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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

#221

Post by raducu »

gritzko wrote: post #105
CyberDildonics wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would bitcoin's power consumption stack up if it were tasked with servicing tens of millions of transactions per second? It would stay almost the same since the hashing power is not connected to the number of transactions. Also by the way, no one does tens of millions of transactions per second, visa does something like 40,000 at their absolute peak.

No, no, no. The amount of power wasted by BitCoin indirectly depends on the monetary turnover of the system. Because if somebody can spend $1mln to perform 51% attack and move around $1bln, that will likely be done. Hence, the power wasted is proportional to the turnover of the system. Otherwise, it does not work. Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people b…

Sorry, but the bitcoin "wasted power" is just a NON-ISSUE right now.

World wide standby power waste must be 1000 times more than what bitcoin uses - world wide power usage ~17TWH, 1% standby power waste => 170GWH.

I'm pretty sure that all the power dedicated by the banks to perform the same opperations as bitcoin (people driving to work, office building power, air conditioning, datacenters power, and so on) is signifficantly more than 40MWH.

So, just the global standby power waste is orders of magnitude greater than what bitcoin uses, and banks probably use a lot more power to perform the same opperations as bitcoin does.

If you pay a 1$ fee to a bank or a bitcoin fee, that 1$ will recirculate back into the economy. The difference is the banks are a lot more inefficient and are such human resources hogs because of their exclusive right to create money out of thin air.

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

#222

Post by CyberDildonics »

maaku wrote: post #152
CyberDildonics wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like precious metals? Deflationary currencies have been used successfully for over 1000 years. The only people it is bad for are governments. Throughout history there is a patter of promising, spending, and becoming insolvent. The idea that an individual wouldn't choose a deflationary currency is ludicrous. Inflationary currencies are what you want everyone else to use. And by the way, the cat is out of the bag. Cryp…

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…

The value of bitcoin is in properties of ideal money.

> decades-long recessions and wars triggered by fluctuations in the commodity markets

As opposed to now where we have no recessions and no wars? A deflationary currency doesn't cause a recession, the unwinding of practices like fractional reserve banking or the deleveraging of debt do. When these spin out of control the financial system becomes fragile because none of the intermediaries are resistant to any sort of failure to be able to keep their promises. If no one person in an organization is really accountable, why would they care? They can make short term gains, and when things fails they all fail together and no one really has to claim any substantial responsibility - they can say 'it just happened'.

So what you are talking about is a problem with certain systems, not with money that doesn't lose value. Then again it doesn't come as a surprise that a co founder of a company so misguided and desperate doesn't really understand systems, accountability, or even bitcoin/cryptocurrencies.

That is like saying 'the value of the discrete cosine transform isn't JPEG but what it lossy compression gives us'. They are separate things, and denying the impact of one is a simple, easy, and wrong answer.

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

#223

Post by noetic_techy »

amai wrote: post #166
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…

The fluid they use for cooling is either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230 .

Are these systems totally self contained? Seems a bit unsafe to have fire retardant chemicals vaporizing constantly in a confined space. Has anyone given any thought to the health effects of these type of data centers?

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

#224

Post by ragnar123 »

gcr wrote: post #131
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…

Yeah, but how many bitcoins is USD$ 100 million worth?

229922 BTC according to Google's exchange rates.

See: https://www.google.com/search?q=100M+usd+in+bitcoin

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

#225

Post by ikeboy »

lsseckman wrote: post #161
ikeboy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. Even without any mining, running a full node requires 2GB of RAM. Even if you do less than a full node, you'll find it hard to fully process 100x transactions on less than 2GB. Also, you don't seem to understand the point of PoW.

You misunderstood him. He was talking about running a non-bitcoin program on that small computer.

He's talking about running something that does bitcoin, but without the inefficiencies of PoW. I pointed out that the RPi 0 doesn't have enough power to handle that scale, even if we took out the PoW stuff.

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

#226

Post by emin-gun-sirer »

sowbug wrote: post #82
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.

Malice isn't enough. The only special power of a 50% miner is to consistently resolve double-spend attempts in its favor. If this happened, it would surely lower the value of Bitcoin. This, an attacker must be not just malicious but also irrational enough to forfeit the $800,000 in Bitcoin that it creates daily by virtue of its 50% control of the network. (6 blocks/hour x 24 hours/day x 25 bitcoin/block x $450/bitcoi…

>The only special power of a 50% miner is to consistently resolve double-spend attempts in its favor.

No, this post, and the handy table inside, explains the various attacks possible at different percentages of the hash rate:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-monopo...

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

#227

Post by ikeboy »

jgalt212 wrote: post #218
ikeboy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is wrong. Plenty of people have converted to fiat and not been caught, there are ways of mixing coins.

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

#228

Post by x3c »

mootothemax wrote: post #220
cma wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

The only way they make money (cash out) is if trust remains in the bitcoin platform. By doing 51%, they tank the platform itself. No liquidity. Provable and transparent majority attack is MAD in the strictest sense.

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

#229

Post by throwaway45872 »

ikeboy wrote: post #225
lsseckman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstood him. He was talking about running a non-bitcoin program on that small computer.

He's talking about running something that does bitcoin, but without the inefficiencies of PoW. I pointed out that the RPi 0 doesn't have enough power to handle that scale, even if we took out the PoW stuff.

lsseckman had it right. I'm comparing it with a non-bitcoin cenralized little app. In an edit I added "by comparing it with a centralized version" to my first sentence. crud is this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delet...

I'm comparing it with, basically, a spreadsheet/database at a bank (i.e. if trust isn't an issue). to put into perspective the scale of the difference.

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

#230

Post by mootothemax »

x3c wrote: post #228
mootothemax wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ?

The only way they make money (cash out) is if trust remains in the bitcoin platform. By doing 51%, they tank the platform itself. No liquidity. Provable and transparent majority attack is MAD in the strictest sense.

>The only way they make money (cash out) is if trust remains in the bitcoin platform.

Not if their cash isn't - somewhat ironically - tied up in BTC.

Really, I'm sure between the two of us, we could imagine a thousand and one viable ways of making a tonne of cash very, very quickly that wouldn't involve transacting in BTC at any point!

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