Topic: If EVERYBODY but me would stop mining ... (Read 2598 times)

also the diff adjustment is really slow, even if this would happens you won't get anything, because of that

It's a bit had to understand you, which is why I find it hard to help you. I don't even see the point or question in your posts. 

It figures that you'd see it as elitism. Let's recap: You don't understand it, you don't want to read about it, you don't want to hear that that can be dangerous. Fine. You're free to do whatever you like, bud. I'm all about choice and the responsibility that comes with it.

BTW, it is DIFFICULTY that is one of the feedback loops. Naturally, for there to be a loop at all, it must be able to move within a range. "High" difficulty now, according to you—to me, it is operating exactly as designed, and is limiting the release rate of new BTC as intended, and the economy is just doing its supply-and-demand thing based on available tech and the current and speculative price, seen as ROI by miners—and by the time we're at minuscule block rewards and all Tx fees for miner incentives, maybe it'll be what you call "low" relative to the tech at that time.

How can one begin to "argue different[ly]" without understanding the foundational structures? I am continually amazed by the now-majority here in the ruins of the once-brilliant BCT. So glad there's a more "secretive" one, which admits only those who at least have read and grasp maybe 20% of the whitepaper. You'd probably say elitist, I say that's a low bar compared to BCT even 18 months ago. If there were a way to bet on it and it could be proven, I'd wager you've never even skimmed the whitepaper, though only a few pages long.

You really should read it if you give a damn about any of this at all. If you're just here for a thrill or to play with magical internet money like a penny stock hoping to strike it rich, by all means, do as you please. You're right, Doge is more suited for you, then, as a community.

Doge is fantastic, BTW, because of exactly that. What I can't fathom is, why everyone all of a sudden wants the serious Bitcoin communities and the older hands to stop being "serious" and be more like Doge. Serious is how we got here, and it's how you got Doge! Yes, we're flippant about politics and jurisdictional shenanigans. See TPB. Lawmen thinking they can order the internet about is funny to us. But the mission is serious. Financial oppression and economic war is very real and this is the first chance we've had to implement radical change and free billions. Why Bitcoin exists *is serious*. If you're uncomfortable with that, go play with your carefree Shibe brethren. And—I'll repeat this because you're clearly a "muggle" and muggles are like goldfish—I love their being around in their section of the cryptocommunity as well.

What I hate is pretension, mockery, and anti-intellectualism. To say nothing of the incredible disrespect and hypocrisy. You're here because of serious people doing serious work, for free, in their own time, for no guaranteed result. You don't have to worship or love or admire that, but I won't stand for spreading misinformation, refusing to read, and then shrugging it all off like it makes no difference. You're still in a public forum, and a Bitcoin one, and a few random passers-by might actually give half a fuck, brand-new and looking for real answers. You're a "Sr. Member" according to the forum. Fucking act like it, or expect to be called out when one of the few remaining old hands pops by for nostalgia.

sry never gonna happens

If EVERYBODY but you would stop mining you will get all the btcs.

Im not sure elitism works in a network economy.   The inane Doge coin approach seems to have worked far better then it should have but I think it does help to simplify things for people.
  The product will do far better, go further maybe be worth more if it looks and works even like lego.   Thats generally how mass production or scales of economy goes I think

I'll just take it high difficulty is part of a feedback loop and essential to the continuance of BTC and nobody should argue different

I don't know how to simplify it further. It's a system with several feedback loops to self-regulate, just like biological or mechanical systems. These are mechanisms by which the whole operates within design paremeters when individual subsystems are driven out of equilibrium by an environmental delta.

Though fascinating Bitcoin may be, as the first attempt at a global self-regulating economic apparatus, there are just a few feedback loops involved. It is dwarfed by the complexity of myriad manmade and biological systems. So I suggest you spend a few more minutes reading and thinking about the basic building blocks of Bitcoin and derivative cryptocurrencies.

Alternatively, if you insist that you know these pieces already, and still are unclear on even their first-order functioning—which are simpler than the regulatory mechanisms of the humble amoeba—I must conclude that a great number of systems are beyond your grasp, and will certainly not strain to wedge the concept into your mind.

If this is the case, I mean no disrespect or insult. I am not blessed with the time for circumlocution. Be careful around things you don't understand. Bitcoin isn't ready for safe use by you just yet. It's still in the realm of those who understand it, or trust those who do, or just love gambling. The O'Reillys of the world, stymied by gravitational attraction between celestial bodies, are sitting ducks for accidents, robbery, or exploitation (and cannot tell the difference!) when they enter Bitcoinland.

I get its to regulate mining.   Im just pointing out the treadmill effect, you know what Im talking about.    All that technology and energy and like the OP says, it could just be done by one person.  (however that aint much of a network or with redundancy)

I thought someone might summarise why high difficulty improves the product not just prevents abuse.   All these posts and I still dont know everything or least Im checking

Faster blocks improve transaction and confirmation speeds.   If there was no block reward, would that unrestricted process be ok or is a good blockchain still requiring higher diff; to stop forks perhaps

The difficulty adjust accordingly so that a block is found every 10 minutes as intended.

How do you have hundreds of posts and not understand the purpose of difficulty retargets? Let me ask you, then: What do you suppose would happen with fixed difficulty? Or a max difficulty in reasonable space, like, now or before now, so it could only adjust down from here?

Not bitcoin but other coins retarget every block by design, because they are more volatile I guess.    Theres no doubt any drastic change would mean devs take action not just leave it to hang, or it'd be replaced and exchanged to rival crypto currency is my guess.


It does raise a point though.  What is the use of all these difficulty rises.   Is it somehow helping security by open competition it constantly raises the bar beyond the reach of hackers or nefarious parties like NSA, etc

It would take you forever to get to the next difficulty adjustment alone. But yes, essentially you would mine a block every 10 minutes after that.

if everybody stops mining you will never find block and bitcoin will come to the end of time

If difficulty is low, and YOU are the only person mining.... thats not quite decentralized is it? Also if difficulty is low, 51% attacks be easier so if this were to ever be implemented it should only be allowed if you have like 50 th/s or more

Never going to happen, bro.

yeah true.

just ask directly for money, much faster and easy

That is what I mean. How differently could be meant?

No, it will not be more difficult. It will just take more time.

It looks that decreasing difficulty is now much more difficult than increasing it.

Exactly.
And if 90% of the hashrate is gone, it will takes 140 days (14 days * 10) to finish the 2016 blocks.

Yet this is to a certain extent contradicted by the idea of mining pools in order to overcome the increasing difficulty. I mean as far as I see it the purpose of a mining pool is exactly what competition is supposed to avoid: combine hashing power in one place in order to solve as many blocks as possible in that single place so everyone that mines for the pool has a guaranteed and steady BTC input instead of the gamble that is solo mining in the light of ever increasing diff.


In all seriousness: Of course I am not proposing that we should mine one single miner after the other. But imagine a system where a set amount of miners at a set amount of combined hashrate is mining and each time a miner solves a block he is put back on hold and the next miner with comparable hashrate takes over. Ok this idea has a flaw as for low hashrate miner it could still take etremely long to get a slot because in their hashrate range the current miner could take ages to solve a block.

Maybe a system in which you would have to provide a hashing power in a certain range (speaking of a lower aswell as an upper bound here) in order to get assigned work for solving blocks, so strong miners can work alone and are guaranteed to get a mining slot at a stable rate and slow miners can come together in pools and share income as they do now only that we'd have a great many different pools.

The whole point of all the competition in mining is that no single entity one can decide what should go into a block and what should not, or roll back the transaction history.
Of course, when building a block a mischievous miner could leave out some transactions or include some bad ones, but in either case the chance is slim that this miner gets to mine the next few blocks, so it will be compensated for (either by including the transaction later, or by forking a new chain without the bad transaction).

So even if there wasn't money to be made with mining, miners who want to ensure bitcoin's stability would still continue.

Onkel Paul

Stop mining afterwards myself so the next in line can take advantage so to speak.

It's all just theoretical now because it won't happen after people have invested five figure sums into mining equip. But imagine the community instead of starting a race for GH/s had started to sort of organize mining back in the day in an attempt to keep difficulty relatively low and stable, thus allowing everyone that mines a pretty much equal, but significant share in premined coins and even more important avoiding the need for this expensive specialised hardware to mine coins and sustain the network by solving blocks and confirming transactions.

Sure the idea struck my mind out of the realisation that I would benefit personally from a lower difficulty right now, but taking the thought further ahead to the time when all preminable coins will be premined and the BTC from solves blocks are just transaction fees, which I expect to be only 100s of satoshis by then if the bitcoin price maintains it's upward trend: I really think that the difficulty will need to decline again by then because I doubt that mined blocks will come anywhere near the 25 BTC they get you now, so mining won't sustain the hardware cost anymore.

Coming back to the idea of maintaining stable difficulty by mining one after the other with equalish hashrate: Wouldn't such a system of many changing miners be much more in line with the idea of decentralization than the current situation of having maybe two hands full of big pools that do the confirmations? Also it would be more secure in terms of the impending harm of a 51% attack that is allways present with having big pools of combined massive hashing power.

Edit: I mean I understand that the system is designed to "spit out" BTC at a stable fixed rate, so even with low difficulty people would still share the same amount of BTC, so every miner would get less the more people mine. But organizing mining in a shift system with the target to maintain a certain hashrate and thus difficulty would have avoided the exploding cost of mining hardware and the need to aquire newer and better mining equip almost every 6 months when a newer faster ASIC is born.

Y will return the favor?     How?  

The info you need is here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target

You should conclude that a significant and permanent decline in hashrate would disrupt the economy until two retargets have occurred — between 2016 and up to 4032 blocks must be found at the new hashrate to achieve stasis. The more blocks that need finding, the less important that second retarget is, in terms of achieving full stasis.

Thus, any highly significant permanent change in hashrate, such that the economy will be disrupted (estimating that is another question I suppose) would result in a need for a fork to permit a manual retarget. Not really that big a deal, in practice, unless the cause of the hash speed decrease was unknown to the community, which seems unlikely.

I don't claim to know this for sure, but as I understand it, the difficulty only adjusts after 2016 blocks. So if all of a sudden there was only 1 THz of hashing starting today it would take thousands of years for the difficulty to change.

That's an interesting thought.  Let's assume for a minute that every miner in the world but you shut down.  Isn't the difficulty level reset every 2 weeks (give or take) based upon the number of blocks solved and hash rate?  If absolutely no blocks are solved (or maybe the OP gets lucky and solves 1 at the current level), how does the network react?  Isn't the algorithm designed such that blocks should be solved on average every 10 minutes?  If suddenly no blocks are being solved, wouldn't the difficulty level be recalculated immediately such that blocks again are solved every 10 minutes or so?

Yes it would, but I guess it would take a few weeks, and no they won't. 

... would difficulty drop down to a point where i solve a block every ten minutes? If yes would you guys consider doing it for an hour or so? I'd sure return the favor.