Wondering these day if Bitcoin will stay decentralized forever...hear me out
The mining difficulty is rising day by day, I used to be a miner back when mining was as easy as 90mh/s and have quit half a year ago.These day you need to be way beyond the gigahash range to earn anything at all.
Most of the blocks nowadays are mined by pools, and people are simply splitting 25BTC into hundreds of thousands of tiny bits among themselves.
And we have to include the fact that the price is falling and not looking that well these days.
SO......what if the general public quits mining because it's not profitable and they can't keep up anymore?
When people quit mining, then the difficulty drops (or doesn't go up as fast), and it becomes more profitable for the people who continue to mine. I expect that eventually there will be some VERY LARGE mining companies located where power and cooling are both extremely cheap to acquire. This does not change the fact that bitcoin is decentralized. There is still nobody in charge of bitcoin, it is still open source, transactions are still peer-to-peer, there is still a cap on the total number of bitcoins that will ever exist. Personally, I would prefer that no single "mining company" control more than 10% of the hash power of the entire network, but bitcoin would probably still operate quite well with just 3 mining companies, with no single company controlling more than 49% of the total hashing power.
There are a lot of mining companies around these days...what I'm saying is that Bitcoin might share the same fate as gold, diamond, etc. where there are buttloads(~240gallons
) of the thing out there waiting to be mined but large companies take control of the distribution so that they can make more profit out of it...
There will never be more than 20,999,999.9769 bitcoins in existence. At the moment that I'm writing this, a total of a bit less than 12,402,050 bitcoins have already been mined and already exist. This means that 59.06% of ALL bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined. Less than 41% remain for these "large companies" to "take control of the distribution". Every 10 minutes that number becomes even smaller. Meanwhile, people who already have bitcoins, can always exchange them with others that want them for anything of value.
Some country's governments are also interested in Bitcoins such as the US and China...there are rumors about the Chinese government interested to putting their latest and the world's fastest supercomputer into Bitcoin mining.
That would certainly be a waste of money. Supercomputers are not very good at mining. There are far more profitable things they could do with that.
Who knows how powerful these computers are at mining Bitcoins? What if this turns into another race between countries just like the arms race and the space race?
If they create incredibly good and efficient ASIC? That would be WONDERFUL. Bitcoin would become super secure, making the possibility of an attack on the blockchain impossible. The cost per hash to the world (and the environment) of that security would be drastically reduced. Seems like a good idea to me.
