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crypto-currency is not about scarcity of numbers its about proof of work. Bitcoin started with relatively little computation power and has now scaled to where m
by jVinc 9y ago
crypto-currency is not about scarcity of numbers its about proof of work. Bitcoin started with relatively little computation power and has now scaled to where more power is spent than a small country uses in the mining operation... Its unfeasible to mine bitcoin on a cpu or gpu because ASICs are just so much more efficient. None of this scaling in hashing rate really changing the underlying concept which is that you prove you did some work in order to add blocks. If quantum computers do in fact result in a couple of thousand orders of magnitude raise in the hashing rate... well then miners will use different hardware the difficulty of the network will adjust each 10 minutes as new hardware gets added, and after the change you'll just have a large army of quantum miners instead of ASIC miners.
Remember the exitsanse of quantum computers does not prove P=NP, which is to say, even with quantum computers you can still have the class of problems which are difficult to solve but easy to verify which is the essential component of proof of work.
- roywiggins 9y ago> If quantum computers do in fact result in a couple of thousand orders of magnitude raise in the hashing rate... well then miners will use different hardware the difficulty of the network will adjust each 10 minutes as new hardware gets added, and after the change you'll just have a large army of quantum miners instead of ASIC miners. If it's a couple of thousand orders of magnitude, the first person with a working quantum chip might entirely dominate the hashpower, long before the chip is available commercially. So you'd end up concentrating hashpower into a couple of BigCorps's hands. Like, if I went back in time to the beginning of BTC with an ASIC I'd probably completely dominate the baby blockchain and outcompete the entire network.