Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problem
by
TPTB_need_war
on 08/02/2016, 15:14:27 UTC
Bitcoin didn't solve BGP either. Nothing does because...

What you keep denying is that there are solutions (all solutions, and provably so in the case of BGP) that solve the problem within a specified range. Generally up to 33%-of-generals in the case of BGP and maybe 50%-of-hash rate for Bitcoin.

ASIC-resistant PoW seems like a delightful idea to me.  Is memory latency the barrier to stand upon for the ages?  Hmm, that sounds familiar.

Of course no PoW proving algorithm (of any design) can be as efficient on less optimized consumer hardware and retail electricity (10 - 20 cents per KWH) as compared to highly optimized ASIC mining farms on 0 - 4 cents per KWH electricity (hydropower colocated or China's collectivized corruption). Even distributing ASICs to consumers won't level the playing field and not only because of differences in electricity costs, yet also due to economies-of-scale, access to lower interest loans, better connectivity to the major pools of the P2P announcement network, amortization of block chain verification over great income, etc..

Profitable PoW will always centralize, because there is a "selfish mining" attack always ongoing and there is no such thing as a minimum requirement for 25 or 33% of the hashrate, because (a conceptual variant of) "selfish mining" is built into the economics of Bitcoin (e.g. the amortization of verification costs, etc).

That is why I designed an UNprofitable PoW system. There is no other hope.

Edit: the reason I am interested in narrowing the margin between PoW prover computation on consumer hardware and mining farms, is because in an UNprofitable mining design then the aforementioned ratio dictates from the ratio of UNprofitable hashrate to profitable hashrate determines how high that block reward can be and not be profitable to any miner. Obviously a coinbase reward of 0 is always UNprofitable (unless transaction fees are considered which is another detail I covered in the Decentralization thread).