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Bitcoin 'Miners' Face Fight For Survival As New Supply Halves (reuters.com)
SpzToid quotes a report from Reuters: On Saturday, the reward for [bitcoin] miners will be slashed in half. Written into bitcoin's code when it was invented in 2008 was a rule dictating that the prize would be halved every four years, in a step designed to keep a lid on bitcoin inflation. From around 1700 GMT on Saturday, instead of 25 bitcoins up for grabs globally every 10 minutes, worth around $16,000 at the current rate BTC=BTSP, there will be just 12.5. That means only the mining companies with the leanest operations will survive the ensuing profit hit. "The most important thing is to be the most efficient miner," said Streng, the 26-year-old co-founder of German firm Genesis Mining, which has "mining farms" in Canada, the United States and eastern Europe, as well as in Iceland. "When the others drop out, that means that they leave the market and give you a bigger share of the pie."
Which leads to two options
1) miners that are rented per GHash will continue to provide services.
2) miners that want profit, and customers renting (1), will stop mining. For some time. Looking at previous halving, this can lead to drop in mining and increase in price. And in the end, miners will be back, and the bitcoin price will move to compensate (e.g. x2 higher price). The price already did increased, even x3 in last ~month, possibly that was in anticipation of this effect (but maybe even more of it will happen).
Fuck ALL POLICE.
With smaller players dropping out of the game, soon it might become a "single player" game after all. If this scenario happens, then a single entity controlling 51% of the keychain nodes can potentially disrupt the entire BitCoin economy by effectively "rewriting history".
I'm not sure this is a good thing. Every advancement seemed to have moved the needle to this direction. While everyone was able to run CPU miners is was very democratic. Then GPUs came, but still people could drop in a few hundred, and continue. After FGPA, and the ASICs, it's not just very large firms, where smaller people can only "rent" nodes, and hope they can trust the infrastructure.
We might need a "reset", where ASIC is no longer viable, but I'm not sure that would still be possible.
This is precisely why Bitcoin has always been a scam. If you weren't in on the ground floor you get screwed.
Is the greek way. Also sprach Zarathustra, Uber Mensch!
Why such a hard step instead of a constant progression?
it always comes back to the banksters.
From 1998 to 2002, DRAM makers colluded to fix prices. There was a recent settlement to a class action suit. Lawyers must have made out well.
Anyway, for those who filed a claim, expect a settlement check any day now. Looks to be about $10 per computer, PDA, printer, etc since we had 20, and got about $10 per. Obviously it was much more than that lost due to the price fixing, but CAs only pay right to those leading the suit, and the lawyers.
https://topclassactions.com/la...
Not quite. If a country has a minimum wage law, then the currency is effectively underpinned by a quantity of labor.
Pretty much the modern equivalent of a gold standard, but using a service instead of a commodity.
All altcoin systems suffer from the same massive problem,the public is not interested,the problem is that they will all end up in the hands of criminal groups trying to use them to launder cash or for use on criminal dealings online.
What happens if there is no-one to swap altcoins for real cash ?
The whole idea relays on someone somewhere being willing and able to except other people's altcoins and pay out real coins of some kind..
This is how governments will kill off the idea of altcoins when they want to,by making it very difficult or impossible to cash out..
The price of Bitcoin more than tripled since it's low point of $200/BTC last August. It increased 50% in the last three months (with even higher peaks). Miners are not going to go broke because of the halving: Half the bitcoins are still worth more than the reward they got for mining a block last year.
Sell the equipment and resources to the miners, skim the illicit trade hidden from governments, and rob your clients blind as an exit strategy seems to be the result of Bitcoin operations. Are there _any_ bitcoin markets that show legitimate handling of client transactions for more than a few months without turning to direct theft from clients?
Stay away.
Stay far, far away.
GOLD! Now that you can trust.
Their whole concept of creating money of thin air is kinda flawed. You might argue that the USA is doing the same thing but at least they have an army with a proven track record of convincing entire countries of accepting USD as payment for petrol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The price already did increased, even x3 in last ~month, possibly that was in anticipation of this effect
Exactly, there is no fight for survival since the price more than doubled. Any miner that survived during the time bitcoin spent in the mid 200's recently is quite happy even with the split. If anything miners that had shut down are now finding it profitable to turn their hardware back on, again even factoring in the split. With current prices and a split we are equivalent to the low 300's. Mid 200's to low 300's (equivalent) is a win for miners.
Sure, a handful of very old mining hardware might be turned back on for now, hardware that needs 500+, they're just going for a brief final run until the split but they haven't really been players for over a year.
Everything takes energy.
Its a solved problem, the mining/minting algorithm can be based on proof of ownership not proof of work. See Nxt for example. The problem is in distributing the ownership initially after block chain genesis.
You're just so wrong in so many ways. Gold is almost never moved; in fact, most people buying and selling significant quantities of gold don't actually audit it very often. And, just to rub in your stupidity, bank IT systems are designed to be efficient, where as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are most deliberately designed to be inneficient, as wasting energy is their only protection against counterfeiting.
In the past the value of bitcoin was inherently tied to the production costs of bitcoin where there is a very narrow margin of profit above the minting costs from production.
What makes you think this has changed? The price has roughly doubled with a reward halving upcoming.
Thus if bitcoin every did go mainstream than the electrical costs to mint such bitcoins would also similarly skyrocket .
No, bitcoin could switch from a proof of work system to a proof of ownership system. The problem with the later is the initial distribution of coins, but that is a problem for a new coin not an established coin that is already widely distributed.
Bitcoin won't be viable for shit until you can process a few million per second.
Visa averages around 2k tps (transactions per second)
Visa is not supporting a speculative investment scheme. Bitcoin is more analogous to high frequency wall street trading, not actual consumer transactions. Bitcoin is *currently* primarily a speculative investment scheme.
Honest question from someone who only knows the basics: how do you trade bitcoins without miners around? I thought the transactions had to be embedded in the blockchain.
You use a proof of ownership mining/minting scheme like Nxt rather than the current proof of work mining/minting scheme. In proof of ownership it is the owners of coins who make their computer a node in the network for the processing of transactions which maintain the blockchain.
Switching to proof of ownership is something bitcoin could do. Especially now that coins are widely distributed. The big problem with proof of ownership is the initial distribution of coins, bitcoin is beyond that.
Of course miners will oppose any such switch. But if bitcoin wishes to survive in the long term and not be centrally controlled by mining hardware manufacturers (China) operating their own farms next to dirt cheap hydroelectricity (China), and return power to users (owners of coins), and truly be peer-to-peer (owners participate as a node in mining/minting network), then proof of ownership is one of very few options.
minerminerfortyniner1849bitcointards.
If i was a betting man and i am. ;)
I am too lazy to look in to it and could care less.
But if i was the engineer behind the bigger system then bitcoin i would
have it crunch useful and practical stuff for benefit of mankind , instead of crunching random noise,
wasting power and resources to fool people in to thinking they are making a few bux, but thats just me, an idealist!
Yes - fiat currency declared by a recluse with a false name.
Makes it far worse than fiat currency of a state with real assets doesn't it?
I really don't get why bitcoin perpetrators take this angle - it's an own goal.
Disinflationary - You keep on using that word. How about instead of trying to mislead people you just write "deflation"? You can't? The rubes would catch on and not add to the pyramid scheme?
The entire thing is a scam baited for geeks and really pisses me off.
with a side of bankruptcy and living in your parents basement
Ah so it is the submarines that were the biggest issue in the Greek debt crisis. Yup, that's what every meeting between the Greeks and the IMF/EEC spent the most time on which was reflected in the importance Submarines were given in newspaper headlines of the day where The Submarine Issue dominated economic reform...
That you think an argument as weak and easily provable as a minor detail as this is is important shows how poorly you understand the Greek crisis & the IMF. It does serve to clearly display (at least some of) your bias though.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue