Quote from: sturle on March 19, 2017, 04:37:08 PM

... I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF. The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all.

Sturle, I am not an expert cryptocurrency programmer, but on the topic of business I feel qualified to comment: as a KnC exec said during their company's dying swan song, it's unlikely the Chinese mining operations would be able to operate at their margins unless the Chinese miners receive virtually unlimited funding from a state-level entity (e.g. the government of China or perhaps the PBoC).

Many of the people in those original reddit threads expressed concerns about Bitmain's disregard for market cap (e.g. Jihan Wu going unhinged, saying ""These stupid c*nts are going to be caught unprepared for the complex circumstances in which the fork is going to occur." source).

Recently, in the face of Bitfinex releasing tokens for people to speculate on the future value of forked variants (with BitcoinCoreCoin being valued around 0.8 BTC, and BitcoinUnlimitedCoin valued around 0.125 BTC), Jihan doubled down (and dropped the market cap a good $1 billion or so) by threatening to accelerate the BU hard fork.

That is why I suspect Bitmain does not simply want to gain control of Bitcoin, they are paid by governments to actually see to its destruction (economically).

In my view, the best way to remove Bitmain and other tyrants (for a year or two) is to have the full PoW change, rather than having 50% SHA-256 and 50% a new algorithm.

OTOH, yes I feel regret about the economic harm it would do to the non-tyrannical miners; maybe it's worth keeping say a 15% weighing of SHA-256 work so they are not totally wiped out.

Quote from: sturle on March 19, 2017, 04:37:08 PM

Quote from: BitUsher on March 19, 2017, 11:50:23 AM

Quote from: sturle on March 19, 2017, 11:28:19 AM

I think a hardfork change is too drastic, and will certainly end in a contentious hard fork. A POW change light can be implemented as a soft fork by a requirement for an extra proof of work of a different type in the coinbase transaction or in another special transaction. This will encourage cooperation between miners having lots of specialized SHA256 hardware and users mining the extra proof of work on their CPUs.

Good thoughts but miners will never approve this proposal with BIP 9 and I doubt even 51% so would need to be a UASF , whicj will likely end up as a HF only . This proposal is more of a HF in reaction to a 51% attack from miners which would not be as controversial.

The current miners will still have a huge advantage with the extra-POW soft-fork model, since SHA256 hashing power as well is required to find blocks, so I think a large enough economic majority will make the current miners come along in a UASF. The miners have no interest in mining worthless coins after all. They will have to share their power and some of their income with CPU miners, since none of them can operate alone, but will likely still have most of the payout. It is easier to recruit another CPU miner for peanuts, than getting enough ASIC hashing power to compete at the current difficulty. The most challenging task here is to find the right balance between first and second POW difficulty, and how to adjust this autonomously in a way compatible with the current difficulty adjustment scheme.