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 <pete@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 <mike@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
>