4 ms·

I don't see how that adds up, unless production of these light computers is extremely constrained they are just going to be produced en masse if they provide an

by simias 5y ago

I don't see how that adds up, unless production of these light computers is extremely constrained they are just going to be produced en masse if they provide an edge for PoW mining, then you'll just have many more computers using the same amount of energy. And if the supply is constrained in such a way that only a tiny amount of people have access to the technology it just means that you have a centralized mining pool that can easily perform a 51% attack. It's always a zero-sum game in the end. The only way to "fix" PoW is to get rid of it.

vmception 5y ago
yeah my post covered that, with much more brevity. read it again, slowly, specifically the third line.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I think the contention is around that it could even be a 10 year stopgap. I too think it would be much shorter - a couple of years at most.
  - vmception 5y ago
    ah okay so some of us are are agreeing about the limited utility. I mostly think the production and distribution would be constrained for the level of demand out there.
  - simias 5y ago
    Indeed, I should have made that clearer. 10 years is what separates the iphone 1 and the iphone 8, or the PlayStation and the PlayStation 3. If there's a breakthrough in computing technology it'll be everywhere within a couple of years IMO, and miners will be among the first ones served because they're willing to pay above market price and in bulk (see the GPU situation at the moment).
danlugo92 5y ago
> it just means that you have a centralized mining pool that can easily perform a 51% attack. Miners do not ultimately decide what blocks get into the blockchain or not, full nodes[0] do. Here's a collection of 8 articles explaning who (if anyone) controls Bitcoin and why miners are not who are in control: https://endthefud.org/control https://endthefud.org/control [0] ~$200 of hardware, and there are about 12k of them right now.
- simias 5y ago
  I don't understand the relevance of your articles. What would nodes have to do with the issue of who creates the nodes? Why would nodes reject valid blocks arbitrarily? Why would it be an improvement? I'm talking about a situation where a small group of people would have access to exclusive technology that would let them mine blocks faster than the rest of the miners with no way for others to compute without losing money. Nodes are irrelevant here unless they decide to arbitrarily reject valid blocks coming for certain miners because they'd deem them "unfair competition", but that's a huge can of worms. Who decides who goes on the list? Based on what? Could it not be trivially worked around?
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    The network self-regulates. Pour more computing into it (via your exclusive technology or whatever), the difficulty ramps up and you're back to square one (but you'll mine bitcoin alright). Were you start censoring transactions, node would start rejecting your blocks, back to square one.

by simias 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

yeah my post covered that, with much more brevity. read it again, slowly, specifically the third line.

vlovich123 5y ago
I think the contention is around that it could even be a 10 year stopgap. I too think it would be much shorter - a couple of years at most.
- vmception 5y ago
  ah okay so some of us are are agreeing about the limited utility. I mostly think the production and distribution would be constrained for the level of demand out there.
- simias 5y ago
  Indeed, I should have made that clearer. 10 years is what separates the iphone 1 and the iphone 8, or the PlayStation and the PlayStation 3. If there's a breakthrough in computing technology it'll be everywhere within a couple of years IMO, and miners will be among the first ones served because they're willing to pay above market price and in bulk (see the GPU situation at the moment).

danlugo92 5y ago

> it just means that you have a centralized mining pool that can easily perform a 51% attack. Miners do not ultimately decide what blocks get into the blockchain or not, full nodes[0] do. Here's a collection of 8 articles explaning who (if anyone) controls Bitcoin and why miners are not who are in control: https://endthefud.org/control https://endthefud.org/control [0] ~$200 of hardware, and there are about 12k of them right now.

simias 5y ago
I don't understand the relevance of your articles. What would nodes have to do with the issue of who creates the nodes? Why would nodes reject valid blocks arbitrarily? Why would it be an improvement? I'm talking about a situation where a small group of people would have access to exclusive technology that would let them mine blocks faster than the rest of the miners with no way for others to compute without losing money. Nodes are irrelevant here unless they decide to arbitrarily reject valid blocks coming for certain miners because they'd deem them "unfair competition", but that's a huge can of worms. Who decides who goes on the list? Based on what? Could it not be trivially worked around?
- danlugo92 5y ago
  The network self-regulates. Pour more computing into it (via your exclusive technology or whatever), the difficulty ramps up and you're back to square one (but you'll mine bitcoin alright). Were you start censoring transactions, node would start rejecting your blocks, back to square one.