2 ms·

Bitcoin mining could be more decentralized if it better resembled a lottery, where huge numbers of people play for an expected loss. In other words, the lack o

by tromp 11y ago

Bitcoin mining could be more decentralized if it better resembled a lottery, where huge numbers of people play for an expected loss. In other words, the lack of people mining at a loss makes mining profitable and hence subject to forces of centralization. There are several reasons why mining as a lottery substitute is rare, a major one being that commodity hardware is inefficient by many orders of magnitude, making even a botnet next to useless. Perhaps, if a proof of work, whose efficiency gap (with custom hardware) is at most an order of magnitude, were adopted (or slowly phased in), enough lottery players would arise to make mining unprofitable at scale. Botnets should then just be welcomed as a modest increase in decentralization.

darkmighty 11y ago
Yes there are several other cryptocurrencies that (at least attempt to) address this issue. Those solutions were disregarded as non-essential technical improvements, and any change to Bitcoin would bring instability. Now perhaps more people will see those as fundamentals to the currencies' goal. You can see here many alternative coins and an estimated market cap: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ A lot of altcoins came up as mere clones of another, pump-and-dump schemes, or with irrelevant or plain bad changes; but there were quite a few valid innovations. Bitcoin has barely changed in it's core protocol. I hope other projects get more exposure in the future (or Bitcoin becomes less afraid of change). "You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential." -- Freeman Dyson

by tromp 11y ago

darkmighty 11y ago

Yes there are several other cryptocurrencies that (at least attempt to) address this issue. Those solutions were disregarded as non-essential technical improvements, and any change to Bitcoin would bring instability. Now perhaps more people will see those as fundamentals to the currencies' goal. You can see here many alternative coins and an estimated market cap: http://coinmarketcap.com/ http://coinmarketcap.com/ A lot of altcoins came up as mere clones of another, pump-and-dump schemes, or with irrelevant or plain bad changes; but there were quite a few valid innovations. Bitcoin has barely changed in it's core protocol. I hope other projects get more exposure in the future (or Bitcoin becomes less afraid of change). "You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential." -- Freeman Dyson