Re: [Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

Dnia niedziela, 20 lipca 2014 02:21:21 grarpamp pisze:

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 4:02 PM, John Levine wrote:

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But none of them will have the property that their currency is not under their control. Other than the obvious head start bitcoin has in the digital currency game, that is what bitcoin offers philosophically... freedom from control.

I realize that's the theory, but in reality, there is a mining pool that could easily grow to be more than half of all the miners, at which point it could start ignoring blocks from outside the pool, which would be to the benefit of people inside the pool. So long as the cost of joining the pool remained small, e.g., if you join you still get 98% of the coins you mine, this looks to me like it would be a stable situation, no matter how much outsiders complained about how awful it was.

Thing is, having seen the possibilities, people actually *want* this freedom from central control, in a bad way, and they're willing to act to get it. They also realize that if they, and the entire community, don't act together to maintain the decentralization they have... then it's over. That's why ghash.io (the largest pool) just announced that they will not exceed 40%. Down from 55% to 32% now...

While I applaud ghash.io's self-regulation (!), I do not in general believe in self-regulation. "We promise we will not abuse the system" only works as long as the payout from having the system not collapsing is (by the self-regulating potential abuser) deemed higher than the one-off payout from collapsing the system and running away with the spoils. This is not a good base for a monetary system, I'd say. ;) -- Pozdr rysiek