According to Nick Lambert in the following post: Is Ethereum in trouble? Maidsafe has “very much retained a start-up mentality and have kept the team relatively small and nimble” I would hope that a devastating drop in the price would not knock them out of the game but only give those committed to this project an opportunity to buy cheap coins.
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What’s important is to be able to pay salaries.
Last year Nick said funds were sufficient for X months, so if you halve that due to a huge drop in BTC, you get X/2 “time to live” (unless they sell BTC and go to fiat soon).
Anyway, hundreds of millions have been invested in Bitcoin mining, software and businesses. It’s not going to disappear anytime soon.
Wonder if changing the hashing algorithm every few months would help with decentralization.
I think Bitcoin itself needs to fail as a currency, and we need to find a better replacement if we going to see an alternative currency to fiat. As for now Ethereum or Safe coin are not fully developed and I do not see any other alt coin competing for bitcoin place.
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Bitcoin should not fail until ethereum and safe becomes stable. Then it can fail. 
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Mike Hearn chose to view Bitcoin as an experiment, a Proof of Concept. And this “experiment” did gain popularity.
Does this not say that there is certainly a demand for such a technology?
And as we all know, technology comes and goes. It rarely comes and stays. It needs to meet every-changing demands, as well as keep pace with the evolution of technology as a whole.
The only way that it does so is by changing with the times. If it is not able to, there certainly is the ability for alternative software - whether that software is an overhaul of the original, a fork, or a new product entirely.
It is then not uncommon for technology to be usurped by superior technology?
This is why @dirvine has left many of the questions about the future of the Network unanswered: future farming algorithms, safecoin divisibility vs inflation, etc. He knows that as much game-theory as you run, you can never 100% predict the future.
Issac Asimov explored this in depth with his Foundation Trilogy. Basically his point is that good preparation to deal with these issues is the best that you can do before they become relevant. The relevance may span the entirety of the lifetime of the technology, in which case it can be solved at the outset. Otherwise, it must be left until the climate is ripe to deal with it.
And that’s not to say that these questions are of a purely technical nature. They have important political undertones as well. Politics rely heavily on the environment in which they operate, and as we agreed earlier, the environment - the technology - is constantly growing and changing.
For instance, we haven’t truly begun to see how Bitcoin’s deflationary nature affects, well, everything about it!
So, isn’t it true that when an issue is defined, that issue can only be solved when it becomes relevant?
Which brings me to wrap things up all nicely with a little bow. If there is a demand for the technology, the technology can adapt to the every-changing environment in which it operates, and it can solve issues as they arise, that technology continually fulfills the needs of those who use it.
Does it not follow that if the basic functionality of that popular technology is unable to deal with the issues at hand, then the opportunity is ripe (in all aspects) for a new technology that does?
P.S. In most cases, asking rhetorical questions phrases one’s point of view much better than asking open-ended ones.
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I don’t think this would work with bitcoin at this stage because if changing the hashing algorithm every few months would require a hard fork, (miners hate this) this would also kill the second hand asic market. Im running asics so as a miner i wouldn’t want my miners to be made worthless.
I think that bitcoin some how needs to prevent the big mining pools from getting even bigger. If the pools could be equally forced a cap in hashrate on all pools, this would prevent further centralization. But the big mining pools are not easily influenced, so unless someone can come up with a soft fork work around?
In terms of decentralization, the smaller pools need to grow. The problem is 78% of the bitcoin network hashing power is controlled by 4 mining pools. This needs to change naturally or by any means necessary.
Centralization hasn’t proven to be a problem yet. There’s no need to introduce new problems to fix ones that don’t exist.
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I agree. Perhaps Mike Hearn’s post was what galvanized miners, because with 89% of the votes counted the vast majority of them are now in favour of raising the block size to 2MB:
Hah, I sense you got a sense of humor!
As far as I know only a tiny minority of users were against raising the maximum block size.
What people questioned was the putschist’s attitude, not the need to raise the max. block size.
Yes, it looks to me like the miners have voted in favour of Bitcoin Classic and that we are headed for a hard fork. The toxic members of Core (and their “putschist attitude”) have also been ditched as Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are the only ex-core members to have moved to Classic. Far from being dead, this is very good news for bitcoin.
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In any case the max block size is going to be increased.
Hearn was the catalyst here. Unintended consequences or something far more interesting?
Here is the aforementioned podcast with Adam, Stephanie and Andreas. https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-278-doublespends-and-bitcoinxt
Its called having foresight.
That’s kinda the whole point of my idea.
Regarding the small topic of so-called devastating price fluctuation for SAFE, the patient ones just have to wait for any semblance of big pump relative to their buy-in, and can choose to get out (or re-buy if so chosen, or heaven forbid stay in it forever) at a decent high still, considering there’s quite a ways more that this coin can go.
I’ve been saying this for three years and it’s why I left the bitcoin community and moved to NXT and MAIDSAFE.
I’m happy that Hearn is finally smelling the coffee.
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So is anyone aware of strategies manifest in code that will allow the Safe Network to scale as high as Visa transactions, like thousands per second? I’m assuming that the Safecoin system is not ready for testing yet right @dallyshalla ? Then how can Safecoin transactions be “future proofed” within the Safe Network mechanisms against this self-destructive phase?
- Increase block size > push out small at home farmers by requiring ever more powerful machines.
OR - Leave the block_size as is and choke off transactions per second as the network becomes more popular.
EDIT
It would be interesting to see a dynamic block_size so as Safecoins get distributed and resources are mined, certain levels will trigger an increase in the block_size. This would solve at home farmers in the beginning of the Safe Network, and when it’s really popular, the increased block_size would allow more transactions per second. Of course, needing massively powerful home servers to farm larger safecoin block_size should require another set of mechanisms, which requires more creative thought before go live.
So in Safe Network there is not really block_size. There is 1mb chunks. The network will only need as much space as is necessary to store all of the 1mb chunks. And the safecoin cost will prevent a person from storing more data than there is capacity.
Furthermore, once I had asked about the connectivity and scaling. @anon86652309 replied:
If you were talking about all connections for the whole network, then the theoretical limit on the number of nodes is 2^512, and each of these can have 64-200 connections. Of course, it may be some time before anyone actually manages to create a network of 2^512 nodes :simple_smile:
So I think that the upper limit of necessity for the future is accommodated today. This means 2^512 machines can connect with varying sizes and strengths, and the Safe Network will utilize each machine to it’s maximum capacity that it needs and can get. And each machine is responsible for just it’s 1mb chunks, and not ALL of the 1mb chunks on the network. Effectively this to me gives grounds to accommodate visa size transaction rates, and better depending on the size of the network in terms of machines. Also, I get a feeling that we will scale with transactions, the more transactions the more farming machines will exist.
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