How are we going to take decentralized mining back?

[cryptokeeper]

I may be eating my own words here as I am a fellow miner and run my own pool and have a fairly significant hash rate.

How will we be able to take back the mining power/hash rate from the existing BIG 3? it seems like they are getting beefy'er and beefy'er every three months and coming out with new hardware and keeping it to themselves. What will happen is they will run all of the transaction processing for the Bitcoin network or the majority at one point or another. I am pretty sure we are almost there.

TLDR; BIG 3 are going to be operating like traditional financial network that goes against Bitcoin's decentralized model.

[The_Void]

Well, looks like nobody wants to have a fully DISTRIBUTED Bitcoin system. DECENTRALIZED is fine.

Im not a tech expert, but it seems like this question will emerge in future just like block size debate.

[PatMan]

With p2pool - currently it's the only way.

[cryptokeeper]

p2pool does not address the issue of mega-datacentres lighting up with petahash of miners....

[helloworld]

I'm not sure what people expect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Thinking that bitcoin mining could be perfectly decentralized is idiocy at it's finest.

[Harrichael]

Completely distributed mining is not even desired. If mining could be done with any CPU, then you run the risk of a massive botnet malware taking over millions of computers and using the CPU to mine.

[moredillon]

If I could run my S3s without taking a loss, that would be a start. Waiting for more transaction fees or the value of bitcoin to go up enough to warrant running my machines again. Really want to have them connected, but I spent too much over the last year with cost of power. Idle in the garage.

[vanilladev]

I may be eating my own words here as I am a fellow miner and run my own pool and have a fairly significant hash rate.

How will we be able to take back the mining power/hash rate from the existing BIG 3? it seems like they are getting beefy'er and beefy'er every three months and coming out with new hardware and keeping it to themselves. What will happen is they will run all of the transaction processing for the Bitcoin network or the majority at one point or another. I am pretty sure we are almost there.

TLDR; BIG 3 are going to be operating like traditional financial network that goes against Bitcoin's decentralized model.

It would cost roughly 300 million USD (low ball estimate) to "take back" Bitcoin mining. Since the trend of pool shrinkage continues I expect there will be a handful of mining operations left in a few years because most large operations now make their own ASIC hardware.

[CryptAxe]

p2pool does not address the issue of mega-datacentres lighting up with petahash of miners....

It's too bad... p2pool does at least allow people to pool together their small mining power to potentially compete with the huge miners. It's not a solution to the centralization though, as the mega-datacentres with a petahash of miners could just take over the p2pool.