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Bitcoin Gold, the Latest Bitcoin Fork, Explained (arstechnica.com)
Timothy B. Lee via Ars Technica explains Bitcoin Gold: A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold -- like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August -- is different in two important ways. Bitcoin Gold is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins. While Bitcoin Cash was designed to resolve Bitcoin's capacity crunch with larger blocks, Bitcoin Gold aims to tackle another of Bitcoin's perceived flaws: the increasing centralization of the mining industry that verifies and secures Bitcoin transactions.
The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin.
The original vision for Bitcoin was that anyone would be able to participate in Bitcoin mining with their personal PCs, earning a bit of extra cash as they helped to support the network. But as Bitcoin became more valuable, people discovered that Bitcoin mining could be done much more efficiently with custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As a result, Bitcoin mining became a specialized and highly concentrated industry. The leading companies in this new industry wield a disproportionate amount of power over the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Gold aims to dethrone these mining companies by introducing an alternative mining algorithm that's much less susceptible to ASIC-based optimization. In theory, that will allow ordinary Bitcoin Gold users to earn extra cash with their spare computing cycles, just as people could do in the early days of Bitcoin.
Pre-mine = scam. Big pre-mine = big scam.
Actually, bitcoin, litecoin, etc. is all one big scam. A currency with this much fluctuation isn't a currency. It's a penny stock. An unregulated speculative penny stock. When the bottom falls out (and it always does) there's going to more wailers and teeth nashers than ever before.
There are two types of people making money on this. The scammers at the top of the food chain, and the people selling "miners". Everyone else is just going to get screwed.
~X~
You can't really measure the ping time in bitcoin PoW, only internet ping time. You could just put a small proxy VPS node that gets the requests from the pool and delivers them to the actual mining farm. Running the algorithm on the work usually results in nothing. Only very rarely will a solution for the work exist and a block (or pool share) be found. This is a random process, with seconds to days in between, depending on the hardware and your luck. Adding some random latency of a few hundred ms will do nothing.
Besides, bitcoin is a decentralized network. Who will verify this ping time in a distributed way that is compatible with a blockchain architecture? Other miners would need to do this verification, pass all measurements to each mining party (the miner creates the contents of the blocks he/she mines) and then reject mined blocks that have a too high reward. To do this all measurements would need to be put in blocks mined by others, otherwise the network has no means of verifying that the reward if not too high. This is a lot of work to implement, would use a lot of (already very sparse) transaction bandwidth, and trivial to bypass.
Finally, many miners are mining though Tor or a VPN, either to bypass country level firewalls, mitigate DDoS risks, or just to have actually anonymous bitcoins. Their internet latency will be quite high.
The way BC is setup and the way the algorithm is build is such that the complexity of calculation and thus the resources needed to perform it are increasing as time goes by.
That's incorrect. Bitcoin mining difficulty is dynamic and adjusts to the total hashing speed of the network. It does this by requiring a certain number of zeros in the SHA256 hash. As more miners join the network with custom ASICs that only perform this calculation, difficulty goes up, but if they leave to join another network (like Bitcoin Cash), difficulty goes down. It's got nothing to do with the complexity of the calculations are increasing.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Yes, its still hidden even if its in open source. By your thinking, the idea of a "hidden fee" wouldn't exist anywhere in the world. After all, for the fee to be enforceable, it has to be clearly spelled out in English between other English words in the contract (please substitute "English" with your language of choice). Since its clearly spelled out in the contract, it can't be hidden.
No, the term "hidden fee" is generally used to refer to any fee which, while clearly spelled out in the contract", is not clearly advertised on the package, in the marketing, or pretty much anywhere other than the "fine print"
How long before that bursts and there are hundreds if not thousands worthless crypto-currencies, like dot-coms after 2001?
This is a list of actively traded cyptocurrencies:
https://coinmarketcap.com/all/...
Remember, the hoardable value of each of them is based on the idea of limited supply. Your question should be, How long before the market realizes that this has already happened?