ADSactly Witness Report 2018/04/05

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Witness Update Report #5

All is well in the land of our witness server, no downtime and it has not missed any blocks. The Steemit community still patiently awaits the implementation of Hardfork 20, also known as codename Velocity, which will most probably see the launch of SMT's (Smart Media Token). The HF will bring some minor curation reward changes as well as eliminate the self-voting curation rewards. There is so far no official date set for the Hardfork, but might expect it to take another month or three.

Please take a moment to read our Witness Proposal, and if you support the same fundamentals and vision as we do for the future of the Steemit community, please consider voting for us as witness here.


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ADSactly Education :

We have decided that as part of our weekly Witness Report post, we will be choosing different technical topics to discuss.

Please feel free to request a topic in the comment section.

The Dangers of PoW

Now that we have learnt what Witnesses are and the differences between PoW, PoS, and DPoS, we are going to explore the dangers of PoW algorithm.

PoW consensus algorithms (adopted by Bitcoin) use the power of hardware (calculated in hash rate1 ) to mine coins. The more power you have, the more you earn. Simple, right?
Also, because mining can take ages, miners created what we call Pools. A Pool is a group of miners; where one shares their mining power with thousands (millions) of others miners, and gets a share every time a Bitcoin is mined, depending on their hash rate.

The only way to take control of the Blockchain is to have at least 51% of the total network hash rate. You may think this sounds impossible. Let's take a closer look at three crucial points.

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Source: Pool Distribution (calulate by blocks)

1 - The Top 5 Pools control more than 78% of the total hash rate of the network. Also, one organization controls more than 40% (!) of the total hash rate: Bitmain (Antpool & BTC.com).
Bitmain is known to create mining devices used by millions (the Antminers). What if these mining devices, made by the same manufacturer, had a backdoor to control them? This is not the kind of thing we only see in movies, OnePlus have been caught using a backdoor on their phones, and the access password is... Angela.

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Eliott and Angela, from the series Mr. Robot

2 - Moreover, most of these Top Pools are located in the same country: China.
A concentration of so much power in only one nation is questionable: What if someday there is a geopolitical crisis in China? What if politicians want to influence those mining Pools?

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Source: 10 Best and Biggest Bitcoin Mining Pools 2018 (Comparison)

3 -Bitcoin has a limited supply and one day miners are not going to be rewarded with freshly made Bitcoins but only with the fees. Mining would become unprofitable, and millions of miners will have to stop their activities. Fewer miners mean less hash rate: the blockchain would be more vulnerable to a 51% attack, or hash power: "the measuring unit that measures how much power the Bitcoin network is consuming to be continuously functional")

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Source: China: Political stability


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ADSactly

Each week our community grows bigger and bigger, this week we surpassed 5100 members in our discord server. This is our central hub of communication and where we continuously try to help each and everyone who joins, all you need is but to ask. We are really grateful to have wonderful people who are willing to help newcomers find their feet, in what can sometimes be a very overwhelming ocean that is Steemit.

We welcome you to join the society, meet and talk to people, make friends and establish fair relations with other ADSactly members. You will receive ADSactly community units just for showing up and taking part in our voice hangouts, for helping out with promotions, for helping new members feel welcomed, showing them around and helping them get familiar with the society, for finding new projects that might catch interest of other members. Sometimes even for being generally a good person willing to help others.


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Amazing thanks for sharing! i love your posts! Checkout my posts as well

I wish you success my friend

thanks so much for your support! it is very much appreciated :)

Oh nice post... I will Go to witness page and do the needful.

Do you you have a hash tag #?
Thank you for sharing

hi! we use the tag #adsactly. Thanks for your support, every vote is very much appreciated.

Thanks for the info, great post

Hardfork 20. Still getting to terms with all these.

I appreciate your work and have already voted for you for Witness.

In Steemit (POS) there is also a concentrated group that controls a majority. According to @arcange there are 36 "Whales" who control 63% of the voting power. While not as "bad" as bitcoin mining, they still control a major part of Steemit and to a great degree determine who and how the rewards pool will be distributed.

Hey :)
Voting power and Witness are 2 different things. Witness have the power to influence Hard Fork.
Witness can for example influence the way those 36 Whales can vote.

I meant SP not VP.

perfect explanation, thanks @folken

Thanks for the clarification @folken. I see more of the difference now. My concerns are still the same but not directly correctly.

The whales have a very, very large influence on the day to day functioning of Steemit as they control the money. On the one hand they should have the most SP/VP as they have the most invested. On the other hand 80% of the people have left Steemit. For many of these people it isn't that they don't write "good" posts. It's because they get very little return for all of their efforts. That's what I feel needs to be addressed.

I've read so many blog posts on this arguing both sides and why something will or will not work. I don't claim to be an expert in Steemit or even the crypto world. I do like Steemit and want to see it continue. However, I do see a problem here and now you (@adsactly-witness), as a witness, can perhaps address this when policies are being discussed.

That should say just SP, (not VP)

I really appreciate the weekly report. Thank you.

Didn't Bitmin once go over the 51% limit? When another company pulled out of BTC mining? Or was that a movie I saw? :)

Again, thanks.

We appreciate your constant support!

And yes, indeed! And some claims that Bitmain owns way more than just 40% It could be more than 70%

But holding more than 51% of the whole network hash power doesn't mean that an attack will occur. As long as the entity holding so much power is not evil...

Also, the nodes allege that they are ready for such an attack.

We'll probably explain that in a more in depth post explaining what types of attacks could occur and how to try to fight them.

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