Quote from: nullius on February 21, 2018, 11:27:17 PM

Clickbait for hardcore Bitcoiners:

https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement

https://opentimestamps.org/

Right. I'd like to think that tech like the above could be leveraged to create a database of author attribution (although I must stress: not the laughable "copyright" concept). It'd be a great way to promote the generalised use of cryptographic signing keys; anyone who believes their idea might be falsely attributed to someone else can submit a signed hash of their original works to a blockchain.

Quote from: nullius on February 21, 2018, 11:27:17 PM

Quote from: Carlton Banks on February 21, 2018, 08:48:00 PM

Quote from: nullius on February 21, 2018, 12:11:11 AM

Quote from: HeRetiK on February 20, 2018, 01:43:59 PM

One of the side-effects of the rise of ASICs has been that Bitcoin is sharing its PoW scheme with only a handful of coins, signifcantly reducing the number of possible targets to alternatively point hashing power at. Nonetheless it is of course impossible to predict how the world and cryptocurrencies will look like a 100 years from now, given the latter still exist.

And this is one facet of a very significant reason to not switch POW algorithms. Thank you.

Don't you mean this is the reason not to be holding any coin using the PoW algo to which Bitcoin's PoW algo is switched?

No. First off, the existing investment in ASIC hardware benefits Bitcoin security insofar as it locks miners into mining Bitcoin (or scamforkshmmm). If Bitcoin miners were forced to dump their existing investments in the trash and restart from scratch, they may very well decide to play the market with altcoinsespecially since they might feel betrayed (and in the case of some of the better miners, they might have a point). Moreover, the existing ASIC base provides a formidable hashpower which could not be rebuilt overnight. Meanwhile, network would be relatively weak. Lesser hashpower equals lesser resistance to anybody obtaining 25%/33%/51% of it.

There is a trade-off involved: Mining is now much too centralized; and installed base obviously benefits incumbents. But on the other hand, a switch would most benefit whomever could rapidly build out a new installed base. That very well could be the same incumbents.

Eventually, kakistocracy could overwhelm Bitcoin. S2X only failed because not enough people are presently foolish enough to swallow stories about politically motivated emergency hard-forks to different consensus rules defined by a different dev team. At some point, the balance of fools running Bitcoin nodes could be right for that to happen. PoW change is the only possible way to fight that scenario.

Although I hope that won't be necessary, I can see how some kind of technological improvement in semiconductor fabrication could decentralise mining with SHA-2 PoW. I would also point out that it would be surprising to me if SHA-2 has infinite longevity, but maybe that's a long-term problem.

Quote from: nullius on February 21, 2018, 11:27:17 PM

Any alt already using the hypothetical new Bitcoin POW would be potentially crushed out of existence, unless the new POW could be merge-mined. Then, both blockchains would share a mutually beneficial symbiosis; and the existing alt would receive a security boost from the flood of new miners. Of course, I dont see great prospects for this unless the coins are not economic competitors; observe that Namecoin, inventor of merged mining, does not compete with Bitcoin as a currency.

Yes, this is what I meant. Unless other cryptocurrencies using a hashing algorithm that Bitcoin uses have some in demand use-case that isn't duplicated by Bitcoin, then they're set to lose significant amounts of hashrate (assuming Bitcoin is still the dominant cryptocoin)