Quote from: Lauda on March 21, 2016, 07:39:47 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 21, 2016, 06:21:01 PM

I did a calculation recently where I figured it would cost a minimum of six million dollars in order to carry out a viable solo mining operation.

Show me these calculations. Additionally, you don't need a 'viable' operation; you need 1 block.

I would not consider finding one block lets say over the course of a year to be a viable mining operation, that would be more like gambling. Look I am a miner myself, when you invest a lot of money into equipment you would not want to gamble that investment away because of variance.

I can do another conservative estimate for you now, the six million dollar figure I got because that would be the cost of ordering three containers off Bitfury. But because those exact numbers are unknown I will use the latest antminer S7 instead, not that I think those machines are even a good bet right now.

I would argue that you would need at least 0.5% of the share of the total hashrate in order to solo mine. This is a very conservative estimate, considering that I am not comfortable with mining with pools below two percent, the variance is just to high, it is painful not to find any blocks for days, especially when you are still paying for the electricity and you still need to reach your ROI.

Here is the antminer with a power supply:
https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201603211525448720q7Dtj890660
https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201505040743496917U7kGsCm0694

So that would come to a total of 742 dollars, for a single unit, each one of these units can do around 4.73ths according to Bitmain, it usually is a bit lower then what they advertise lol. now 0.5% of 1134514353 GH/s is 56725717.65 GH/s. if one antminer is 4730 GH/s then it would take 11993 antminers in order to gain such a network share which would cost a total of 8898806 dollars, which is actually closer to 8.8 million dollars, now this does not include electricity cost, infrastructure and building cost. Along with security and other staff to actually operate a Bitcoin mine at this scale.

Quote from: Lauda on March 21, 2016, 07:39:47 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 21, 2016, 06:21:01 PM

Do you seriously believe that someone who invests six million dollars into a mining operation would not be able to afford to run their own full node in a datacenter anywhere in the world?

I never said this.

You implied it by saying that the increased cost for running a full node increases mining centralization when as you can see the cost of setting up a solo mining operation is so high that the cost of running a full node would certainly not deter such an operation. The truth is that most miners do not run full nodes for the purpose of mining, which is why increasing the cost of running a full node does not effect mining centralization.

Quote from: Lauda on March 21, 2016, 07:39:47 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 21, 2016, 06:21:01 PM

Agreed, which is why I think a hard block size limit is not even necessary, which is why my preferred implementation is Bitcoin Unlimited.

If it truly wasn't necessary, everyone would either jump to BU and/or remove the limit in the current implementation. In other words, it is necessary.

I hope you can realize how flawed this thinking is, just because the majority believes one thing it does not make it true, there are plenty of historical examples that show this principle does not hold, furthermore it is not necessarily that clear to know what the majority is thinking, which is a dilemma I am sure the miners also face when making the decision what rules to change or adopt, this is both true for an increased blocksize and segwit.