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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

#151

Post by maaku »

LAMike wrote: post #95

Once the 16nm chips become a commodity, it will make sense that the hashing power would get more distributed. I hope figures out how to get a solar powered, interchangeable bitcoin miner in a box at a positive ROI. It may seem impossible now, but solar prices are falling faster than expected.

Why would you expect hashing power to become more distributed? Mining is a race to the bottom/thin margins, and the differentials in power rates far exceed normal miner profit margins. It would still only be profitable to mine at scale in a few select locations in the world.

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

#152

Post by maaku »

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…

Yes, like precious metals. The history of precious metal economies is pretty bad -- decades-long recessions and wars triggered by fluctuations in the commodity markets. Deflationary currency is not a good thing, and bitcoiners will eventually realize this.

(Note I work on Bitcoin Core and co-founded Blockstream, a prominant bitcoin company. The value of Bitcoin is not the currency, but rather what censorship-resistant, distributed global consensus gives us.)

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

#153

Post by lukifer »

csseinpoont wrote: post #119
jonknee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm no fan of fiat, but your statement is tautological at best: the fiat currencies that have collapsed, collapsed. Communications tech and electronic fiat make the future anyone's bet.

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

#154

Post by pmorici »

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?

Buy a scratch off lottery ticket you would have a better chance of coming out ahead.

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

#155

Post by rasz_pl »

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.

except gold is very useful, every bit of electronic around you uses it.

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

#156

Post by thaumasiotes »

morsch wrote: post #44
twic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40MW! For bitcoin! This is nuts!

As a point of comparison, a typical commercial nuclear reactor produces around 1000 MW (give or take; most power stations have more than one reactor).

You know, I'd kind of like to see someone construct a nuclear plant just to self-source their bitcoin mining power needs.

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

#157

Post by Scoundreller »

maaku wrote: post #149
feelix wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Therein lies the problem: New users pay the average price, but new capacity has to be built at the marginal cost.

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

#158

Post by iofj »

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.

If BitFury resolved a single doublespend transaction differently from the "main" blockchain, people would(/should) realize that it now has the power to cancel transactions, and stop trusting bitcoin ASAP. At that point you can no longer trust the blockchain, since you can no longer know you're looking at the "true" blockchain, and not a fake one that has been presented to you to make you do something (e.g. pay someone real money).

In any reasonable person's version of "wait X blocks for confirmation" (currently mostly 3), X would be infinite.

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

#159

Post by cgjaro »

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

You couldn't buy BitFury for less than 200 or 300 million dollar. After all they expect this $100 million data center to be profitable so I am sure they value their company at least 2x or 3x this.

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

#160

Post by gnaritas »

poizan42 wrote: post #21
gnaritas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then no new bitcoins will be created and all mining profits will come from fees. That won't happen until 2140.

There's some very big ifs in that. We really have no idea what sort of breakthroughs might happen the next 125 years

That's always true of the future, but the difficulty is continually self adjusting and pluggable and quantum proof algos exist so that'll be about the timeline no matter the power of future CPU's.
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