Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#111

Post by danieltillett » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:11 AM UTC

narrator wrote: post #106

danieltillett wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the theory of a bank is to act as an efficient mechanism to transfer capital from businesses and consumers with excess capital to those with a need for more capital. Of course in practice banks have got pretty good at capturing almost all the value out of this process. Business should not really be in the business of retaining earnings. If it was not for tax reasons it would be best to return any excess funds to…

This would be fine and good, except banks create money when they lend through the money multiplier effect.

Yes but returning capital to shareholders would have the same effect too.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#112

Post by mpnordland » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:13 AM UTC

neurotech1 wrote: post #93

burger_moon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW. 50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen. I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators. [1] http://ww…

They do. Natural Gas fueled generators are practical at 50MW capacity. GE basically sells a 747 engine (CF6) driving a generator, known as the LMS6000 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 [1] http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/

That's probably the most awesome thing I've heard tonight.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#113

Post by sanswork » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:14 AM UTC

cgjaro wrote: post #99

sanswork wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So less than half of one datacentre entirely owned by one company is enough to commit a 51% attack. I get that they say they are going to work on distribution these chips to ensure they don't end up in that position but let's be honest they just destroyed any claim that the network is powerful enough to avoid malicious control by one miner now. They've not even raised that much money.

This DC cost $100 million. Not exactly pocket change. http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-details-100-million-georgia-... Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million. The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 n…

Or you could just buy bit fury

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

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Post by gritzko » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:14 AM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #90

tveita wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only by as much as the miners themselves spend. And it's a running cost, you have to spend it every day, while an attacker would spend it only during their attack. The only way to make a 51% attack impractically expensive is to make the network impractically expensive to run.

That would only make sense if you could somehow rent 51% of the hashrate, which isn't remotely true.

Another option is to hack 51% of the hashrate. The third one is to own it from the very beginning.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#115

Post by jgalt212 » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:16 AM UTC

What a colossal waste of electricity. Great, they've created a general ledger and currency formed by individual untrusted participants, but who in the aggregate are trusted.

What about this: Why not just diversify your risk by doing transactions or investing in currencies/assets across a diversified set of untrusted counterparties? Same net effect, and a lot less electricity wasted.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#116

Post by ant6n » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:17 AM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #45

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Bitcoin feels a bit like the gold standard. Massive mining operations dumping huge volumes of resources and energy to acquire some thing that is only mildly useful. It seems quite wasteful.

Proof of work is the most secure way we have by far of running a decentralized currency. I am hopeful that a better, more energy-efficient method will be developed, but until then, I think advancing the state of the art is worth the energy cost. It's not obscene to me that a truly global currency, that is decentralized and not controlled by any government, would cost a tenth of the energy output of a modest-sized pow…

1GW is a large sized power plant.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#117

Post by sfackler » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:27 AM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #92

jonknee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We re-learn why a deflationary currency is an awful idea.

Like precious metals? Deflationary currencies have been used successfully for over 1000 years. The only people it is bad for are governments. Throughout history there is a patter of promising, spending, and becoming insolvent. The idea that an individual wouldn't choose a deflationary currency is ludicrous. Inflationary currencies are what you want everyone else to use. And by the way, the cat is out of the bag. Cryp…

I am pretty confident that the amount of precious metals in circulation has gone up over the last 1000 years.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#118

Post by gritzko » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:30 AM UTC

nemild wrote: post #30

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Bitcoin feels a bit like the gold standard. Massive mining operations dumping huge volumes of resources and energy to acquire some thing that is only mildly useful. It seems quite wasteful.

There's a pretty good writeup about this issue in the Stanford/Princeton Cryptocurrency Class: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B4-bDFu_72Beelkxd3VlbXoyd0E&... Excerpt: According to our estimates then, the whole Bitcoin network is consuming maybe 10% of a large power plant’s worth of electricity. Although this is not an insignificant amount of power, it's not yet a large amount of electricity compared to all the other…

I believe that most of money consumed by the financial system actually goes back into the economy. Some bankers buy sushis, then sushi chefs buy gasoline, then oil drillers... and so on.

BitCoin tends to waste energy irrecoverably.

Apples-to-apples comparison is a challenging task, but the modern financial system hardly has that feature of burning more for the sake of burning more.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#119

Post by csseinpoont » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:37 AM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #23

Mandatum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold seemed to work for a long time.

They keep digging more of it up too, it's not like Bitcoin. It's also not a good thing to run an economy on, but that's another concern.

Every fiat currency ever has collapsed, yet gold is still being hoarded in vaults. You have a limited perspective of history.

Re: Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days

#120

Post by Jtsummers » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 3:37 AM UTC

feelix wrote: post #96

jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a race to the bottom. It will end with the party that manages to just win that race by making the smallest profit possible at the highest efficiency of Joules per hash computed. Bitcoin is interesting for many reasons, the real-world effects of a couple of configuration settings and some cleverly picked auto-scaling parameters are immense. The number of orders of magnitude that the protocol has survived with min…

Anywhere in the USA who has to pay USA power prices is going to be at a disadvantage by that alone then. It would seem that locating the hashing equipment to the place with the cheapest power possible would be a logical step when things start to get cut that fine. Unless that could be overcome with clever usage of naturally generated local power (such as solar power).

There have already been articles about people doing that a couple years ago. I believe they were located in a cooler climate as well, made cooling the datacenter a bit cheaper so more power was going to computing than maintaining the computing equipment.

I'll look for that article now.

EDIT: Not the article I was looking for, but it covers it and was from 2013. This guy was using the cheap Icelandic power and the cold Icelandic air to his advantage.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mine...