@pebwindkraft, sorry, you were responding to a plagiarist who copied one of my old posts (and also a post by bob123), as
reported by BitCryptex.
Replying to you, with corrected attribution:
We have sidechains/drivechains/Alpha Elements, where new concepts can be tested. I wouldn't expect something being "the right thing" from the very beginning, but the more development we have, the better it secures bitcoin future. And everything which looks at things that are more than low-level increase of blocksize or amount of coins should benefit future work.
There are many people worried about miner centralization(three countries: Canada, Island and China...), unhappy situation with ASIC miners and BCH support, and possibly growing size of blockchain... And then we learned, hard forkes are probably a "no-go". Further development is necessary.
So if UASF inspired hardforks are a no-go for MR POWA (wow, what a combination of buzz words!) is not visible, we should encourage ongoing research from many areas, and not only Altcoins, also sidechains can be used.
First, I wish to highlight my critical next sentence, which you cut—here in boldface:
I do not endorse that proposal; I think it’s interesting, but I have no desire to see collateral damage made of all the fine folks who invested their lives’ savings in SHA-256 hardware, and swore they would mine Bitcoin or nothing.
Sidechains/drivechains/etc. which you mention are irrelevant to concepts such as the MR POWA proposal—or total POW change. These are aptly described as “nuclear options” for the main chain, in case certain ill-intended large centralized miners become an existential threat to Bitcoin. But nuclear war is not a desirable prospect; it always has collateral damage, and it could be MAD. Consider that in recent months, certain evil miners
have tried to seriously compromise Bitcoin—and they failed, because other miners kept their own ASICs mining Bitcoin, and the network is much more resilient than some people expected.
I want to see commodity SHA-256 ASICs sold cheaper than GPUs, and as readily available. I think that’s probably the best solution, long-term. Too bad I am not a hardware guy.
Yes, in principle I agree. Economies of scale in the manufacturing environments have shown centralization. So even if we find new ASICs with independency from the evil ASIC provider of today, I would guess, that after finding a new cheap SHA256 ASIC cheaper as GPUs, we'd do the race again and find centralization of manufacturer of these new devices, and maybe they implement then a hidden function to flood the blockchain with invalid blocks, bringing new attack vectors to light... Decentralization (to keep independency) is a very, very hard topic. Economically and especially at sociological level...
Imagine you could get ten million devices each doing a modest 800 GH/s out on store shelves at a moderate price—made plug-and-play, and advertised as the hot new thing. Just make sure the thing runs
quietly, and has sleek industrial design. Congratulations, you just added 8 EH/s—somewhere around (
waves hands) doubling the global hashrate, with half of the global hashrate now spread amongst computer enthusiasts, gadget fetishists, people who want a show-off conversation piece, finance people, maybe even gamers (many of whom have a gadget fetish, and want to show off to their friends).
I know that there have been previous attempts to create something along these lines. What is needed is for a well-established, competently managed Bitcoin company with in-house brains and leadership who
cares about Bitcoin to take a serious interest in making hardware happen for miner decentralization. I know that the whole process from ASIC development to fabbing, to device design, to manufacturing, to (sometimes most difficult for engineers)
distribution would be a challenging task. It is not a project which some genius lone-gun could pull off by himself.
(In my dreams: Where’s a
Blockstream conspiracy when you need one? If they could do a satellite feed, they’re adept at the sorts of contracts they would need to arrange. They are already hated by Jihan & Co. Go for it.)
As for this:
and maybe they implement then a hidden function to flood the blockchain with invalid blocks, bringing new attack vectors to light...
Behold the power of nodes: Invalid blocks do not exist, insofar as the blockchain is concerned. Malicious miners can try to make all the invalid blocks they want, whether via “hidden functions” or otherwise; they’d only be wasting their electricity. Malicious hardware manufacturers who added such “hidden functions” would be criminally defrauding their customers, but could not thus damage the Bitcoin network. This is a non-issue.
