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No, a pool is not a single entity. That's some bad misinformation.

solidasparagus 7y ago
A mining pool is a group of people coming together to share resources and share rewards. Just like a public corporation. And just like a public corporation, decision making/power is concentrated. Who controls the pay-in/pay-out system? Who decides who can join the pool? Who sets prices? Who gets the pool fees? Many mining pools have models extremely similar to Uber's business model. Others (including one of the major players) are completely private.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  Pools are very fluid, large numbers of miners move from one to another to avoid centralization. And it's not like they can decide one day that transactions from address X are banned. That doesn't happen, there's not even a mechanism. And if some pool were to implement it, they would lose most miners very quickly. Corporate censorship, on the other hand, is abundant and is widely accepted. Lots of left-leaning people even proudly support it these days (for obvious reasons). So no, pools are not like corporations, and generally crypto currencies have attracted more libertarian crowds.
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    Transaction acceleration exists and was built by the largest pools in cooperation with 'several leading Bitcoin pools'. This is literally a mechanism to tell a mining pool what transactions to focus on (and therefore which transactions are low priority^). And yet BTC.com is still the largest pool and Antpool the second largest. I mention both because they are both operated by the Bitmain company (33% of all Bitcoin compute is in those two pools), which also sells the ASIC. Bitcoin is decentralized in theory alone. Fundamentally Bitcoin has structural flaws due to its design that create a self-reinforcing cycle of centralization. The corporation with the deepest pockets can survive the sparse rewards. They can reinvest in hardware, reducing the value of everyone's hardware. This runs people out of business (or forces them to join the largest company). Once they have enough market share they can set transaction prices as they like. Transaction prices have grown 20x in the last 3 years. Even more than that considering you need to pay for accelerated transactions to have a good chance of the payment going through within an hour (a requirement for most real currency use-cases). I'd be happy if you could explain how this is wrong, but in years of asking this to crypto enthusiasts, I still haven't found a convincing argument of how cryptocurrencies can truly be decentralized while serving real-world use-cases. ^Corporations don't generally censor by banning - that would be stupid because they'd lose the lawsuit. They prioritize some things and allow unprioritized things to be buried (ask Yelp).

A mining pool is a group of people coming together to share resources and share rewards. Just like a public corporation. And just like a public corporation, decision making/power is concentrated. Who controls the pay-in/pay-out system? Who decides who can join the pool? Who sets prices? Who gets the pool fees? Many mining pools have models extremely similar to Uber's business model. Others (including one of the major players) are completely private.

bufferoverflow 7y ago
Pools are very fluid, large numbers of miners move from one to another to avoid centralization. And it's not like they can decide one day that transactions from address X are banned. That doesn't happen, there's not even a mechanism. And if some pool were to implement it, they would lose most miners very quickly. Corporate censorship, on the other hand, is abundant and is widely accepted. Lots of left-leaning people even proudly support it these days (for obvious reasons). So no, pools are not like corporations, and generally crypto currencies have attracted more libertarian crowds.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  Transaction acceleration exists and was built by the largest pools in cooperation with 'several leading Bitcoin pools'. This is literally a mechanism to tell a mining pool what transactions to focus on (and therefore which transactions are low priority^). And yet BTC.com is still the largest pool and Antpool the second largest. I mention both because they are both operated by the Bitmain company (33% of all Bitcoin compute is in those two pools), which also sells the ASIC. Bitcoin is decentralized in theory alone. Fundamentally Bitcoin has structural flaws due to its design that create a self-reinforcing cycle of centralization. The corporation with the deepest pockets can survive the sparse rewards. They can reinvest in hardware, reducing the value of everyone's hardware. This runs people out of business (or forces them to join the largest company). Once they have enough market share they can set transaction prices as they like. Transaction prices have grown 20x in the last 3 years. Even more than that considering you need to pay for accelerated transactions to have a good chance of the payment going through within an hour (a requirement for most real currency use-cases). I'd be happy if you could explain how this is wrong, but in years of asking this to crypto enthusiasts, I still haven't found a convincing argument of how cryptocurrencies can truly be decentralized while serving real-world use-cases. ^Corporations don't generally censor by banning - that would be stupid because they'd lose the lawsuit. They prioritize some things and allow unprioritized things to be buried (ask Yelp).