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You have a say in it in principle. In contrast, you have in principle no say what others do with their private property. That's the difference, and it's an impo
by musage 9y ago
You have a say in it in principle. In contrast, you have in principle no say what others do with their private property. That's the difference, and it's an important one.
- mirimir 9y agoYou can't control what miners do, sure. But you can fork code that changes the game for them. Contrary to all the noise, Bitcoin does not need commercial miners. They are parasites. Allowing them to dominate mining was a serious bug. It's users who should be mining.
- anigbrowl 9y agoI mined a little in the early days, but it kept my CPU pinned into the red and frankly all the people online patting themselves on the back on the size of their mining operation were offputting. I'm interested in cryptocurrencies because of their potential to liberate the mass of people from financial bullying by governments and corporations, not as a speculative vehicle to easy riches. This will seem pointlessly ideological to most people, but I'm struck by the fact that the bitcoin blockchain is held up as 'proof of work.' There's no work involved besides that to understand the system initially and any code contributions made to the source tree. The actual calculation is carried out by machine. So mining is basically a game for capitalists to invest in industrial hash table production. People who learn about it later and comprehend it in full but don't have any large sums of capital to invest in mining equipment or as a speculative investment don't really derive much benefit from it. Don't get the idea that I consider it a bad thing because of this - its mere existence speaks to the fact that we've run out of accessible natural frontiers where the curious might stumble upon a fortune, and so we are forced to invent them.
- ycombobreaker 9y agoIt's not about need. If it is profitable to mine, professional miners will exist. You can't create an incentive structure and then call it a "bug" when somebody optimizes for it.
- mirimir 9y agoSo you can create a disincentive for non-user mining. What would be the downside? This is supposed to be a distributed system.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoWhat kind of discouragement do you have in mind?
- mirimir 9y agoOne could limit share of hash power. Perhaps by IP address. Or through blockchain links to previously-solved blocks. The Tor Network, for example, has mechanisms for excluding bad participants. There's the bad exit flag, for relays that snoop traffic. Relays that harvest onion hostnames get banned. So do relays that attempt traffic analysis. There's even a policy of discouraging new relays in commonly-used AS. There's no exclusion mechanism. But I don't see why there couldn't be, if there were too much concentration. Edit: See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingBadRelays https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingB...
- jedrek 9y agoIt's interesting how so many people want government to be run like a business while hating it most when it runs like a business. Business is opaque, secretive, with no oversight and loyalty only to the bottom line. Well run government institutions are none of these things.
- okaram 9y agoAlthough I still see it as a difference, I think it's good to remember you DO have a say in 'private property' .... there's nothing magical or natural about private property. Private property is whatever society/the government says it is.