141–150 of 295 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do that and it would no longer be useful as proof of work. Proof of work-i-was-going-to-do-anyway is not useful for securing the ledger.
That's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.
Long term outlook for mining isn't good. Ethereum, for example, is moving toward Proof of Stake ( https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ ), and Bitcoin will become less profitable for miners soon, beginning with the activation of Segwit. The reason for the recent Bitcoin Cash fork, was that miners are terrified of losing control given the substantial investment required to maintain profitability. I…
Miners can choose to include more profitable transactions, skiping segwit ones. POS will not work. you need to back Bitcoins value with something, and its electricity. Gov backing with gold.
PoS will succeed. It already has, we've set all the pieces. The thing is, you don't want to live in a world where Bitcoin and PoW dominate our financial transactions. That world is not livable.
Bitcoin transactions are secured by spent electricity. PoS transactions are secured by cryptographic signature schemes and reputation of operational security. It's how the world already functions, just more replicated.
Well...yeah. It's kind of by design, right? I mean, it's either "work" or centralization, so that's the trade off bitcoin makes. The work is the disincentive against cornering, right?
The statistic that stands out to me from this article is that 1 bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5.58 us households for a day. I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment - is it likely that this will continue as the mining reward decreases? How expensive will transactions be after that happens? And if smaller rewards reduce total mining and power consumption, how vulnerable does th…
I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable about bitcoin can comment I did and was quickly voted to the bottom. bitcoin can be competitive with centralized competitors like credit cards In it's current form it can't. It's already running at max capacity. No further increase in transactions per day is possible. If there will be a cryptocurrency that can handle as many transactions as Visa, it will be something else then wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hashing is merely a way to choose a random block. It's not a proof and it doesn't do anything fancy. It just picks a random computer to say "this is how the transaction history looks". The energy increases with the volume of transactions because there will be more people calculating hashes. The more people mining, the harder they make the hash calculation so that the target is ten minutes. More transactions = mor…
I repeat, you got it very wrong. Transaction number is not correlated with mining energy expenditure. Mining is used to secure the ledger in a way that the same amount of energy is needed to alter it. The block hash begins with a number of zeros. Try for yourself how many tries it takes to find a string that hashes to a hash beginning with 3 zeros. Bitcoin block hashes begin with 13 or 14 zeros IIRC. This means that…
You're only kind of right. The mining algorithm cares not one bit about number of transactions, so higher tx volume has no direct effect on the mining energy expenditure. But it does have a second order effect.
More transactions usually entails higher fees (as people compete for block space to put their transactions in). More fees means higher mining rewards, means higher incentive to mine, means more mining activity, and, therefore, higher energy expenditure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do that and it would no longer be useful as proof of work. Proof of work-i-was-going-to-do-anyway is not useful for securing the ledger.
That's incorrect. All that matters is you can't game the system by taking shortcuts or deciding what the problem will be beforehand; the work cannot be even partially computable without knowing the previous block.
Blockchains only work by probably wasting in order to build a history. If you aren't wasting, then it wasn't expensive to build the history (it was subsidised), and it wouldn't be expensive to build a different history (that one could also be subsidized)
> Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh Thats about $20 in the US. If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions? What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?
A transaction here is a block. A block averages 2000 or so transfers, so that $20 becomes $0.01 for any individual transfer in the block. Electricity price in the US is also irrelevant. As the article shows just over 0% of blocks are mined in the US, or a rounding error. Bitcoin mining chases cheap electricity.
> Electricity consumed per transaction: 165 kWh Thats about $20 in the US. If a transaction is that expensive, how can this system even work for transactions with a value of that order? Are large transactions "sponsoring" small transactions? What happens if more people use the system for small transactions? Will BTC become unusable?
A transaction here is a block. A block averages 2000 or so transfers, so that $20 becomes $0.01 for any individual transfer in the block. Electricity price in the US is also irrelevant. As the article shows just over 0% of blocks are mined in the US, or a rounding error. Bitcoin mining chases cheap electricity.
Sure China and Ukraine is cheaper but not that much.
The energy expended is a guarantee of security and immutability. The fact that real world energy is expended is the thermodynamic guarantee of the irreversibility of a transaction. If you have access to the VISA database, and change something, you cannot have the cryptographic proof that it has not been tampered with. At the very best, you trust a VISA root key. With Bitcoin you trust math and physics, telling that i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hashing is merely a way to choose a random block. It's not a proof and it doesn't do anything fancy. It just picks a random computer to say "this is how the transaction history looks". The energy increases with the volume of transactions because there will be more people calculating hashes. The more people mining, the harder they make the hash calculation so that the target is ten minutes. More transactions = mor…
You have a very distorted view of how it works. The number of transactions is entirely unrelated to the number of people mining. There could be an increase in transactions while the number of miners falls, or vice a versa. This is why the hash difficulty adjusts, to ensure that the new block rate (and therefore the transaction rate) stays the the same regardless of the number of miners. If the number of miners droppe…
I also commented elsewhere to this effect, but this is not quite true: number of transactions correlates very strongly with higher transaction fees, which further incentivises mining activity. Higher transaction volumes also usually come hand in hand with higher prices, which is another incentive for mining activity. Just because there is no direct effect (which you're absolutely right — the mining algorithm cares not one bit about the transaction volume) doesn't mean there aren't second order effects at play.