Quote from: inBitweTrust on October 22, 2014, 08:34:43 PM

Quote from: findftp on October 22, 2014, 08:30:46 PM

Now I think of it, could it be possible for the 1% to block the 99% entity?

Easily. With Bitcoin, 1 person can block the decisions of all the other users. It is called forking the code. The power of mining pools and asic farms is grossly exaggerated.

Additionally, the Asic miners are beholden to the will of the users because all their electricity and hardware means diddly squat if there are no users sending transactions to them and buying their coins.

It must have been several years ago that I suggested we think about how to back off the 'decentralized' bullshit while there was still a modicum of truth to it. It was not well received

I also proposed to resolve the 'majority of hashing cheats' (aka, 51% attack) scenario by simply consulting with a random verification authority. That would be someone who analyzes block and blacklists those blocks which are bogus.

The theory would be that relative to mining it would be fairly low-overhead to do such validation, and would be very low overhead to transmit info on a per-block basis (meaning that such services could hide almost anywhere.) What I believe would happen is that a handful of trusted verifies who provide consistently good results would emerge. They would lose confidence immediately if they themselves cheated.

In this way the blockchain would likely continue on good blocks even if bad actors controlled a large majority of the hashing power. Use of these (probably numerous) self-elected authorities by honest miners would be optional and abstract, but I believe that it would probably result in enough strength against a 51% attack to be effective (meaning especially that the 51% would not even be attempted because it would have a high chance of failing.)

This theory is predicated on the assumption that the number of honest miners are significantly in excess of the dishonest ones but they are outgunned in straight hashing power. Also, of course, the original assumption of Satoshi(s) that miners do not want to destroy the system or allow it to be destroyed because of a net loss.

At the time I first described this mechanism transfer agents (full nodes) were more of a factor. I was thinking of these also consulting verification bodies and interfering with block propagation enough to damage a 51% attack effort. Since transfer nodes are not rewarded they are not nearly as well represented at this time. OTOH, centralized services which serve end-users are more highly used. They themselves may gain credibility by advertising the various verification authorities they leverage. The chief danger would be clients that don't allow the user a choice in what blocks they accept information from and from whom. Whether Multibit contains this 'defect' I don't know since I don't use it. My bet is that it does.

edit: Actually, miners do verify blocks themselves as do old-school full clients which act(ed) as transfer nodes so they need not rely on independent verifies. Making my description above not sensible. Thinking back, my idea was to make sure that a somehow even if a bad longest-chain did develop (due to excess hashing power) it would still not really work due to rejection provoked by independent versifiers, and that would be more to thwart legal but unethical activities. Like Hearn's famous 'can't spend for 20 years' scenerio which is tenable if/when there are only a small number of coordinated entities monopolizing hashing power.