Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 15, 2014, 06:25:35 PM

It's not just mining. The general trend over time is centralisation of everything. That's because professionalism is important but takes a lot of work, and the most obvious way to fund it is through offering services and charging a fee. Right now for a lot of Bitcoin users, their experience is like:

- Buy some coins on coinbase (essentially a bitcoin bank)
- Send them to a friend who uses blockchain.info
- Mine on a big pool like BTC Guild or GHash.io
- From time to time, buy things from a merchant who is using BitPay

What I see happening is that Bitcoin is scaling by organically supporting a multi-tiered or 'off-chain' series of solution while remaining within the grasp of small and independent entities to operate the infrastructure and thus they remain difficult to manipulate. We are already at pretty impressive 'market cap' and I still use native global/persistent transactions to buy trinkets, and we are not yet really pushing into the supposedly absurdly low transaction rate. I see this as a really good thing, and there is a lot of room to grow in this direction.

The mining centralization is starting to bother me, but only slightly. It is clear to me that the current primitive form of mining is really the Achilles heal of the solution. But how to correct the deficiency given that the miners are likely to be highly uncooperative? I'll posit that the only way to do so would be a when a pool takes advantage of this weakness. At that point the value store could/would be rolled back and locked and an entirely new method of mining implanted. It would be all kinds of scary and disruptive, but in the end Bitcoin will come out stronger since none will be lost and this design deficiency will be addresses. I just hope that some good options are ready to go.

Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 15, 2014, 06:25:35 PM

It varies by region of course. Here in Europe I see a lot of people using the Android SPV wallet, so that's at least fairly decentralised. But it takes huge and constant effort to keep the decentralized solutions competitive with the more centralised forms. Cracking that problem is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

Not to be to glib, but I would expect you to be putting some thought into that problem. Just in such a way that banishes the small fry as quickly and completely as possible since they are not inclined to freeze the assets of the Butcher of [insert capital of country with coverted energy corridors here.] And similarly disturbing (to me) reasons.

I'm still waiting for an explanation of how SPV clients do anything of any significance toward strengthening the network. I guess you mean that simply the body-count of end-users is somehow to be taken as 'decentralization'?

---

retep: Whether one is bored by Mike or not, I don't think that it is a stretch to consider him THE most critical individual in the Bitcoin universe at this point. My arguments:

From back when I was following commits I considered sipa to be effectively the principle architect of Bitcoin. Mike at least is familiar with his priorities enough to comment authoritatively on them though it is, of course, not clear if what influence he has on them.

In the interview with Mike from a few months ago (when the Yifu Guo, Mellon ID+blacklisting authority effort was in the news) it sounded pretty much like Mike has a pretty close relationship with Gavin and is exerting influence to really opening up the transaction rate when that occurs.

A high position in the Bitcoin Foundation focused regulatory efforts which seemed to be associated with an exploration of blacklisting. To be fair, that's his job, but one cannot help but conclude that he's flirted with the concept from an early time. It's hard (but not impossible) to conclude anything but that he favors some form of them.

---

I would again like to point out that there is nothing illogical about the various theoretical methods of controlling Bitcoin. It would solve a lot of problems that a lot of people (including myself) see.

It is highly critical, however, to note that a very large number of grandmothers and Joe Sixpacks are going to agree vigorously with the need to dispense with a lot of the freedoms that Bitcoin users currently enjoy, and I'll bet that ideas like blacklisting are going to be pretty popular. I might remind everyone that these folks are exactly the people that nearly everyone here wants to suck into the ecosystem as quickly as possible.