Author: Eric Voskuil 2017-05-13 06:43:59
Published on: 2017-05-13T06:43:59+00:00
The discussion between Luke Dashjr and Eric Voskuil revolves around the issue of mining centralization in Bitcoin. Dashjr contends that most people cannot mine except at a huge expense, so the profits from every miner you buy will go to pay for Bitmain growing their arsenal more than enough to offset your influence. Mining is simply broken at this point. Voskuil disagrees that nobody should mine because it's a zero-sum game that one miner will always win and therefore we should not push up the hash rate by trying to compete because the same miner just makes more money on the hardware. He argues that there is nothing inherently wrong with paying people to run nodes or signal "readiness," but there is no reason whatsoever to consider these ideas beneficial from a personal/economic or security/decentralization standpoint.Dashjr agrees that there is a serious problem of mining centralization (and economic/validation centralization). He believes that if these problems are not solved, Bitcoin will fail. Many people must mine, and there is no way around it. And if people want a say with respect to mining, they should mine. As a developer, he would rather work toward fixing that problem than putting a band-aid over it that basically tells people that the way they get their say is by donating to the big mining personality of their choice.Voskuil argues that miners are offering a service in voluntary trade and incurs no obligation to the "greater economy." He says miners control Bitcoin in some way, but nothing whatsoever obligates them to signal soft forks (or not optimize his operations). Double spending is an attack, on the person who has been robbed. The state enforcing a patent is an attack, on the person against whom it is enforced. These are called attacks because they are actually theft.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T00:46:46.988948+00:00