171–180 of 260 posts
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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 is cool. Wonder what the efficiency of one of those will be.
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.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...
"Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury, said: “We are very excited to launch mass production of our super 16nm ASIC Chip. The final results of our hard work have fully met our expectations. We understand that it will be nearly impossible for any older technology to compete with the performance of our new 16nm technology. As a responsible player in the Bitcoin community, we will be working with integration partners and resellers to make our unique technology widely available ensuring that the network remains decentralized and we move into the exahash era together. BitFury warmly welcomes all companies interested in joining our integration and reseller program.”"
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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…
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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.
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Bitcoin inflation was around 10% recently Hashrate!= inflation btw
The question was about when new coins stop being mined...
Right now all comments about "inflation" etc are downright silly, usually form people regurgitating sill cons against bitcoin that are not a concern at this time.
But lets not have fact get in the way, downvote away.
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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).
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…
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> All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security. This is completely wrong. The higher the difficulty, the harder it becomes to attack the network, which is a critical feature. If anyone who rented a data center could attack Bitcoin at this point, it…
No. Read what I said. "Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security." If everyone can use technology to push a higher hashrate, then what has changed? The people who can get their hands on new mining chips first have an advantage for a little while, but in the end it's a zero-sum game. The pie is 100% of hashing power/block validation power. How can you divide a pie i…
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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-resistan…
You can get that while being less deflationary though, e.g. Dogecoin.
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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.
Yes and no. If a banker is being paid $100/hour then presumably (in an efficient-markets sense) their labour is worth that much, and they could be doing something else with their time that would be creating $100 of value instead.