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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

#161

Post by lsseckman »

ikeboy wrote: post #139
throwaway45872 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

You're wrong. Even without any mining, running a full node requires 2GB of RAM. Even if you do less than a full node, you'll find it hard to fully process 100x transactions on less than 2GB. Also, you don't seem to understand the point of PoW.

You misunderstood him. He was talking about running a non-bitcoin program on that small computer.

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

#162

Post by gritzko »

lukifer wrote: post #146
gritzko wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, things work much better in crypto (not proof-of-work, but the "real" one).

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

#163

Post by exo762 »

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…

> Because if somebody can spend $1mln to perform 51% attack and move around $1bln, that will likely be done.

This attack allows double spending and censorship. It does not allow to directly steal someone's BTC.

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

And horses are pissed at cars.

> The power burnt by BitCoin is actually literally immediately irrecoverably physically wasted.

No, it is not. It buys security in a way which traditional banking is not capable of providing.

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

#164

Post by School-Cotton »

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.

The USD and Euro haven't collapsed, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

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

#165

Post by exo762 »

gritzko wrote: post #118
nemild wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Bitcoin is best technical solution we have for an existing societal problem. As soon as better technical solution will be created (e.g. proof-of-stake which can be relied upon), Bitcoin will be modified to use it. And Bitcoin will continue to operate with lower costs - burning less energy.

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

#166

Post by amai »

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…

The fluid they use for cooling is either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230.

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

#167

Post by BlackFly »

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…

Actually that 1% normally will go to paying the electricity bills for the bank back end systems and the fraud analysis algorithms. On top of that they need to pay for fraud insurance. The power spent on bitcoin is not analogous to these costs, it is equivalent. The question is, is bitcoin more cost effective at preventing specific types of fraud?

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

#168

Post by iSnow »

shmageggy wrote: post #104
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…

I will forever refuse to spend my 0.5 BitCoin just so one day I can say to my grandkids in a creaky old voice, "See! I mined that myself on my own computer in a couple of nights!"

"What are you even talking about, Bitcoin? And what's the big deal about the $0.5 you got there?" :)

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

#169

Post by Viper007Bond »

Scoundreller wrote: post #157
maaku wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Washington and Oregon sell a lot to the SW. Google just built a big data center here near a dam from a huge city for power reasons.

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

#170

Post by hhw »

elorant wrote: post #58
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…

How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.

40MW = 40,000KW Typical power density in a colocation facility these days is approximately 5kW per full cabinet (sold as 30A @ 208V or 60A @ 120V at 80% utilization). So, approximately 8000 full cabinets at average density, which would be enough power for one of the 10 largest known facilities in the world. Most likely though, the power density is going to be much higher than typical with bitcoin mining, and could be as few as 1333 actual cabinets at the high end of density of 30kW per cabinet.
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