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Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving
- ewillbefull 14y ago13 bitcoins in transaction fees... lots of people wanted to be in this block.
- adanto6840 14y agoCan you expand on this for a non bitcoin-savvy person?
- tvdw 14y agoTransaction fees are a 'gift' from the person doing the transaction to the person that's processing the transaction. Processing transactions is done in blocks, and the process is called 'mining' because for every processed block, the person who processes the block gets 25 BTC (before today that was 50 BTC) plus the transaction fees. Obviously 25 BTC is a lot, which is why it's so hard to mine blocks. Mining is often done in groups, and the person who mines a block has to share the profits with the rest of that group. IIRC the entire Bitcoin community mines 6 blocks per hour, and it's the mining process that keeps Bitcoin going, because without miners there couldn't be any transactions.
- pdog 14y agoWhat happens when nearly all of the 21 million Bitcoins are mined[1]? Will transactions not happen anymore? [1] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Long_Term https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projec...
- himlion 14y agoTransaction fee's should support the network.
- bglusman 14y agoThis is why transaction fees will increasingly be important as BTC matures, after all 21 Million are gone the only reward for "mining" will be the award of all transaction fees paid for transactions in that block, so much like the old west, mining is gradually replaced with banking/processing :-)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 14y agoThe reward for mining a block just halved; it'll continue to halve as the supply increases, so that 21 million is not the endpoint so much as it is an asymptote.
- yebyen 14y agoThat's not true. It will continue to halve, exactly one more time to 12.5, and then the next time after that, it will stop. Once the 12.5 reward is gone, the network will be supported entirely by transaction fees, and no new bitcoins will be created. So, yes, asymptote, but the rest of your comment seems misleading. It will halve once more, that's not exactly "continue to halve."
- ewillbefull 14y agoWhat are you talking about? Check out the wiki page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Long_Term https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply#Projec... It's supposed to halve 33 times.
- yebyen 14y agoI am the one who is misinformed! I was also wondering how to reconcile this (seemingly very) early first halving with my concept of a 21 year bitcoin generation span. Thanks for clearing that up! *edit: Turns out I was misinformed about the 21 year thing too. These projections have the halving terminating estimated at 2140. Don't suppose either of us will be around to see it.
- jamoes 14y agoAnd, actually, it may continue well beyond 2140. The only reason it would stop there is because the smallest value bitcoin can currently represent is 0.00000001 BTC (1e-8). Many people believe that the rising value of bitcoin will bring about a need to increase the number of decimal places that bitcoin supports. If this change is made to the protocol before 2140, the the mining reward will probably keep on halving to values even less than 1e-8 BTC.
- harrigan 14y agoFor the 210,000th block some people voluntarily provided high transactions fees to reward the miner of the block: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13xd05/idea_for_the_210000th_block_lets_all_make http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13xd05/idea_for_the...
- kirian 14y agoSome people also wanted to make sure that their particular transaction was included in this block for posterity. Paying a fee increases the priority (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vocabulary https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vocabulary) of the transaction to make it more likely to be included. Here is someone who claims to have missed out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128200.msg1363948#msg1363948 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128200.msg1363948#ms...
- narcissus 14y agoI saw that, too, and was really surprised at the fees generated. Didn't realise it was specifically for that block, though, until I saw that the one prior only got 0.53BTC :)
- Evbn 14y agoTranslation to English from Bitcoinese?
- nelse 14y agoBitcoin are "mined" by miners across the globe who run special software on their machines/mining rigs. Each time a block was mined before block #210 000 miner earned 50 bitcoins (+transaction fees). Now, it will got only 25 bitcoins. It's part of Bitcoin specification. More reading: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining#Reward https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining#Reward
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoBitcoin works by having "blocks" of data, containing transaction history (every Bitcoin transfer someone has made - it is only actually made when incorporated into a block), "mined" by a network. These blocks are mined by incrementing a value in the block of data computing a hash of it, until it falls within a certain range. The fact the hash must be in this range results in Bitcoin miners having to do millions of hash computations until they find the correct one, creating a significant level of difficulty in producing a block. This difficulty means that it is difficult to spend Bitcoins twice, since you would theoretically need to control 50% of the computing power working away at it. Each miner is competing with every other to mine the next block first. Whoever does so can add a "reward" of Bitcoins to the block of transactions, and this is how new Bitcoins are made. Over time, the Bitcoin network increases the difficulty by making the range of valid hashes narrower, so that even as more miners join the network, it will still take roughly 10 minutes until the next block is mined. What's happened in this case is that now the reward, previously 50 BTC, has been halved to 25 BTC. I should note that miners can also deduct transaction fees... anyone who makes a transaction can add a small fee. This adds an additional incentive for miners to mine a block beyond the other reward. It also means, of course, that they prioritise whoever pays the highest fee.
- StavrosK 14y agoI've long wondered about this, how long does it take to process a transaction if you add no fee? The fee is pretty significant (especially for microtransactions), and I'm not in a hurry, so I can wait a few minutes/hour. TL;DR: What's the wait like if you're stingy?
- IanDrake 14y agoCan anyone explain this to me? Sorry, I never really paid attention to bitcoin. I was sure the government would have killed it by now, labeling you all criminals.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Syssiphus 14y agoNoooOOoooOOOooo!
- pixelcort 14y agoLooks like the exchange rate didn't fluctuate too much during this time: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5ztgSzbgBzm1g10zm2g25zv http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5ztgSzbgBzm1g10zm... I wonder what will happen to the difficulty over the next couple days: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Considering the exchange rate remained stable, I expect the difficulty to halve.
- nullc 14y agoI expect the moon to be made of green cheese. ... GPU mining is still fairly profitable with the half reward for ~most people (those who don't have electricity over $.15/kwh or so). My expectation is that the difficulty is currently lower than its proper equilibrium because people have opted to not purchase more GPUs while anticipating the introduction of ASIC devices.
- IgorPartola 14y agoWhere do you get the $0.15/kWh figure from? I am curious, since this seems to make it sound like there is a stable formula for converting kWh's to BTC's. That will of course depend on the exchange rate, but I'd like to see the figures.
- TomatoTomato 14y agohttp://bitcoinx.com/profit/ http://bitcoinx.com/profit/ Settings: Profitability decline = 1, Hardware Cost = 0, Time Frame (months) = .033333 (1 day), Electricity Cost = $0.15 Profit: -0.56 USD/day For this example (1200MH @ 750W) you need electricity to be <$0.12 to be profitable. My rig (2x7970) does about (1400MH @ 650W) and electricity @ $0.16 is my break even point (Profit: 0.01 USD/day)
- makomk 14y agoBear in mind that most people's GPU mining rigs use cards that are a lot less efficient than the 7970, especially any remaining large-scale GPU miners.
- debacle 14y agoWhat might this do to the acceptance of bitcoin? In an article yesterday, someone mentioned in the comments that it was no longer financially viable to make money from mining, I would assume that this would make it doubly so. If that is the case, will there be required transaction fees for processing transactions, and how will that effect the price of BTC?
- DennisP 14y agoTransaction fees will be one factor, and are already built in. Pay a transaction fee and your transaction gets processed faster. But also, miners who can't be profitable anymore will drop out. As they do, the mining difficulty will decrease until mining becomes viable again. On the other hand, the first special purpose mining ASICs are starting to be offered, and people with those will be able to mine more efficiently. I'm not expecting the bitcoin price to change significantly, since I figure it's determined more by the demand for bitcoins than by production costs. Looking forward to seeing whether that's correct.
- mrb 14y agoThis person is misinformed. Mining is still quite profitable to many of us. Eg. each one of my Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards makes about $43/month, after the halving. Before the halving, they made $86/month. I paid $640 for each one. Electrical cost for one of them (40W) is $2.90/month at the worldwide average rate of $0.10/kWh.
- debacle 14y agoSo it takes the better part of a year to make your money back? What kind of money do you make on transaction fees?
- mrb 14y agoYou can make your money back in 3 months. Because after 3 months you would have mined $129, and the resale value of the board is at least $500 on eBay. So, in essence, anything mined after 3 months is pure profits. However I don't recommend anyone to buy FPGAs right now, as ASICs are coming in December/January, and they will change the game. Transactions fees only increase my revenues by ~1%.
- kylec 14y agoThe fireworks and sound were extremely annoying. I'm not used to web pages making noise on my iPhone and was unprepared for it.
- duiker101 14y agoNobody is, that's why it's usually pissing everyone. A "Party" button might have done a better job.
- jonny_eh 14y agoThe animation is fine, but add a pre-selected mute button for the audio, and a stop button for the animation.
- ShawnBird 14y agoSome kind of fuse or something to show what was about to happen with a 'stop' button might have been better. I don't think anyone would click a 'party' button.
- kaiuhl 14y agoMay I suggest a bookmarklet I created called PARTYMODE? http://wenthiking.com/partymode http://wenthiking.com/partymode
- ryanlbrown 14y agoEPILEPSYMODE
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- motters 14y agoBitcoin is looking increasingly less practical. The size of the block chain is becoming massive. Recently I tried downloading the official client, and after 2.8GB of downloading with the progress bar only about half way through I gave up. If Bitcoin becomes more popular in future the block chain really isn't going to scale well, and that's going to result in a more centralized system in which there are fewer block chain "banks".
- ch0wn 14y agoThis is a fixable problem. BIP 0037[0] for example tries to mitigate the size issue with bloom filters, so you no longer need to download the complete block chain to be able to verify transactions. [0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0037 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0037
- narcissus 14y agoThere's already a couple of ways around this. One is the 'online wallet' set up, where someone already has the complete block chain online, the other is the bootstrap approach, whereby although you still download the entire chain, you can do it a lot more quickly via Bittorrent or the like. But generally, I imagine most people would go with the online wallet approach if they're not comfortable with the drive space requirements. I also believe that it is possible (theoretically, at least) to essentially just start somewhere further in the chain, in a way. Having said that, that would probably remove you from the option to mine at the same time. Maybe?
- bencoder 14y agoHard drive and network cost per gigabyte is always falling, and much faster than the blockchain is increasing, so it's not expected this will be a huge problem. But what you say is true that it will "centralise" more in a sense - but the barriers to entry will still be much smaller than any other financial institution so there will likely be many groups still involved with processing the block chain. If it's just the download time that's bothering you, try the electrum client: http://electrum.ecdsa.org/ http://electrum.ecdsa.org/ It uses a remote blockchain so that you don't have to sync with the network. But you control the wallet (the private keys that let you spend the coins) so it doesn't suffer from the problems of the online hosted wallets where you are not in control of your coins.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- BladeMcCool 14y agowhat makes you think it's a problem? the fewer bitcoins in circulation, the more they will be worth. And being (theoretically) infinitely divisible means that the tiniest fraction of a single bitcoin would still be enough to go around if all other bitcoin was somehow lost.
- betterunix 14y agoSo instead of spending Bitcoins, I should just save them and spend dollars, because if I have a whole Bitcoin token when people are trading in millionths of a token, I am a millionaire. Sounds like a currency that has a pretty dim future...
- AdmiralBeotch 14y agoNo because you'll eventually have something come up that makes you want to spend those bitcoins, even though you know they'll be worth more in the future. and when you do so, you'll be getting a significant effective discount on your purchase. For example, if you bought bitcoins now at $12, sat on them like a good little hoarder, knowing they'll be worth $1000 in 5 years and all of the sudden you need a new car and the bitcoins are only worth $24, you're getting a 50% discount on your car purchase by spending those bitcoins.
- mdonahoe 14y agoThis argument gets made frequently. Here is a response from the bitcoin community. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
- sp332 14y agoSome details for the curious http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13xd05/idea_for_the_210000th_block_lets_all_make/c78337n http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13xd05/idea_for_the...
- Kilimanjaro 14y agoAfter the bitcoin debacle, it went from $30+ to $3- and I knew if it were to rebound to that same price again, that would be the perfect time to buy. Three dollars, now I regret it.
- mikeash 14y agoIs it time to haunt eBay for cheap video cards unloaded by miners who no longer find mining worthwhile?
- iso-8859-1 14y agoI doubt that the Bitcoin community is large enough to affect the video card market.
- cwkoss 14y agoI'd say give it another month or two. Many are still able to mine profitably if they have 4x cards per rig (dividing the "fixed (power) costs" of motherboard, psu, etc). Once ASIC mining hardware comes online, GPUs will be completely worthless for Bitcoin mining. But if you see a deal, by all means grab it. * Disclosure, I am the community manager for a GPU-centric Bitcoin mining pool
- kristianp 14y agoMore like FPGAs and ASICs.