Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM¥<div class="post">The strength of this project was meant to be its distributedness.<br/><br/>But 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.<br/><br/>The average user no longer has a fighting chance and has given up generating blocks altogether.<br/><br/>What does this remind me of? That's right, bitcoin is becoming like the physical money economy, where a small number of central banks now guarantee the trustworthiness of paper money.<br/><br/>There are two problems: One, the possibility of market manipulation, and more importantly, if only a handful of people do most of the proof of work, what is the point of a decentralized currency in the first place? It weakens us, because a powerful attacker would only need to bribe a few people to gain more than 50% of khash/s.<br/><br/>To stop this, I suggest the following:<br/><br/>1) Add more hash functions that must be solved in addition to SHA-2. The more, the better. The function ecosystem should include functions with very different requirements, eg. some that require lots of memory, some that can't be paralellized, some that require lots of disk space,...<br/>Also, function parameters that change randomly every time difficulty changes. This would take away some advantage from people who are highly specialized at solving just one hash function.<br/><br/>2) Pooled block generation. For instance, if 100 users join a pool and one block is solved, the 50 coins are distributed among those users. This would encourage amateur users to start generating again.</div> text/html