Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: rpietila Altcoin Observer
by
AnonyMint
on 25/07/2014, 02:57:17 UTC
And those Asian gaming machines might be running 64-bit and are newer hardware according to the steam survey I cited (and according to the sources I cited are available for 1000 computers for $15).

Gaming machines are certainly going to be newer than many light-usage home machines (web + email generally). I don't know what cafe machines are like.

Here what I typically see is maybe 50% of them are recent CPUs (because growth radically accelerated when the Fed did QE driving the bond investors to emerging markets to seek yield, with credit growing > 20% annually here) but only dual-core. Often only 2MBGB of memory. They are cheap machines but later generation, because they need the latest AGPU to play Dota, etc.

I also think gaming machines are likely to be running newer software better maintained, less frequently used for random crap on the Internet (no time since the gamers are spending 20 hours a day gaming). So in general less likely to become part of a botnet. This does not mean that no gaming machines are part of botnets, but the number is likely quite small, relatively speaking.

If the number is not small, then why are GPU-mined coins allegedly not overrun by botnets, and the why is the problem of botnets attached to CPU-mined coins?

Maybe small but maybe 50K or your 100K Smiley Really I don't know if yours is the most profitable to mine with a botnet, so I have no idea.

My point is it wouldn't take too many at this stage of your mining usage to gain significant coins cheaply.

You ignored my main point which is the 50% attack but rather disproportionate concentration of the ownership of the coin.

I don't agree with it. I expect the fairly frictionless marketplace to sort out to more or less the same ownership as would otherwise exist. People who value the coin more will buy it, and the botnet owner who already owns a valuable asset, the botnet will sell it for whatever he values most, giving him a return on his asset.

They key difference is the botnet owner will likely sell the mined coins, and the other miners at this stage will not.

So therefor the price is driven down and the miners are mining at a loss compared to those whales who sit on the bid to mop up the cheap coins.

This drastically retards the network effects growth of the coin. Sheesh! I already explained this to you in the Monero thread and you choose to forget it. Peter R already showed that Bitcoin price scales as the square of N where N is some proxy for users.

Yeah I know for you everything is theory and should be ignored, even though Peter R showed in fact it is occurring.

You don't like to entertain any possibilities that would cause you to make the conclusion that Monero is flawed.

I am pretty sure it is flawed. I don't care. Everything is flawed. If you mandate perfection, you spend years contemplating everything and delivering nothing.

I prefer to deliver something that might work, and then see if it does. The world is complex and chaotic enough that I don't believe this is knowable without real world experience.

Agreed delivery is crucial. There is a balance between delivery haphazardly and being too methodical and never delivering on time.

But this notion of "delivery and we can work it out over time, given we are open source and have a lot of good minds" actually doesn't work in practice. I quoted Linus Torvalds for you on that.

Agreed one of the first principles of open source is "ship early and ship often". But in terms of design, this is known to suck (ignore Eric Raymond's blog at your peril, for he is originator of the term "open source").

How much effort have you done to investigate the botnets?

How much effort have you applied to investigating my points about your proof-of-work?

None. As a volunteer I work on things that interest me. Neither of those interest me particularly.

Ok understood. As I said, this is why design sucks in this model. Eventually open source rectifies this, but it can take a loooonnng time, e.g. Mint finally makes a Linux that looks like Windows desktop. How many years did it take to come?