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Well those particular miners should have read the extremely open and specific code before they bought all the hardware. It is exactly designed this way, power

Well those particular miners should have read the extremely open and specific code before they bought all the hardware. It is exactly designed this way, power off some hardware for a while if it is no longer profitable

toss1 1y ago
For sure! Tho it seems the original BTC design expected huge transaction volumes and transaction fees to take over providing income for miners as mining fees repeatedly halved. But they didn't anticipate that people are not using BTC to buy pizza and a million other things, the great bulk of BTC is being stashed in financial vehicles like ETFs, generating fewer and fewer transactions. Seems like a doom cycle. Fewer transactions, less profit, fewer miners, slower transactions, less value.....
- papageek 1y ago
  Wealth always ends up in the hands of a few.
- beeflet 1y ago
  Satoshi did not anticipate that the block size would be restricted to 1MB by the development team forever, making the base layer impractical for payments.
  - npoc 1y ago
    Base layer is impractical for normal payments no matter what size you make it, and increasing it reduces decentralisation, weakening the strength of the network.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      200MB blocks every 10 mins would compete with paypal's throughput, and wouldn't significantly reduce decentralization. A couple cryptocurrencies of this size, perhaps merge-mined, with atomic swaps between them could cover most of the world's need for transactions without the security and complexity of payment-channel based solutions. This seems to line up with satoshi's original intentions. Mobile users could just shard, prune, or use SPV on a typical residential internet connection. Meanwhile merchants and exchanges can afford ~$200/yr in hard drives to store the whole chain (It is only about 10TB). When you consider that an efficient entry-level bitcoin miner is in the many thousands of dollars, the cost of a couple hard drives a year is not very significant in the grand scheme of the centralization of the network. You sacrifice a lot with payment channels. You have to be online to accept payments, you need to pre-fund a channel (that you pay expensive fees on in the case of a small blockchain), you need to route through other nodes with enough liquidity, you need to occasionally go online to prevent the channel from being insecurely closed. Even if it was the case that the economy should primarily rely on the lightning network, it would still be complemented by a large adjustable blocksize for reasons mentioned in this article and the lightning network whitepaper. The current status quo is unmistakably bad for the security of the network.
      - npoc 1y ago
        200MB blocks would lead to a >100x increase in size of the blockchain compared to the 1.6MB blocks we currently have, putting it at around 100TB. Of course that would significantly reduce decentralisation - instead of a standard 1TB disk to run a node, you'd need 100TB! of storage space, without even considering the download. Then you've got the increased bandwidth necessary to run the network which at the moment can even run over ham radio if necessary. And even with those massive compromises, it would still be slow to confirm and could in no way compete with Visa/Mastercard.
beeflet 1y ago
Miners have to cover rapid depreciation costs in their equipment due to moore's law. They can't just "turn it off". Every second the ASIC miner is off, it's burning a hole in their pocket.
andirk 1y ago
In hindsight, I suggest GPUs and hardware that can handle both bitcoin _and_ ML, and oscillate between the two as demand oscillates.

toss1 1y ago

For sure! Tho it seems the original BTC design expected huge transaction volumes and transaction fees to take over providing income for miners as mining fees repeatedly halved. But they didn't anticipate that people are not using BTC to buy pizza and a million other things, the great bulk of BTC is being stashed in financial vehicles like ETFs, generating fewer and fewer transactions. Seems like a doom cycle. Fewer transactions, less profit, fewer miners, slower transactions, less value.....

papageek 1y ago
Wealth always ends up in the hands of a few.
beeflet 1y ago
Satoshi did not anticipate that the block size would be restricted to 1MB by the development team forever, making the base layer impractical for payments.
- npoc 1y ago
  Base layer is impractical for normal payments no matter what size you make it, and increasing it reduces decentralisation, weakening the strength of the network.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    200MB blocks every 10 mins would compete with paypal's throughput, and wouldn't significantly reduce decentralization. A couple cryptocurrencies of this size, perhaps merge-mined, with atomic swaps between them could cover most of the world's need for transactions without the security and complexity of payment-channel based solutions. This seems to line up with satoshi's original intentions. Mobile users could just shard, prune, or use SPV on a typical residential internet connection. Meanwhile merchants and exchanges can afford ~$200/yr in hard drives to store the whole chain (It is only about 10TB). When you consider that an efficient entry-level bitcoin miner is in the many thousands of dollars, the cost of a couple hard drives a year is not very significant in the grand scheme of the centralization of the network. You sacrifice a lot with payment channels. You have to be online to accept payments, you need to pre-fund a channel (that you pay expensive fees on in the case of a small blockchain), you need to route through other nodes with enough liquidity, you need to occasionally go online to prevent the channel from being insecurely closed. Even if it was the case that the economy should primarily rely on the lightning network, it would still be complemented by a large adjustable blocksize for reasons mentioned in this article and the lightning network whitepaper. The current status quo is unmistakably bad for the security of the network.
    - npoc 1y ago
      200MB blocks would lead to a >100x increase in size of the blockchain compared to the 1.6MB blocks we currently have, putting it at around 100TB. Of course that would significantly reduce decentralisation - instead of a standard 1TB disk to run a node, you'd need 100TB! of storage space, without even considering the download. Then you've got the increased bandwidth necessary to run the network which at the moment can even run over ham radio if necessary. And even with those massive compromises, it would still be slow to confirm and could in no way compete with Visa/Mastercard.

beeflet 1y ago

Miners have to cover rapid depreciation costs in their equipment due to moore's law. They can't just "turn it off". Every second the ASIC miner is off, it's burning a hole in their pocket.

andirk 1y ago

In hindsight, I suggest GPUs and hardware that can handle both bitcoin _and_ ML, and oscillate between the two as demand oscillates.