Quote from: smooth on September 18, 2014, 06:45:14 AM

Quote from: SomethingElse on September 18, 2014, 06:24:46 AM

Now that has been proven and I am waiting for something better. I have been looking into PoS and maybe NEM PoI, but listening to AnonyMint's suggestion that also seems really interesting. Basically, if lots and lots of uses were miners, that any time a wallet was open it was mining, then the network could be supported. His solution makes a lot of sense.

BTW, I posted this idea earlier than the post I saw from AM that described it the way JM did. I don't know if AM got it from me, in reality he and I probably just think in similar directions so I won't claim plagiarism or anything of the sort. In fact he might have posted something earlier than mine, but I never read a lot of his posts so I can't say.

The problem is, this tells you the goal but not how to get there, and even more importantly stay there. Remember, Bitcoin started with a miner in a wallet. Eventually mining become professionalized and the wallet miner was ripped out because no one used it. Although a wallet miner is pretty pointless with ASICs, the miner was ripped out earlier, during the GPU era. Another option could have been to add GPU support to it.

I wonder if possibly the fact that Satoshi expected mining to become professionalized helped push things in this direction, in a sort of self-fulfilling way. The fact that we have seen how Bitcoin has become not only professionalized but highly centralized might be enough to nudge successor projects in a different direction. Centralization is certainly one of the things (besides anonymity) that does interest the Monero developers.

I'd be interested in reading your explanation of the idea, as AM's posts are intentionally vague as to not give away the secret sauce.

I was also thinking another possible solution could be to somehow eliminate the need for pools altogether. This may be achievable with a multi-level GHOST PoW, where stale blocks could be mined at various difficulties with corresponding profitability.