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Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

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Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#51

Post by debacle »

mrb wrote: post #45
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.

So it takes the better part of a year to make your money back?

What kind of money do you make on transaction fees?

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#53

Post by yebyen »

AdmiralBeotch wrote: post #46
ewillbefull wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like it. Produce the proof that your rig solved the latest block, and you get your name in the book. Sounds much better than "no further rewards will be issued from this date."

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#54

Post by mdonahoe »

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...

This argument gets made frequently. Here is a response from the bitcoin community. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#55

Post by MrMan »

freehunter wrote: post #41
flog wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My start-up already pivoted into the personal productivity blog posting space, so you are out of luck.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#56

Post by finnw »

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 difficulty to halve.

Why would it? Those who have invested in dedicated mining hardware aren't going to switch it off just because the reward has halved. At least not until mining fails to pay for the electricity that goes into it (but I don't expect that will ever happen.)

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#57

Post by rfugger »

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.

Difficulty would only halve if none of the miners had anticipated the block reward halving.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#58

Post by downandout »

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…

I think that the sustainability issue can be managed with bloom filters etc, but you are correct. Under the current model where the entire block chain must be in the possession of every client, Bitcoin is not remotely close to sustainable. Imagine if, in order to process credit cards, you had to download transaction data for every credit card transaction in the history of credit cards.

What surprises me is that the original creators, who were obviously very intelligent, didn't anticipate this becoming a problem and create the system from the ground up to address it.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#59

Post by mrb »

debacle wrote: post #51
mrb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it takes the better part of a year to make your money back? What kind of money do you make on transaction fees?

You can make your money back in 3 months. Because after 3 months you would have mined $129, and the resale value of the board is at least $500 on eBay. So, in essence, anything mined after 3 months is pure profits.

However I don't recommend anyone to buy FPGAs right now, as ASICs are coming in December/January, and they will change the game.

Transactions fees only increase my revenues by ~1%.

Re: Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

#60

Post by graue »

bencoder wrote: post #37
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…

Hard drive and network cost per gigabyte is always falling, and much faster than the blockchain is increasing, so it's not expected this will be a huge problem. But what you say is true that it will "centralise" more in a sense - but the barriers to entry will still be much smaller than any other financial institution so there will likely be many groups still involved with processing the block chain. If it's just the…

However, using Electrum entails putting significant trust in the third party that hosts the blockchain for you (and it's not clearly identified on the Electrum website who that is). See past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4836269

If I were going to trust a third party to begin with, I'd just go with a hosted wallet like Coinbase. They seem more reputable to me than whoever's behind the Electrum project.

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