5 ms·

I have never understood the bitcoin protocol very well, and I did not have time to read the entire posted article and its linked supporting pieces. That said, I

by markbnj 11y ago

I have never understood the bitcoin protocol very well, and I did not have time to read the entire posted article and its linked supporting pieces. That said, I did pick up that one of the major issues is that a few miners in China control a huge portion of the hash power and have an incentive not to allow growth. Given that computing power is so affordable, is it really not possible for some competing group to decide to save the protocol by creating some large resource pools? In other words, can miners not be evicted once in control?

outworlder 11y ago
The problem is one of scale. Bitcoin is heavy resource-intensive. So much so, that your Core i7 can't really do anything. These days, not even the latest GPUs can compete. You really need specialized hardware, and a ton of it. And so, money. It's not enough to spin a thousand VMs in AWS and call it a day.
- markbnj 11y ago
  Yes, certainly. I wasn't assuming that a couple of programmers could pull it off. But if a group of people with the funding wanted to take control of the network away from these problematic miners could they?
  - wmf 11y ago
    Sure, but they'd lose $10M+ to do it.