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within a year or so, only people with a dedicated ASIC (costing $1000+) can mine (even fewer people).
within a year or so, only people with a dedicated ASIC (costing $1000+) can mine (even fewer people).
And in two years maybe anybody who can afford to buy an asic-mining-space-heater for their house can mine. And in ten years maybe new houses will come pre-equipped with asic-mining-baseboard-electric-heaters.
Or maybe not. Nobody knows what is going to happen, which is why I keep repeating BITCOIN IS AN EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS. If you can't handle uncertainty and the very real possibility that the experiment will fail, then don't get involved (but don't come back whining that you missed out if the experiment turns out to be a huge success).
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The thing is that while that the raw hashing power needed to attack the network is growing, the number of miners you need to target by DDOS or otherwise (if you are a malign government wanting to take down Bitcoin) is getting lower by the day!
IMO the 3000 nodes that we currently have seems like an easier target for a well funded attacker than than the prospect of deploying 55,000+ spartan 6 chips to brute-force a 51% attack.
What do you think? Is the chronic decline in hosts a genuine problem for the backbone p2p network?
No, I don't think it is a problem, any more than the relatively small number of "backbone" routers are a problem for the Internet. The bitcoin network is evolving in roughly the direction I expected it would (lots of lightweight clients connecting to a smaller number of heavyweight "backbone" nodes).IMO the 3000 nodes that we currently have seems like an easier target for a well funded attacker than than the prospect of deploying 55,000+ spartan 6 chips to brute-force a 51% attack.
What do you think? Is the chronic decline in hosts a genuine problem for the backbone p2p network?
All of the incentives are for merchants, exchanges, and big mining pools to accept lots of connections, relay only valid transactions and blocks, and be as DoS-resistant as they can afford. Merchants and exchanges want transactions to be validated quickly, the big mining pools want their payouts to be processed quickly and want their blocks propagated quickly, and they all want to be reliable. The big exchanges and mining pools have ALREADY implemented DDoS countermeasures because they have ALREADY been attacked. And the network keeps chugging away, processing transactions....