131–140 of 224 posts
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In the near future every nation state will be vying for the largest stake of the BTC mining pie and the BTC race will be bigger than the Space Race and the Nuclear Arms Race combined and adjusted for inflation.
Why? BTC is not just worthless, it has negative value due to how much electricity it takes to securely mine new blocks.
TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Well what's arguably even more horrifying is according to "Estimated average energy efficiency of bitcoin mining hardware" no significant changed happened since 2014. I imagine we went from CPU to GPU to ASIC in couple of years and now for more than a decade, no change, just more.
TIL: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci - quite horrifying! EDIT: For comparison: https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Since when is incentivizing low cost renewable energy horrifying?
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The idea is that you can start with the next head earlier than all the others, giving you an edge in being the first to find the next block.
But what do they gain by doing that? What's the edge? Starting earlier doesn't give you any advantage.
It's a race. Starting earlier obviously gives an advantage?!
The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage. It looks like a result wi…
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I don’t discredit any crypto based solely on its ability or inability to fulfill debts, public and private. But I do wonder if the abstract nature of it will forever hinder its ability to do so universally. I’m also interested why Bitcoin Cash wasn’t more successful after the fork.
>I’m also interested why Bitcoin Cash wasn’t more successful after the fork. you mean besides it being run by a bunch of crooks and scam artists like CSW?
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But what do they gain by doing that? What's the edge? Starting earlier doesn't give you any advantage.
> Starting earlier doesn't give you any advantage It's a race. Starting earlier obviously gives an advantage?!
It would be like saying you've an edge if you start earlier at the roulette.
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I might be wrong but I think it's like this.. A finds a block after 1 minute, then powers off and waits for another minute. They reveal the block after 2 minutes. B searches for the block for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, A has used 1 minute of their compute, and B has used 2.
But the time spent by B is not wasted. If they find a block between minute 1 and 2, their block will be accepted, and A just lose the reward of the block they found.
If B finds a block between minute 1 and 2, they start working on their competing chain, but A is already working on theirs. And A had a headstart because it started working on it somewhere between minute 1. So it's more likely that A's fork wins the race in the end.
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I don't think it is the same thing. Everyone agrees that mining the next block is valuable.
Unless they didn’t. There’s nothing inherently valuable about crypto beyond what value people assign to it in their minds.
The answer is "no, it's not the same". The attack does not require everybody to agree that the bitcoin is worthless.
Obviously if everybody agrees that the bitcoin is worthless, then it is worthless. But that's a separate topic.
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How are you so confident that it will never weaken? Especially since there will come a time when the block reward is literally 0.
Tx fees make up a bigger and bigger fraction of miner rewards over time.