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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

#41

Post by jnbiche »

woah wrote: post #33
escherize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... by simultaneously facilitating a large ratio of bitcoin's infrastructure.

Not 100% sure, but from your tone it sounds like you think they are performing some kind of service. This is not true. Miners do not increase the number of transactions the network can handle. An infinitesimal amount of the electricity going into mining is actually goes to process transactions. A raspberry pi in a shoebox running mySql is capable of processing more transactions than the entire bitcoin network, liquid…

> All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security.

This is completely wrong. The higher the difficulty, the harder it becomes to attack the network, which is a critical feature. If anyone who rented a data center could attack Bitcoin at this point, it would be even less stable (much less!) than it has been already.

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

#42

Post by fosk »

feral wrote: post #37
woah wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100% sure, but from your tone it sounds like you think they are performing some kind of service. This is not true. Miners do not increase the number of transactions the network can handle. An infinitesimal amount of the electricity going into mining is actually goes to process transactions. A raspberry pi in a shoebox running mySql is capable of processing more transactions than the entire bitcoin network, liquid…

>Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security. Not sure exactly what you mean here - mining, and mining faster, generally increases the computational resources another third party would need to 51% attack the network.

Is there any possibility that they could themselves attack the network?

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

#43

Post by jnbiche »

guelo wrote: post #35
nemild wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty good writeup about this issue in the Stanford/Princeton Cryptocurrency Class: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B4-bDFu_72Beelkxd3VlbXoyd0E&... Excerpt: According to our estimates then, the whole Bitcoin network is consuming maybe 10% of a large power plant’s worth of electricity. Although this is not an insignificant amount of power, it's not yet a large amount of electricity compared to all the other…

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.

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

#44

Post by morsch »

twic wrote: post #28
mwilcox wrote: post #7

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...

40MW! For bitcoin! This is nuts!

As a point of comparison, a typical commercial nuclear reactor produces around 1000 MW (give or take; most power stations have more than one reactor).

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

#45

Post by jnbiche »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Bitcoin feels a bit like the gold standard. Massive mining operations dumping huge volumes of resources and energy to acquire some thing that is only mildly useful. It seems quite wasteful.

Proof of work is the most secure way we have by far of running a decentralized currency. I am hopeful that a better, more energy-efficient method will be developed, but until then, I think advancing the state of the art is worth the energy cost.

It's not obscene to me that a truly global currency, that is decentralized and not controlled by any government, would cost a tenth of the energy output of a modest-sized power plant.

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

#46

Post by dopamean »

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…

Could you translate some of that into an estimate of X coins mined per day and Y kwh used per day? Thanks.

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

#47

Post by jacquesm »

keyle wrote: post #39
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…

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.

It's a race to the bottom. It will end with the party that manages to just win that race by making the smallest profit possible at the highest efficiency of Joules per hash computed. Bitcoin is interesting for many reasons, the real-world effects of a couple of configuration settings and some cleverly picked auto-scaling parameters are immense. The number of orders of magnitude that the protocol has survived with minor tweaks to date is very impressive.

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

#49

Post by neilk »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Bitcoin feels a bit like the gold standard. Massive mining operations dumping huge volumes of resources and energy to acquire some thing that is only mildly useful. It seems quite wasteful.

Stellar solves the same problem in a different way - nodes pick whom to trust in the network. So it doesn't burn vast quantities of energy just to stand still, and it's not vulnerable to someone with vast computing resources.

I'm not an expert but it makes a lot of sense to me. Most real-world decentralized institutions work kind of like this.

https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...

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

#50

Post by crdoconnor »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #36
jonknee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/04/money Essentially, if you think that a currency will be worth more tomorrow than it is today there is little reason for investment (or even spending!). It quickly becomes a spiral where no one wants to spend. Inflation provides a nice kick in the pants for people to put their money to good use. This isn't a concern yet for Bitcoin because in the scheme of world econ…

Deflationary spirals are a hypothetical concern and mostly a fringe neo-Fisherian idea that has recently gained some mainstream nodding, but is otherwise difficult to verify in any way. For one thing it assumes a massive collective irrationality where people's expectations are all rendered berserk and plunged into a negative time preference. It's a very tough gambit to make that people can withdraw their propensity t…

>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.).

Indeed, what would really be irrational is spending all of your money immediately.

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