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

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

#211

Post by crdoconnor »

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.

A gold standard makes debt deflation routine whereas fiat money systems make it much easier to adjust to systemic capital flows.

In essence the problems faced by Greece are due to a reinvention of the gold standard despite there not being gold involved this time around.

Point being that Gold only "worked" for a small elite and it was largely devastating to the rest.

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

#212

Post by tveita »

homogeneous wrote: post #64
urbanarson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, how much power does Visa, Mastercard, the Federal Reserve (and its printing presses), banks, and all of the buildings and employees that work in the traditional financial sector use? Now think about that in every single country on this planet. It's a lot more than 40MW. The Bitcoin network is a steal by comparison.

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?

> How would bitcoin's power consumption stack up if it were tasked with servicing tens of millions of transactions per second?

There is no way to do this calculation. At the moment Bitcoin mining uses, let's say 150MW and can do around 4 transactions per second. If you gave the network a 1000 times more hashing power, you'd be using 150GW, and could handle... around 4 transactions per second.

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

#213

Post by stefantalpalaru »

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…

> Since most HN readers are technical, this comment is being downvoted by bitcoin enthusiasts among them.

No, you're being downvoted by technical people because you're missing the whole point of decentralized digital currencies. Educate yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#Timestamping

> I love fiat currencies, they're one of the great achievements of modern civilization.

Yeah, unless you want to export some Cuban cigars from Germany to Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Worldwide_Interban...

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

#214

Post by acveilleux »

burger_moon wrote: post #73
elorant wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.

After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW. 50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen. I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators. [1] http://ww…

Maybe want to checkout engines from Wärtsilä.

They have gas capable engines (50DF series, 50cm cylinder bore) with ratings up to 975kW/cylinders and up to 18 cylinders or 17MW per genset at 60hz.

They're not the only player in that field. Fairbanks-Morse sells the Colt-Pielstick PC2.6 line with 750kW per cylinder at 600rpm and up to 16 cylinders for 11.5 MW @ 60hz. They also sell MAN 48/60 engines that go up to 21MW and MAN natural gas 51/60 G engines up to 18.5 MW.

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

#215

Post by celticninja »

mootothemax wrote: post #206
gavazzy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

they make money by mining bitcoin, if the value drops then their return, even if they sell all BTC immediately, would be affected. They just spent $100m on a new mining facility so to trash bitcoin would be to write off that investment. They cannot make good money by screwing over bitcoin without screwing themselves over.

Best case scenario is that at the end of the effective life of this DC BitFury decide to doublespend their coins to allow them to spend all bitcoins once, however by that time their relative % of the network will be less than 50%.

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

#216

Post by fla »

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…

Yes but in practice you can't convert that much BTC into USD that quickly.

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

#217

Post by mootothemax »

celticninja wrote: post #215
mootothemax wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

they make money by mining bitcoin, if the value drops then their return, even if they sell all BTC immediately, would be affected. They just spent $100m on a new mining facility so to trash bitcoin would be to write off that investment. They cannot make good money by screwing over bitcoin without screwing themselves over. Best case scenario is that at the end of the effective life of this DC BitFury decide to doubles…

>They cannot make good money by screwing over bitcoin without screwing themselves over.

Why not? Surely this is more a lack of imagination on your part, rather than a hard fact?

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

#218

Post by jgalt212 »

ikeboy wrote: post #143
jgalt212 wrote: post #115

What a colossal waste of electricity. Great, they've created a general ledger and currency formed by individual untrusted participants, but who in the aggregate are trusted. What about this: Why not just diversify your risk by doing transactions or investing in currencies/assets across a diversified set of untrusted counterparties? Same net effect, and a lot less electricity wasted.

Huh? How does this "diversifying risk" idea let you do any of the major bitcoin applications? (For example, how would your idea that has the "same net effect" as bitcoin allow anonymous markets?)

Bitcoin is not anonymous. The entire ledger history is exposed. Through network analysis you can figure out who the original anonymous holder is. And as soon as that holder tries to convert to a fiat currency their identity will be exposed. It's precisely because Bitcoin is way more traceable than cash, the US government has not tried to shut it down despite a lot illegal activity being paid for via bitcoin.

As soon as Satoshi tries to convert any of his coins into dollars or any other legacy currency everyone will know who he is.

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

#219

Post by mootothemax »

fla wrote: post #216
mootothemax wrote: post #204

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. 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…

Yes but in practice you can't convert that much BTC into USD that quickly.

>Yes but in practice you can't convert that much BTC into USD that quickly.

Would they even need to convert BTC into USD? Even ignoring the obvious opportunities for shorting an entire economy?

I mean, I'm kinda curious to know what effects they could cause by e.g. choosing to mine zero-block transactions for a few days.

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

#220

Post by mootothemax »

cma wrote: post #208
mootothemax wrote: post #204

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. 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.

>because other would anticipate the future state of things and the price would plummet before a couple years.

Why would the price plummeting matter to them if they've already made their money?

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