Quote from: thejaytiesto on April 09, 2017, 03:06:52 PM

Even if you change PoW, what stops new monopolies to be formed? Look at LTC. There's a scrypt monopoly already. Change it to anything you want and you will get chinked again because chinese miners have free electricity and cheaper labour force coupled with sponsored PBOC money. PoW cannot be saved as it stands, changes need to be made, all PoW will always lead to the current situation. I had an idea of randomly changing PoW algo or something like that, SOMETHING must be done to avoid coins getting chinked or else you might as well dump and have nuke backed dollars. What's the point if both are centralized anyway.

I agree with you, but the move still makes sense.

The fundamental problem is access to manufacturing, and design. Even a CPU only PoW has this problem, there's a more serious monopoly there with high performance integer specific (which I think hash functions uniformly handle, anyone?) computation units, and they're called Intel. A whole panoply of problems stems from that particular monopoly too.

But, we can level the playing field that bit extra by changing to CPU only mining. ASICs are even more cartelised than Intel's monopoly, simply because Intel chips don't have the huge price gouging markups that Antminer and others can afford to charge. Mining with ASICs has been highly uncompetitive for independents right from the start.

And we're buying time by changing PoW. Time to test ideas like randomly changing PoW hashing (as you mention), or even requiring a series of 10 different hashing algos per block header attempt (Meni Rosenfeld's idea).

And the endgame is 3D printing of silicon (or other substrate...) ASIC processors. Even then, the company that sells the silicon and copper can begin to get in on the action in the same way nVidia or Intel could. But it still levels the playing field that bit more. If we could use a nitrogen or iron based processor substrate for 3D printing, someone might still find a way to monoplised or cartelise the most abundant elements on earth.

But let's get there one step at a time. The current miners have demonstarted all too well that power has corrupted them as much as anyone else, so we must work towards the most free market possible. I feel for the honest miners, but, if they're honest with themselves as well as the Bitcoin network they contribute to, they're getting ripped off and losing in this situation too. Mining rigs are only one part of the miners infrastructure, small miners will win out in the end.