In my opinion, for-profit bitcoin mining is detrimental to the ecosystem. Prices should fall to unprofitable levels,so network hash power is more distributed among smaller groups.
Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a point I see a lot of people miss about Bitcoin's power consumption. It doesn't have to use as much electricity as it does, as the difficulty is adjusted to mining capacity. The reason why so much electricity is being used on BTC is a result of an arms race between miners, not a necessity of the technical specification. Bitcoin would still operate correctly with less mining capacity. What is sacrificed is th…
How quickly would the difficulty adjust? My understanding is that there is an algorithm that slowly adjusts difficulty. If a big chunk of the ASIC miners went offline and mining reverted to individual GPUs, it might be a very long time before the difficulty reverted to something reasonable.
Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks, nominally 2 weeks. Each time it can adjust by a factor of at most 4 (in either direction).
Many other cryptocurrencies adjust difficulty every single block.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#73I think it's time that the government started to consider stepping in a providing support to these out of work ASICs.
In the interest of hijacking this into a productive discussion: Does anyone know if it's possible to use BTC ASICs for anything else? It's just a lot of sha256 hardware, right? Can we use it for arbitrary checksumming?
Absolutely not. They’re application specific as the name implies. They can not do anything else.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any. You have fun now with all that name dropping. The track record of cryptocurrencies so far has quite thoroughly shown me and most of the world AFAICT that those points are a bust. It's worse than the systems we already have, in pretty much every way. I note you don't a…
> I have no bitcoin and would never give one red cent to the shabby, frequently fraudulent outfits that call themselves exchanges in order to obtain any. Not that I entirely disagree with your sentiment, but do you realize the biggest exchange in the US/World is actually a YC backed venture based in Silicon Valley? You're the one that said they were 'fools to be parted with,' yet these are the very VC titans of the S…
> Had you purchased BTC 8 hours ago when I made that post, the 'store of value' of your purchase would have yielded an increase in 8% in a matter of hours while everything else in the stock market and fiat currencies is tanking.
Wow, now you're using the massive volatility as if it's some sort of benefit for something you're selling as a 'store of value'
If I'd bought a month ago I'd be down 50%.
You really are off on one.
Also that's hilarious "I won't address your arguments on the internet because I get paid for that, so I'm just going to tell you I already won the discussion without actually taking part".
LOL. Amazing.
The foresight you claim has had over ten years to play out now, and we've just had failure after failure after failure. The world has not been changed by it. It's time that the players in this space demonstrated real benefits or stopped the grandiose claims. Preferably both.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#75In my opinion, for-profit bitcoin mining is detrimental to the ecosystem. Prices should fall to unprofitable levels,so network hash power is more distributed among smaller groups.
The already existing mining hardware would make attacks easier and more probable, especially considering actors able and willing to operate at a loss.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't see the value proposition of peer-to-peer digital cash, cool.
Bitcoin needs a highly reliable network to work properly. Without block propagation, you cannot do anything with it. Thinking that there would be a network when even the slightest disruption to civilization happens is simply naïve. The internet would probably be the first thing to go. Even before electric cars.
Bingo. Gold is pretty straightforward -- shiny metal. You don't need any understanding of cryptography, networking, distributed services, or modulus calculus to "get" gold.
You also don't need electricity (or most other modern luxury) to modify, trade, or use gold -- plenty of gold changing hands throughout the ages.
Cryptographic currencies have their use, but if the economy is looking shaky I'd rather have cash, gold, silver, cans of beans, or ammunition; BTC wouldn't even rank top 25.
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
it was always funny that people with a prepper mentality touted bitcoin as some sort of rock stable currency in times of crisis when government money was going to be worthless despite the fact that it basically takes an electricity source the size of the country to keep the whole thing running. What are you going to do in the post apocalypse, get a team of people with an abacus to calculate hash functions?
tesla solar cryptoshingles
could you baseline that against solar output on a clear day?
1 TSC = 1 day of solar panel power with a clear sky at sea level at the equator, or something
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 people with electricity, networks, and computers.
You don't think 3 people could figure out electricity and computers and networks whether local or even satellite links? That would be one hell of an apocalypse.
I don't think my entire IT department could figure it out in a disaster scenario
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 people with electricity, networks, and computers.
You don't think 3 people could figure out electricity and computers and networks whether local or even satellite links? That would be one hell of an apocalypse.
After the power is out, and without internet access or delivery services?
As happened in parts of California last year?
How are you imagining they would do it?
Re: Bitcoin price crash forces miners off network
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a service like Paypal would likely work just as well but with the added benefit of being much more stable. That, combined with gold is really enough for most middle class people in Asia. Once you start getting into the tens of thousands of USD, you can afford to obtain bank accounts outside of the country tied to a business. These are widely available and there's an entire cottage industry of lawyers who can prov…
You don't see the value proposition of peer-to-peer digital cash, cool.
Is the value in circumventing KYC and AML?