4 ms·

How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most peopl

by ue_ 9y ago

How does "the network" decide this? And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC?

maxerickson 9y ago
The difficulty calculation is built into the software. Solutions to the meaningless problem that must be solved to "win" a block are rejected if they don't match the network difficulty, so setting it low on your computer just wastes your computation entirely.
ufo 9y ago
> And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? The difficulty constant is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the average time that it currently takes for a new block to be mined. It tries to balance difficulty so one block is mined every 10 minutes, on average (if blocks are being mined too fast the difficulty increases, if blocks are taking too long to mine it decreases). This algorithm is part of the "bitcoin protocol" and you can't just change it in your own mining code because the other nodes in the network will not recognize your blocks as valid if you use the wrong difficulty constant > Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC? This is kind of what has already happened. Nowadays there is specialized bitcoin mining hardware out there which is has driven the difficulty into the stratosphere. Bitcoin mining using CPUs and GPUs has become unprofitable, which is why the small miners have moved on to alternative cryptocurrencies where they won't need to compete with specialized hardware.
- ue_ 9y ago
  Thanks for the response. Out of interest, what are the smaller currencies that may still be profitable to mine with a 2012ish GPU, aside from Etherum? I've read that LTC is unprofitable, for example.
  - ufo 9y ago
    The value of the smaller currencies is tied to the value of bitcoin and bitcoin is down 30% this month so I doubt that there will be much profit to be made here today.

by ue_ 9y ago

maxerickson 9y ago

The difficulty calculation is built into the software. Solutions to the meaningless problem that must be solved to "win" a block are rejected if they don't match the network difficulty, so setting it low on your computer just wastes your computation entirely.

ufo 9y ago

> And what's stopping me from setting the constant to something lower in my own mining code? The difficulty constant is determined by an algorithm that takes into account the average time that it currently takes for a new block to be mined. It tries to balance difficulty so one block is mined every 10 minutes, on average (if blocks are being mined too fast the difficulty increases, if blocks are taking too long to mine it decreases). This algorithm is part of the "bitcoin protocol" and you can't just change it in your own mining code because the other nodes in the network will not recognize your blocks as valid if you use the wrong difficulty constant > Does it follow that if most people in the network are duped into a ridiculously high difficulty, that it will be impossible to mine more BTC? This is kind of what has already happened. Nowadays there is specialized bitcoin mining hardware out there which is has driven the difficulty into the stratosphere. Bitcoin mining using CPUs and GPUs has become unprofitable, which is why the small miners have moved on to alternative cryptocurrencies where they won't need to compete with specialized hardware.

ue_ 9y ago
Thanks for the response. Out of interest, what are the smaller currencies that may still be profitable to mine with a 2012ish GPU, aside from Etherum? I've read that LTC is unprofitable, for example.
- ufo 9y ago
  The value of the smaller currencies is tied to the value of bitcoin and bitcoin is down 30% this month so I doubt that there will be much profit to be made here today.