Quote from: adam3us on April 19, 2013, 06:32:16 PM

Quote from: passerby on April 19, 2013, 11:55:28 AM

Well, if you don't mind, I will provide a few comments without specific quotes:

When you account for pooled mining, ASICS become completely irrelevant - it doesn't really matter whether there are 4000 corporate-owned ASIC farms or 4 000 000 individual GPU miners, because in both of those cases the equipment will be connected to 4-10 "megapools" which will be effectively in control of the network

It thus appears to me that, if empirical evidence is to be trusted, ASIC resistance (or lack thereof) will have little to no effect on "decentralization", primarily due to very strong centralization arising from "pool" infrastructure.

Well I dont think thats as dangerous a problem as corporate control by a long way. A pool cant misbehave much. If it does the users will realize and pull out and it'll go under.

It appears to me that many miners care little about protocol intricacies. As long as dollers keep falling out of the vidjacard, all is fine and dandy to such folks Cheesy

.

Besides, I do think that you're overestimating corporate malice. Corporations are, by design, fairly sociopathic - but they are just profit driven decision makers, much like pool-ops, and would, just like pool-ops, seek to refrain from doing things that may break the profit model (one could argue that de-pseudonimizing bitcoin or removing the max coin count would drop the price like a giant bag of rocks, and that would not be good for Coinmining LLC, would it ?).

Also, I'm not convinced that "de-ASICing" BTC would necessarily prevent "corporate encroachment". It just so happens that it is much easier to run a large cluster of complicated equipment when you are a small company - and much more comfortable for the proprietor.

Quote from: adam3us on April 19, 2013, 06:32:16 PM

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P.S.:
My limited understanding of concepts involved suggests that "poolproof" design is possible, but my limited understanding of miner behavior suggests that it would be woefully unpopular.

Surely thats just a question of mining in much smaller parts, so that rewards are meaured in the Satoshis range instead of 25 whole coins. I think the harder but probably solveable problem if it was desired would be p2p traffic efficiency. I do think poolproof would be useful.

Well, the problem with "mini-mining" is variance, also known as "luck" and occasionally affectionately referred to as "fuck my life"

Miners want their payoff come in stable and predictable intervals (which makes business sense). They want it so much they are ready to pay pool fees in order to ensure that stochastic nature of mining won't throw them under the proverbial bus.

And they will probably ignore a coin that does not allow for such a service to take place - it massively increases their risks without offering any benefit that a for-profit miner would consider "substantial"

Quote from: adam3us on April 19, 2013, 06:32:16 PM

ppcoin seems interesting. I think I reinvented it or something similar, had another post in draft form, though ppcoin seems complicated at least the way its explained on the wiki (not sure I fully understood it from quick skim of wiki). Will post my similar idea next.

Adam

Ppcoin is incredibly contrived and opaque - I'm not too fond of it (and also, I have a conflict of interest Wink

) but at least it is kinda trying something new, which is, one has to agree, cool...

Quote from: kjj on April 19, 2013, 08:47:31 PM

Quote from: adam3us on April 19, 2013, 07:54:31 PM

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and do nothing whatsoever to exclude the people that some would like excluded.

It would do something about the people we want to exclude, that was my point/intention anyway: there are limits to custom hardware optimization where it becomes just too expensive and you're better off buying or making a faster CPU. Intel is a target you're chasing at the speed of Moore's law. Particularly if the algorithm is changing every 6 months in interesting and novel ways. Imagine someone come to you with a mountain of money and says build me this custom CPU in 3 months (so there's three months left to start mining). Maybe you cant do it in time to repay the investment. Maybe you cant do it in the timeframe with any amount of money. Even all of it - there are complexity and science limits for hw gurus and chip fab people etc.

You are assuming that the investment must be repaid in terms that you understand. Maybe someone is rich and just wants to mess with the network. It seems unwise to make ourselves vulnerable to that sort of thing merely because we wouldn't take advantage of it ourselves.

You can not stop someone who has so-called "disposable money" in the upper millions/lower billions USD and is, as far as you can tell, insane, with just "merely" sound cryptography and better hashrate, unless this hypothetical opponent is obsessed by the idea of taking you down by hashrate alone.

If he can't out-hash you with superior ASICs, he will lobby for BTC to be banned in USA and EU.

If can't out-lawyer us, he'll directly go after the exchanges.

If that fails, who knows...
...maybe he will buy some BTC and ~~anonymously~~ strongly pseudonymously hire hitmen to go after everyone worth going after in the community, at which point no half-sane dev will touch this code with a ten-foot pole.

"disposable money" in the upper millions/lower billions USD + batshit insane = IRL Saturday morning cartoon villain.