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You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of
by solatic 10y ago
You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of course that's ancient history now, but Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client.
You are correct that history hasn't been very favorable to the notion of finding stability in anarchy. And true anarchies are indeed unstable. With that said... history isn't too favorable to the global empires either. Caesar, Attila, Xerxes... none of them managed to unite the globe under a single flag. Today, global control is pretty decentralized (at least if you're not a conspiracy theorist).
I think your original premise is flawed. The problem isn't so much that Bitcoin tried to enforce decentralized governance, but that its fundamental assumption was flawed, which was that no entity could take over the majority of computational power. Can we create a blockchain which limits the influence of any one source, to ensure that the distributed computation of the blockchain stays democratic?
I'd imagine there might be a way with memory-hard hashing, the kind used to prevent an attacker from throwing too much processing power at a table of scrypt hashes and getting the original passwords, but this is already deeply out of my depth...
- lacker 10y agoBitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. This is not true - from early on Satoshi was describing how you could have thinner clients that didn't run a full node.
- MBCook 10y ago> Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. Isn't that a flawed premise though? There are clear incentives. As soon as Bitcoin had any value, it seems obvious it would start an arms race for people to mine the coins as fast as possible. At that point any normal computer would quickly become almost useless. It seems like it's inevitable that anything like Bitcoin would quickly lead to mining pools and GPUs and ASICs and other fancy stuff. You'd need some sort of algorithm that required a minimum amount of CPU power but didn't scale at all so that it doesn't mater if you throw more RAM/CPU at it you still mine at the same rate. Even then people would just be incentivized to use lots of minimum spec machines to increase their relative payouts to a 'normal user'.
- CyberDildonics 10y agoThere is such a thing, it is called Argon and it relies on memory latency.