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This is woefully uninformed. > There can be only 21 million Bitcoins ever found or mined, though once found ,Bitcoins can be divided into 10^8 small subparts c
by nwh 13y ago
This is woefully uninformed.
> There can be only 21 million Bitcoins ever found or mined, though once found ,Bitcoins can be divided into 10^8 small subparts called shitoshis which are what’s actually used for buying things.
There's not really a limit to it. You can increase the precision to 64bit if you really wanted to, 8 decimal places is just arbitrary for the moment. Values below 0.00005 BTC aren't even spendable though at the moment to avoid spam, so eight points is hardly a limiting factor.
> but on the other hand Bitcoins are inflation-resistant because of constrained supply and can’t easily be counterfeited, either.
They can't ever be counterfeited actually. At one point an integer overflow meant that additional ones were erroneously created, but that's been patched since 2009.
> Bitcoins, while possibly uncrackable are definitely not unhackable. Mining Bitcoins requires the validation of 90 other random miners before your Bitcoins are judged real and assignable
120 blocks to mature, actually. The term "random" makes them sound untrustworthy, but there's not really much trust put in them either. They could be as malicious as the author.
> but what’s to keep me from owning 90+ Bitcoin mining accounts and gaming the system?
Nothing but the cost of doing so, which is the entire point of miners competing.
> What if Amazon Web Services simply assigned all unoccupied EC2 cores to this task?
Nothing. EC2 rented servers are far too slow to attack the network at this point, that's the point of having a faster hashing speed and overall difficulty.
- mb0 13y ago> > What if Amazon Web Services simply assigned all unoccupied EC2 cores to this task? > Nothing. EC2 rented servers are far too slow to attack the network at this point, that's the point of having a faster hashing speed and overall difficulty. The point he's making is one that was referenced in the original bitcoin whitepaper. If one user were to amass more computing resources than the honest users, that person would have the ability to over-ride the transaction record. This however would incredibly difficult given the global hashrates are probably coming close to terahash/sec levels. If one extremely wealthy person wanted to, they could get butterfly labs' developers to sell them the design for their new 600ghash/sec mining card, then go on to fill a datacenter with systems that have several of those cards in each of their systems. Consider what the following could do: 1) Supermicro X9DR3-F - server board with 3 pci-e x16 slots 2) Any 2U supermicro chassis 3) 3 Butterfly labs Monarch cards per server 4) 48U cabinet Those cards mine at 600ghash/sec, put 3 of them in a single server, and the single system can mine at 1800ghash/sec, or 1.8thash/sec/server. Fill a 48U rack with 24 of those systems, you're mining at 43.2thash/sec. Fill 10 cabinets with these systems, and you're mining at 432.0thash/sec.
- nwh 13y agoPossibly, but those devices don't exist. Given ButterFly Lab's record (12+ months late), I don't expect them to exist any time in the near future. The Monarch cards are very much stretching what a normal motherboard would be able to handle anyway, probably up to the point where you could only have one per board.
- xekyo 13y agoActually, the bitcoin network's hash-rate is currently at about 1.46 PH/s, as in more than 1460 times 'coming close to terrahash/sec levels'.