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CE004: Cockroach Fallacy
1884 sats \ 10 comments \ @manusbuck 23 Dec bitcoin
Many believe that the centralization of mining pools is harmless since the miners can switch pools when necessary (like cockroaches scatter when disturbed by light). This belief is flawed since it assumes that miners will do it just because they can.
Moreover, switching from one large pool to another large pool may not help if both the pools have been co-opted by the governments. And, governments do have tools (like IMF) to coordinate with each other to co-opt mining pools across their jurisdictions.
Miners have to find pools which have the willingness and ability to run covertly. Current financial incentives of large pools discourage joining such covert pools. We must reverse them to decentralize mining.
PS: This is an attempt to write a simplified version of Eric Voskuil's Cryptoeconomics one chapter at a time.
  1. Axiom of Resistance
  2. Censorship Resistance Property
  3. Centralisation Risk
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283 sats \ 0 replies \ @jasonb 23 Dec
My experience is that most industrial miners don’t think about mining pool decentralization AT ALL, which exacerbates the problem you’re presenting here. Even the bitcoiners that get endorsements from these industrial miners don’t seem to care.
Everyone who holds Bitcoin needs to really consider how much contributing their weight in hash effects the security of their savings.
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213 sats \ 5 replies \ @we_can_supply_you 22h
Mining centralization is absolutely an issue, and there is, as of yet, no good solution to it afaik. More effort needs to be done here. I do believe mining hardware becoming more accessible to home hobbyist miners is helping with this.
My hope is that as more governments get involved in mining Bitcoin and/or having strategic reserves, they will want to mine on their own pools for reasons of maintaining sovereignty and providing economic advantage to transactions originating from or going to nodes within their own country/economic network/ally. While this isn't good in an of itself, it will help break up the hashpower a bit.
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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 21h
Is StratumV2 not a good solution?
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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @we_can_supply_you 21h
My understanding is that is helps move more power from pool -> miners (miners can now choose what goes in blocks) but does not fundamentally change the mining pool centralization problem. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 20h
Why does miners choosing their own blocks not solve the centralization problem? If a government wants to ban addresses, they now have to force every individual mining farm to not include specific transactions in their templates instead of just forcing a few pools. I don't know what the ratio of mining farm/pool is though.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @we_can_supply_you 20h
This is unfortunately beyond my understanding of the intricacies of the protocol. My guess is that pool centralization is still required because you still need a pool. How much control does that pool have? Certainly less than before. But more than an infrastructure that doesn't need pools at all (for example, a truly P2P "pool").
As long as you need a pool for something, there is some centralization and risk of the pool being attacked for some nefarious purpose. But hopefully someone here can chime in with a source or explanation which is more well-explained.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 22h
USA mining pool USA node
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 23 Dec
We don't make hashed numbers into links (we make links into hashed numbers):
Axiom of Resistance: #528424 Censorship Resistance Property: #528771 Centralisation Risk: #529015
This was written like:
Axiom of Resistance: https://stacker.news/items/528424
Censorship Resistance Property: https://stacker.news/items/528771
Centralisation Risk: https://stacker.news/items/529015
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @028559d218 24 Dec
"Moreover, switching from one large pool to another large pool may not help if both the pools have been co-opted by the governments."
The pools haven't been co-opted by governments. They have been co-opted by laziness.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 23 Dec
I'm going to bury those cockroaches!
Love Al Pacino in Scarface
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