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I think there is a market for selling hand-mined bitcoins as a novelty item, but selling individual hashes might be a pretty small niche.

by _pmf_ 9y ago

tim333 9y ago
It takes a lot of billions of hashes per bitcoin - I think your hand mined one would work out a bit too expensive for anyone to buy.
- Shoothe 9y ago
  Not to mention that Bitcoins are indistinguishable from themselves. So that'd be a very niche idea.
  - stctgion 9y ago
    You'd need a new coin. Perhaps some form of proof of work that could only be done by hand
    - david-cako 9y ago
      Nike sneakers :^)
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    That's not entirely true - individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I've been a Bitcoin proponent for a long time, but this lack of basic fungibility is one of its major downsides in my opinion.
    - Shoothe 9y ago
      > individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I'd say it's rather tainting transactions that use outputs of your "tainted" transaction. Personally I don't like bringing "coins" into discussion because people think it's something more material than it really is while in fact "coins" are just numbers in transaction outputs. If you have transaction that sends 2 BTC to an address you can't taint 1 BTC out of it because in this scenario they are just numbers, like you can't distinguish both 1s in 1 + 1 = 2. That you can track transactions back to their mining block is another matter.
Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
To be able to mine at all (with whatever speed), you need to be able to complete an individual hash operation in less than 10 minutes - before the next Bitcoin block is created elsewhere on the network - because you have to base your calculation on that previous block's hash. If it takes more than a day to compute one hash, it does not work, no matter how many of them you could theoretically do in parallel.
- esnard 9y ago
  10 minutes is the average time between the creation of the two blocks, so the time could be much greater. Block 74638 was mined almost 7 hours after the previous one, for example, because of a serious overflowing issue. Of course, the combinaison of "no block created in 36 hours" & "the hand-calculated block is valid" is highly unlikely, but still possible.
  - Shank 9y ago
    The network adjusted difficulty aims to average 10 minutes between blocks at all times. In order to get a point where you could feasibly calculate a hash you would have to have an extraordinary breakdown of something (like all of the hashpower vanishing) in order to get enough time before the next block.

I think there is a market for selling hand-mined bitcoins as a novelty item, but selling individual hashes might be a pretty small niche.

by _pmf_ 9y ago

I think there is a market for selling hand-mined bitcoins as a novelty item, but selling individual hashes might be a pretty small niche.

tim333 9y ago

It takes a lot of billions of hashes per bitcoin - I think your hand mined one would work out a bit too expensive for anyone to buy.

Shoothe 9y ago
Not to mention that Bitcoins are indistinguishable from themselves. So that'd be a very niche idea.
- stctgion 9y ago
  You'd need a new coin. Perhaps some form of proof of work that could only be done by hand
  - david-cako 9y ago
    Nike sneakers :^)
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  That's not entirely true - individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I've been a Bitcoin proponent for a long time, but this lack of basic fungibility is one of its major downsides in my opinion.
  - Shoothe 9y ago
    > individual addresses and/or transactions can be seen as "tainted", and those coins can be tracked through the Blockchain. I'd say it's rather tainting transactions that use outputs of your "tainted" transaction. Personally I don't like bringing "coins" into discussion because people think it's something more material than it really is while in fact "coins" are just numbers in transaction outputs. If you have transaction that sends 2 BTC to an address you can't taint 1 BTC out of it because in this scenario they are just numbers, like you can't distinguish both 1s in 1 + 1 = 2. That you can track transactions back to their mining block is another matter.

Erlich_Bachman 9y ago

To be able to mine at all (with whatever speed), you need to be able to complete an individual hash operation in less than 10 minutes - before the next Bitcoin block is created elsewhere on the network - because you have to base your calculation on that previous block's hash. If it takes more than a day to compute one hash, it does not work, no matter how many of them you could theoretically do in parallel.

esnard 9y ago
10 minutes is the average time between the creation of the two blocks, so the time could be much greater. Block 74638 was mined almost 7 hours after the previous one, for example, because of a serious overflowing issue. Of course, the combinaison of "no block created in 36 hours" & "the hand-calculated block is valid" is highly unlikely, but still possible.
- Shank 9y ago
  The network adjusted difficulty aims to average 10 minutes between blocks at all times. In order to get a point where you could feasibly calculate a hash you would have to have an extraordinary breakdown of something (like all of the hashpower vanishing) in order to get enough time before the next block.