Bitcoin Forum

I really was wondering , we always tell people to hold their bitcoins for the next 5-15 years on Cold storage then come and sell them and they make shitload of profit , yes but .. I got this suddenly , what if CPU's & GPU's gets more developped and become better and better and faster over the years of course , would that destroy Bicoin ? I mean if it's easy to mine  , Bitcoin should logically lose it value ?  ???

Feel free to let me know if I don't know what I'am talking about , won't take it as an offense :-[

I don't think so. The technology serve to make better the things and not to destroy that. All the story of development of technology testify this. There no more future if the invention will destroy the future and the past would be better. It is impossible that with the new technology the future will be worst.

No , just because a better hardware exists it won't increase the number of coins that can be mined in a day or the blockreward .

It would only mean that on entity might have more control over the mining operation . I am not sure if more mining power relates to the 51% attacks as well but if it does, only then it can be a risk to bitcoin.

the efficiency of future hardware generation will be tiny for every new tech that will come out, in terms of gain the % will be ridiculous low with the future machine

unless some new material will be discover that can boost to a new level the production process and miniaturization

It never gets "easier to mine", actually it gets harder, difficulty increases with the network hashing power, faster, better hardware leads to difficulty increase.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Agreed. In the PoW system of mining, with higher hashing power and better hardware, the difficulty will just increase resulting to an even more harder mining for slower and inefficient miners. What bothers me is not the development of faster, more powerful, and more efficient mining chips to mine bitcoins, but the things that might actually "break" bitcoins security via brute-force (which I know wouldn't be available anytime sooner, but come on, technology is rapidly evolving every single day.)

Bitcoin is never "easy" (nor "hard") to mine. It takes all worldwide mining hardware combined, 10 minutes on average to mine a block. No matter if CPUs and GPUs and ASICs are getting 100000x as fast.

More detail here: difficulty (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty).

I would be more worried about an unencrypted "cold storage" wallet by then. Difficulty will adjust to always take around 10 min per block, but the encryption of the private keys doesn't change. Thus it gets easier to crack that.

Yeah just like if you can bench press 600 lbs, it gets "easier" to lift a tank over your head.  ;D

Even if computers got a trillion times faster, they couldn't bruce force a private key.
There are 2^256 possible private keys and 2^160 addresses.

2^160 is beyond huge.  If you don't believe me, do the math yourself and see how long it would take.

That's a horrible thing to tell people.  You are selling a promise of a "shitload of profit" on a highly volatile financial experiment.  In 5 -15 years bitcoin *might* have an exchange rate significantly higher than today, but it also might be significantly lower than it is today.  If you tell someone that they WILL "make shitload of profit", and then they don't, are you going to compensate them for the profit that you promised them?


I don't understand the question.  What do you mean by "what if"?  CPU's and GPU's DO get more developed and become better and better and faster over the years.  In the early 1980's I had a desktop computer with a 1 megahertz CPU.  Today you can purchase consumer grade computers with multiple cores operating in excess of 3.5 gigahertz.  That's 3500 times faster!  In the beginning of bitcoin, mining was only done with CPU.  Then someone figured out how to mine even faster with GPU.  Then someone figured out how to mine even faster with FGPA. Then someone built a custom designed circuit specifically for the application of bitcoin mining (ASIC).  This was even faster than FGPA. Faster and faster custom designed circuits are being created.  The more efficient bitcoin mining becomes, the more secure its blockchain is.


No.  It would just increase the security of the the bitcoin blockchain. Faster processing of hashes means more hashes per second calculated by the mining participants.  This just increases the number of hashes per second an attacker would need to calculate in order to control a substantial percentage of the global hash power.


No.  That's not "logical" at all.  The bitcoin difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to keep the average time between blocks close to 10 minutes.  If equipment can calculate more hashes per second, then the difficulty is increased.


You don't know what you are talking about.

The future is now! have you read about "The Machine" from HP... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcmsby8jDKE

Lets imagine this scenario, if you have 10,000 of the Machine working together, maybe you can use vanity gen to generate any addy. If the hardware is enough powerful i think it can be used to bruteforce addys.

no one knows how fast this is, but let's say it's 100 petaflops, ok so
that's 10^17 flops.  10,000 machines gives you 10^21 flops.
assume a sha-256 hash is about 100 flops, so that's 10^19 hashes per second...
or about 3.15*10^28 hashes per century.

You're still not in the same ballpark as 10^48, which is the number of Bitcoin addresses.

the answer to your question is answered by you inside your question!
when better technology and equipments are created in the future they will serve bitcoin as they are just making the mining easier which means the more secure the blockchain becomes. because the whole process of processing hashes becomes faster

As you have seen it till now that when new hardware starts mining Bitcoin, then the network difficulty increases.
So if cpu and gpu evolved in next 5 to 15 years then the network difficulty also increase with it.

eh i doubt so, asic new generation are much faster in improving and more powerful and always will be, there will be no reason to use gpu ever to mine bitcoin directly, asic will always be number 1, at best a new form of asic will emerge like i dunno, quantum asic?

I also know that asic is the first choice for sha-256.
But I mentioned cpu and gpu because the OP mentioned those.
BTW currently quantum computers are not able to solve sha-256.

Regardless of how advanced any hardware will become, there is still only one block per ~10 minutes.

If blocks are being found faster than every 10 minutes, the difficulty will rise to match the hardware so that it still remains one block every ~10 minutes.

What does that mean to you or me? Well, if you're still mining with a CPU or GPU, you already know what that means. For people who are using ASICs, they have an advantage.  
Whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, it has no affect on what a bitcoin is worth. And no affect on whether bitcoin is in any danger of being destroyed.

no man!!!
Bitcoin can come in danger if the quantum computer starts solving sha-256.
There is a theory that if we use quantum computer with sha-256 capabilities then it will solve the entire network in just a little bit of time.

Not exactly. 

First of all there is no quantum algorithm that can undo a hash function.
Possibly ECDSA can be cracked using a quantum computer running Shor's Algorithm
at some point in the unforseeable future, but even that would only partially
break Bitcoin.  For more info:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3008.0

I dunno if a quantum computer could out horse power an ASIC.. if it was a quantum asci okay but just a quantum comp.. I dunno man.  You'd have to out horse power 50% of the entire network... no chance.


THIS IS WHY I AM PRO ASIC.

There really is nothing more to say than this. Super chips will just strengthen the network.

Understood now , It's funny how I'am on bitcoin since like one year now and still don't know a lot of things about it .
thank you guys , so basically the easier it is the more difficult it is ? (I mean difficultly increase when it's easy to mine) and it changes every 2016 blocks if I got it right ? (not sure why this number specifically)

Here you can see the status of the network including the difficulty. I think it resets about every two weeks.  ???
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

There is always a lot more to learn about bitcoin.  :D

Intel is preparing something, something pretty powerful from what i've read. There's definitely millions being invested right now into hasing technology to become the leaders of the Bitcoin mining network. It will be hard work overtaking the chinese but I think US and EUR will get on it soon.

Blocks are solved on average every 10 minutes.  Therefore, it should take about 20160 minutes to solve 2016 blocks.

20160 minutes / 60 minutes per hour = 336 hours
336 hours / 24 hours per day = 14 days
14 days / 7 days per week = 2 weeks.

So, bitcoin is designed to adjust the difficulty approximately every 2 weeks.

i'm inclined to think that this specific number(2160) has to do with the fact that satoshi wanted 4 years between each halving, to give the time for miners to have a good time-frame for allow new technology to kick in between each halving

and probably to spread enough the supply in a long time, so the network can be secured properly, if it was only 1 year, for example, there were not time to build a big infrastructure to secure the network with future exahash and order of magnitude like that

Nah it will never be able to destroy Bitcoin.
If we use more hashing power on the network then it will automatically adjust the difficulty to mine Bitcoin.

If sha-256 is cracked by quantum computers, everything running on that would be compromised too. This includes all credit cards and most secure sites on the internet using SSH technology. They could also just upgrade to a better and more secure algorithm - sha-512 or whatever.

I am not a security expert, but I have read the information and understand the basics of the theory behind it. This has also been discussed before, and everyone agree that this is not an issue at all. Bitcoin is very flexible and the algorithms behind it is very robust.

Bring on the quantum computers, and see if they can do what no super computer have been able to do, up to this date. The mathematical calculations to crack a private key is staggering and beyond the combined computer power of all the computers on this planet.   

No chance to happen this. I don't think that there will be some cpu and gpu with more performance than the ASICs for example. It is impossible. One ASIC have to many cpu or gpu (processors) within. How it will be possible that one of them be better than some of them working together? This is the first. The second thing why this (if happen) will destroy bitcoin? There is no sense on this. Maybe will be produced more easily bitcoin but destroy it... Impossible...

There is no chance of this to happen.
And Bitcoin can never be destroyed by anything.