Mining, a flawed concept coming home to roost?

[Blinken]

I hate to question the fundamental Satoishian principles, but I have to admit, I thought mining was a really bad idea even the first time I heard of Bitcoin years ago, and now that rotten vulture is coming home to roost.

The mining pools are getting bigger and bigger and this is a really serious danger that is presenting itself. It appears to be only a question of time before the pools have the critical mass to control verification and then really bad things are going to start to happen. Once the St. Petersburg cyber mafia realizes they can garner a few million by writing a specialized client and then hacking a few big pools, there will be chaos and devastation.

Unfortunately there is no way out of this problem without dumping the whole, flawed mining concept, and replacing it with a distributed inflation mechanism.

[casascius]

You're right, the whole thing is flawed, mining is just a crude electricity-wasting practical joke, Bitcoin doesn't really work, it's all just going to collapse any minute, so let's all pack our stuff up and go home now, it was fun while it lasted.  I will bail you out and buy all your worthless coins at 50 cents on the dollar!

[grue]

Ok, go design your own inflation based crypto-currency.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Collectively mining pools have gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power).
The largest pool has gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power).
The four largest pools have gotten smaller (as a % of hashing power) and now combined represent less than 50% of hashing power.
There are far more stable and well run medium sized pools giving miners a real choice on where to send their hashes.

So no need to dump anything.  

Also it is possible for block construction/validation to happen locally.  Two pools (p2pool & eligius) already support it.   Most pools will be forced to support this eventually due to significantly faster miners (FPGA & ASICs) combined with the constraint of the 32bit nonce.  When block generation occurs locally the reward is pooled (less variance) but the validation of tx are distributed.

Any more FUD you need refuted?  I will be here all day.

[Blinken]

Ok, maybe I was misinformed but I thought the network hash rate was like 15 Thash/s and I see that Deepbit advertises a hash rate of 3 Thash/s and it is only one of 6 major pools. I would think that if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

[Stephen Gornick]

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could.  Then what would you do with this voting power?

[Vernon715]

If someone was going to do what you are talking about they would have **probably**done so already.

[Blinken]

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could.  Then what would you do with this voting power?

Well, what I would do is muster a DDOS attack on www.sesamestreet.org, but that's just me.

The more important question is what would a group of professional Russian hackers do? The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

[kjj]

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could.  Then what would you do with this voting power?

Well, what I would do is muster a DDOS attack on www.sesamestreet.org, but that's just me.

The more important question is what would a group of professional Russian hackers do? The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.  Getting 51% of the network lets you prevent or reorder spends.  Not make fake coins.

[DeathAndTaxes]

The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

Step 1.  Actually learn how Bitcoin works.
Step 2. Start trying to "fix" it.

It would appear you jumped right to step 2.

"what could go wrong with a stuck gas pedal?   Well if the gas pedal remained stuck the car could jump backwards in time or might achieve escape velocity.  Obviously gas pedals are fatally flawed.  Lets scrap cars and start over".

[Blinken]

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could.  Then what would you do with this voting power?

Well, what I would do is muster a DDOS attack on www.sesamestreet.org, but that's just me.

The more important question is what would a group of professional Russian hackers do? The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.  Getting 51% of the network lets you prevent or reorder spends.  Not make fake coins.

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

[grue]

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

doesn't work that way. 51% doesn't allow you to transfer other people's coins; you still need their signatures. and your avatar tells us what you really are: a troll.

[casascius]

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

doesn't work that way. 51% doesn't allow you to transfer other people's coins; you still need their signatures. and your avatar tells us what you really are: a troll.

I didn't assume troll, Bitcoin admittedly has a steep learning curve.  It's perfectly normal the way I see it for someone not to realize that 51% attacks don't mean you can make fake coins.

[kjj]

if you could control about 10 Thash/s currently you would have voting power and could you not obtain that by gaining control of Deepbit, 50BTC, Ozcoin and BTCGuild?

Let's say you could.  Then what would you do with this voting power?

Well, what I would do is muster a DDOS attack on www.sesamestreet.org, but that's just me.

The more important question is what would a group of professional Russian hackers do? The answer to that is forge a million BTC and use the proceeds to underwrite an expansion of their criminal enterprises.

An even more scary possibility is that the Schumerites would take over the network and deploy armageddon: delete half the coins and quadruple spend the other half, or just transfer everyone's coins randomly between different addresses. Now, THAT would be FUD.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.  Getting 51% of the network lets you prevent or reorder spends.  Not make fake coins.

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

Yeah, except that bitcoin totally doesn't work that way.

Verification doesn't mean what you think it means.  Miners don't approve transactions, they check to make sure that they are valid, cryptographically.  If a miner creates a block with an invalid transaction, the rest of the network will reject that block.  Even if the attacker has 51% or 100% of the hashing power in the network.

A slightly less simple version is that you spend a transaction by proving that you possess the private key that corresponds to the public key embedded in that transaction's output.  You don't prove it to your local miner, you prove it to everyone in the entire universe at the same time.

[Blinken]

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

doesn't work that way. 51% doesn't allow you to transfer other people's coins; you still need their signatures. and your avatar tells us what you really are: a troll.

Ooooo, you figured out who I am.

[Gabi]

More people using p2pool is what we need
It's safe, it's easy to setup and give you moar btc (0 fees and you also get the transaction fees for each block)

[Syke]

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

That would simply fork the chain. Miners will reject those bogus blocks.

[TECSHARE]

If you can verify, you can do whatever you want. If you want a million coins just transfer other coins to your own addresses. When the transactions come up for vote, all your machines approve the transactions. If you want to delete coins, transfer them to an invalid address and approve the transactions.

doesn't work that way. 51% doesn't allow you to transfer other people's coins; you still need their signatures. and your avatar tells us what you really are: a troll.

...said the biggest thread shitter on the forum.

[Sunny King]

Unfortunately there is no way out of this problem without dumping the whole, flawed mining concept, and replacing it with a distributed inflation mechanism.

The 'distributed inflation mechanism' known as proof-of-stake has now been built. We have been working on this for almost a year and just now we are releasing a new block chain this coming weekend.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99735.0

[tiberiandusk]

P2Pool