Quote from: iamnotback on March 26, 2017, 07:14:17 PM

@dinofelis, I just realized another possible reason why the Chinaman miners have urgency to HF and why the whales want small blocks.

If the 1MB blocks become monopolized by whale transactions (because they can pay higher fees than anyone else), then the whales can become the miners and pay themselves the fees, especially as coinbase reward declines to 0. The miners who don't spend Bitcoins, will not receive any income and be bankrupted. Thus miners are fighting for their existence.

Also the whales have a converse problem. If they don't take control over mining, then the miners could gouge them for fees such as a 5% fee for all transactions (which consumers will pay but whales will not pay that!!!).

Now it is crystal clear. They must fight. They have no choice but to fight.

And now I realize how horridly broken Satoshi's PoW design is.

And so this is possibly why the whales haven't been transparent about their motivation. It reflects very poorly on Satoshi's design.

So I think the whales have perhaps been planning for a PoW hash change at the opportune time. No need for them to have invested in SHA2 ASICS. Those will be deprecated soon. Interesting to note that MP had remarked in 2013 that both the USG and China were getting into ASIC mining. He seemed happy about that. Now I think I understand why. Wink

Quote from: iamnotback on March 25, 2017, 05:25:59 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on March 26, 2017, 01:37:59 AM

Quote from: http://trilema.com/2013/things-that-matter-these-days-things-that-dont-matter-these-days/

What you probably don't know already is that a good chunk of the recent hashpower coming online is actually a taxpayer funded adventure. A good chunk of the recent hashpower is split roughly evenly between the Chinese and the US government. There might be a third player in there but I can't discern. I can't tell which of the two is actually ahead, it seems to oscillate on a three week period. But in either case, the race is on : the governments are mining, boys and girls.

We appear to be at a very volatile period for Bitcoin or perhaps the can will be kicked down the road.

@dinofelis, I want to thank you for stimulating this thought provoking discussion. I suspect the community feels the same appreciation.