Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposals for improving Bitcoin mining decentralization

[Isidor Zeuner <cryptocurrencies@quidecco.de>]

quote:
> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getblocktemplate is supposed to solve most
> of the pooling-centralization problems. Unfortunately, it is opt-in,
> and GHash.io doesn't support it.
> 
> Also most miners don't care and don't do the work to set it up. To do
> transaction inclusion themselves, they'd need to run a full node,
> which is a bit more work and resources than just pointing hashpower at
> a stratum server.
> 
> If you figure out a way to make GBT widely used (>50% hashpower), kudos to you.
>

Well, as soon as miners learn about the merits of controlling the
blocks' contents, this issue may get solved by the market pressure
of miners expecting this kind of service from their pool.

I mean, the dev community constantly has some level of disagreement
about the best policies for what to include in blocks. But seen from
the perspective of some Bitcoin business or another, certain policies
might be more preferable. So if miners start to understand that they
could take a stake for their favourite Bitcoin businesses by choosing
a mining pool which employs a preferable transaction inclusion policy,
the question would not anymore be "which pool gives me the most
Bitcoins or the lowest variance, regardless of the technical
background", but "which pools does the best for my Bitcoin economy
needs". And this may be a very economically driven decision by itself,
considering that the exchange rates for Bitcoins depend on Bitcoin
businesses doing well.

If we get to this point with respect to user (miner) education, then
it is probably only a matter of time until people start to find it
cumbersome to mine on a black-box pool and having to manually verify
that they still have an agreeable transaction inclusion policy, when
they can just mine on a GBT pool and configure things in their mining
software.

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 4:57 AM, Raúl Martínez <rme@i-rme.es> wrote:
[...]
> > We all know the recent news, Ghash pool controlling 51% of the hashrate.
> > While some consider it a threat others think that is not harmful.
> >
> > The thing is that we have to do something to stop this from happening again.
> >

Bear with me, but this piece of rhetorics struck me. Why even mention
those who think it's not harmful, when your next sentence states
that their opinion should be ignored completely?

Best regards,

Isidor
>