Two very valid and important points. Thank you for making these observations Peter.
p. On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 7:26 PM, Peter Todd <p...@petertodd.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 06:42:05PM +0800, Pindar Wong wrote: > > On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Mike Hearn <m...@plan99.net> wrote: > > > > > Whilst it would be nice if miners in China can carry on forever > regardless > > > of their internet situation, nobody has any inherent "right" to mine if > > > they can't do the job - if miners in China can't get the trivial > amounts of > > > bandwidth required through their firewall and end up being outcompeted > then > > > OK, too bad, we'll have to carry on without them. > > > > > > > I'd rather think of mining as a responsibility than a right per se, but > > you're right in so far as it's competitive and self-correcting. > > It's important to remember that the service Bitcoin miners are providing > us is *not* transaction validation, but rather decentralization. > Validation is something every full node does already; there's no > shortage of it. What's tricky is designing a Bitcoin protocol that > creates the appropriate incentives for mining to remain decentralized, > so we get good value for the large amount of money being sent to miners. > > I've often likened this task to building a robot to go to the grocery > store to buy milk for you. If that robot doesn't have a nose, before > long store owners are going to realise it can't tell the difference > between unspoilt and spoilt milk, and you're going to get ripped off > paying for a bunch of spoiled milk. > > Designing a Bitcoin protocol where we expect "competition" to result in > smaller miners in more geographically decentralized places to get > outcompeted by larger miners who are more geographically centralized > gets us bad value for our money. Sure it's "self-correcting", but not in > a way that we want. > > > > But I'm not sure why it should be a big deal. They can always run a > node > > > on a server in Taiwan and connect the hardware to it via a VPN or so. > > > > > > > > Let's agree to disagree on this point. > > Note how that VPN, and likely VPS it's connected too, immediately adds > another one or two points of failure to the whole system. Not only does > this decrease reliability, it also decreases security by making attacks > significantly easier - VPS security is orders of magnitude worse than > the security of physical hardware. > > -- > 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org > 00000000000000000e187b95a9159d04a3586dd4cbc068be88a3eafcb5b885f9 >
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