Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin is no longer decentralized
by
gollum
on 17/09/2013, 14:15:09 UTC
This is just FUD.
I have been following bitcoin since 2011 and has seen how the bitcoin world has changed over time,
yes you could call me a FUD, but Im just being analytical and aware of the trends in the bitcoin world over time.

adam3us, the inventor of hascash is also concerned about the centralization in bitcoin mining.
...
Now the concern is longer term.  Imagine its 3-5 years down the road.
Rows of data center racks lined with blades chock full of 14nm
hashcash mining cores.  A danger I see is that manufacturers have an
interest to hoard as long as bitcoin price supports a high profit with
next gen hardware compared to what is available to others.  So the big
boys (and I mean financial houses, venture capitalists, kind of level)
will be best placed to be able to buy their way into the line at TMSC,
front millions in design, pre-order fees, circuit board design.  The
risk is p2p miners arent going to be able to get access to equipment
that can financially compete with this equipment.  Butterfly seems like
a small player - maybe they'll ship.  But what can be done with the
above scale could eclipse their power and efficiency, probably in the
same way ASIC outclasses GPUs and I can see market reasons why
you or I wont be able to buy them.

Now some people might think so what - all's fair in a moore's law arms
race - thats part of the design.  And to some extent thats right.
Bitcoin could do fine like that, but it wont be a p2p currency any
more, not really.  That's because if all the peers are big stock market
listed companies, with corporate lawyers, very statically and easily
identifiable, they will do whatever governments tell them to do.  And
governments will tell them to convert the network into swift 2.0
including government feeds for analysis (yes bitcoin is public anyway,
but not to your legally required truename etc), and legal requests to
block this and that payment entity change the protocol by fiat etc. to
roll back transactions because of some fraud or dispute unrelated to
bitcoin, to freeze and confiscate bitcoins - we'll be back to square one.

...