Quote from: BTCfaucetTIME on September 01, 2014, 11:06:54 PM

Quote from: delulo on September 01, 2014, 10:54:31 PM

Quote from: HELP.org on September 01, 2014, 10:42:21 PM

Quote from: MangoJ on September 01, 2014, 09:46:38 PM

Daniel Larimer is a nobody.
He does not know what he is talking about.
Big "conglomerates" doing the bitcoin mining does NOT effect the security of the block chain.
Lets pretend only ONE person in the world is mining bitcoins.
Big deal.
Who cares?
There is nothing that one person can do to hurt bitcoin.
Everyone else using bitcoin has the block chain.
Easily over 1000 people have the block chain downloaded. No I didn't bother to look that up, it is a safe guess.
This one remaining miner cannot change the record, or the records of future transactions.

Perhaps I am missing something, but why does anyone care if everyone STOPS mining bitcoin?
The Bitcoin QT software will still behave as a wallet and peer to peer transaction data will still be shared among everyone elses wallet, correct?

Or are miners acting as a control node, in addition to mining?

No, Bitcoin completely depends on mining to operate. A miner in control could completely destroy Bitcoin if they wanted to. if they had a chain that took more work they could release it any time and wipe out all the transactions and miner rewards during the period they mining in secret.

Correct! A miner that constantly has more than 50% of the hasing power can reverse transactions at will reaching back to the moment when he got that 50% + hashing power.

I feel that many ppl in this thread express their believes without really knowing much about D. Larimer and POW. Doesn't seem like a productive discussion.

On the issue: POW is costly, slow, tends to centralize (because of ASICSs and Pools) and requires trust (in the few pool operators).

Here is more info on the system Daniel L. proposed http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS http://bitshares.org/delegated-proof-of-stake/
It is operating already in BitSharesX.

I don't think this is true. If someone were to have 51% of the hashrate and somehow change the protocol then the rest of the network could just ignore that blockchain.

You only need to trust pool operators for a very short period of time because if the pool were to do something nefarious the miners could simply leave and join another pool.

In your first paragraph you mixed up a few things: The amount of hashing power a miner or a group of miners have has noting to do with changing the protocol. A 51% attack does not require changing the protocol. The other 49% can not ignore it if it is the longest chain unless they made a "social" agreement to ignore it -> Then is is not much different anymore from (D)POS, read about it (see the links above)!

You are right with your second paragraph. But what I said was that someone who "constantly has more than 50% of the hashing power can reverse transactions at will" (corrected quite a few spelling mistakes form my original post

). If this is the case it doesnt matter what the other 49% of the network do. But this is basically the same with POW as with DPOS or any consensus network security model.