Witness Update Report #5
All is well in the land of our witness server, no downtime and it has not missed any blocks. The Steemit community still patiently awaits the implementation of Hardfork 20, also known as codename Velocity, which will most probably see the launch of SMT's (Smart Media Token). The HF will bring some minor curation reward changes as well as eliminate the self-voting curation rewards. There is so far no official date set for the Hardfork, but might expect it to take another month or three.
Please take a moment to read our Witness Proposal, and if you support the same fundamentals and vision as we do for the future of the Steemit community, please consider voting for us as witness here.
ADSactly Education :
We have decided that as part of our weekly Witness Report post, we will be choosing different technical topics to discuss.
Please feel free to request a topic in the comment section.
The Dangers of PoW
Now that we have learnt what Witnesses are and the differences between PoW, PoS, and DPoS, we are going to explore the dangers of PoW algorithm.
PoW consensus algorithms (adopted by Bitcoin) use the power of hardware (calculated in hash rate1 ) to mine coins. The more power you have, the more you earn. Simple, right?
Also, because mining can take ages, miners created what we call Pools. A Pool is a group of miners; where one shares their mining power with thousands (millions) of others miners, and gets a share every time a Bitcoin is mined, depending on their hash rate.
The only way to take control of the Blockchain is to have at least 51% of the total network hash rate. You may think this sounds impossible. Let's take a closer look at three crucial points.
1 - The Top 5 Pools control more than 78% of the total hash rate of the network. Also, one organization controls more than 40% (!) of the total hash rate: Bitmain (Antpool & BTC.com).
Bitmain is known to create mining devices used by millions (the Antminers). What if these mining devices, made by the same manufacturer, had a backdoor to control them? This is not the kind of thing we only see in movies, OnePlus have been caught using a backdoor on their phones, and the access password is... Angela.
2 - Moreover, most of these Top Pools are located in the same country: China.
A concentration of so much power in only one nation is questionable: What if someday there is a geopolitical crisis in China? What if politicians want to influence those mining Pools?
3 -Bitcoin has a limited supply and one day miners are not going to be rewarded with freshly made Bitcoins but only with the fees. Mining would become unprofitable, and millions of miners will have to stop their activities. Fewer miners mean less hash rate: the blockchain would be more vulnerable to a 51% attack, or hash power: "the measuring unit that measures how much power the Bitcoin network is consuming to be continuously functional")
ADSactly
Each week our community grows bigger and bigger, this week we surpassed 5100 members in our discord server. This is our central hub of communication and where we continuously try to help each and everyone who joins, all you need is but to ask. We are really grateful to have wonderful people who are willing to help newcomers find their feet, in what can sometimes be a very overwhelming ocean that is Steemit.
We welcome you to join the society, meet and talk to people, make friends and establish fair relations with other ADSactly members. You will receive ADSactly community units just for showing up and taking part in our voice hangouts, for helping out with promotions, for helping new members feel welcomed, showing them around and helping them get familiar with the society, for finding new projects that might catch interest of other members. Sometimes even for being generally a good person willing to help others.
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