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

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

#141

Post by ikeboy »

gritzko wrote: post #105
CyberDildonics wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would bitcoin's power consumption stack up if it were tasked with servicing tens of millions of transactions per second? It would stay almost the same since the hashing power is not connected to the number of transactions. Also by the way, no one does tens of millions of transactions per second, visa does something like 40,000 at their absolute peak.

No, no, no. The amount of power wasted by BitCoin indirectly depends on the monetary turnover of the system. Because if somebody can spend $1mln to perform 51% attack and move around $1bln, that will likely be done. Hence, the power wasted is proportional to the turnover of the system. Otherwise, it does not work. Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people b…

No, it's proportional to the value of the coins used as reward. If there's high turnover, that might lead to bitcoin's price increasing and therefore higher energy costs. Also, high turnover may lead to higher fees, increasing the reward.

If the high turnover is done between trusted parties, or with settlement time, then it doesn't matter to security. It needs to be people accepting large amounts from strangers/untrusted counter-parties and giving stuff for it immediately. But usually, if I send someone $1000, they can wait 3 hours for security.

>Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people buy food.

When a bank has lights on, burns fuel to send an armored truck around, etc, that's also wasted.

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

#142

Post by gavazzy »

iofj wrote: post #137
sowbug wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malice isn't enough. The only special power of a 50% miner is to consistently resolve double-spend attempts in its favor. If this happened, it would surely lower the value of Bitcoin. This, an attacker must be not just malicious but also irrational enough to forfeit the $800,000 in Bitcoin that it creates daily by virtue of its 50% control of the network. (6 blocks/hour x 24 hours/day x 25 bitcoin/block x $450/bitcoi…

Not true. A malicious 50% miner can cancel any transaction it wants, not just fix doublespend. Assuming the transaction was sufficiently recent (the more hash power they have the more such a transaction can be in the past). So they can "unspend" their own bitcoins, as follows : use 51% of your hash power to create a parallel blockchain, which is not published. Include all transactions, except the one you used to buy…

Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

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

#143

Post by ikeboy »

jgalt212 wrote: post #115

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.

Huh? How does this "diversifying risk" idea let you do any of the major bitcoin applications? (For example, how would your idea that has the "same net effect" as bitcoin allow anonymous markets?)

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

#144

Post by techdragon »

burger_moon wrote: post #127
neurotech1 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I understand that gas turbines can produce that kind of power, in fact I used to work on some pretty large turbines and turbo generators in the 500-1000MW range. However they aren't used as backup generators where they have to be online in a minute. These are the types of generators I was referring to, https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/...

More batteries to get over the slower generator startup time, and likely quite a few smaller generators to do the best they can to keep the batteries going if the big generator is slower than expected to startup that day.

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

#145

Post by techdragon »

elbigbad wrote: post #130
pmorici wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to think about the mining market is that the number of Bitcoins available to be mined each day is _constant_* no matter what the total hashing power deployed is. As a miner your share of that fixed pool of available coins is determined by your hashing power relative to the overall hashing power of all miners. So if you control 30% of the hashing power you should on average get 30% of the coins mined each…

The question I haven't seen answered that I'm intrigued by: Assuming I put my 2015 pretty-normal-specs (i7 processor, 8gbs ram) laptop to work bitcoin mining 24 hours a day, how long before I have a single bitcoin?

At this point, basically never. Sad but true.

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

#146

Post by lukifer »

gritzko wrote: post #102
craigyk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any point since bitcoin's inception there have been plenty of major govts that could have easily afforded the resources to pull off a 51% attack.

A real bad thing here is the asymmetry. To prevent 51%, the network has to burn enormous amounts of energy 24x7 forever while the attacker only needs his energy for the duration of the attack.

Counterpoint: physical security largely works this way too.

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

#147

Post by maaku »

sanswork wrote: post #113
cgjaro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or be the sovereign state whose jurisdiction that data center is in.

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

#148

Post by maaku »

gavazzy wrote: post #142
iofj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A malicious 50% miner can cancel any transaction it wants, not just fix doublespend. Assuming the transaction was sufficiently recent (the more hash power they have the more such a transaction can be in the past). So they can "unspend" their own bitcoins, as follows : use 51% of your hash power to create a parallel blockchain, which is not published. Include all transactions, except the one you used to buy…

Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

maybe people will trust bitcoin more if you put the right spin on it (bitcoin is now regulator-approved, etc.).

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

#149

Post by maaku »

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).

USA (Washington state) has the cheapest power in the world (at volume -- places like Iceland are cheaper/nearly free, but with too limited capacity for large scale mining).

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

#150

Post by maaku »

throwaway45872 wrote: post #109
mrb wrote: post #26

Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which reportedly achieve approximately 0.06 joule per gigahash. They also use immersion cooling which gives them an insane PUE of 1.02. So the mining capacity of this DC alone is ~650 Phash/s! We saw an increase of ~200 Phash/s in the last 30 days, so presumably they…

(Note: Since most HN readers are technical, this comment is being downvoted by bitcoin enthusiasts among them. You won't see many replies from them to this comment, since their reaciton is political and not a technical statement. Still, I'll keep it up. This comment is currently at -2.) To put this into context, by comparing it with a centralized version, an equivalent number of actual transactions could be done at a…

What the expense of mining buys you is censorship-resistance.
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