141–150 of 238 posts
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> There was even a brief moment when the price of an oil barrel went negative More accurate: The price for an _option_ to buy/sell oil was negative, not the price of the barrell itself.
How could the option price go below 0? Why couldn't someone just not exercise it in that case?
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Depends on if you see the use case of censorship resitant payment as something we should allow or not (such as paying the Ayatollah to go through the strait). I for one don't.
But even of you do see the use, why not proof of stake rather than proof of work?
Other than that, it is probably tradition at this point, like with Gold.
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If "difficulty drops, costs go down" so ought the price? Isn't that basic economics? Or are they chasing the "phase difference", lag, between supply demand?
It's the reverse. As price per coin goes up, more folks will find mining profitable and invest in mining operations. Difficulty goes up until it's no longer attractive for anyone to add to the global hash rate. As price per coin goes down, less of those operations are profitable and fewer new people will find it to be a good investment. Difficulty stays the same or goes down. Due to capital expenses, difficulty is mo…
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This only works when the difficult drop rates are below miner leaving rates. Which in normal times, are something taken for granted, but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system. edit: the earlier language is not exact, the scenario is an exponential drop of value that results in exponential drop in miner willing to mine until this discrepancy can be resolved. i.e. the system is not protected aga…
> but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system. Which is when exactly, and how likely is that to happen? It hasn't happened yet in ~14 years, but I guess "never say never". There is a lot of money saying it won't happen very soon though.
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It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel of oil, find the next ounce of gold, or harvest the next acre of a certain crop; exceed the reward. When that happens, wells are shut down, mining operations suspended, and differ…
Satoshi thought of everything, man.
It's 2026 and there's still people that believe that proof-of-work makes sense as a consensus mechanism
There is a breakthrough on a more productive Po(useful)W: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47430951
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There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment. Let's call this cycle A and cycle B. If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder. This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter. This isn't completely critical as the…
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
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There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment. Let's call this cycle A and cycle B. If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder. This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter. This isn't completely critical as the…
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment. Let's call this cycle A and cycle B. If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder. This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter. This isn't completely critical as the…
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
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A perpetual boom bust cycle? Sounds healthy.
It is a negative feedback loop, so yes, it makes systems stable.