Troy Benjegerdes wrote: > Mark Friedenbach wrote: >> Bitcoin is not a centralized system, and neither is its development. I >> don't even know how to respond to that. Bringing up altchains is a total >> red herring. >> >> This is *bitcoin*-development. Please don't make it have to become a >> moderated mailing list. > When I can pick up a miner at Best Buy and pay it off in 9 months I'll > agree with you that bitcoin *might* be decentralized. Maybe there's a > chance this *will* happen eventually, but right now we have a couple of > mining cartels that control most of the hashrate. > > There are plenty of interesting alt-hash-chains for which mass produced, > general purpose (or gpgpu-purpose) hardware exists and is in high volume > mass production. Decentralized doesn't mean "everyone is doing it", it means "no one can stop you from doing it". Observe bitcoin development. A few people do the bulk of the work, a bunch more people (like me) do work ranging from minor to trivial, and millions do nothing. And yet, it is still totally decentralized because no one can stop anyone from making whatever changes they want.
So it is also with mining. The world overall may make it impractical, perhaps even foolish, for you to fire up your CPU and mine solo, but no one is stopping you, and more to the point, no one is capable of stopping you. There is no center from which you must ask permission. On moderation, I note that moderation can also be done in a decentralized fashion. I offer this long overdue example: :0 * ^From.*ho...@hozed.org /dev/null ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/13534_NeoTech _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
