Quote from: thejaytiesto on March 20, 2017, 05:21:07 PM

Anyway, my main point was: We change to another PoW algo. This makes sense short term for the reasons described above, but what about long term?

Doesn't a new algo create a new arms race to create the new mining machines that will create the new Jihan Wu's? And it will be in China, since they have the cheapest electricity.

So we have a constant here... the cheap electricity of china, that is the key that will keep generating chinese monopolies on a long enough timeline after a PoW algo change.

luke-jr pitched this some time ago (maybe he was a bit brash about it); but he got shot down like a bucket of bricks. he was on the money but the major players obviously don't want a bar of it.

Quote from: thejaytiesto on March 20, 2017, 05:21:07 PM

What can be done about this? Maybe something can be done to not allow a % higher than X inside the same area?
Can the IP's of the mining farms be blocked after X % is exceeded? maybe adjust depending on the electricity of the location of the miners?
anyway I guess IPs are useless nowadays due VPN and whatnot.
What is clear is we need something to avoid massive monopolies to be formed. Monopolies are never good for obvious reasons. We need something to force mining activities to be more widespread and not everything happening in china.
Less hashing power but more widespread mining operations are safer. Similarly, less nodes spread all over the world are safer than a million nodes inside a Coinbase bunker.

you could easily block a set of ip's, but then there are just as many methods to get around that.

Quote from: thejaytiesto on March 20, 2017, 05:21:07 PM

I don't know what the f*ck can be done, but the problem is obvious: china will always have the hedge due the ideal mining circumstances: cheap electricity and cheap production of the machines.

they will also have complete control over which tx's get relayed; like they are doing right now, cherry-picking the best ones to go into each block. not to mention antpool still mining empty blocks.

your comments regarding majority of hashpower at one pool interesting.
essentially over 70% of verified blocks come out of china anyway; all behind the GFC (great firewall of china), adding latency between them and the rest of the world.
additionally, its well known that most of these pools run dead miners on one anothers pool for the latest block hash update (even if this hash hasnt been propogated to the network).

i covered this quite well at https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5epa0x/why_the_big_pools_really_dont_want_to_budge_in which promoted a site i was running, that showed when the pools had found a block but hadn't announced it to the world.

i love bitcoin, still use it every day, but due to the infighting and frankly retarded behaviour (particularly reddit users), i don't think it will advance into wide spread use.