Seems to me that a decent solution to any class of 51%-ish problems (including evilvladmirinc or evilnsagov) would be to have any interested group publish white or black lists.  If a majority of users choose find a particular list credible for some reason, chains with the offending blocks would be rejected by the majority and the blocks would be valueless (no matter what hardware they were generated on.)  Under such a scenario, anyone who had the interest could support then network to their hearts content but if they pissed off the natives, they, and their investment, gets voted off the island.

I've mentioned before that having such a solution developed, tested, and in place would be in my opinion a prudent defensive tool and one who's very existence would almost guarantee that it would never need to be used.  The complexity (although rather modest compared to the 'supernode cluster architecture' needed for Bitcoin scaling) and increased latency would be a nuisance, but I doubt that it would be much more than that.

Right.  You can not.  The only thing close is things like the 1 trans blocks from MM.  You can not 'vote' or try to blacklist as that is very easy to get around as long as there is money at stake.  The only thing you can do (which is actually quite do-able) is change the hashing algorithm. 

The initial post just rings of the following to me:

"We have a great idea of making money"

"We dont have money to do this on our own"

"We need investors to pay for our mining hardware"

"We will own the hardware that was paid for by investors"

"We effectively get everything for free, paid by investors and end up paying a portion of profits generated back to investors"


I have it extremely odd anyhow that vladimir last dissapeared from this forum vowing never to return and only remain at his own forum then suddenly come here posting about the GOD machine he will produce based on aSIC tech.

Vlad? Didnt your own forum fall for this and now you try pull funds out of the unexpected on the forum you left in disgust?

I do admit the request for capital funding is somewhat fishy.

Or maybe we are being overly paranoid.

Wrong-ish.  The lists are simple and freely available for anyone to create.  If they are credible and seen as such by a majority of users, they survive.  The moment they are suspect, they die.

The lists are also not integral for the function of Bitcoin.  If through some sort of coordinated attack on the loose network of list maintainers they needed to be disregarded for a time it would not impair the ability of the Bitcoin network to function.  It could create a mess to clean up, but without such a 'weapon', Bitcoin would probably suffer a terminal blow to it's survival under this magnitude of attack.  Or would if/when Bitcoin grows to scale.

I wish Vladimir the best; however, I think his passion/greed is getting the better of him (happens to me all the time).
This doesn't appear to be thought through entirely. Could be wrong so I hope Vladimir would be willing to respond.

Right now, the Bitcoin economy is valued at 42 million U.S. Dollars, but this does not mean there is 42 million dollars to be extracted by mining extremely cheap bitcoins and selling them on the market. There's only a few million dollars that are day traded keeping the market liquid (I really don't know the amount, but it sure isn't 42 million; it's much less). So, if you are expecting profits that are near or in excess that amount, you'll crash the market and your business will suffer.

A Bitcoin business that is bad for Bitcoin is bad for business!

I've read multiple comments that have mentioned the time and economic conditions still are not right for ASICs. Now that I've put more thought into it, they may be right. The amount of money/R&D required is near or higher than the amount of cash keeping the market liquid. If someone pursued ASICs at this point with plans to recoup their investments ASAP they may just crash the market and hurt themselves at the same time.

Please Please do not stop pursuing ASICs; just realize that the risk may be much greater than you think and please reconsider a different business model.....you know... Like selling hardware to the rest of us. I'm sure over the long run you'd recoup your costs and Bitcoin would be much better because of it.

Either way, I wouldn't change any plans to increase mining capacity (if anyone had any) over this thread. I really don't think there's anything to fear here, but I do realize that a few millions dollars foolishly invested with unrealistic expectations could kill a business and cause a recession/depression in the bitcoin market.

1) Why does a large company minnig for bitcoins automatically mean they won't be spending their bitcoin in the community?  I hope to invest in this company (if I'm a big enough fish for Vladimir to listen to) and spend plenty of bitcoin on products (if companies actually accept them)

2) Mergers & Acquisitions happen all the time.  Some businesses consolidate while others rip each other appart.  It's a cycle.  Maybe right now, mining companies are consolodating, but without regulation, there's no reason why they can't.  Welcome to the free market.

3) I'm sure when people started GPU mining, they "waited for all the CPU miners to buy GPUs before turning them on.... NOT"

4) Who cares if people cash out 100% of their mined coins?  The average volume on Mtgox is over 50k a day as of late.  So this means there's enough market activity for all 7,200 BTC generated each day to be dumped into the market daily and the market will gobble them up...

5) If BTC become worth $0.25, I'll be buying plenty of them.  That would be frickin amazing. 

6) Define a small investor.  What's the cut off amount for investing directly with Vlad $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000?

I agree with you kjlimo.  Just used you as an example.  The idea that if some entity gained 51% (and thus 100%) of mining profits isn't the death of Bitcoin.  Now don't get me wrong I think that is a horrible blow to Satoshi vision but for daily users not much changes.  The idea that BTC value becomes $0.00 is just silly.

The network remains secure, tx are still possible, the protocol is still decentralized.  Sure as a miner it is a death blow but in time if Bitcoin grows the increased profit potential ensures that competitors will once gain decentralize the network.  Life would go on.