3 ms·
> as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up Difficulty adjusts up and down as needed to maintain an average of 1 block every 10 minutes, it
by ric2b 6y ago
> as bitcoin becomes more difficult to mine energy needs go up
Difficulty adjusts up and down as needed to maintain an average of 1 block every 10 minutes, it doesn't just tend to infinity.
It's mostly correlated to the block reward, miners won't spend more money on energy than they get back from mining blocks.
- newswasboring 6y agoI may be confused here. But the regulation mechanism to get to 1block/min is to ask miners to do more computations, right? Making the problem harder in this context does have the effect of more power consumed. A block is an answer to the riddle who's parameters are being regulated. So the block rate is not important, number of computations is. And that is directly linked with power consumption.
- ric2b 6y agoIt's 1 block every 10 minutes. The difficulty adjustment goes both ways, if blocks start taking longer than 10 minutes to be mined (for example if some large miner stops mining for some reason) the difficulty goes down, which likely means less energy is used. You're correct that the actual adjustment is on the number of computations, so the correlation to energy use isn't direct, different machines can be more or less efficient at making those calculations.
- newswasboring 6y agoSo basically the more popular bitcoin is, more inefficient it is. Great.
- ric2b 6y agoNot necessarily, depends on the ratio between users and value of the block reward.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]