RE: EOS with DPOS is immune to the GFW attack _because it is more decentralised_
Does it really matter if BTC loses 80% of all its hash power? Won't we suddenly get new miners appearing because the network will adjust the difficulty and it'll be more profitable to mine elsewhere again? Sure we'll get a defacto fork without all the Chinese miners if they are going alone on the other side of the GFW. But pretty quickly if they are shut down the rest-of-the-world chain will be so far along that the Chinese one will be irrelevant.
However, to be honest, I don't fully understand the details of the BTC protocols - is there actually something that causes the system to break if 80% of the miners drop off the net one day? Or is the impact purely limited to an effective fork without them, which should, as those miners actually get shut down, very quickly become the longest chain of blocks and hence the de-facto BTC and not just a fork.
Happy to be schooled on my errors about BTC here, I'm just asking. No disagreement with your theory about EOS - other than if Ethereum goes to POS it too could be "better than Bitcoin" in this regard. I really do hope that will happen but that too seems to be a huge hurdle for ETH to cross.
Yes it does. The difficulty adjustment mechanism for Bitcoin is based on every 2016 blocks, not dynamic every block, meaning that Bitcoin does not handle large drops in hashpower well at all. In fact it could be catastrophic, especially with a feedback mechanism of dropping prices and long backlogs as a result of the drop.
Thanks, that's a good point. All these numbers can be changed if miners felt like it. But a reduction in block time to 1/10 what it is now doesn't seem like it would be that harmful. Ditto a big reduction in the readjustment time. Reduce the difficulty and block reward appropriately so it's effectively a no-op for miner income and what do they have to worry about?
Sure we mine all the coins a lot sooner and things get squirly at the end sooner (did anyone really think about that?) but in the mean time BTC is a lot more stable and usable. If we lost 90% of the hash power it wouldn't be any worse than it is right now and the network would adjust a lot sooner.
I assume you mean ten times increase. That would reduce effective transaction capacity by 90% for several weeks. I think that would be extremely harmful for users.
Edit: I think I understand what you mean now. Bitcoin doesn't have a "block time" parameter. "Block time" is a function of difficulty, available hashpower and chance. Miners cannot change these at will, it requires consensus across the community (miners, exchanges, wallets, all relevant economic participants).
That would require a hard fork. The history of Bitcoin governance suggests that would be anything but a smooth fix these days.
Yes, you got what I meant second time - I should have been more precise. And I understand the "block time" issue - it's a statistical measure of the effect of hash difficulty and available hash power and difficulty is adjusted every X blocks to approximate to the mean 10 minute block time, right? (I've never read the code but that was my understanding).
And I understand it requires a hard fork vs. soft fork, but for miners why wouldn't they go with it. More stability for the net, no change in revenue, and since it would increase TPS capacity for BTC and decrease mean confirmation time it would make BTC more competitive with ETH as a utilitarian payment system vs. "store of value" not traded often. Although personally, I think all the work on payment channels and off-chain settlement is the way forward there.
I wish that more people would look at the work being done with Tezos where the consensus protocol is part of the blockchain - which makes it easy to change the rules within the system itself. And a "do-over" is possible - again with consensus.
Bitcoin worked fine before china got heavily into Bitcoin, it will work fine without china again, its crazy to think that bitcoin needs the chinese to operate lol
but EOS will be really cool i can't wait for EOS to be $1000 or more man EOS will be the shit! it will be our ethereum, it will be our coin that made us all rich! EOS will be Steemits coin that makes us all wealthy and able to buy more steem!
Upvoting for EOS = 1000 USD :-)
eos up 22%
steem up 14%
making money with crypto must look like this to normies
BTC hashing: I heard somewhere between 80-90 percent of all BTC hashing was in China, as of late Aug this year.
So if those miners are shut down (is ASIC mining really that hot of an electrical power issue?, big assumption in some ways) then BTC would be easier to corner all hash power and be able to control the network.
POS changeover is a huge hurdle for ETH, but they have almost unlimited resources to work with now, so I assume they will do so successfully.
And in fact, it's interesting (!) to read Dan's comments on the ETH spec for POS.
He is the only person I have seen actively criticize it; if you look through his posts you will see it.
I assume it is in his interest, to see ETH last at least until the middle of next year ;-)
Well some magic mining wizard can always turn up and save the day.
I think one of the most immediate issues for BTC would be the hash difficulty would take some time to adjust and block times would blow up almost immediately if 80% of the hash power dropped. We saw how difficulty fluctuations have messed with both BTC and BCC block times during the recent fork while a new equilibrium was found and the hash rate changes were far less severe.
If 80% of the hash power drops off, blocks will suddenly take 5 times longer on Bitcoin Segwit. On Bitcoin Cash they have a new feature called emergency hash adjustment which allows a fast response. So they will be fine.
The other thing to consider is that the capital will be hit hard. A lot is invested in mining rigs. OK, so this is someone else's problem, but the knock-on effects are sometimes hard to predict.
I've never understood why BTC didn't just agree to reduce block time to 1 minute or less like ETH.
Yesteraday i analyze eos bought at $9 next target $20
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EOS will break $12 next target $20