Quote from: itod on April 24, 2014, 10:07:54 AM

Quote from: SlipperySlope on April 24, 2014, 08:34:25 AM

Look at the following pie chart from Blockchain.info . In the Unknown pie slice are private datacenters and ASIC manufacturers that are large enough to keep the 1% typical pool fee for themselves. Suppose there are four very large datacenters in there. Count the named pie slices and add say 4 for the private datacenters in Unknown and get 12.

Those 12 miners control Proof-of-Work Bitcoin mining.

Wrong, these "named slices" are not miners, they are public pools with thousands miners contributing to each one. The second those miners sense their pools get bribed to destroy bitcoin, their source of income, they would switch to non-corrupted one. Instantly, within a day. With each month passing and more and more money being poured in mining hardware the chances that hardware being obsoleted by some external bribing attempt are diminishing rapidly.

No, you are wrong and here is why. These "named slices" plus a few private datacenters are the miners, only they execute a few instances of bitcoind.

The numerous ASIC owners execute cgminer or another program that adheres to the stratum protocol which is not a part of the Bitcoin Network and was never envisioned by Satoshi.

An ideal you might be thinking about is P2Pool for Bitcoin. Only in this sort of pool does each participant actually execute an instance of bitcoind, and the pool exists to share the solved block rewards fairly among them. Note that P2Pool does not appear in the named entities on the market share pie chart. Why? Because the ASIC operators find it more convenient not to be miners and delegate that most important aspect to the few big pool operators.

As core developer Greg Maxwell said in a thread suggesting a revival of Bitcoin P2Pool . . .

Quote from: gmaxwell on January 05, 2014, 02:46:10 AM

. . .

We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to. The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't who has a financial interest to the tune of say >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people including you overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.

. . .

Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.

In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.

If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread then I think progress could be made.

. . .

Here are Bitcoin network statistics showing the number of bitcoind instances - and few of these actually have generation turned on because it wastes resources if they have only minuscule chance of finding a block.

Note how few nodes there are compared with the number of bitcoin wallets.

With Proof-of-Stake, each wallet owner would be highly motivated to join the Bitcoin network to receive their 10% annual dividend on the amount exposed to the network.

credit: https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/