Interesting article, especially useful to those who need a primer on Bitcoin's block halving structure and what that might mean for the future. I was unaware that 100 nanometer miners were so close. A core idea is that Bitcoin mining will become distributed to consumers and happen at a loss, in return for some other useful service (perhaps heat).
Here's a site that counts down the days to the next Bitcoin halving:
http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/Since Uno moves off a Petahash slice of Bitcoin's mining power, we will of course watch what happens.
If I do my math right, unless it's forked in the future Bitcoin's block reward will reach absolute
zero at block 6930000, in about 125 years (give or take a decade). At block 6.93M, there will be zero rewards per block, not even 1 satoshi. So I guess Uno will have to carry Bitcoin for the next 175 years beyond that.
(of course, btc transactions fees will carry the day for miners, so I am joking a bit here. But if Bitcoin fails to achieve wider adoption, merge mining rewards from alts like Unobtanium could play a more important role for miners in the future. Uno will continue to pay miners for the next 300 years).I was intrigued by this last comment - partly because I'm slightly sceptical about merge mining and also because the UNO reward is so low I really couldn't see it having a big impact and so I did a bit of calculating.
Average BTC block reward from fees over the last 80 blocks (simply a number I happened to grab off an explorer no science to it) is 0.21435357 BTC
Current UNO reward per block 0.00781250 UNO
Number of UNO blocks per BTC block: 3,46 (very roughly, averaged over 100 UNO blocks, again what I could easily grab from an explorer)
Current exchange rate: 0.00379849
BTC value of UNO block reward: 0.00002968
BTC value of UNO block reward per BTC block - 3.46 x 0.00002968 = 0.00010268 BTC
So (unles I have made a mistake) the Bitcoin transaction fees are already over 2000 times more valuable than the UNO block reward, averaged per BTC block*.
* As an aside I don't know how merge mining works in detail but I assume the UNO blocks are going to be randomly "won" so won't necessarily go to the miner that happens to win that BTC block.
So unless UNO increases in value massively I'm not convinced it will have a significant effect.