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

#201

Post by davidgerard » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:12 PM UTC

SolarNet wrote: post #83

homogeneous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're comparing the microscopic bitcoin economy to the financial infrastructure that services the entire planet; it's a ridiculous comparison. How would bitcoin's power consumption stack up if it were tasked with servicing tens of millions of transactions per second?

Well a miner like the one going live is also responsible for managing the transaction volume. So the capacity of Bitcoin to manage many more transactions just went up.

No, this is completely incorrect: the transaction rate limit is inherent in the protocol.

You could do it with an increase in the block size, but the Bitcoinsphere has bitterly resisted all attempts to increase the block size.

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

#202

Post by davidgerard » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:15 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #43

guelo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That paper estimates the bitcoin network's total power consumption at around 117MW. This latest increase is estimated at 40MW. So it is a significant increase.

Not sure how they came up with that estimate, but the miners are getting more and more efficient, so it's not a linear increase.

No, it's a race to the bottom. The cost of mining 1 BTC will naturally tend to 1 BTC, and we're already circling that.

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

#203

Post by blencdr » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

No one is afraid of the ecological cost of crypto currencies ?

We are in a world where the energy has a frightening ecologic cost and people to spend it in gigantic quantities just to create a virtual money...

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

#204

Post by mootothemax » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

Sealy wrote: post #173

cgjaro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People seem to forget that it is NOT in BitFury's best interest to perform a 51% attack because, bitcoin's value will plummet if they do that.

>People seem to forget that it is NOT in BitFury's best interest to perform a 51% attack because, bitcoin's value will plummet if they do that.

If BitFury can turn $200 million into $400 million now rather than over a couple of years, why on earth would they care about the side-effect of killing off bitcoin?

For the avoidance of doubt, I think that BitFury's best interest is BitFury; as long as they make a decent chunk of money, the end result for bitcoin is - and should be - immaterial to them.

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

#205

Post by crdoconnor » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #60

crdoconnor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For one thing it assumes a massive collective irrationality where people's expectations are all rendered berserk and plunged into a negative time preference. One of the more idiotic ideas to come out of neoclassical economics is the assumption that a negative time preference is irrational or impossible, when most of us have one (pension, passing wealth on to one's kids, saving up to buy big ticket items, etc.). Inde…

I am uncertain as to why you imply that a) I think a negative time preference is irrational or impossible apodictically , b) that the former is necessarily a neoclassical idea when the neoclassical synthesis in fact eschews it, c) that there is a natural rate of time preference, d) that time preferences do not differ per subjective valuations and units of goods on an individual scale, or that they are not dynamic, an…

>the opposite straw man idea of extremely high time preferences that favor immediate consumption is a convincing line of argument (indeed, the latter cannot be true for it would make capital investment an impossibility).

Under the neoclassical synthesis capital investment is done purely by investors who have a positive time preference but are being paid enough to offset their desire to spend absolutely all of their money right this second.

It's kind of dumb.

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

#206

Post by mootothemax » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:37 PM UTC

gavazzy wrote: post #142

iofj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. A malicious 50% miner can cancel any transaction it wants, not just fix doublespend. Assuming the transaction was sufficiently recent (the more hash power they have the more such a transaction can be in the past). So they can "unspend" their own bitcoins, as follows : use 51% of your hash power to create a parallel blockchain, which is not published. Include all transactions, except the one you used to buy…

Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

>Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

If they make good money from it, why would BitFury care about bitcoin's long-term outlook?

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

#207

Post by cryowaffle » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

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 find this style of commenting passive aggressive... "Nobody has pointed out this great fact?! I guess I will be forced to do it." Just lead with "This is BitFury..." we don't need to know how annoying it is for you to have to post this.

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

#208

Post by cma » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

mootothemax wrote: post #204

Sealy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to forget that it is NOT in BitFury's best interest to perform a 51% attack because, bitcoin's value will plummet if they do that.

>People seem to forget that it is NOT in BitFury's best interest to perform a 51% attack because, bitcoin's value will plummet if they do that. If BitFury can turn $200 million into $400 million now rather than over a couple of years, why on earth would they care about the side-effect of killing off bitcoin? For the avoidance of doubt, I think that BitFury's best interest is BitFury ; as long as they make a decent ch…

But if that was a predictable consequence, they can't turn $200million into $400million now, because other would anticipate the future state of things and the price would plummet before a couple years. Not that I think that is at all what is going to happen.

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

#209

Post by sireat » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

lifthrasiir wrote: post #51

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.

Right at the moment the current hashrate is 723 Phash/s, so BitFury hashing at 200 Phash/s rate would get ~28% [1] of the newly generated bitcoin in average, i.e. 0.277 * 144 [block/day] * 25 [BTC/block] ~= 996 [BTC/day]. (Assumes that the difficulty approximately keeps up with the hashrate, which seems to be fine to me.) That translates to more than 400,000 USD per day if BitFury manages to sell them at the current…

Since the amount of Bitcoins introduced into world daily is near constant (except for the scheduled halving of the rewards every few years), SOMEBODY is selling most of the freshly mined coins without disrupting the market.

It doesn't really matter how high the difficulty is or who the miner is the coins are mined and most of them sold.

There might be a small fraction of coins which are still mined in pools using outdated miners and those people don't bother selling them coins(fractions of coins that is).

It has been accepted wisdom that most mining operations sell most/all of their mined coins.

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

#210

Post by nanny » Tue, Dec 22, 2015, 1:56 PM UTC

blencdr wrote: post #203

No one is afraid of the ecological cost of crypto currencies ? We are in a world where the energy has a frightening ecologic cost and people to spend it in gigantic quantities just to create a virtual money...

>No one is afraid of the ecological cost of crypto currencies ?

I am. But this is a drop in the bucket compared to financial sectors that deal with "real" money. Really, isn't nearly all modern money "virtual"? Nevermind the fact that a lot of money only exists electronically, modern money doesn't actually physically represent anything. Therefore: virtual.