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Miners choose where it's profitable to mine, which will always be the more active blockchain. It's called voting with your feet, and clearly Ethereum miners fo

Miners choose where it's profitable to mine, which will always be the more active blockchain. It's called voting with your feet, and clearly Ethereum miners followed the quorum of powerful individuals. What matters your massive holdings of ETC when there's no buyers?

latchkey 5y ago
Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years. You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others. I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals influenced that decision.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Random question but as a large miner and supporter of ETH how will the proposed switch to PoS next year impact you?
  - latchkey 5y ago
    Thanks for asking. My business model has always been larger than just mining ETH. I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. Mining (aka: being paid to validate anonymous transactions) is just one use case. You see all these articles about how a dApp went down because AWS was down? I'd like to help solve that issue. It isn't just about renting out servers or virtual machines. It is about providing compute in a way that nobody realizes where it is even hosted. True "cloud" in my eyes.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Thanks for the answer it’s very interesting to see how the infrastructure spin off of mining could lead to more conventionally useful hosting. So in some sense you intend to be multi-region without the eye watering data transfer costs?
      - latchkey 5y ago
        You're into gaming, GALA nodes are a great example.
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        Thanks, I'll take a look.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      > I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. You're building data centers for decentralized compute?
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        That's not totally crazy, it's just the decentralization is at a different layer. Like Solid pods provide decentralized ownership over personal data but it's probably easier for people to use a provider for them than host their own server.
- fatbird 5y ago
  I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?
  - latchkey 5y ago
    ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people. Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable. We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably. It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain. I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.
    - fatbird 5y ago
      Thanks for the detail. BTW, "quorum of powerful individuals" (QOPI) means the core ETH people who decided to execute the hard forks. I think you're demonstrating my point for me. It's not that QOPI led you all by the nose or that you acceded to a vote; it's that the core ETH people decided to hard fork and you made a pretty rational business decision to stick with ETH and not ETC in part because, as you put it, "nobody trusts the chain". It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.

latchkey 5y ago

Disclosure: I'm a very very large miner and I've been doing it across many protocols over the last 7 years. You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others. I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals influenced that decision.

meheleventyone 5y ago
Random question but as a large miner and supporter of ETH how will the proposed switch to PoS next year impact you?
- latchkey 5y ago
  Thanks for asking. My business model has always been larger than just mining ETH. I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. Mining (aka: being paid to validate anonymous transactions) is just one use case. You see all these articles about how a dApp went down because AWS was down? I'd like to help solve that issue. It isn't just about renting out servers or virtual machines. It is about providing compute in a way that nobody realizes where it is even hosted. True "cloud" in my eyes.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Thanks for the answer it’s very interesting to see how the infrastructure spin off of mining could lead to more conventionally useful hosting. So in some sense you intend to be multi-region without the eye watering data transfer costs?
    - latchkey 5y ago
      You're into gaming, GALA nodes are a great example.
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        Thanks, I'll take a look.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > I'm focused on building data centers for providing decentralized compute to all these web3 applications being built today. You're building data centers for decentralized compute?
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      That's not totally crazy, it's just the decentralization is at a different layer. Like Solid pods provide decentralized ownership over personal data but it's probably easier for people to use a provider for them than host their own server.
fatbird 5y ago
I understand. What did influence that decision? I expect it would be your overall appraisal of the viability of a particular blockchain and future expectations of activity. Is that accurate?
- latchkey 5y ago
  ETH is where the mindshare and developer resources went. ETC became too fringe. BETA vs. VHS. It really had very little to do with some quorum of powerful people. Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable. We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably. It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain. I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.
  - fatbird 5y ago
    Thanks for the detail. BTW, "quorum of powerful individuals" (QOPI) means the core ETH people who decided to execute the hard forks. I think you're demonstrating my point for me. It's not that QOPI led you all by the nose or that you acceded to a vote; it's that the core ETH people decided to hard fork and you made a pretty rational business decision to stick with ETH and not ETC in part because, as you put it, "nobody trusts the chain". It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.