21–30 of 260 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when we reach 100%?
Then no new bitcoins will be created and all mining profits will come from fees. That won't happen until 2140.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We re-learn why a deflationary currency is an awful idea.
ELI5 por favor
Essentially, if you think that a currency will be worth more tomorrow than it is today there is little reason for investment (or even spending!). It quickly becomes a spiral where no one wants to spend. Inflation provides a nice kick in the pants for people to put their money to good use.
This isn't a concern yet for Bitcoin because in the scheme of world economies BTC simply doesn't matter (it could go away tomorrow without any noticeable effects), but if in the future it becomes a critical thing it would be a major concern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens when we reach 100%?
Then blocks continue to be created, but no more coins are mined (in practice, we will be mining tiny little fractions of a coin for a very long time until it drops off to true zero).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then blocks continue to be created, but no more coins are mined (in practice, we will be mining tiny little fractions of a coin for a very long time until it drops off to true zero).
If no more coins are mined (or the mining rate drops to almost negligible levels), is there still any incentive for people to keep the blockchain alive by computing power? Aside from keeping the whole system alive, I mean.
40e6 (watt) / 0.06 (joule/gigahash) / 1e6 (petahash/gigahash) = ~650 petahash/second
BitFury's immersion cooling tech:
http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s (shows the fluid boiling - starts at 0m42s)
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...
BitFury's 16nm chips:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...
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.
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 things that people are using electricity for on the planet.
Any payment system requires energy and electricity. With traditional currency, lots of energy is consumed guarding and moving gold bullions around, running ATM machines, coin sorting machines, cash registers, and payment processing services, and transporting money in armored cars.
Some people say Bitcoin wastes energy because the energy expended computing SHA-256 hashes doesn’t serve any apparent purpose. But you could make this same argument for traditional currency as well — there’s a lot of energy being wasted and it doesn't serve any purpose besides maintaining the currency system. So, if we value Bitcoin as a useful currency system, then the energy required to support it is not really being wasted.
That said, we can ask if there’s a way to do better ...