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The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

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Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#71

Post by MichaelBurge »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #31
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still no discussion on the value of pissing away our planets energy reserves, just to create imaginary points in a paranoid game. In one view, all the electricity burned to make bitcoins is a crime against the planet.

This is so misguided I can barely think of a place to start. Do you think the current financial system is optimal? The financial industry currently makes up 8% of the entire US economy. Do you realize that bitcoin mining hashes and the number of transactions they can process are not linked?

Does the 'financial industry' include loans, insurance, and stock brokers? Or - this being compared to Bitcoin - are you strictly speaking about 8% of the economy being devoted to maintaining point-to-point transfers of money using credit cards, checks, or wire transfers?

In practice ACH transfers within the United States are free and clear within a few days(giving you time to catch fraud). There's also very little technical barrier to transferring money abroad, although there is risk to the bank.

Credit cards are a different matter. They have to clear instantly so the merchant is guaranteed payment(excepting a chargeback). Bitcoin (usually) clears in an hour, or at least 10 minutes, so it's unsuitable for realtime financial transactions unless you build a financial industry on top of it to mitigate risk.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#72

Post by ikeboy »

zamalek wrote: post #70
ikeboy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily add more decimals with a soft fork, or with a sidechain.

See: second-to-last paragraph.

What change that's less significant than allowing individual satoshis to be further divided has been refused as a soft fork? (Bigger blocks is far more significant.)

You don't even need a fork, you can just use off chain middlemen that add extra units, or if it's done as a sidechain then no agreement is needed and it's all on chain.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#73

Post by hasch »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8
schmichael wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More electricity is being burned to do the same amount of work. I know that sounds snarky, but it's how proof-of-work systems like bitcoin work: "miners" all attempt to generate a specific hash which just means lots and lots of computation. The number of transactions per second the bitcoin protocol can handle is essentially capped and completely unrelated to hash rate as the difficulty of producing a correct hash is…

And still no discussion on the value of pissing away our planets energy reserves, just to create imaginary points in a paranoid game. In one view, all the electricity burned to make bitcoins is a crime against the planet.

miners do more than just burning energy, and without this mechanism, the price can't be justified. a really forward looking perspective is, how a structure on top could be created to leverage bitcoin without mining. if you figure out something clever, you can call yourself the saviour of the planet :-)

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#74

Post by hasch »

schmichael wrote: post #7
arnauddri wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hash rate represents the total computational power used by the miners to secure the Bitcoin Network. The more miner, the more secure it is but the less it is profitable for them to mine. For more information about mining, you can refer to this description: https://kaiko.com/learn/mining-blockchain

> The more miner, the more secure This isn't totally accurate. You need a lot of different miners and a high hash rate for security. The least secure place bitcoin can be is when a single miner controls most of the hash rate.

good point, but a mining monopoly would destroy the value and hence it's in the self-interest of miners to be diversified. that's an economical self-correcting mechanism on top of this technical mining/reward feedback mechanism.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#75

Post by onnoonno »

this_user wrote: post #42
ethanbond wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a worse crime to say that because you have access to a stable, relatively apolitical currency, that no one else needs one. Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people. Our energy crisis was not created by, and will not be solved by, Bitcoin. Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by i…

> Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people. The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were…

> The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

It is not a given that Bitcoin cannot scale, even though a select few in the ecosystem repeat this as if it is a fundamental truth.

Bitcoin is proposed by many in the ecosystem to scale as it has been before: By scaling up transactions on the chain. See http://www.bitcoinclassic.com/

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#76

Post by nostrebored »

hasch wrote: post #73
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still no discussion on the value of pissing away our planets energy reserves, just to create imaginary points in a paranoid game. In one view, all the electricity burned to make bitcoins is a crime against the planet.

miners do more than just burning energy, and without this mechanism, the price can't be justified. a really forward looking perspective is, how a structure on top could be created to leverage bitcoin without mining. if you figure out something clever, you can call yourself the saviour of the planet :-)

Savior of the planet? Bitcoin without mining is just fiat money sans government.

Bitcoin is not necessary. The environment is. Easier solution is stop operating a power plant to play speculator on play money.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#77

Post by wlesieutre »

icebraining wrote: post #63
wlesieutre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of things: 1) With electric heat you have to account for the energy production and grid transmission being around 30% efficient. Even though an electric heater or bitcoin miner is converting electricity to heat 100% efficiently, a majority of the thermal energy released in the power plant was already thrown out as waste. 2) Even using electricity, a heat pump beats the electric heaters. They're 2-3x as "effi…

Bitcoin is basically a giant scheme to extract as much value for the miners by dumping a bunch of externalities on everyone else in the form of fossil fuel subsidies and greenhouse gas production. Not a fan. How is that different from any other of thousands of energy-intensive services?

Most of those energy-intensive services are providing a useful service that makes the energy expenditure worthwhile. Bitcoin has some novel features like its decentralization, but I don't believe its benefits outweigh the deliberately energy-guzzling architecture. That is, of course, just my opinion.

The bitcoin network's integrity basically boils down to "Waste so much energy that a single adversary couldn't possibly waste more energy than everyone else." It then rewards individual actors for wasting more energy to make sure that stays true.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#78

Post by schmichael »

hasch wrote: post #74
schmichael wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more miner, the more secure This isn't totally accurate. You need a lot of different miners and a high hash rate for security. The least secure place bitcoin can be is when a single miner controls most of the hash rate.

good point, but a mining monopoly would destroy the value and hence it's in the self-interest of miners to be diversified. that's an economical self-correcting mechanism on top of this technical mining/reward feedback mechanism.

AFAIK this is the conventional wisdom but not a proven fact. A smart 51% attacker could profit and go unnoticed:

> And contrary to commonly-repeated assertions, a monopolist can engage in subtle attacks that are hard to detect.

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

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#79

Post by a_humean »

VMG wrote: post #49
a_humean wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in the case of encryption we have competing issues relating to commerce, privacy, crime, and national security that have to be considered and weighed - which is a political process. In the case of gold buggery all we have is a political ideology of unrelenting suspicion of government trying to enforce through law or technology ideas about monetary policy that fall well outside of the economic mainstream all…

Would you say the suspicion is justified in, say, Venezuela or Zimbabwe?

Well their citizens have the option of using an alternative currency such as the USD or Euro or whatever if their leaders really screw up, and it doesn't seem right that you should lock out policy tools from developing countries just because the occasional despot or incompetent screws up fiscal and monetary policy. Eventually many of these countries or regions, with luck, will mature into stable states with competent civil servants that should have the full suite of tools that our civil servants use and employ. Not be locked into a limited child's toy tool set just because their predecessors were less than competent.

Re: The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month

#80

Post by VMG »

huherto wrote: post #67
VMG wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, people have thought about these things. Mining wasn't chosen because the developers love destroying the environment, but because it's the only way to bootstrap the system and keep it going. It's a system to distribute scarce tokens as fairly as possible. At the beginning, you could just do it on your own computer device. Now the space is much more specialized, the barriers to entry is much higher,…

> Again, how should the initial units be distributed fairly? Same amount for everybody. One weekly/monthly payment for everybody. Like basic income. I am just guessing, I haven't thought about it deeply.

That requires a central registry match cryptographic identities with physical ones. That is overhead and a trusted third party.

An idea like this was also often brought up in spam prevention, which interestingly is also the origin of proof-of-work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

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