Re: Decentrally mined currency has failed and can't possibly be rescued
Anonymint, I am not ignoring your political arguments, I just don't feel any need to dwell on the problem when we have a solution in our laps.
I am not trying to be an a$$hole, and I don't mean this as a personal dislike of you, but I am frustrated when you debate me and make so many incorrect technological assumptions. So I hope you understand that I need to speak frankly in reply, so that you might get yourself more grounded to accept that you can't make analysis of what you don't understand well enough.
Since all we're doing here is engaging in hypotheticals, I'll take a shot.
Afaics, I am talking technological specifics and you are handwaving.
TOR can obfuscate enough to make whackamole very time consuming.
The "hiding in plain sight" because the "NSA doesn't can expend resources on small fish" doesn't apply, because the mining pools are not numerous. There are several pools which collectively have the majority of the hashrate. Thus they can be compelled by the government to blacklist the other small pools that don't comply with regulation.
Is not the recent action against 100s of Tor hidden servers not a reality wakeup call for you?
Also the government can make public examples of a few high profile cases of miners violating a regulation requiring miners to use only government approved mining pools, and this will be enough to scare most miners into compliance and provide the larger regulated pools with the majority of the hash rate.
The lack of realism in your analysis is difficult to comprehend.
There is a plethora of black markets already using the technology as well as legitimate businesses that prefer privacy.
Tor is not anonymous. 100s of hidden services have been seized and recent research paper explains that 81% of the users can be unmasked. I warned a long time ago that low-latency mix-nets can not be anonymous. I think you lack technological understanding to appreciate why that is so?
It would be good for Bitcoin to minimize pool mining anyway.
Impossible. I can't blame you that didn't read the important link I provided upthread which explained why:
Indeed I invite all to the read what gmaxell can not rebut.
Btw, gmaxell was wrong in that thread, for which I have written a detailed design document in private to explain, but I am not going to rehash that here.
In that post I cited:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/
Which links to:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/
Quote from: Vitalik Buterin
If, in the current 100 PH/s network, you are running an ASIC with 1 TH/s, then every block you have a chance of 1 in 100000 of receiving the block reward of 25 BTC, but the other 99999 times out of 100000 you get exactly nothing. Given that network hashpower is currently doubling every three months (for simplicity, say 12500 blocks), that gives you a probability of 15.9% that your ASIC will ever generate a reward, and a 84.1% chance that the ASICs total lifetime earnings will be exactly nothing.
It's not risk of government censure that I see to threaten pools, but extreme corporate espionage. When Bitcoin gets to a certain level, miners will need to secure their facilities and pools even more so.
Corporations don't have the ability to see all traffic that passes over the network. Governments do. Thus governments can unmask Tor, corporations can't.
At some point mining pools will develop their own proprietary obfuscation networks. It's not so much about hiding money, but more about privacy and security.
You start with one false technological premise above, then proclaim that pools can create a better mix-net (and I know you don't realize that is the only possible solution to remain hidden) without even comprehending how a mix-net amongst a few pools would be trivially easy to unmask. For a mix-net to work, you need a lot of varied users of the internet involved, meaning you need to create the high-latency improved Tor I have called for. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect (sorry not wanting to ad hominen, but factually this is exactly Dunning-Kruger).