10 ms·
The Bitcoin hash rate has increased by 28.2% over the last month
- andreygrehov 10y agoSorry for a silly question, but can someone explain for does it mean?
- arnauddri 10y agoThe 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 https://kaiko.com/learn/mining-blockchain
- schmichael 10y ago> 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.
- arnauddri 10y agoYou're perfectly right, thanks for clarifying!
- riprowan 10y agoThis is exactly correct. All the hashpower in the world provides zero security if 51%+ of it is not "honest". http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- hasch 10y agogood 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.
- schmichael 10y agoAFAIK 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-monopoly-can-attack-bitcoin/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/16/how-a-mining-monopo...
- schmichael 10y agoMore 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 adjusted based on the hash rate.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoAnd 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.
- eganist 10y agoWell, unless you replace furnaces with bitcoin mining hardware. But then again, I'd rather replace a furnace with a more productive set of hardware anyway.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoHeat pump. EDIT: Unless you live somewhere where the ambient temp goes below ~0F, get a heat pump.
- eganist 10y agoHence furnaces. Unless someone's managed to create servers which become cooler upon load, I'd assume these boxes wouldn't be able to substitute for heat pumps. But in general, I agree with you. :)
- martindevans 10y agoWhat's special about 255K (0F) in relation to heat pumps?
- ucha 10y agoWhat's newsworthy about this? First of all, 28% could almost entirely be attributed to noise. Second, the fastest hash rate increase recently observed occurred between Nov 2015 and Feb 2016, not during the last month.
- arnauddri 10y agoSure, but you cant deny the trend over the last month. This is a funny timing to see the hash rate increase, i.e. more miner joining in, when the halving is 3 only months away
- CydeWeys 10y agoIt's just the latest batch of mining hardware coming online (which is more efficient per watt than the previous generation). Design and manufacturing is highly bursty on Bitcoin difficulty increase time scales.
- mxfh 10y agoReally nothing spectacular there. Probably just a new hardware generation getting implemented. See alltime log scale: https://kaiko.com/statistics/hash-rate?logscale=true&range=10y https://kaiko.com/statistics/hash-rate?logscale=true&range=1... The gain just plateaued out after the mid 2013 to mid 2014 rush. The current rate is note even half of that.
- cloudjacker 10y agoIt isn't newsworthy.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoNot really, going by the graph linked it increased from 1.2 to 1.3 Petahases/sec from a month ago to today, which is not 28.2%
- dharma1 10y agohttp://bitfury.com/products#16nm-asic http://bitfury.com/products#16nm-asic
- geertj 10y agoDoing some back of the envelope calculations.. Hash rate is about 1,200 PH now. The most efficient ASIC miner today is the AntMiner S7 [1], which does 4.86 TH at 1.21 KW. This gives us a power consumption of the entire Bitcoin network of at least 300 MW. Actual power will easily be double that, given that not everybody is using the latest miner. So let's say total power consumption is about 600 MW. This is the output of a small power plant. [1] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/ https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/
- InclinedPlane 10y agohttps://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/440629519192305665 https://twitter.com/celestialweasel/status/44062951919230566...
- ikeboy 10y agohttp://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-gr...
- cloudjacker 10y agotl;dr
- ikeboy 10y ago"Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home island. They quarry the limestone, and then shape it into circular wheel-like forms with a hole in the middle, called fei. Some of these fei stones are absolutely huge, fully 12 feet across. Then they sail the fei back to Yap, where they’re used as money. The great advantage of the fei being made from this particular stone is that they’re impossible to counterfeit, because there’s none of the limestone on Yap. The fei are rare and difficult to get by definition, so they hold their value well. You can’t fake a fei. Just as you have to work to get money in a developed economy – so the money constitutes a record of labour – the fei are an unfakeable record of the labour that went into their creation. In addition, the big ones have the advantage that they’re impossible to steal. By the same token, though, they’re impossible to move, so what happens is that if you want to spend some of the money, you just agree that somebody else now owns the coin. A coin sitting outside somebody’s house can be transferred backwards and forwards as part of a series of transactions, and all that actually happens is that people change their minds about who now owns it. Everyone agrees that the money has been transferred. The real money isn’t the fei, but the idea of who owns the fei. The register of ownership, held in the community memory, is the money." The larger point is that money has always required waste to create. Gold was valuable because it was scarce, fiat money was valuable because it was backed by gold. Eventually fiat money went off the gold standard, but it couldn't have started like that.
- riprowan 10y agoIt would be interesting to know total sales of the leading mining hardware, and who the customers were.
- nikolay 10y agoSlow tech news day? I guess the craptocurrency speculators need periodically "news" like this to dump their bitcoins and buy them cheaper next week.