Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by bertil » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 11:35 AM UTC

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…

I believe that your being down-voted for writing:

> But it's a stupid, wrong solution. The basic idea sucks. It's bad.

instead of explaining that the cost is the cost of guaranteeing the authenticity of the transaction. HackerNews likes technical comments, and will happily burry expletives.

You could find more compelling example, such as estimate the ecological cost of having most of the current world-wide banking transactions on BitCoin, and prove your point.

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

#182

Post by lmm » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 11:35 AM UTC

Mandatum wrote: post #20

jonknee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We re-learn why a deflationary currency is an awful idea.

Gold seemed to work for a long time.

No it didn't. It worked for less than 100 years and ruined many national economies.

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

#183

Post by bertil » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #47

keyle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those crazy jargon words meant to translate to $ ? If so, is it profitable? Sounds like they've just cut their lunch by 40% too.

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…

> It will end with

What you describe is price-based competition. It’s probably the most documented situation in economics, and it present in many markets. It is a race to the bottom, but rarely ever ends; when it does, it is generally by disruption (something people on HackerNews know a lot about). In the mean time, it drives technical innovation after technical innovation—but I doubt, after 40 years of Moore’s law that it will suddenly end.

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

#184

Post by maaku » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 11:59 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #179

maaku wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (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.) You can get that while being less deflationary though, e.g. Dogecoin.

Or Freicoin, which I co-authored with another Blockstream founder. But neither has the network buy-in and security of Bitcoin.

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

#185

Post by maaku » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:00 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #172

maaku wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "Why would you expect hashing power to become more distributed?" 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 o…

That doesn't address any of the concerns I raised.

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

#186

Post by yxhuvud » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #68

crdoconnor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "work". Gold denominated WW1 debts caused WW2.

The problem sounds like the debts, not the gold. Since, if you accept the debt deflation hypothesis and the idea of debt overhangs, these obviously occur in fiat money systems as well. Gold makes it hard to inflate monetarily, but we observe that catastrophic debts still occur in its absence.

Catastrophic debts occur in its absence, but fiat money gives a way to handle catastrophic debt in ways that are a lot less harmful than when it happens in a gold based system.

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

#187

Post by maaku » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #176

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).

Really limited capacity? They run aluminium smelters in Iceland, I can't imagine bitcoin mining requires more power than that.

At that price point, yes. Maybe the problem has been not enough power required... I don't know. I just know that most bitcoin companies in Iceland have moved or are moving to get cheaper power elsewhere.

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

#188

Post by ZenoArrow » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:14 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #185

ZenoArrow wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Why would you expect hashing power to become more distributed?" 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 o…

That doesn't address any of the concerns I raised.

Yes it does. If the article is correct, the 16nm BitFury chips will be sold to interested parties, so new mining capacity won't be dominated by a single company, thereby ensuring newly mined BitCoins can be distributed throughout the network.

If your concerns were about something other than distribution, please clarify.

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

#189

Post by creshal » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:19 PM UTC

cgjaro wrote: post #99

sanswork wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not pocket change… except for government organizations.

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

#190

Post by kushti » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 12:21 PM UTC

Some alternatives. Permacoin(http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf) has mostly the same security properties, but effectiveily non-outsorceable, and work done is useful. We made the first open-source implementation of that https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki/tree/master... .

I also have paper draft about better Proof-of-Stake protocol, and would like to share it with people from academias to get a feedback. Please write me ( kushti at protonmail dot ch ). I also have half-written paper draft about PoW+PoS hybrid chain.