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Comment by gvhst | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you are claiming that BTC currently solves the "more wealth -> more power in system" problem but it clearly doesn't. The current state of affairs is more wealth -> more ASICS R&D and infrastructure budget -> more hash power -> more power in the system.

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There's a difference. You can't physically centralize energy production. Local energy price will increase when more energy is used. This ensures that no one can get in a position of control. In PoS, it's possible to get > 50% ownership, and it's game over.

Is 70% of Bitcoin mining still in China?

Does it matter? As long as there is enough mining that isn't controlled by a single entity (mining in China isn't a single entity), then the network is secure.

Aren't 65% of all bitcoin miners in China? Couldn't the CCP sabotage the network at any time? Say, a month before the launch of their digital currency?

https://cbeci.org/mining_map

This specific visualization is limited to 37% of the hash power on the network. It's possible that it is a representative sample, but I don't think we can assume that.

Even better, it is limited to pools that primarily operate in China. I really wish someone would turn off that link. It is really awkwardly bad and mis-quoted a lot.

With proof of work you have economy of scale working in your favor. You'll get different deals on asic, power, server farms, etc. the more you buy.

PoW by design leads to centralization and we can see it happening live with bitcoin mining. At least with proof of stake there's no economy of scale. Everyone can participate fairly easily.

> You can't physically centralize energy production.

But you can centralize ownership of energy production.

That is true, but its easy to centralize private ASIC designs or in a more extreme case the underlying chip fabs. If TSMC wanted to control the Bitcoin network they'd have a fair shot given they have by far and away the best fabrication technology for high performance chips

You hit the nail on the head.

TSMC, Samsung and GlobalFoundries are the centralization points of all of mining because they produce the chips.

Good thing they like money and they are global corporations.

This doesn't work for ETH1, which is PoW, but memory hard, which ties the network to GPUs over ASICs due to the cost structure of producing ASICs. It is cheaper to buy an off the shelf GPU than it is to buy an ASIC.

You also have to factor in the fact that the latest GPUs are not necessarily the best ROI. If you can get lower speed GPUs for a fraction of the cost, then your return on that is much faster. Of course, that is starting to change now that mining is becoming so profitable again. But regardless, you are still tied to GPUs, so anything you can get there is good.

> It is cheaper to buy an off the shelf GPU than it is to buy an ASIC.

Ahh I guess all the people making/buying ETH mining ASICs must be out of their minds then? First result I found: https://www.coindesk.com/linzhi-rollout-long-awaited-ethereu...

You know how much that costs? I specifically mentioned ROI.

If you did the research into that one, it also only has 4.4gigs of ram. It will also slow down (aka: zombie mode) starting early November 2021 once the DAG gets large enough.

https://minerstat.com/dag-size-calculator

It takes about an hour of running it, just to start mining because the DAG generation takes so long.

By the way, Linzhi only sells to large customers because they've taken so long to produce this thing (years now) that they don't have enough money to front the production run.

They are also a super sketchy company. You should have seen the stuff they pulled during the ProgPoW debate.

Disclosure: I'm a very very large GPU miner and I'm deeply involved in this business.

Matthew principle strikes again.

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