anti-monopoly rules

[CLIENT]

It is conceivable that a government of a state or other large entity may get into the game and monopolize the transaction validation process for non-economic motives.

Is it possible to limit the power of mining/transaction confirmation by imposing a cap based on a region or top level domain?

[1715404870]

1715404870

[1715404870]

1715404870

[1715404870]

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[kjj]

No.

Though if it concerns you, you could create your own cryptocurrency that requires that blocks be signed, and then use PKI to enforce authentication, and then impose whatever other rules you desire using that identification.  I don't recommend it, and no one will use it.

[BitOnyx]

Sure they can do it but execution of such low would be impossible. Not to mention that people would just move to another coin even if it would be possible.

[CLIENT]

There are two separate questions: 1. how can it be done? 2. why it make sense to have anti-monopoly rules?

I can explain why it make sense to have location based rules.

The mining process will evolve from individual developers mining on their hardware, to could-based mining.
Eventually, large pools will take over from individual miners and transaction verification process will be concentrated in few extremely powerful computer farms. That effectively means the end of "distributed" verification. With transaction process being monopolized, its easy to manipulate the entire system. So anti-monopoly rules are not a luxury, but necessity.

To enforce fair mining some sort of cap/limit has to be introduced.
To be practical, the cap has to be very generic and easy to implement for example:
1. Cap by top level domain
2. Cap by physical location

PKI seems like an overkill. Am I wrong?

[kjj]

Your reasons for wanting it are speculation and you seem to be operating under some grave misunderstandings of what mining is all about.  It defines the order of transactions.  Everyone still always validates everything.

1. Cap by top level domain

VPN

2. Cap by physical location

VPN.  Also, physical location of what?  Reported by what?  Authenticated by what?

[cr1776]

Am I wrong?

Yes.

You have a lot of assumptions in there that are unsupported and lots of hand-waving away problems, two to start:

1. Top level domain?  Bitcoin doesn't care about TLDs (assuming you are talking DNS TLDs).  So a single big ISP would be mining limited since all the IP addresses are under one TLD regardless of how many individuals are under that ISP?  What if a single miner has 80% of the network behind a single IP with NAT?

2. Physical location?  How are you tracking this?  What about Tor, i2p, VPNs etc?

PKI is about the only way to make this practical and enforceable, and having signed blocks is a new coin.

[CLIENT]

Guys, you all bring very good reasons "why not".
Let me give you one reason why yes - 51% attack.

It's true that
1) its risk seems highly unlikely and
2) you cannot totally prevent such event

However, by limiting single miner (or pool) to let's say 25% will make 51% attack even harder to carry out.

Having this thought in mind, what do you think can be done?

I appreciate the fact that VPN and IP proxy make this job hard, but isn't there a simple, clean, elegant way?