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

61–70 of 260 posts

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

#61

Post by sanswork »

narrator wrote: post #53
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…

As a counterpoint, you should consider Hayek's critique of the Paradox of Savings: https://mises.org/library/hayek-paradox-saving The "deflation makes people not spend" is a hand-wavy argument. There is zero empirical evidence for it.

You could just read any Bitcoin forum where everyone is 'hodling' because they expect their coins to be worth $100000 each soon.

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

#62

Post by urbanarson »

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.

And all of the myriad redundant banks, central banks, credit card processors, buildings in every city in the world aren't wasteful? Bitcoin is a monetary system for the whole world and if it succeeds none of the things I previously listed will need to exist.

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

#63

Post by jonknee »

yc1010 wrote: post #27
jonknee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We re-learn why a deflationary currency is an awful idea.

Bitcoin inflation was around 10% recently Hashrate!= inflation btw

The question was about when new coins stop being mined...

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

#64

Post by homogeneous »

urbanarson wrote: post #59
twic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40MW! For bitcoin! This is nuts!

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?

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

#65

Post by mjevans »

jnbiche wrote: post #45
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 pow…

That's my main issue with bitcoins (aside from how they're marketed to anyone; it is most definitely NOT anonymous!).

Instead of 'proof of work' it should require actual, /useful/ work. I think it should be a mix of work /types/ to promote general purpose computing, instead of ASICs. Imagine if a comity decided, and the owners of existing coins voted on, what work was worthy of being included. Folding proteins for medical research, SETI, attacking DRM/bootloader encryption keys... things that benefit the world.

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

#66

Post by jlarocco »

nemild wrote: post #30
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.

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…

> guarding and moving gold bullions around

I forget where I read it, but when countries and banks buy and sell large amounts of gold bullion they don't usually move it around because it's expensive and inconvenient.

The ownership changes, but it's usually left where it is.

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

#67

Post by jonknee »

baddox wrote: post #52
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…

I'm no economist, but it seems like a lot of things (most, by dollar amount) I buy are simply not things I could feasibly defer for long. Food and rent (shelter) are the obvious examples by necessity, but also plenty of discretionary spending is obviously time-sensitive. I want to see a movie now, go skiing now, fly home for the holidays now, etc. It's unlikely that deflation stop me from making these purchases, unle…

It doesn't take a big change of behavior if there are a lot of people doing it. If everyone reduced spending by just a couple of percent it would radically change the economy and growth forecasts (we'd be in a recession). Lowered growth forecasts would then incentivize savings, further pushing down future growth. There is no Bitcoin Fed that could cut rates and incentivize investment, a Bitcoin dominated world in recession would be a dire place to be.

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

#68

Post by vezzy-fnord »

crdoconnor wrote: post #48
Mandatum wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold seemed to work for a long time.

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.

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

#69

Post by danieltillett »

narrator wrote: post #53
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…

As a counterpoint, you should consider Hayek's critique of the Paradox of Savings: https://mises.org/library/hayek-paradox-saving The "deflation makes people not spend" is a hand-wavy argument. There is zero empirical evidence for it.

It is not so much that it stops people from spending - it is that it makes the real interest rate high relative to the nominal and so discourages borrowing.

Actually with negative interest rates proving possible (almost nobody thought they were a few years ago) if you had a deflationary currency you could always use negative interest rates to control demand. I am sure some smart economist has looked into this.

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

#70

Post by brianpgordon »

sanswork wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Not less than half of their datacenter, but less than all of their datacenter. See the current hash rate here:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&sho...

Post reply on HN