Quote from: rovchris on June 21, 2013, 09:43:22 AM

Quote from: glon on June 21, 2013, 09:41:58 AM

Quote from: rovchris on June 21, 2013, 09:40:08 AM

Dude the problem is not the code - it has worked fine till this point.

What has messed it up are ASIC's and the way they have been distributed. Basically only a select few have managed to get their hands on this technology - I would guess around 10% of miners are using ASIC's yet they are probably 70 - 80% of the network hash rate.

It has caused a concentration of power into the hands of a few.

The increase in performance has blown Moores law completely out of the water - Satoshi never envisaged this problem - the idea was Bitcoins were available for anyone to mine - this is no longer the case.

If everyone could order ASIC's next day then maybe it would not have such an impact - like the change form CPU's to GPU's.

These guys developing the ASICs have gone so against everything Bitcoins stand for.

If they had stockpiled enough before making them publicly available (and not using them to mine themselves AVALON) it would not make a difference. But their greed was put before the mission of the Bitcoin project.

ASICminer are a perfect example - like I said in a previous post - One company should not be able to impact the entire network.

If they have a major outage - block times would be dramatically increased.

Look and see how they are expanding as well. ASICMiner are almost like a central bank now.

Dude chill down. All I'm saying is a change to the code may be a solution to this problem...

? errr - I am chilled - I thought you wanted an explanation!

The changing of the code does not stop the centralisation of power - the inability to get your hands on an ASIC is.

... so the ASIC miners are going into the hands of a few people (or they could be used by the ASIC mining manufacturers themselves (mining BTC to offset/lower their production costs) before being released to their customers), and that means that ASIC units are going for $3800 for a 5000 MHash/sec unit on Ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/Butterfly-Labs-ASIC-5-6-GH-s-Jalapeno-Bitcoin-Miner-IN-HAND-NOT-PRE-ORDER-/330944064052?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4d0dcdaa34 (as opposed to anywhere near their $274 list prices).

One possible solution is to use the most advanced FPGA technology - 28 nm FPGA - which can get you 2000 MHash/sec for $1000. http://www.raspberrycoins.com (The ASIC miners are using 65 nm technology node - they are limited by how much time and technology a Fab will provide them - (and the Fabs give their best customer services to companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Altera, and Xilinx - who order hundreds of millions of chips) ). The FPGA prices will continue to drop over time (Altera recently announced a 14nm and 20nm nodes, and they're a little overdue to announce a Cyclone 6).

There were many times that FPGA's were considered too overpriced, but these companies just keep pushing Moore's law consistently ... (and companies like Altera and Xilinx can afford the 7 figure ASIC NRE's for the newest process nodes), and they make standard products which gets sold to a myriad of applications (and those volumes again - lowers cost) ...

... so between the greed and/or incompetence of certain ASIC mining manufacturers who are over a year late to market, and the steady execution of professional FPGA chip vendors, I wouldn't quite count out the FPGA technology just yet ...