Can some explain what's happening better than I understand bitcoin? Wouldn't the idea that there is less miners be a positive for the price point? Supply and Demand? I mean if you have market of frozen orange juice, and they announce dry season will produce LESS juice, the price will skyrocket. So wouldn't less miners for something like Bitcoin with hard set limit of coins, be a positive for its price?
Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
341–350 of 431 posts
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that even remotely strategically good for China......? These miners are probably making USD or some other foreign fiat at the end of the day which adds to the supply of foreign reserves without needing to use trade... And if they're siphoning power to get around currency exchange limits moving wealth abroad then a traditional crackdown to confiscate their equipment would be much more effective (you can't exact…
China still has capital controls. Bitcoin gets around those - which is why it’s popular there, and also why I think it’s likely China will ban Bitcoin at some point.
Like the previous 20 times it already has?
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other blockchains using proof-of-stake over proof-of-work are not ‘relatively easy to mutate’ for any definition of easy. Can you point a single occurrence of this happening on a top 30 market cap PoS crypto, such as Cardano, Tezos, or Algorand?
Very many examples. EOS (dPoS) reversed transactions multiple times while being top 10 at the time: https://cointelegraph.com/news/eos-reverses-previously-confi... Ethereum Classic was attacked multiple times with chain reversing double spends due to not enough energy being committed to immutability: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-attacker-successfu... Ethereum reversed the "DAO hack" with a hard fork. So…
I didn't expect this, the security argument invalidates 99% of cryptocurrencies and leaves Ethereum and Bitcoin as the only winners. Bitcoin is technologically unimpressive and Ethereum is quite successful technologically but it is having scaling problems.
You know, this is quite ironic because cryptocurrencies are reaching a dead end, through their own flaws.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that. When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care…
> It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. sorry, is that just because you say so? the success of bitcoin is the only thing i need to point to contra every point you make. if it's so bad, why does it work? maybe that won't always be the case, but so far the market has deemed it suffic…
The "market" sometimes drops incredibly cancerous waste chemicals in the water supply.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is nothing stopping anybody from making something better They already did. Half the crypto ecosystem is already better than Bitcoin if you're trying to build a functional currency. We're talking about a coin that doesn't have any privacy guarantees, it's not exactly hard to improve on that. When I talk about religious loyalty, what I'm getting at is that it turns out the Bitcoin ecosystem doesn't seem to care…
> It turns out that having a fixed number of coins that fluctuate wildly in price is very bad for building a currency, but we have people on here arguing that it's a good thing. sorry, is that just because you say so? the success of bitcoin is the only thing i need to point to contra every point you make. if it's so bad, why does it work? maybe that won't always be the case, but so far the market has deemed it suffic…
> if it's so bad, why does it work?
As a currency? It doesn't. Do people actually think that Bitcoin is succeeding as a currency right now? If you want to talk about the market deeming something sufficient, the market has broadly, almost universally decided that credit cards are preferable to cryptocurrency.
As a speculative investment? Because of what I said in my last paragraph.
> chaumian coinjoin
I've seen multiple vulnerabilities pop up with coinjoin wallets, plus the process costs extra money to do, plus it's not network-wide so the coins involved can still be blocked from future transactions. I don't understand why a community would go down that route when solutions like zero-knowledge proofs already exist and have a better track record. I mean, that's supposedly the whole thing with Bitcoin, right? Stability and security?
The single advantage that coinjoins have is that they don't require iterating on Bitcoin itself, which the community seems to be desperate to avoid. This is something that pops up a lot with Bitcoin-centered "solutions". We have coinjoin, because having a coin with real privacy guarantees would require iterating on Bitcoin and we can't have that. We have the lightning network (which also has serious privacy problems) because building a completely separate layer that operates off of the blockchain is preferable to the community over fixing the problems with transaction delays and fees in the coin itself.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#346A good reminder that Bitcoin runs on cheap renewables is BS. See also miners buying gas power plants in New York.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479
A friendly reminder that PoW runs just fine on 100% renewables. It's the job of regulators to make sure all PoW runs this way. Just like it's the job of regulators to mandate renewable energy for literally all other industries.
Why 100% renewables? Biofuel is renewable but also emits lots of carbon and air pollution. Nuclear is not considered renewable but is low carbon and clean air. Seems like the the term allows undue wiggle room. Might want to require that it be generated with energy that emits less than 50 gCO2-eq/kWh on a lifecycle basis or something more specific.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does VISA create and secure an asset that is open source, decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless to participate in? Apples to oranges. VISA can't do those things, it is a centralized settlement layer for US Dollar transactions. So when we selectively compare the transactions per energy metric, we are conveniently ignoring the fact that VISA is not responsible for securing the stability of the global US D…
And... does any of those addons actually matter? I have yet to see why the average person should care. If I was a drug dealer or trying to side step customs or hiding wealth in general, dude, I'm going crypto. But I do none of that. It's just extra layers of hassle for me to go buy a bottle of rum, pack of chicken breasts, and pay for my electric bill. There was an article on HN regarding money laundering in the past…
Feel free to look through my comment history to see some of my arguments against fiat currency and federal reserve. I don’t think you’re familiar enough with the economics, the ideas of hard money/soft money and hyperinflation.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#348Can some explain what's happening better than I understand bitcoin? Wouldn't the idea that there is less miners be a positive for the price point? Supply and Demand? I mean if you have market of frozen orange juice, and they announce dry season will produce LESS juice, the price will skyrocket. So wouldn't less miners for something like Bitcoin with hard set limit of coins, be a positive for its price?
IANACryptoExpert, but:
The production rate of BTC does not depend on the number of miners as long as there's one miner (with zero miners no BTC is produced). A block is produced every 10 minutes by a computer that produces the smallest hash for a randomly arranged set of inputs (transactions and previous block's hash). This lowest hash serves as an identifier for that block and all input transactions are recorded on the new block with that hash and appended/linked in the chain. Currently, each mined block is associated with a miner reward of 6.25 BTC (I think) that's given to the computer which produced the lowest hash. It doesn't change if there are more/less miners in the network. So, there's no "dry season" just because the mining rate cut in half. There's just less energy being spent competing to generate the lowest hash and get block rewards. So, all the miners not running are failing to potentially earn money and the system is, theoretically, less decentralized, now.
But, there's no change to the rate of production.
Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heat generation is the only way we know to get the fairly robust security guarantees we need. Proof-of-stake and other “efficient” schemes have vastly worse security properties.
You don't see the inherent flaw still, do you? Financial security isn't worth anything in face of extinction. Bitcoin inherently works against human prosperity. No matter the riches we achieve, PoW will take a massive cut. Please, play it through in your head: What would happen to the PoW system, if we achieve almost infinite energy proliferation? E.g. some scifi space solar energy harvesting. Don't you see how Bitco…
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Re: Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is correct but I don't see why you are pointing it out.
It's a reply at this part of GP's comment: >So if miners started returning higher yields we would output a larger hash rate
That statement was to show why there is room to increase hash rate and not how you'd defend against a 51% attack. Most of the miners in the US are not mining for a significant portion of the day.