RE: A response to proposed changes to witness/miner rewards in the next Steem hardfork

[everittdmickey]

I don't think the word 'monopolize' means what you think it means.
What's to stop someone, anyone, from mining? All it takes is a computer?
so...apparently they are just taking advantage of an opportunity...which ANYONE can do if they want to spend the time and money to do it.
I see no problem with that.
In fact I'm considering mining my ownself....once I get some other stuff done. I have this old XP laptop just sitting there.

Comments

[pfunk]

You would be astronomically lucky to enter the miner queue with an XP-era laptop versus a person using a private GPU miner with multiple modern GPUs. When both the supercomputing and rabbit accounts were competing in the queue, it was rare to see even one account belonging to someone else in the queue.

[everittdmickey]

(shrug) I dunno how it works. I have some learning to do.
I suspect that if it was easy anyone could do it.
I also suspect that if it was easy it wouldn't be as worthwhile TO do it.
I think the word is 'dominate' rather than 'monopolize.'

[pfunk]

When the two groups of accounts have competed, they have duopolized the queue. If the accounts are owned by the same person, as the timing of their block production might suggest, it is a potential effective monopoly.

[fyrstikken]

Hmm.. You know - We don´t really need outside miners nor the mining queue imho.
I´d say we should drop the whole mining-thing all together and just witness.

[pfunk]

I've had similar thoughts, but the miner slot does provide some value such as anonymous account creation. I'm pretty sure Dan wants to keep it for diversification of block production, which is valid to me. But I don't agree that it should be paid equal to the backup slot.

Here's what the Steem whitepaper has to say about it, from page 22:

This process is designed to provide the best reliability while ensuring that everyone has the potential to participate in block production regardless of whether they are popular enough to get voted to the top. People have three options to overcome censorship by the top 19 elected witnesses: patiently wait in line with everyone else not in the top 19, purchase enough computational power to solve a proof of work faster than others, or purchase more SP to improve voting power. Generally speaking, applying censorship is a good way for elected witnesses to lose their job and therefore, it is unlikely to be a real problem on the Steem network.

[ibringawareness]

But seriously, thanks for the real research and dedication to Steemit.