Has the Bitcoin "Experiment" failed?

Dave_Wills 2016-02-04 16:27:55 UTC #179

So I guess the question is, if we know what went wrong. Which from what I have seen and read there are many, many things. Why is it so hard to fix it and come up with the ultimate "usable" adoptable coin/platform that everyone wants to use. All I ever see is lame ass attempts at various alts etc. I really wouldn't think it would be that hard knowing what we know now about what is needed/required. And if you think outside the "Bitcoin" box, you'll soon figure out the day that China changes it's mind about Bitcoin, is the day there won't be a Bitcoin anymore. Keep in mind without the need for ASICS we wouldn't really need China anymore. I am sure there are many that wouldn't agree but it's just my opinion.

Daffy 2016-02-04 17:01:37 UTC #180

For bitcoin it really is impossible to change algo's nobody would support it especially the large scale miners. And LTC has the same problem already once the scrypt asics came along. The only good alternative would be POS coins but none of those are getting a lot of adoption.

cryptichermit 2016-02-04 22:24:09 UTC #181

S7's operate in the 60 C range just fine.

cryptichermit 2016-02-04 22:29:57 UTC #182

Was mining really the experiment? Or was mining a by-product of the incentive system to maintain the experiment? Anywhere capital can be used to gain an edge, capital will be used. Whether it be an ASIC world or GPU world, scale is where it's at. The hardware used by the end users won't change the scales.

Aethercollector 2016-02-04 22:35:30 UTC #183

When I first read the white paper and the blockchain.
To me the experiment was how long could a living, reactive, encrypted, network be able to run on the global scale?
Mining is the incentive to make it live, from the rewards.

Daffy 2016-02-04 22:55:56 UTC #184

Well it's part of the experiment. The decentralized part but now with all the high powered ASICS and the mining consortiums it's not really decentralized anymore. It should be much more decentralized to make it more stable and tamper proof. How many times have pools been shutdown or limited the number of clients because of the possibility of a 51% hashrate on one pool?

huskypower2015 2016-02-05 00:54:30 UTC #185

Satoshi's model had a "1 CPU 1 vote" model. With that said, ASIC's have blurred that line...much like Wall Street has blurred the US democratic system. No longer is the small man in charge of the system, but the power brokers.

Dave_Wills 2016-02-05 01:16:30 UTC #186

It's that way around the globe! Even secluded tribesmen in Africa fear the "Big Man Power Brokers" they come in all shapes and sizes, nationalities and religions. But the end result is the little guys get pushed aside!

rootdude 2016-02-07 17:53:42 UTC #187

You guys are making Luke-Jr's arguments for him. Shame on you

More than this @Daffy - China has the ability, today, to co-opt the bitcoin network in one fell swoop. If their pools decided they wanted to increase the number of coins to 42,000,000 they could do it, easily, by writing their own code and pointing their pools to that wallet and forking bitcoin. Would they do it? Unlikely, since it'd cost them value in the short term, but they certainly have leverage to do so.

I've said this many times before - multi-algorithm mining against the BTC blockchain is really the only mechanism to level the playing field. Maybe I haven't spent enough time describing how this works, but the Digibyte people have done an excellent job making the case for it.

TL;DR, ASICs, GPU's and CPU's would all mine different strata with different diff levels (still based on hashrate) - but there would be a normalization algorithm similar to what Nicehash uses to level the playing field. The top CPU rigs would mine against other CPU rigs, and likewise GPUs and ASICs - and no rig would be able to generate blocks more than a few in a row until they were barred from generation allowing the other strata to generate one of more blocks. Over the long haul, 33% of the generated blocks in, say, 2016 blocks would be produced by each strata.

Think about what this would accomplish - it would spur the re-birth of more pools because even small CPU pools would be generating nice rewards... and spread out both adoption and distribution more fairly. I'd definitely be interested in hearing more thoughts against this - Some of the more obvious ones are, of course, marginalizing the investments in ASICs and ASIC development - but is this a terrible thing? What country ends up producing ALL of the ASIC hardware? What country and companies hold back that hardware in their own best interests? Even the ones that allow us to have a 'taste' do so with little hope of ROI without a commensurate bump in BTC value...

Look, even KnC manufactures their chips in CHN/KOR foundries - and like every technology that hits those foundries, they get cloned (stolen) and manufactured in knock-offs.

paulc010 2016-02-07 18:07:45 UTC #188

I would say that in anything in life, when a minority attempt to subvert the system (in this case decentralisation) then the system needs to adapt. You've sold me

cryptichermit 2016-02-07 19:54:24 UTC #189

But what keeps a farm from simply diversifying into multiple Strata and dominating each one?
My point is that it doesn't really matter how many different angles you approach attempted diversification, there is always the availability to dominate given the required resources.

I think there is some level of self governance at play already. Those that invest more are risking more and thus should yield a proportionate reward. However there is a risk of too much dominance. When for example the market is controlled by a small percentage, there is bound to be less desire from the outside to even play in the game. Thus the buying demand dries up and the market values decrease. Those that dominate are left holding a devalued coin and would have been better off sharing the control in the first place. There is great incentive to increase adoption. The greater number of users the stronger the potential market value and vice versa. It's a fine balancing act the whales of the market are teetering on. They need to share the harvest or they will hold all the fruit and it will turn rotten quickly.

paulc010 2016-02-10 16:01:29 UTC #190

It has failed only if we allow it to.

Aethercollector 2016-02-15 08:50:47 UTC #191

Case in point for TJ.
http://nypost.com/2016/02/13/goldman-sachs-banker-involved-in-a-massive-overseas-money-scandal/

With open ledger blockchain technology the entire would could see where the monies pooled and who signed for it.

cyberdexter 2016-02-15 22:54:29 UTC #192

I think what most people still don't realize, especially those who are so surprised that cloud mining has literally gone down the drain in just 3 months.. you do realize that the networks hashrate has jumped from 400+ PH/s back in August 2015 to almost 1.2 XH/s at the time of me writing this.

In other words the networks overall hashrate has QUADRUPLED in less than 120 days which nobody could predict. I myself never seen the networks hashrate go up like this in such a short time in 5 years.

Has bitcoin itself failed? No, absolutely not and the $100's of millions of VC investment in industrial scale farms, blockchain projects and compliment that claim.

Has home and cloud mining failed? Probably not. However, the current hardware and continued arms race with more hardware coming online doesn't really leave much room for home miners or smaller operations and you can forget about voting with your own power on any kind of network consensus (such as block size debate and hard fork) cause your power isn't worth writing home about.. not any more.

BoB 2016-02-15 22:57:20 UTC #193

This is why I really like @rootdude 's idea, making it multi algo, at a stroke there'd be little point in overkill with the sha 256 farms...

We can dream, I suppose.

cyberdexter 2016-02-15 22:58:32 UTC #194

Wont happen cause rude isn't par of the "bitcoin elite" who's deciding on how to proceed. Speak those who have already received them 100's of million in VC, the payment processors, remittance businesses and co.

"It's not what it used to be" which doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Anyway.... next 4 months will show where "this" is going.

BoB 2016-02-15 23:07:56 UTC #195

There's a lot of things happening which weren't anticipated in the beginning. It's going to be interesting, going forward. We're still in the early stages where many of these business' will fold, many more will arrive, I think.

huskypower2015 2016-02-16 05:19:20 UTC #196

Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) hashrate will continue to climb exponentially.

While QC is lightyears away from being a reality, many speculate that further performance increases in IC's will plateau and we will see performance drag. However; with that said, there are the prospects of light-based computation that will show us how we can derive computational power form basic switching of light. This will affect bitcoin, but not in the way you would expect.

As for the powers that be behind bitcoin, realise that even if they dictate the direction of bitcoin, another satoshi will come about and create a new 'bitcoin 2.0'

I can't say I agree with @rootdude on the multi-algo concept. I'm not versed well in blockchain tech, but I would imagine that if someone were to dominate one algo, then the rest will charge after that one guy and then we have SHA(2)-256 all over again.Not to mention consensus when it comes to voting blocks onto the blockchain.

suchmoon 2016-02-16 05:35:09 UTC #197

I might be wrong but I think the idea is that a certain amount of blocks/rewards would be reserved to each algo and the difficulty adjustments would take care of balancing it out. So technically it shouldn't matter if billion-dollar corporations are slaughtering each other in the ASIC arms race - you could still make some coins with a GTX 970.

But seeing how thoroughly we are failing to solve a simple transaction throughput issue I think it's safe to say that the likelihood of Bitcoin multi-algo is about the same as my chance to win Powerball.

cryptichermit 2016-02-16 07:21:32 UTC #198

There is already a capacity to continue making coins with video cards - alt coins, then trade them off to BTC if that's what you are after. I don't think multi-algo on the blockchain would add much to mining BTC direct, even with some sort of smart ratio implementation built into the algo to control the given rewards per strata. Bottom line is if there were other markets available in the BTC mining scheme and they could generate similar profits for the big corps - then they'd control those as well. I mean just look to the time before ASICs. There were large scale GPU farms. This is merely a byproduct of the monetary incentive mechanism.

If you want a coin that limits each individual to a single share of the network, the coin would require some sort of identity verification system - probably biometric. Each node would require authentication of the individual. Then there would need to be a limiting hashrate per node implemented so as to nullify any variants in the hardware used by the node. Biggest difficulty would be a central verification system and the trust thereof. If the Internet Verification ID system moves forward a coin of this nature might be more easily implemented.