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Hypothetically, what if someone developed a paradigm-shifting quantum computer that was able to near-instantaneously compute solutions and mint BTC for some fin
by iplaw 9y ago
Hypothetically, what if someone developed a paradigm-shifting quantum computer that was able to near-instantaneously compute solutions and mint BTC for some finite amount of time? Would those BTC be invalid? Would the mining community say that it wasn't fair? Seems to me like miners always chase optimizations, from CPU to GPU to FPGA ...
- Animats 9y agoThat's essentially what happened when custom hardware ASIC vendors and Bitcoin mining companies got together. Right now, the top 5 mining pools, all in China, control more than 50% of the hash rate. At one point, one pool had almost 50%, but they split up, or at least pretended to. Mining outside an organized mining pool is down to about 1% of hash rate. The original vision was that end users would do Bitcoin mining as a background task on their CPU, and mining would be highly distributed. That's totally dead.