forked from cheng/wallet
4678fba3ce
modified: docs/libraries/cpp_automatic_memory_management.md modified: docs/libraries/time.md modified: docs/manifesto/consensus.md renamed: docs/notes/big_cirle_notation.md -> docs/notes/big_circle_notation.md modified: docs/writing_and_editing_documentation.md
38 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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# katex
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title: >-
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consensus
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sidebar: true
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notmine: false
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abstract: >-
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consensus is a hard problem, and considerably harder when you have shards
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Nakomoto Satoshi's implementation of Nakomoto consensus, aptly described
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as wading through molasses, failed to scale
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---
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# Failure of Bitcoin consensus to scale
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Mining pools, asics
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# Monero consensus
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RandomX prevented asics, because RandomX mining is best done on a general purpose CPU,
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but as Monero got bigger, it came to pass that payouts got bigger. And because
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more and more people were trying to mine a block, they got rarer and rarer
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So miners joined in mining pools, so as to get smaller, but more regular and
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predicable payouts more often. Which destroys the decentralization objective
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of mining, giving the central authority running the mining pool dangerously great
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power over the blockchain.
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Monero's workaround for this is P2Pool, a mining pool without centralization.
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But not everyone wants to use P2Pool.
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Monero has a big problem with people preferring to mine in big pools, because
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of the convenience provided by the dangerously powerful central authority.
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It easier for the individual miner to let the center make all the decisions that
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matter, but many of these decisions matter to other people, and the center could
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make decisions that are contrary to everyone else's interests. Even if the
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individual miner is better off than mining solo, this could well make everyone
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including the individual miner worse off, because he and everyone may be
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adversely affected by other people's decision to pool mine.
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