How would big advancements in technology affect the crypto world?

[Flame]

First thing that might come to your mind is mining would be easier?

But i was thinking along the lines of what if it become easy to get the master key, so all our real world money, time and effort would go to waste.

Or would a country or company use this to they advantage?

 

[notimp]

Wrong question? How important is decentralization?

So mining is a meme for "keeping validation of transactions decentralized" which is a meme for "keeping stakes/interests decentralized".

If trend says you dont need that - then you dont need mining. At all.
Speculation has far outpaced it in terms of market making for example.

Even if you 'had' increased capacity to mine - if no one is interested in decentralization, lets just buy up the thing people agreed on, why not. Owning their money (In high volume) and their transaction validation capability is always fun.

As I see no one currently championing decentralization and the transaction capability to use crypto actually for daily transactions, this means that mining - in its entirety - is a red herring.

Totally useless (in its current form, in a state - where most people still perceive BTC as "sufficiently decentralized" for some reason). Totally unscalable.

Wearing silly hats as the source of your social status. Or running silly programs, as the source of future wealth? (Almost trickle down wealth at that point, compared to what the 'market makers' earn. So not much - if decentralized.)
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Aside from that - probably not that much - banking on two principles.

a.) encryption is always easier than decrypting (just change math equations)
b.) not enough high priests that would need "computing power" for a structured attack against 'the payment system' - when the first choice for elites (even intellectual ones) is, and always has been to suckle on the tit of the system thats most likely to serve them well int heir lives -

the rest are outside factors - so something you declare 'illegal hacking' and have some brutes deal with.

 

[Flame]

Wrong question? How important is decentralization?

So mining is a meme for "keeping validation of transactions decentralized" which is a meme for "keeping stakes/interests decentralized".

If trend says you dont need that - then you dont need mining. At all.
Speculation has far outpaced it in terms of market making for example.

Even if you 'had' increased capacity to mine - if no one is interested in decentralization, lets just buy up the thing people agreed on, why not. Owning their money (In high volume) and their transaction validation capability is always fun.

As I see no one currently championing decentralization and the transaction capability to use crypto actually for daily transactions, this means that mining - in its entirety - is a red herring.

Totally useless (in its current form, in a state - where most people still perceive BTC as "sufficiently decentralized" for some reason). Totally unscalable.

Wearing silly hats as the source of your social status. Or running silly programs, as the source of future wealth?

I ask a question.

You say wrong question.

 

[notimp]

I ask a question.

You say wrong question.

My bad.

Wrong emphasis on this question. I propose, that mining isnt needed that much, even now. (Not in Libra, not in proof of stake.)

It becomes more and more anyone who wants to do that may do that, and call themselves something ("I'm a miner!") - but if they are not huge, and I mean huge - conglomerats owning asic or GPU farms, or buying up currency for voting rights they - miners - dont matter at all.

Cut them out today - what harm does it do to your crypto currency? What percentage of earnings do you have to invest into actual people, or hardware. (As most of your earnings are speculative anyhow.)

If that cost moves towards zero... I mean, you have your answer even as of now, dont you?

You might have to guard against individuals owning more than 51% of validation capacity, by going to Best Buy - but the rest you anker in a corporate distributed stakes system - as you always did...

What purpose do miners serve? Currently.
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Or the other way around, there are crypto currencies out there TODAY; where you can get an XP boost, by onboarding (hooking) more of your friends. If that (market making) is worth 2x and more of your 'mining' capability - as dictated by hardware you own. F*ck that hardware you own. And get comfortable with the notion that you as a miner are just used as a pawn in creating the myth - that gold is something valueable - world wide. Because look at that guy - he was a miner once....

(And in reality the people owning the brothels on the mining trail got the actual percentages out of every miner..)

Miners are worth exactly as much as you value decentralization you cant buy otherwise.

edit: Dont tell me FLAME is the only one that believes, that the thing everyone was financing spanish sea expeditions for (the Inka gold!) was the worthwhile thing here... FLAME looking for the Inka gold, and worrying, that it could become too easy for people to find it... Maybe you could hide it better? Then write a novel about it or something. Call it - Treasure Island. Then worry about it becoming too easy for people to find buried treasure, or something..

 

[notimp]

Here is an adventure story of people, really - really believing in that last bit of BTC Inka gold is buried in the US!

What patriots!

https://fortune.com/2020/12/12/bitcoin-jobs-cryptocurrency-mining-hiring-core-scientific/

TBH, I'm only really posting it for this graph:

 

[Taleweaver]

First thing that might come to your mind is mining would be easier?

But i was thinking along the lines of what if it become easy to get the master key, so all our real world money, time and effort would go to waste.

Or would a country or company use this to they advantage?

Kind of stands to reason that the more horsepower you've got, the more (faster?) you can mine. The flipside is that mining requires more resources the more coins are being used. And the consequences of that...*sigh*

The obvious negative is that while you're mining, you're using electricity. So if it costs YOU more in electricity than YOU gain in coins, it's not really worth it (and it HAS to be worth it to keep the currency viable). Which leads to a dystopian prospect. I mean...I've heard there's already malware out there that secretly mines on your computer (and transfers the result to the writer). And while my colleague and me were joking to install bitcoin miners on our company's computers (we work in ICT), I'm kind of expecting rather lucrative but shady business in the near future. Like...what if certain PC's were sold at discount prices on the condition that you leave the PC company's miner running when not using it? How long until antivirus scanners need to stop more miners than programs aimed at nuking or locking your computer?


I've got no idea what you mean with "the master key", though. What's that about?

 

[Flame]

I've got no idea what you mean with "the master key", though. What's that about?

i mean the master key, the private key, the public key. that will enable somebody to decrypt the code.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

i mean the master key, the private key, the public key. that will enable somebody to decrypt the code.

Cryptocurrencies have no master key. Each block mined is essentially its own, independent key.

First thing that might come to your mind is mining would be easier?

But i was thinking along the lines of what if it become easy to get the master key, so all our real world money, time and effort would go to waste.

Or would a country or company use this to they advantage?

Nothing would change. Every time more powerful hardware comes out there is a short time where the mining rate increases but once everyone has upgraded to the new hardware it stabilizes back where it was.

 

[Bladexdsl]

hopefully it would make it obsolete

 

[Taleweaver]

i mean the master key, the private key, the public key. that will enable somebody to decrypt the code.

But...bitcoin is already open source (don't know about other coins). There's no code to decrypt. That's the technology of blockchain: the register is continuously synced across all miners, with addition of all transactions ever. There's no central server, no governing overseer or - indeed - no secrets.
I mean...it's probably relatively easy to write a program that gives you 100'000 bitcoins. The problem is that there's no way to pass it on as real ones, as you will have to add it to the register somehow. And unless I'm totally missing the point, that register isn't just "one" file but a whole bunch that continuously get synced back and forth, adding all transactions to it. As such, you can't magically "add" coins because there's no trace of you mining that much coins.

 

[notimp]

A few additions, getting miners on peoples computers (like it was the jam on some torrent clients for a while) is highly inefficient. (For BTC you need asics, for Ether you need GPUs with large amounts of ram) Turns out it might be more efficient to create botnets for DDOS and then enter the extortion racket - also comes with less user pushback.

So that scheme simply never took off.

Also - seriously, you are missing the point that there only are 2,6 million BTC left to mine out of 21 million, with mining distribution like in the graph above.

So BTC mining is over -

Etherium now pegs mining capability to RAM capacity of your graphics card, so you cant do the calculations on ones with less than 6GB of VRAM.

Which opens up a few points.

1. When the majority of stakeholders in a cryptocurrency get together and agree - you can change the thing, by forking the algo. So if there are any unexpected changes, performance wise - or attack wise, you can be certain, that even today something like a "trading freeze" and then a fork would happen. The algorithm isnt sacrosanct. What the dominant version of the algo is - IS NOT determined by people using it, but by the amount of validation entities, buying into it - being the dominant one. They, probably have more say than even investors. (Non voting share investors that is, because they are investors themselves.)

2. BTC mining is over - yet the speculation bubble arround it far from it - so incentive is always to buy the thing thats about to take off (speculation), and not to mine away for something useless. With BTC it might have been slightly different, because it was first. But in the general setup - forget the idea of 'decentralization' some entity will always buy up concentration to coordinate market movements.

3. As BTC mining is over (just in relation to how mining capability is distributed) - you have to look at the question in light of non proof of work crypto currencies as well.

So I'm sorry, if FLAME still is in 'but I want to believe that every crypto is BTC' mode - he is dead wrong, and if you want to do theoretical deliberations of 'what miners would have to think about - with technological advancements' you are doing them an actual disservice, because it never is about 'miners'.

Miners are just a flipping tool, to get stakes distributed and scarce - when the thing becomes established - they never matter one bit (the part thats more than transaction validation) - and are only useful to maybe build out the first 'get quick rich' examples - so other people believe that the digital thing is worth a damn.

In addition to that, BTC isnt worth jack as a daily digital currency (transaction limit). Its worth jack, as a blockchain for IOT transaction management.

And all the potential solutions that are, dont need miners at all - because you just keep validation "limited decentralized" (a few companies supplying the data processing centers) and call it a day.
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The more you get into what miners, and even BTC is actually needed for - the more you end up with 'mythbuilding' and NOTHING else - because entire currencies, and arguably even BTC - currently just serve the purpose to getting people 'accustom' to 'want to own that stuff' - so when roleout on an actual digital currency begins, they arent negatively averse.

And even for that - miners are less important than market makers (the paypals, and other transaction platforms, that invest heavily into PR).

So what the heck of a question is this?

Moderator wants to have BTC explained to him? Then leave with an understanding, that would fit exactly no other crypto currency that follows from here on out? Give out a bunch of likes - for being sold the myth - that you couldnt change the algo, and the thing could be gamed in theory?

Dude - if five people in china get together, the algorithm of BTC is changed from one day to the next, just to react to potential developmental problems. They own most of the validation capability - they own voting rights over how the currency changes tomorrow.

You fork, you call the new thing BTC, and the old thing "old BTC" - you change defaults, and every flipping honcho - and that includes miners - will want to go for gold 2.0, because thats the new hot thing, with mass acceptance as a thing.

The question "but how would it end up, if something changes" simply has to be answered with "corporate networks" would fight against it - and win.

Why corporate networks? Because decentralization on BTC never worked. And decentralization down to the little individual miner as a serious stakeholder - always was a myth.

So in essence - if everything valuable about cryptocurrencies (in terms of a productive addition to anything - and not just "value storage" for speculators), doesnt necessarily need miners at all, isnt represented in BTC (proof of work simply doesnt work for that - that well, and leads to concentrations, that would have no western country adopt it as an actual blockchain for anything), and BTC mining is dying anyway - and mining is not where you make your money - (even miners today, might mine the best currency for their rig, then immediately start speculating. i.e. exchanging the mined currency for Bitcoin) - it ends up being the case, that the OP here is more interested in the "fabled Inka gold - thats still burried" (and how it would affect the value of gold already mined) than in the searoute to america and future markets, and future trade.

But at least the moderator understands BTC now.

Its just that if you take that understanding and apply it to most of 'why crypto is hyped right now' it doesnt even apply.