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A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). A
by xiphias2 6y ago
A very interesting part of Bitcoin is that there’s no reason it couldn’t have been invented 10 years earlier (after having practical public key cryptography). Anyways, better late then never.
- varjag 6y agoA lot of energy would have been wasted for a lot less mined volume, so it's probably for the better.
- vmception 6y agothe same amount of bitcoin would have been mined. what did you mean?
- kortilla 6y agoIf it still didn’t become popular until around the same time, all of the rewards would have been halved much earlier. The big miners would be fighting over even smaller rewards.
- vmception 6y agoThe network emission adjusts to the amount of computational power on the network, every 2016 blocks. So if there was 1/1000th of the computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in the same time span, 10 minutes. If there was 1000x more computational power on the bitcoin network, blocks would still be generated in 10 minutes. If you understood that already then I'm not sure what you or the prior person is referring to exactly. If you mean that all the halvings would happen a decade earlier because bitcoin started a decade earlier, I'm not sure what the point of mentioning that is. If you mean the exchange rate would have been lower, the same scarcity drivers would exist, who knows who cares. The "big miners" would be bound by market forces of what's anything worth to them, and would likely be 100% proportional to today's reality.
- varjag 6y agoPerformance per watt energy was a lot worse a decade prior.
- vmception 6y agojust likely means the same amount of energy would be used with lower hashrate, the same amount of bitcoin would be generated
- tdrgabi 6y agoLess powerful computers, so they would spend more time to find the same amount, I guess
- vmception 6y agowell that's not how bitcoin works. they would have found the same amount in the same amount of time. the network is adaptive.
- freeone3000 6y agoDoes the mined volume practically matter? As a relative factor, yes, it needs to be big enough to be too expensive to compute, but, as computation grows more expensive the volume necessary is actually reduced.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mlcrypto 6y agoIt took a true genius & visionary to see that the whole is better than the sum of its parts. A masterclass of engineering, economics, & philosophy. Very few still understand the importance
- mFixman 6y agoThe rate of information transmission was much higher in 2010 than in 2000. If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. Since it was invented in 2010 it easily spread through Facebook, Reddit and other universal social media before making the jump via mainstream news to non-technical people.
- pcthrowaway 6y ago> If Bitcoin had been invented in 2000, it wouldn't have been more than a technical curiosity in the hands of a few crypto-nerds in very niche internet forums. It most certainly was this for at least 2 years. 2-4 years more if you count the time Satoshi was working on it before the public release
- mFixman 6y agoI remember hearing about Bitcoin in HN in 2011. I'm sure that same post convinced a lot of people with better hindsight than me to start mining.
- thatcat 6y agoGreen energy and small scale nuclear coming online will make the transition to self sustained mining easier after rewards run out.
- mannerheim 6y agoIt's worth noting that the very first block was created with the following comment: 'The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.' It seems there was a good reason why it was created when it was.