Did pools scare Satoshi away?

[needFREElunch]

I would argue that he would prefer the mining pools above either having a more central network of miners or having an overall lower network hashrate. Pool mining is much more decentralized then what many people understand. If a pool were to in any way act dishonestly or harmful to the network then the owners of the miners would likely promptly pull their equipment and redirect it to another pool

[1714166472]

1714166472

[1714166472]

1714166472

[1714166472]

1714166472

[1714166472]

1714166472

[Kipsy89]

Na, they didn't scare him away. He himself gradually went away. THat's the most interesting and best theory I've heard so far. He wanted everything to be decentralized so he gradually gave away control by fading into obscurity and turning off his own hashing power.

[iGotSpots]

I would argue that he would prefer the mining pools above either having a more central network of miners or having an overall lower network hashrate. Pool mining is much more decentralized then what many people understand. If a pool were to in any way act dishonestly or harmful to the network then the owners of the miners would likely promptly pull their equipment and redirect it to another pool

Ummmmm what?

[Kipsy89]

I would argue that he would prefer the mining pools above either having a more central network of miners or having an overall lower network hashrate. Pool mining is much more decentralized then what many people understand. If a pool were to in any way act dishonestly or harmful to the network then the owners of the miners would likely promptly pull their equipment and redirect it to another pool

Ummmmm what?

Yeah man, that doesn't make sense. If everyone was just mining by themselves, there would be true decentralization. While having pools, there's one more level of centralization. Still in my opinion this doesn't really threaten Bitcoin in any serious way.

[bg002h]

Satoshi knew pool mining was coming just like he knew gpu mining was coming. Back when I was mining with my laptop, the tiny bitcoin mining world was about to shrink to include only those willing to buy gpu's. Satoshi saw that as bad because it would mean that it would take longer for a large number of people to obtain bitcoin. There was a gentlemen's agreement to delay gpu mining.

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

[needFREElunch]

I would argue that he would prefer the mining pools above either having a more central network of miners or having an overall lower network hashrate. Pool mining is much more decentralized then what many people understand. If a pool were to in any way act dishonestly or harmful to the network then the owners of the miners would likely promptly pull their equipment and redirect it to another pool

Ummmmm what?

Satoshi knew that mining technology was going to advance and that it would not be feasible for "home" miners to continue mining on their own. This means that either corporate miners would need to mine via corporate mining farms or home miners would need to participate in pools. When a corporate miner is mining, they control 100% of the blocks they find, their block/transaction fee policy ect.

On the other hand a home miner is able to influence the various policies of a pool by voicing their opinions to pool operators and when pool operators do not listen they can vote with their feet and mine on another pool 

[Fernandez]

All I can say is the Cartel is everything against Bitcoin stands for. Seeing the likes of Luke Jr. decide what to include in transactions as we saw when he was unhappy with Counterparty, demonstrated to me for the first time that it is no longer a decentralized, ownerless system.

Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

The concept of large scale mining pools was designed into the system from the very beginning.  Satoshi said so himself multiple times.  If it wasn't "what you expected to be", then you weren't paying attention.

[Fernandez]

- snip -
Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

The concept of large scale mining pools was designed into the system from the very beginning.  Satoshi said so himself multiple times.  If it wasn't "what you expected to be", then you weren't paying attention.

I expected Bitcoin to be a decentralized movement, not something effectively owned by a select few individuals. Maybe I misunderstood, and its supposed to be in the grips of such moralistic stalwarts like Luke Jr.

[greenlion]

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

That's exactly what p2pool is, it's a secondary blockchain responsible for trustlessly splitting the coinbase tx by mining lower difficulty shares on the p2pool blockchain.

[Melbustus]

- snip -
Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

The concept of large scale mining pools was designed into the system from the very beginning.  Satoshi said so himself multiple times.  If it wasn't "what you expected to be", then you weren't paying attention.

I expected Bitcoin to be a decentralized movement, not something effectively owned by a select few individuals. Maybe I misunderstood, and its supposed to be in the grips of such moralistic stalwarts like Luke Jr.

He runs one increasingly small pool. Don't mine there.

#decentralized

[cyberpinoy]

Reading some of the earlier mailing list posts made by Satoshi back in 2008 and in his discussions with Hal Finney, it seems that his original vision of Bitcoin was quite different compared to the situation today. He did briefly mention ASICs as a possibility by referring to "specialized hardware" as well as the transition towards light wallets like Electrum and Multibit but he mostly referred to miners as being discrete individuals who mined using their personal computers. The only times where he talks about miners cooperating with each other to mine bitcoins is when botnets are discussed. Neither in his mailing list postings nor in his white paper does he ever mention the possibility of mining pools.

Each node's influence on the network is proportional to its CPU power.  The only way to show the network how much CPU power you have is to actually use it.

If there's something else each person has a finite amount of that we could count for one-person-one-vote, I can't think of it.  IP addresses... much easier to get lots of them than CPUs.

That quote is from a couple of months before he left the forum. Even then, he still held onto the belief that nodes are directly proportional to CPU power. Of course now we know that from the perspective of the network, someone that is mining on a pool is not considered a node and has no influence on the network. Instead, the influence lies in the operator of the mining pool.

Satoshi left this forum in late 2010. By then, the first pool (Slush's Pool) had opened and CPU mining was on it's way out. Perhaps Satoshi saw something that he had not anticipated and realizing what was coming, he panicked and decided to leave.

I often wonder what made him ack his bags and leave Bitcoin. What did he see that maybe we dont see right now. I also wonder why the developers now just sit around concentrating on just the Protocol, why dont they do productive things that will help Bitcoins. I mean when it boils down this is their business, what business do you knwo that has no advertising paid for by the owners, research and development paid for by the owners, I mean they do well with the protocol and doing things to strengthen the bitcoin transactions but they do nothing of real vale for bitcoins. Without a good value they will lose miners, without miners the transactions can not be processed. it is not 2009 when it was easy to mine bitcoins, today it costs a lot more money and computing power to mine them, allowing the price to dive bomb has to throw some kind of red flag for them, they cant be stupid enough to not be able to compare computing power in 2009, the difficulty and the network hashrate to the costs involved and those things today. Where are the developers? why do we never hear form them on here? where is thier input and why are they so willing to let their dream die. Satoshi knew something we did not. What was it?

[Atruk]

Satoshi went most of his BTC history not knowing if GPU mining would ever be. And not he never implemented his ideas of which there were many that counted on no GPU mining.

Satoshi knew pool mining was coming just like he knew gpu mining was coming. Back when I was mining with my laptop, the tiny bitcoin mining world was about to shrink to include only those willing to buy gpu's. Satoshi saw that as bad because it would mean that it would take longer for a large number of people to obtain bitcoin. There was a gentlemen's agreement to delay gpu mining.

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

Following Dr. Goss is one of the fastest ways noobs in BTC historically can lose coins.

[DannyHamilton]

- snip -
Unless the Cartel problem is solved, Bitcoin won't be what we expected to be, but maybe thats not a bad thing.

The concept of large scale mining pools was designed into the system from the very beginning.  Satoshi said so himself multiple times.  If it wasn't "what you expected to be", then you weren't paying attention.

I expected Bitcoin to be a decentralized movement, not something effectively owned by a select few individuals. Maybe I misunderstood, and its supposed to be in the grips of such moralistic stalwarts like Luke Jr.

Yes.  You misunderstood.  Here's what Satoshi had to say on the matter:

- snip -
I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less.  It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in.  The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.

At equilibrium size, many nodes will be server farms
- snip -

- snip -
If the network becomes very large, like over 100,000 nodes, this is what we'll use to allow common users to do transactions without being full blown nodes.  At that stage, most users should start running client-only software and only the specialist server farms keep running full network nodes, kind of like how the usenet network has consolidated.
- snip -

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions
- snip -

[bf4btc]

Satoshi went most of his BTC history not knowing if GPU mining would ever be. And not he never implemented his ideas of which there were many that counted on no GPU mining.

Satoshi knew pool mining was coming just like he knew gpu mining was coming. Back when I was mining with my laptop, the tiny bitcoin mining world was about to shrink to include only those willing to buy gpu's. Satoshi saw that as bad because it would mean that it would take longer for a large number of people to obtain bitcoin. There was a gentlemen's agreement to delay gpu mining.

I think coming up with a way to break blocks up so that 250 computers could mine 1/250th of a block while maintaining hash power in the network would help solve the pooling/central hashing issues.

Following Dr. Goss is one of the fastest ways noobs in BTC historically can lose coins.

Satoshi knew that GPU mining was coming before anyone even thought about possibly GPU mining. When someone suggested using GPUs to mine more efficiently he asked people not start this yet because it would prevent additional users to "invest" modest CPU power to try mining on their own (so the network could become more decentralized).

satoshi did have a lot of hashpower (as a percentage of the total network) so it is possible that he himself was using GPUs to mine at first