sorry -- the "living under a rock" reference threw me off.
As far as "multiple [central] banks competing with each other" -- that's not the way central banks work, so it's the technical aspects of fiat that you should look into.

[ronimacarroni]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

well no need to be a dick about it.
Anyways what i was saying is that there will be multiple banks that compete with each other.
Unless I there is something I'm missing about the technical aspect of bitcoins?

Sorry -- the "living under a rock" reference threw me off.
As far as "multiple [central] banks competing with each other" -- that's not the way central banks work, so it's the technical aspects of fiat that you should look into.

But I didn't say multiple central banks.
I said multiple banks.

[crumbs]

The original bitcoin fans will give up bitcoin since it is no longer the utopian internet currency they started with.

By the time corporations get to it the block reward will be small and bitcoin will have completed its mission.
Its mission being:

a.being out of the reach of central bankers
b.being a stable currency that doesn't lose value.
and optimistically
c.becoming a world wide currency.

Bankers have money.
ASICs are made for profit, not "to secure the network."  They will be sold for money.
Bankers can buy out a couple of ASIC mega-mines much easier than thousands of small-timers.
If Bankers were *evar* a threat to bitcoin, they are now.

Uh yeah.
That's capitalism.
The guys with the most capital can invest more.
But they can also lose to others with capital via competition or bad investments.
People can also raise capital by convincing investors and starting their own business.
Have you guys been living under a rock or something?

Not at all -- i wouldn't be surprised if my family owns yours.  Capitalism has been quite good to me, but that's not my point.
My point is bitcoin is currently more vulnerable to "central bankers" than it ever was.  That's all.

well no need to be a dick about it.
Anyways what i was saying is that there will be multiple banks that compete with each other.
Unless I there is something I'm missing about the technical aspect of bitcoins?

Sorry -- the "living under a rock" reference threw me off.
As far as "multiple [central] banks competing with each other" -- that's not the way central banks work, so it's the technical aspects of fiat that you should look into.

But I didn't say multiple central banks.
I said multiple banks.

The red text provides context -- that's what we're talking about.  You did, and that's what i'm replying to.  If you'd like to discuss commercial banks, i'm happy to -- as long as i can has polite.

[clock27]

centralization is visible in my opinion
look at the faucets most are coinbox or inputs now very very few send directly to a wallet that you chose without hitting a minimum
and having a minimum is also an attempt (a needed one) at controling what people can and can't do with there $$ (just like daily limits at a bank)

[gollum]

guys stop trolling if you don't have any new ideas or facts to add.

[Wary]

guys stop trolling if you don't have any new ideas or facts to add.

I have  Self-correcting: the more money you have, the more money you put into protecting them. When your 100 coins cost 10K$, you'll be happy with Electrum, but when they'll grow to 1M$, you'll istall full node, just in case. The same with all other vulnerabilities: the more rich bitcoiners are around, the more money will be spend on developing de-centralized solutions.

[freedomno1]

Bitcoin was a nice experiment of a decentralized currency,
but now it is becoming more and more like the traditional banking system,
less decentralized and more in the control of a few entities.

We see already that the blockchain is to huge for most users so they won't bother with using the bitcoin-client.
Instead most people will use bitcoin wallets in the cloud, and the real bitcoin clients will be run mostly by corporations, not by consumers.
The same goes with mining, it is not profitable anymore for you to mine coins at home, it must be done with ASIC and in a large scale to be profitable over time.

So the bitcoin infrastructure will become like fiat:
-The currency is issued by the banks ( bitcoins mined by a few mining corporations)
-The SWIFT backbone is run by the banks (bitcoin clients and mining run by a few corporations)

The only advantage of bitcoin is that everyone has the RIGHT to mine the currency or run the backbone (bitcoin client), but most users wont care about those rights.

Strong enough points here to sustain a conversation, I have noticed bitcoin is becoming more regulated recently and brought in line by governments but it still presents a new idea the issue is how to promote independence in a state run society. The further issue is how they will decide taxation

[instoftech]

I hope the bitcoin-client can be developed in a light-version so you dont need to have ALL the blockchain, just the latest parts.

Centralized mining is more understandable, but thats also aginst the ideology of bitcoin.
Adam3us is warning about the centralization of mining in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180020

I agree with you on a "speedier blockchain." It's painful to download and store the whole chain (~10GB now). Even harder to do it on a mobile device.
But I don't yet know how your proposal could be implemented easily, considering that all account balances have to be deduced from historical transactions in blockchain. I haven't read the blockchain pruning techniques proposed by Satoshi though.

[becoin]

The same with all other vulnerabilities: the more rich bitcoiners are around, the more money will be spend on developing de-centralized solutions.

History proves you're wrong. The rich people of a certain guild will always form a club that will put every aspect of the source of their wealth under control and regulation. Control and regulation is just another name of centralization!