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Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

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Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#191

Post by ctennis1 »

burger_moon wrote: post #73
elorant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.

After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW. 50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen. I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators. [1] http://ww…

I ran a ~10MW capable facility for a while, we had 8 2MW Cummins gensets that would run in parallel. Extra units for redundancy as sometimes units would be offline for oil changes or other routine maintenance.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#192

Post by maaku »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #188
maaku wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't address any of the concerns I raised.

Yes it does. If the article is correct, the 16nm BitFury chips will be sold to interested parties, so new mining capacity won't be dominated by a single company, thereby ensuring newly mined BitCoins can be distributed throughout the network. If your concerns were about something other than distribution, please clarify.

They will be sold to interested parties.. and hosted in the same data center. Back to square one.

It takes a price per kW-hr differential of about $0.03 before it makes sense to put miners on a plane. That's far less than the power differentials one would expect, so those miners will stay put. Just paper ownership will change hands.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#193

Post by [deleted] »

mrb wrote: post #26

Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which reportedly achieve approximately 0.06 joule per gigahash. They also use immersion cooling which gives them an insane PUE of 1.02. So the mining capacity of this DC alone is ~650 Phash/s! We saw an increase of ~200 Phash/s in the last 30 days, so presumably they…

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#194

Post by geon »

rockyleal wrote: post #121
douche wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think Canada would have more major data centers. They've got a lot of extremely cheap hydro power. You could surely lay ultra-high-speed fiber along the same right-of-ways that the transmission lines use. Also, it's cold as hell more often than not, so cooling is less of an issue than putting them out in the desert somewhere.

Bitcoin miner's dilemma: Should I mine where it's hot for the free solar energy or should I mine where it's cold for the extra refrigeration?

Iceland! Active volcano geothermal power and cold climate.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#195

Post by Retric »

Sealy wrote: post #173
cgjaro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This DC cost $100 million. Not exactly pocket change. http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-... Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million. The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 n…

People seem to forget that it is NOT in BitFury's best interest to perform a 51% attack because, bitcoin's value will plummet if they do that.

As the mining rewards keep lowering it's getting to the point here someone is going to do this for the lulz. As to cost you can sell all your coins before doing a 51% attack. Short the market and at some point it might even be proffitable to do so.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#196

Post by ZenoArrow »

maaku wrote: post #192
ZenoArrow wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. If the article is correct, the 16nm BitFury chips will be sold to interested parties, so new mining capacity won't be dominated by a single company, thereby ensuring newly mined BitCoins can be distributed throughout the network. If your concerns were about something other than distribution, please clarify.

They will be sold to interested parties.. and hosted in the same data center. Back to square one. It takes a price per kW-hr differential of about $0.03 before it makes sense to put miners on a plane. That's far less than the power differentials one would expect, so those miners will stay put. Just paper ownership will change hands.

> "and hosted in the same data center."

This is why we're disagreeing, I can't see any indication that the chips will not be used in other data centres. Where are you getting this information from?

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#197

Post by davidgerard »

creshal wrote: post #189
cgjaro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This DC cost $100 million. Not exactly pocket change. http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-... Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million. The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 n…

It's not pocket change… except for government organizations.

It is profoundly unlikely a state-level actor would bother.

You can cripple Bitcoin transaction clearing with a thousand dollars to DDOS the network with spam. If only state-level actors had a thousand bucks lying around ...

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#198

Post by davidgerard »

gavazzy wrote: post #142
iofj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A malicious 50% miner can cancel any transaction it wants, not just fix doublespend. Assuming the transaction was sufficiently recent (the more hash power they have the more such a transaction can be in the past). So they can "unspend" their own bitcoins, as follows : use 51% of your hash power to create a parallel blockchain, which is not published. Include all transactions, except the one you used to buy…

Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

Observation is that pretty much nothing crashes the price of Bitcoin.

* During the transaction spam DDOS attacks, the price went up even though it was literally unusable.

* The present price seems sustained by something that looks very Willybotish running between OKCoin and Huobi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3vnjgk/what_drive...

The remaining American Bitcoin traders are certainly gullible enough to keep buying and trading a 51%-compromised coin. (I mean, there are people who still think Paycoin could make a comeback.) But American traders are a sideshow - all the action is in China (miners, actual traders). So the question would be: will Chinese speculators keep gambling on a 51%-compromised coin?

(And of course the MMM ponzi buyers, whose judgement is sufficiently bad that they wouldn't even understand the problem.)

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#199

Post by davidgerard »

BlackFly wrote: post #167
gritzko wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no. The amount of power wasted by BitCoin indirectly depends on the monetary turnover of the system. Because if somebody can spend $1mln to perform 51% attack and move around $1bln, that will likely be done. Hence, the power wasted is proportional to the turnover of the system. Otherwise, it does not work. Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people b…

Actually that 1% normally will go to paying the electricity bills for the bank back end systems and the fraud analysis algorithms. On top of that they need to pay for fraud insurance. The power spent on bitcoin is not analogous to these costs, it is equivalent. The question is, is bitcoin more cost effective at preventing specific types of fraud?

Evidently not the types that actually happen in the Bitcoin space, all of which have as their root cause "no chargebacks": if someone picks your pocket from the other side of the planet, you have no recourse.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#200

Post by mattmanser »

LAMike wrote: post #95

Once the 16nm chips become a commodity, it will make sense that the hashing power would get more distributed. I hope figures out how to get a solar powered, interchangeable bitcoin miner in a box at a positive ROI. It may seem impossible now, but solar prices are falling faster than expected.

Isn't that logically impossible until renewable is cheaper than fossil fuels?

I'd have thought that because fossil fuels are cheaper, it will literally never be possible to have have a positive ROI bitcoin miner on a renewable energy source, assuming that people are willing to mine using $0.99 of energy to make $0.01 profit.

EDIT: Downvotes and no comments for a simple question? WTF is going on with HN these days, can we not ask questions?

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