Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency
by
afreer
on 12/06/2016, 22:28:52 UTC
...

Doesn't that mean ASICs caused decentralization in our case? Wink (temporarily anyway... I don't think this will last forever. The incentives are prone to cause centralization in the end, we're working on that problem as well)

I am far from convinced that the kind of mining concentration in China that occurred in Bitcoin after the introduction of ASICS will repeat itself in Dash. This is because the latency introduced by the Great Firewall of China around 500 ms has a much greater impact on a coin with a 2.5 min blocktime than on a coin with a 10 min blocktime. Furthermore DASH has an effective blocksize 4x that of Bitcoin and the Chinese Bitcoin miners are fighting any significant increase in the Bitcoin blocksize because of the Great Firewall of China. The impact of ASICS on Dash have implications for many POW coins with block times in the 2 - 2.5 min range

My understanding is it's packet loss and bandwidth that's the issue for data transmission with China not network latency so wouldn't it be block size and not block time that's the issue?  Plus the cause is bottlenecks on the Chinese backbone then bottlenecks in regions you have to cross to get into Asia Pac which also depends which direction you're coming from and isn't unique to China.  It's annoying that people in Bitcoin are using the term 'great firewall' as that refers to censorship hardware and not the infrastructure problems relevant to block propagation, it's also diverting from the fact that the same hardware is now appearing in 'western' countries too, UK and Australia have their own "great firewalls" but transmission throughput is fine.