Quote from: Victorycoin on March 24, 2017, 08:25:43 PM

In the absence of that check, those miners were far gone on punching a hole on Bitcoin. Centralization of miners is a misnomer for Bitcoin, whose major selling point, is its decentralized nature.

Agreed.

I think the PoW change is still important, because of the situation with the current ASIC miners. If they can behave so recklessly once, I have little confidence that they will not do so again.

I feel for the small miners in a way, but not that much. They're the ones actually subjugated by firms like Bitmain, as the highly gouged prices they pay to people like Bitmain (surely it's only Bitmain and Canaan still selling to allcomers these days) are what funded the oligopoly to begin with.

If the miners thought more carefully, they'd see that CPU mining would put the ability to compete against the Bitmain mentality back on the table. And PoW changes really should not be attempted in an emergency, it would be highly disruptive and cause a great deal of uncertainty (not to mention the knock-on consequences of all that).

I propose that an orderly, staged PoW change, implemented 5% gradations via a series of soft forks, would do alot to secure Bitcoin's future. It's not my actual proposal, but one that is being discussed in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833391.0

Not only would we decentralise mining from it's current cartel state, we could attract more users keen to compete in a fairer mining market. I see no downsides, executed diligently.