Quote from: chickenado on October 01, 2010, 11:31:46 AM UTCBut now, it seems that an increasingly small and exclusive elite has taken charge of coin/block generation. It’s dominated by specialists who have access to wholesale means of production and secret, proprietary GPU code.
The average user no longer has a fighting chance and has given up generating blocks altogether.
It’s always been the plan for block generation to not be profitable for most people. It’s supposed to be done mainly by dedicated “backbone” entities. What’s stronger: a thousand people producing 1 Gh/s with hardly any individual economic interest in preserving the network’s integrity, or five businesses producing the same Gh/s that will fail if they or someone else destabilizes the network?
I’m not saying that GPU code shouldn’t be made, but it’s not fair to say that GPU generators are “taking without giving back”. People dedicated to generating deserve a head-start on new technologies.
I was under the impression that coin generation was a way to make sure everyone had a fair chance of putting effort against coins, thus avoiding any central committee of deciding the future of bitcoins. Decentralized is the word, I believe…
But I get it, if you put the time and money into getting better miners, you should be able to keep it to yourself, so the 4way patch should never had been merged into mainline, as its creator would have 2x+ performance over the same machine running common clients.
I have to disagree here. Yes, competition is good and valuable, and people should not get into bitcoins for the mining alone, but if you let a small subset of people hold most of the future generated coins you are putting the whole project in danger of abuse and destruction… but I may be overreacting.
I’ll be glad to stop posting code, buy some serious hw and just do the generation myself. As difficulty goes up and people stop generating, this gets more and more statistically interesting… you say I should, right?