Quote from: novello on December 30, 2015, 05:36:02 PM

Long time since last posted here, quite a lot has happened since. Basically the asic manufacturers have used revenues from sales of their mining machines to fund super sized mining farms, driving the difficulty up and up and then to add insult to injury, stopped selling their wares to consumers.

Don't want to say 'we told you so', fact is that we did but that's history, with the way things are going just now the only way for home miners to make any money is either to get 'free', (stolen, for want of a better word) electricity where essentially they are monetising the power supply or buying a new rig, running it for a few month then selling onto someone else. The rise in difficulty is going to make life harder and harder for miners and I suspect you haven't seen the worse of it yet, think 1,700+ PH by halving time next June.

The only way individual miners are going to be able to compete is by working together, I know it's an idea that's been touted before and failed but what's needed is a community solution, one that's owned by the community and can't be abused. We tried crowdfunding and failed but that doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, especially if it was project managed by a respected figure like Gregory Maxwell, for instance. There are lots of different crowdfunding models nowadays and many of them allow for equity ownership, to fund an all new 28nm asic program - forget about 16nm for now - and use it to build a competitive super farm would cost around $20 million delivering around 300PH using 2 cents per kWh electricity. Even at 1700 PH with halving in place it could generate net profits of over $2 million a month which could be used to build more chips/systems which equity holders could buy for their own use at cost prices or add to the farm to boost their earnings.

No VC's to pay back or interfere, no manufacturers shutting off supplies just when you need more hashing power.

$20 million is a lot of money, but when you consider the number of existing and potential[/i ]miners out there that might be willing to pony up $1000 it's achievable, and many miners might want to put in a lot more, especially if they know their money isn't being used against them as it were.

Comments?

It saddens me to make this statement, of all the wonderfulness that Satoshi gave the world with Bitcoin he has one fatal error in the concept that I am not sure we can fix in Bitcoin 1.0. This may offend people or they may just disagree and I can accept that but here it is:

You can not secure a network of trust and confidence on human greed. Eventually it will consume itself to the point where only the most aggressive, ruthless and cunning players get to reap most if not all the benefits. Satoshi had epic insight when he/she/group/x made Bitcoin but with the great understanding of economics, there is a glaring lack of understanding of human nature on this one point. Bitcoin is not robust in this area and in the end it the mining/processing will only be done by a few huge conglomerate interests and that is it.

You do not know how much this pains me to say. The best we can do it try and put capital into people who are doing what they can to make this accessible as long as they can but in the end, mining is not and will not be for the people in a manner that they matter at all, full stop.

I(Dalkore), personally am on record a long time ago warning of this before ASICs hit and I was decried as either stupid or a hater. Well now I am being proven correct and it gives me zero pleasure in being right. Human interest and greed are some of the most powerful stuff around, it literally can move mountains if directed. In this case it was directed at the mining of a p2p decentralized digital currency and look what we have created, I literally have a data-center that only exist because of this singular idea that Satoshi gave to the world.

I don't know what a solution could be and there might not even be one expect let it runs its course and maybe that will give us insight on how to fix it.

On the bright side, the idea of a p2p decentralized digital currency with a publicly shared ledger is now planted firmly in the human mind and THAT, will never go away and even more epic ideas will spawn from this, you can be assured of that.

If you want to talk about this more in-depth, you know how you can reach me. Thank you.

-Dalkore