Re:What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]
by srtjstjsj on Friday September 04, 2020 @10:59PM
(#24381060)
Mining pools aren't inside the protocol. They collude outside the protocol.
Re:What Satoshi Did Not Know (2015) [pdf]
by colordrops on Saturday September 05, 2020 @12:04AM
(#24381328)
Collude to do what though?
Even if ASICs were not mentioned by name, Sastoshi wrote about how mining was expected in the future to be the work of large bank-like organizations, but apparently did not worry that this would harm the project.
What he may not have foreseen was the emergence of mining pools, separate from miners themselves, that in certain ways can behave like cartels. That could have been avoided with a mining pool protocol where miners are the ones to form blocks, but the software included no possibility to pool mining power at all.