Is Bitcoin not decentralized anymore?

[phillipsjk]

Philip and Yakamoto
Your problem is not with me, it's with the way the protocol works right now.

So pls don't take it on me.
It is NOT my fault that the ones responsible failed to make sure that the protocol is secure.

My intention is not to single you out. As you pointed out earlier, you are only a small contribution to Ghash.io's hash-power. I am not upset with you specifically, but miners hashers¹ as a group that keep pointing their hash-power at pools with greater than 30% market-share.

That will not change the fact that it IS NOT GHash's fault NOR MINE, it's the ones who are responsible for making sure the network is secure.
Apparently it's not.

EDIT: That being said, BTC is centralized because we DEPEND on them.

Maybe it it my selective reading again, but you don't explicitly say who is responsible. The implication seems to be that the developers (specifically Satoshi) screwed up with a flawed protocol.

Bitcoin's innovation was to guard against malicious updates to the block-chain by requiring a "proof-of-work". This allows the validity of the block-chain to be verified in a trustless manner. The "proof-of-work" assumes two things:

• That people are generally good. (Bitcoin also makes is so that cheating in-system is more expensive than being honest.)
• That competition will ensure that no miner gets a substantial market-share. (If your business relies on bitcoin, it makes sense to invest in a full node or pay somebody to do so).

Pools having greater than 30% of the hash-power breaks the second assumption. 30% is the magic number because one of the pools may be run or coerced by a malicious person: we would not know until it is too late.

"Proof-of-work" is not something to be worked around. When you participate in the BItcoin network, you have to accept that it is a valid way to form consensus. There are no known alternatives that are still decentralized. Evidently, it is not known if "proof-of-work" can stay decentralized. However, if decentralization is not possible with "proof-of-work": that means that the experiment failed, and that Bitcoins are worth approximately $0.

I am explaining this, not to take you down, but because I believe that this situation can still be remedied with miner hasher education. With the recent DDOS, the hash-rate at Ghash.io dropped substantially; while the hash-rate at P2Pool went up substantially. That means that miners are using P2Pool as a fail-over. I would prefer it if more miners would use P2Pool (or something like it) voluntarily.



1. Hashers are not miners, and Bitcoin network doesn't need them.
That said, I was a hasher myself last month. I normally use P2Pool, but was distraught to learn that the share-chain only applies to Bitcoin. That is, if you are merge-mining some alt-coins, the miner that finds a block does not share the reward. I mined with Eligius to reduce my variance in finding namecoins.
PS: I currently mine at a loss (10Ghash/s). Because I read fine-print and am running a full node, my biggest expense is commercial Internet access. I understand that not everybody has the time/money to do that.

[ARapalo]

Wow bitcoin has changed so much since last time I looked at it. Yes I've been under a rock this whole time, price shot up to $1200 and now down to $600. And this this whole centralization thing.

[ChuckOne]

Bottom line:  how many people have been the victim of a double spend?  I am not sure a case of a successful double spend exists post march 2013 fork.  BTC is still better than fiat.

Not sure. I mean how many double-spends have been there in fiat money?

[doldgigger]

Hi guys,

I am somewhat worried. This could lead to a extremely bad perception of the cryptocurrencies.

http://lorddoig.svbtle.com/fork-now-and-fork-hard
http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/13/time-for-a-hard-bitcoin-fork/

What is the plan?

Chuck

Well, Bitcoin's potential for decentralization is not something to lean back on. The decentralization is a property we must fight for continuously, if we find it valuable. I was also almost shocked to see that there was hardly any criticism on the bitcoin mailing list when the idea was expressed to lock out non-permanent nodes out of the protocol (which would also create more centralization on the node side of the protocol).

As far as I know, it is not the first time that a mining pool becomes dangerously big. I think that we should head for more distinctiveness between mining pools. If people decide on mining pools merely on which one promises the largest mining profit, then the big ones will always be preferable. But mining pools have a much greater power than creating mining profit, for which it may be time to wield it in order to create more distinctiveness. A mining pool operator can define his own policy on what transactions to include and which ones to penalize. For example, what the threshold for microtransactions is. Even smarter policies could be thought of, so it would be possible to create a mining pool which has some bias towards certain business models running on the block chain. When people would start to choose their mining pool based on the transactions they want to do on the blockchain, I would expect a much more decentralized mining industry, because people use Bitcoins for very different purposes.

[AdamWhite]

Ghash is back to 33%, you can go back to sleep now, nothing to see here.

They are hiding their real power.

I think the 51% we witnessed was a demonstration of power. I do not know for what reason.

They could have blocked miners as to keep their hash rates down as they did before, but they didn't.

I would say that GHash has MUCH more than 51%.

That being said, I do have some of my miners pointed at them.

EDIT: On the subject, NO, I don't believe that BTC is decentralized anymore.
In fact, the fact that we depend on the core dev team for anything means it is centralized, and from what I understand the core dev team is under the TBF orders.
Apart from that BTC mining is completely centralized.

Let's see, you believe Ghash has well over 51% yet you still point miners at them. I'm speechless

[S4VV4S]

Ghash is back to 33%, you can go back to sleep now, nothing to see here.

They are hiding their real power.

I think the 51% we witnessed was a demonstration of power. I do not know for what reason.

They could have blocked miners as to keep their hash rates down as they did before, but they didn't.

I would say that GHash has MUCH more than 51%.

That being said, I do have some of my miners pointed at them.

EDIT: On the subject, NO, I don't believe that BTC is decentralized anymore.
In fact, the fact that we depend on the core dev team for anything means it is centralized, and from what I understand the core dev team is under the TBF orders.
Apart from that BTC mining is completely centralized.

Let's see, you believe Ghash has well over 51% yet you still point miners at them. I'm speechless

I had this conversation yesterday, no need to repeat myself.
Scroll back a few posts on this thread.

[AdamWhite]

Your argument is that you don't think 720GH is very much and you have more than that on other pools. So what? I don't blame bitcoin newbies or people who don't know any better for mining on Ghash. But here you are saying you know there's a problem yet you still point your miners there. You're either greedy, lazy, foolish, or just don't give a fuck about BTC

[S4VV4S]

Your argument is that you don't think 720GH is very much and you have more than that on other pools. So what? I don't blame bitcoin newbies or people who don't know any better for mining on Ghash. But here you are saying you know there's a problem yet you still point your miners there. You're either greedy, lazy, foolish, or just don't give a fuck about BTC

No mate, my argument is that I am not the one responsible for this.
The dev team could have prevented it with a hard fork yet still choose to ignore it.

Why should I lose on my investment when the ones controlling the entire project ain't doing nothing about it?

Like I said, I have been through this conversation yesterday, I will not repeat myself.

You can call me whatever you want, but I ain't the one who let it happen.

Have a good evening

[keithers]

It does seem like mining is becoming more and more centralized, but I don't think Bitcoin altogether is centralized obviously.   I have never mined, but I wish it could go back to when individuals could mine from their own computers without the need for all the very expensive equipment.   

I guess the more power that is out there the stronger the network becomes, but still...

[AdamWhite]

@S4VV4S

LOL

You and miners like you are absolutely the ones who are creating the problem by continuing to mine there. You just can't seem to grasp this fact.

[S4VV4S]

LOL

You and miners like you are absolutely the ones who are creating the problem by continuing to mine there. You just can't seem to grasp this fact.

Maybe you should grasp on this fact: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=651056.0

Like I said I am just a small fish in the pond and not one of the bigger fish that are causing all this shit.

[AdamWhite]

Who cares who you think created the problem. You acknowledge there is a problem but you choose to perpetuate it rather than mine elsewhere. And for what? To get a few satoshis worth of Devcoin and Ixcoin?

I don't understand why you would link to that thread. What does a BTC dev selling coins have anything to do with this. Every miner no matter how small should be part of the solution but it seems you are more interested in being part of the problem. A school of fish is bigger than a blue whale

[S4VV4S]

Who cares who you think created the problem. You acknowledge there is a problem but you choose to perpetuate it rather than mine elsewhere. And for what? To get a few satoshis worth of Devcoin and Ixcoin?

No, coz I am greedy.

Satisfied?
Can we end this now?

We are wasting bandwidth for no reason.

It's like both of us are talking to a wall.
All you get back is an echo and that is only if you are in an empty room.

[AdamWhite]

You're fucking hopeless man, hopeless. Keep mining at Ghash, you deserve each other

[Yakamoto]

Who cares who you think created the problem. You acknowledge there is a problem but you choose to perpetuate it rather than mine elsewhere. And for what? To get a few satoshis worth of Devcoin and Ixcoin?

The hash rate has decreased. It is now at most 43%.

Honestly, I don't care he's still mining there. He's a small fish, he admits that.

But I'm looking at your statement and you declare that's it's his fault he's sitting there and continuing mining.

Look at the charts. The mining has decreased substantially.

As such, there is no issue with him still mining there.

He is not perpetuating the problem. Others are solving it, and he's just adding his two cents.

Unless you can prove that him changing pools will change 1% of the total hashrate, I see no issue.

You're fucking hopeless man, hopeless. Keep mining at Ghash, you deserve each other

I'm not even going to explain this.

[S4VV4S]

You're fucking hopeless man, hopeless.

And you are fucking stupid.

Welcome to my ignore list.

That being said, when a lead dev loses hope because the dev team DID NOT make sure that this wouldn't happen and still IGNORE IT,
it means that it will happen again and again.

That being said I do NOT believe GHash will perform a 51% attack due to the fact that they have too much invested in this now.
Now double spending is a different story but that doesn't affect me.

Now fuck off, and have a good evening

[AdamWhite]

It's an honor to be on your ignore list. So you would rather a hard fork than actually mining elsewhere. LOL. What exactly is a hard fork going to do? How will that solve the issue?

"It's not a problem because it doesn't affect me" - absolutely disgusting attitude.

[AdamWhite]

Who cares who you think created the problem. You acknowledge there is a problem but you choose to perpetuate it rather than mine elsewhere. And for what? To get a few satoshis worth of Devcoin and Ixcoin?

The hash rate has decreased. It is now at most 43%.

Honestly, I don't care he's still mining there. He's a small fish, he admits that.

But I'm looking at your statement and you declare that's it's his fault he's sitting there and continuing mining.

Look at the charts. The mining has decreased substantially.

As such, there is no issue with him still mining there.

He is not perpetuating the problem. Others are solving it, and he's just adding his two cents.

Unless you can prove that him changing pools will change 1% of the total hashrate, I see no issue.

You're fucking hopeless man, hopeless. Keep mining at Ghash, you deserve each other

I'm not even going to explain this.

So, you're calling 43% a huge success? The mining has decreased, because some people decided to do something, while others sat back and said "it's not my problem" and continued to mine there.

[phillipsjk]

No mate, my argument is that I am not the one responsible for this.
The dev team could have prevented it with a hard fork yet still choose to ignore it.

Why should I lose on my investment when the ones controlling the entire project ain't doing nothing about it?

A hard-fork is a last resort that very well may kill the project.

If the dev team controls the entire project, then something is very wrong. Gavin Anderson has had a policy of being very conservative with protocol changes. This allows the development of alternate implementations. Currently the vast majority of the miners use the reference implementation, possibly with minor tweaks. That does not always have to be the case though.

[S4VV4S]

No mate, my argument is that I am not the one responsible for this.
The dev team could have prevented it with a hard fork yet still choose to ignore it.

Why should I lose on my investment when the ones controlling the entire project ain't doing nothing about it?

A hard-fork is a last resort that very well may kill the project.

If the dev team controls the entire project, then something is very wrong. Gavin Anderson has had a policy of being very conservative with protocol changes. This allows the development of alternate implementations. Currently the vast majority of the miners use the reference implementation, possibly with minor tweaks. That does not always have to be the case though.

This is a hard fork that is required.

What happens next time we get 51% ?
Move your miners again?

This is an important issue.
In fact it is the most important issue right now if BTC is to survive.

Expecting miners to move point their equipment elsewhere everytime we have something like this is a weakness in the protocol.

If BTC is to survive the dev team should eliminate all weaknesses now that BTC is still young.