This was an enjoyable read. Slightly off-topic: are there any books that approach Probability in a fun way? (i.e. that I can read on the train)
Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
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Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#22A related statistical "mystery" is the miner cooperation without communication property of Proof-of-Work I describe here: https://grisha.org/blog/2018/01/23/explaining-proof-of-work/ It too is rooted in that the mining problem is progress-free.
Contemplating adding the "20 minute paradox" as a section since I already explain the foundational principles in the write-up.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#23This was an enjoyable read. Slightly off-topic: are there any books that approach Probability in a fun way? (i.e. that I can read on the train)
I enjoy Statistics Done Wrong https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
BCH is frequently more profitable than BTC -- the mining power constantly oscillates between the two. Checkout fork.lol which tracks DARI, an estimate of the profitability of mining the coin, you see how the more profitable one frequently switches: https://fork.lol/reward/dari/btc
This is of course not surprising - in the long run all difficulties (for similarly hashed coins) should trend towards equalizing profitability lest they create an arbitrage opportunity. The driving factor in the grandparent's case was the short-term spike in BCH after it was listed on Coinbase.
Not entirely. There was a flaw/feature in the difficulty algo for BTC Cash that allowed miners to generate a significant quantity of blocks very rapidly.
https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-hard-fork-plans-update...
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#25Does this mean that the second block from a random point in time is, on average, 20 minutes away? Anyone know what the longest wait time on a block in recent history was? Final question -- do large mining operations network their miners so that they don't overlap their hashes. I'm thinking the overhead in doing that would probably be counter-productive given the massive problem space. But, if they were networked that…
> do large mining operations network their miners so that they don't overlap their hashes
The short answer is "no" (there is no need).
The SHA-256 space (2^256) is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe, if you pick the (extra)nonces at random, there is practically no chance you can ever pick the same number as anyone else.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#26Bitcoin mining = "Guess a random number between 1 and 5" If the network guesses too fast due to more cumulative guesses per second, the target number increases. Interesting historical antidote, in early November of 2017 there was an event where it became more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash. During that time about 60% of the miners left BTC Core in unison to focus on BTC Cash. Transactions for BTC Core started taking…
BCH is frequently more profitable than BTC -- the mining power constantly oscillates between the two. Checkout fork.lol which tracks DARI, an estimate of the profitability of mining the coin, you see how the more profitable one frequently switches: https://fork.lol/reward/dari/btc
well that's an interesting top level domain.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#27The article on the "hitchhiker's paradox" that this links to made this much more clear to me (as well as being shorter): https://the8layers.com/2016/10/30/how-long-will-you-wait-hit...
Extreme case for intuition: five cars showing up at once does great for the average, but nothing for you
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#28This is why I like block times of 2.5 minutes that Litecoin does. Rarely the block takes over 4 minutes. So even if it takes a couple of blocks, it's still within 10 minutes. Even 5 minutes a block would be better than bitcoin's 10. With bitcoin, if you put a reasonable fee, but your transaction doesn't make the next block, it can take more than an hour, which makes impractical certain transaction types like online shopping.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#29TLDR: Since blocks that take a long time to mine fill up more wall-clock time, if you pick an arbitrary instant of wall clock time, you're more likely to be in a "slow" block than a fast block. Specifically, you expect to wait 2x the average.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#30The hitchhiker's paradox is correct, taking a point and looking backward or forward will correctly give an average event 10 minutes away, but combining the events to give an average of 20 minutes is false. Two events have been chosen resulting in a conditional probability.
Put more clearly, an event happens on average 10 minutes in the past, but using the same starting point for the event in the future links the events with a dependency. We could also arbitrarily start looking forward at the instance of the event in the past, or another random point in time.