Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

kaiko.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 260 posts

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

#251

Post by scotty79 »

gritzko wrote: post #238
scotty79 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, when a bank charges me 1% for a wire transfer, they pay salaries from that money and some people buy food. So basically they are paying bunch of people to live and consume without doing anything useful. How much power wasted is that? How do you know how much wasted day of human life costs?

I just had some issues with my Dutch bank because they totally switch to the model of "mobile client + internet + paper letter once a year". They deprecate walk-in procedures. They close branches. I did not visit them for 5 years and I would not visit them for another 5, but something happened, so I had to. My Russian bank is mobile+internet from day 1. They have no branches. They don't even have their own ATMs. I am…

My thesis was "if the banks use 1% to pay salaries to their employees doesn't mean it's not a loss"

Maybe you meant the thesis I was responding to that banks use 1% to pay salaries.

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

#252

Post by homonculus1 »

mootothemax wrote: post #230
x3c wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !

Not sure I follow you here. How would they make money from controlling BTC other than by selling it? ...which is impossible if they break it, as argued above.

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

#253

Post by adam_mckenna »

bryanbuckley wrote: post #235
mootothemax wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I thought miners already try to mine zero block transactions first, then add in fee transactions? apparently you can chew through the nonce really fast..

Not exactly. Some Chinese mining firms maintain a stratum connection to pools in the US so they can get just the new block header when a new block is found on the network. They then mine on that header until the full block is downloaded and validated by their local bitcoind (which can take 20 seconds, to several minutes in the worst case) This has been referred to as "SPV Mining".

If they find the next block during the time they are mining only against the block header, that block will contain no transactions. This doesn't happen very often, and there are some other issues that can arise from the practice (a multi-block fork happened once), but miners believe that it increases their profitability so (afaik) they continue to do it. More info here: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38437/what-is-spv...

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

#254

Post by phoogathrw »

MikeNomad wrote: post #84
phoogathrw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, yeah that would be nice. But no one has figured out how to securely do productive work for proof of work. In fact, there are pretty good reasons to believe that it may even be impossible to create a secure yet productive proof of work algorithm.

It almost sounds like you are talking about something like SETI@Home...

You can't use SETI@home for proof of work. The work target has to somehow involve a fully random process.

Lots of very smart people have tried this and failed. The best effort so far has been to find prime numbers, and even that turned out to not be a robust proof of work.

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

#255

Post by jgalt212 »

ikeboy wrote: post #250
jgalt212 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether or not Y is over TOR, it cannot serve as a cut out. All the transactions are stored on the blockchain. So if Y tries to convert to dollars, then they have him. Or if Y's proxy Z tries to convert to dollars, they have Z (and by extension Y). For these reasons, I cannot figure out why they don't know who stole the MtGox bitcoins. The only way to hide is to forever keep your booty in bitcoins. When…

It doesn't matter if they catch Y, as long as he didn't keep logs. Nobody, not even Y, knows who Z is, so Z can safely use his coins. >For these reasons, I cannot figure out why they don't know who stole the MtGox bitcoins. When you don't understand something, something might be wrong with your model. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ comes to mind). The exact addresses of the Gox stolen co…

> as long as he didn't keep logs.

It doesn't matter who keeps the logs, the blockchain is the log. I really think you are the one who is missing something. Because the blockchain has the entire history, everyone knows every transaction wallets X, Y, Z and any other wallet has ever done.

> A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol. A full copy of a currency's block chain contains every transaction ever executed in the currency. With this information, one can find out how much value belonged to each address at any point in history.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_chain

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

#256

Post by gritzko »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #245
gritzko wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are focusing on a single scenario of an individual double-spender. Why don't you consider some other scenario, e.g. a hacker getting control of a major BitCoin mining facility to disrupt things just for a laugh? I've seen a lot of that happening. There are tens of possible scenarios. Mining capacity is highly centralized these days and that trend will likely develop further (see the subj). The mental model of "on…

If a miner gets hacked, then their blocks will go to the attacker, or they won't be mining. Blocks will be mined more slowly and transactions may take longer for the same number of confirmations until the miner comes back. If a bank gets hacked, people steal money enormous amounts of money by directly changing their ledgers. I don't see this as some sort of a loss for cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure what you mean by t…

Turnover: the amount of business transacted during a given period of time. How much BitCoins change hands in a month, for example. Actually, plotting that in dollars is even more correct, as electricity costs are not paid with BitCoins.

Ultimately, that is a graph of dollars moved vs dollars wasted. (I explained the difference of "spent" and "wasted" in a different comment.)

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

#257

Post by gritzko »

scotty79 wrote: post #251
gritzko wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had some issues with my Dutch bank because they totally switch to the model of "mobile client + internet + paper letter once a year". They deprecate walk-in procedures. They close branches. I did not visit them for 5 years and I would not visit them for another 5, but something happened, so I had to. My Russian bank is mobile+internet from day 1. They have no branches. They don't even have their own ATMs. I am…

My thesis was "if the banks use 1% to pay salaries to their employees doesn't mean it's not a loss" Maybe you meant the thesis I was responding to that banks use 1% to pay salaries.

My point is: banks are not driving around trucks full of gold bars (like some other commenter suggested). These days, it is mostly electrons moving. They also minimize the number of people involved. I believe, the remaining people are doing something useful. Like answering my calls and investigating incidents, for example.

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

#258

Post by blencdr »

nanny wrote: post #210
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.

The problem is not the virtual character of the money, but the energy involved to create it.

The idea behind it is that you need energy to gather money (metalic money for example). but this is pointless for bitcoin, it's just wasted without any utility.

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

#259

Post by ikeboy »

jgalt212 wrote: post #255
ikeboy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if they catch Y, as long as he didn't keep logs. Nobody, not even Y, knows who Z is, so Z can safely use his coins. >For these reasons, I cannot figure out why they don't know who stole the MtGox bitcoins. When you don't understand something, something might be wrong with your model. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ comes to mind). The exact addresses of the Gox stolen co…

> as long as he didn't keep logs. It doesn't matter who keeps the logs, the blockchain is the log. I really think you are the one who is missing something. Because the blockchain has the entire history, everyone knows every transaction wallets X, Y, Z and any other wallet has ever done. > A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol. A full copy o…

You don't understand how mixing can work. I send money to your right pocket, you send me money back from your left pocket. At no point were your right and left pockets connected. As soon as you destroy your logs of what your pockets were, there's no way to identify which pocket was which.

Do you understand the concept of taint in block chain analysis, and how mixing can produce untainted coins?

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

#260

Post by jgalt212 »

ikeboy wrote: post #259
jgalt212 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as long as he didn't keep logs. It doesn't matter who keeps the logs, the blockchain is the log. I really think you are the one who is missing something. Because the blockchain has the entire history, everyone knows every transaction wallets X, Y, Z and any other wallet has ever done. > A block chain is a transaction database shared by all nodes participating in a system based on the Bitcoin protocol. A full copy o…

You don't understand how mixing can work. I send money to your right pocket, you send me money back from your left pocket. At no point were your right and left pockets connected. As soon as you destroy your logs of what your pockets were, there's no way to identify which pocket was which. Do you understand the concept of taint in block chain analysis, and how mixing can produce untainted coins?

I'm talking about tainted wallets, not coins. When a tainted wallet tries to transact outside the bitcoin system, then you're busted.
Post reply on HN