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Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

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Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#41

Post by freehunter »

flog wrote: post #38
piuk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, it was meant to be a bit of fun and I wasn't expecting it to get on HN front page (developer).

How dare you have fun on your website. Hacker News users are super serious, busy, important startup people. You've just disrupted my zen flow for my super productive day.

You should read my new blog post and buy it as an ebook (DRM free!) titled "Seven Effective Secrets You Didn't Know About To Not Let Things Disrupt Your Zen Flow For Your Super Productive Day (And Five You'd Forgotten!)". It's even got a forward by someone who had read a Wikipedia article about Alan Kay!

It's available on my website (shameless plug) at www.bltzrg-app.me

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#42

Post by betterunix »

BladeMcCool wrote: post #32
[deleted] wrote: post #31

[deleted]

what makes you think it's a problem? the fewer bitcoins in circulation, the more they will be worth. And being (theoretically) infinitely divisible means that the tiniest fraction of a single bitcoin would still be enough to go around if all other bitcoin was somehow lost.

So instead of spending Bitcoins, I should just save them and spend dollars, because if I have a whole Bitcoin token when people are trading in millionths of a token, I am a millionaire. Sounds like a currency that has a pretty dim future...

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#43

Post by donpdonp »

motters wrote: post #25

Bitcoin is looking increasingly less practical. The size of the block chain is becoming massive. Recently I tried downloading the official client, and after 2.8GB of downloading with the progress bar only about half way through I gave up. If Bitcoin becomes more popular in future the block chain really isn't going to scale well, and that's going to result in a more centralized system in which there are fewer block ch…

Efficiency in syncing the blockchain appears to be the number one priority of the bitcoin client developers right now. The next release, 0.8.0, will have major improvements in this area.

from https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=16 "new features are being added to the protocol to support alternative implementations– next major release of bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt (version 0.8) should support for “bloom filters” to get just the transactions relevant to your wallet"

"...optimize transaction storage so validating transactions requires much less disk access and memory..."

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#44

Post by yebyen »

ewillbefull wrote: post #39
yebyen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. It will continue to halve, exactly one more time to 12.5, and then the next time after that, it will stop. Once the 12.5 reward is gone, the network will be supported entirely by transaction fees, and no new bitcoins will be created. So, yes, asymptote, but the rest of your comment seems misleading. It will halve once more, that's not exactly "continue to halve."

What are you talking about? Check out the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projec... It's supposed to halve 33 times.

I am the one who is misinformed!

I was also wondering how to reconcile this (seemingly very) early first halving with my concept of a 21 year bitcoin generation span. Thanks for clearing that up!

*edit: Turns out I was misinformed about the 21 year thing too. These projections have the halving terminating estimated at 2140. Don't suppose either of us will be around to see it.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#45

Post by mrb »

debacle wrote: post #22

What might this do to the acceptance of bitcoin? In an article yesterday, someone mentioned in the comments that it was no longer financially viable to make money from mining, I would assume that this would make it doubly so. If that is the case, will there be required transaction fees for processing transactions, and how will that effect the price of BTC?

This person is misinformed. Mining is still quite profitable to many of us. Eg. each one of my Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards makes about $43/month, after the halving. Before the halving, they made $86/month. I paid $640 for each one. Electrical cost for one of them (40W) is $2.90/month at the worldwide average rate of $0.10/kWh.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#46

Post by AdmiralBeotch »

ewillbefull wrote: post #39
yebyen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. It will continue to halve, exactly one more time to 12.5, and then the next time after that, it will stop. Once the 12.5 reward is gone, the network will be supported entirely by transaction fees, and no new bitcoins will be created. So, yes, asymptote, but the rest of your comment seems misleading. It will halve once more, that's not exactly "continue to halve."

What are you talking about? Check out the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projec... It's supposed to halve 33 times.

It will halve every 210,000 blocks for about 140 years until the reward is 1 satoshi.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#47

Post by AdmiralBeotch »

betterunix wrote: post #42
BladeMcCool wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes you think it's a problem? the fewer bitcoins in circulation, the more they will be worth. And being (theoretically) infinitely divisible means that the tiniest fraction of a single bitcoin would still be enough to go around if all other bitcoin was somehow lost.

So instead of spending Bitcoins, I should just save them and spend dollars, because if I have a whole Bitcoin token when people are trading in millionths of a token, I am a millionaire. Sounds like a currency that has a pretty dim future...

No because you'll eventually have something come up that makes you want to spend those bitcoins, even though you know they'll be worth more in the future. and when you do so, you'll be getting a significant effective discount on your purchase. For example, if you bought bitcoins now at $12, sat on them like a good little hoarder, knowing they'll be worth $1000 in 5 years and all of the sudden you need a new car and the bitcoins are only worth $24, you're getting a 50% discount on your car purchase by spending those bitcoins.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#48

Post by pkulak »

motters wrote: post #25

Bitcoin is looking increasingly less practical. The size of the block chain is becoming massive. Recently I tried downloading the official client, and after 2.8GB of downloading with the progress bar only about half way through I gave up. If Bitcoin becomes more popular in future the block chain really isn't going to scale well, and that's going to result in a more centralized system in which there are fewer block ch…

Several gigs may be prohibitive for an end user, but not for anyone who wants to set up a server. How many people run their own email servers any more? Spam control and all the security and other BS is a giant PITA. That doesn't mean, however, that there isn't still Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. Email is not centralized.

Though, I see that this is a bit different. If I had 1000 bitcoins I wouldn't want to put it on any server but my own. But, then again, I'd be pretty rich and downloading a few gigs of data wouldn't be the end of the world. ;)

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#49

Post by nullc »

ewillbefull wrote: post #39
yebyen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. It will continue to halve, exactly one more time to 12.5, and then the next time after that, it will stop. Once the 12.5 reward is gone, the network will be supported entirely by transaction fees, and no new bitcoins will be created. So, yes, asymptote, but the rest of your comment seems misleading. It will halve once more, that's not exactly "continue to halve."

What are you talking about? Check out the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projec... It's supposed to halve 33 times.

Well— it's supposed to halve forever, but it runs out of precision eventually.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#50

Post by nullc »

pixelcort wrote: post #21

Looks like the exchange rate didn't fluctuate too much during this time: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5ztgSzbgBzm1g10zm... I wonder what will happen to the difficulty over the next couple days: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Considering the exchange rate remained stable, I expect the difficulty to halve.

I expect the moon to be made of green cheese.

... GPU mining is still fairly profitable with the half reward for ~most people (those who don't have electricity over $.15/kwh or so). My expectation is that the difficulty is currently lower than its proper equilibrium because people have opted to not purchase more GPUs while anticipating the introduction of ASIC devices.

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