Bitcoin Forum

I was thinking today, with the way the total hashing power of the network is growing exponentially, what was once a "decentralised" currency is now becoming ever more centralised....hence the irony...!
It was once spread across millions of "geeks" hashing away in the mega hash range with cpu's and gpu's.... this network must have been vast. Now as the cost and power needed to mine effectively is either 1: pricing the average Joe out of the mining market, or 2: requiring so much power that its becoming almost impossible to reasonably mine at your home, due to power usage, heat and noise !

So how will the network look going out from here?! First we saw the advent of pools, to errr "pool" our resources....and now we are seeing more and more hardware companies offering shares in a mining outfits on a grand scale, sever rooms filled with powerful ASIC's running 24/7  that you just "rent"...this is clustering the hashing power in certain areas....thus making its more centralised! What kind of computing power will be needed to mine the last few 100,000 BTC??? how much electricity is being used to hash all of these coins?! doesnt seem to green to me .....

Also I know the difficulty can and will go down as people drop out of mining but again this just gives way to ever more powerful mining hardware.

P.s. these are just my misguided views and would appreciate a logical and unemotional response, no flaming or typical forum douchebagness.... thanks for reading  ;D

Done.

https://i.imgur.com/EQb4cNv.png

Difficulty won't go down. Growth might slow down in a few months. No argument from me on centralization. "Greenness" is contentious (and I doubt Bitcoin ever had a million unique miners going at once - maybe 50K), though with the current situation, almost all the network's costs are upfront in hardware, where electricity cost isn't significant (thus, it's extremely "green"), but this will change - hashpower on the network will eventually again be determined by electricity costs and BTC price (instead of how quickly ASIC manufacturers lower their prices) - there's a ton of energy spent with conventional payment methods (printing cards, literally tons of paper, B&M branches + loads of employees, computing power processing transactions). Between Bitcoin's storage, bandwidth, and actual mining energy costs - it's hard to determine what Bitcoin's overall energy consumption will be when/if it scales to a point where it's comparable with a conventional financial institution. You can kind of forecast it now, but it couldn't be very accurate given the current technological changes in mining hardware and all the other variables which can become huge when you're doing 1/500,000 the volume of, say, VISA.

oooh here we go straight away  :-\....just reading what you want to read ! where exactly did i say that ?!

Millions of miners using gpu's and cpu's is what I actually said, but seeing as you have trouble reading...... I personally
had over 6 gfx cards running at one point, I constantly saw rooms and racks of mb's with 4 gfx cards on each one...
so the total network must have been made up of lot of individual mining units ......maybe in the millions...

Mining consolidation was never more than an irritation to me.  It can be done off on an island somewhere without impacting the integrity of the value store as long as a lot of full nodes are checking the results.  Ya, interference with a semi-centralized mining framework can fuck performance and expectations all to hell (witness teracoin) but it is unlikely to result in permanent loss of value.

The thing that is 'ironic' to me is the globally accessible ledger in a solution which is supposed to promote privacy.  Of course the conundrum was supposed to be dealt with by dis-associating individuals with private keys, and full nodes which were configured properly were only analyzable by transaction counting, and this was obviously unfeasible because nobody could possibly be tapping the global WAN...Doh!

pfffff AHAHHAHAHA wow.
honestly though, i agree with the OP bitcoin is a littlebit ironic

The ignore was for starting a new thread instead of using the search feature so that we wouldn't need to rehash the exact same points yet again.

Comparing it to the current banking system isn't logical because that system is inherrently wastful
and uses megawatts of power to run, but it doesn't make BTC coin mining any more green !
As the network grows so does its power needs....most of which comes from "un-green" sources...
With companies now offering units in the terrahash range using well over 1kwh of power
its becoming a rather power hungry thing....

Congratulations on your well balanced and thought out reply, you are either a 14 year old boy or a very sad man whom I pity greatly....

Power heat and noise?  Guess you have never seen or heard 48 GPU cores running.   The power and noise for 1/1000th of the network is significantly lower today than under the GPU era.  The peak of GPU mining was probably ~20 TH/s.   GPU rigs requires about 500 J/GH, so 20 Th/s is 10,000 KW or 10 MW of power.  Today the network is ~2,500 TH/s but the average ASIC is ~1 J/GH making total power usage ~ 5 MW.   Of course the network is going higher but GPU weren't any less power hungry.  The network will always reach equilibrium where the power consumed is roughly equal to the value of BTC produced with a small margin for capital cost, risk, and profit.


Also there never were millions of miners.   Never.  Not once, not a single day in the history of Bitcoin.  At the peak there was something like 20 TH/s of GPU miners.   The output per card varies but lets take a middle of the road card the 6870 which is about 300 MH/s.  20 TH/s is ~65,000 HD 6870 graphics cards.   That puts the number of miners in the tens of thousands max.

No, there's checkbox in the profile settings somewhere that you can turn on to show both.

Looks under "Forum Profile Information" near the bottom.

Look stop arguing semantics like a child (Google it I know you don't know what that means)
Try stepping back from the individual words and discuss from there on the wider picture.

maybe the "onis" was on him

Yes no doubt that gups were less efficient by a very large factor. But then they werent designed to hash cryptographic algos specifically. With the power now required by asics we are nearly back at the same point. Some of the units needing to dissipate over a kilowatt of power in a small space, that's no easy feet! My old BFL miner running full tilt was probably louder than when I had two gfx cards to start with....
Anyway we seem to be hitting that infection point again.

Is there a way to estimate the power needed to mine the last few coins when we get there.... Will the network be in the exahash range.....!?
I've sold my miners now but it will be fun to just sit back and see how it plays out, much like Satoshi must be doing...
I'm a currency trader by day and would love to trade my coins like I do other currency's but haven't found a decent "trustworthy" site yet....

The word you're reffering to is spelt "onus" you retard !

no shit genius, hence the parentheses indicating a play on words...

I'm sorry it was such a lame attempt at a quip it must have washed over me....plus I know what you Americans are like with the English language....

But I think I'll give up here, even with the added line at the bottom of my op, it just proves my point that forums are full of  jumped up kids who cannot discuss anything without an ego getting in the way, which is sad, very sad. Maybe I should just stick to talking to people in the real world. Because the kind of person people become online is distorted and pathetic....

Did you just project yourself? seriously dude it was just a joke. maybe you need to grow a bit thicker skin. this is the internet

I wish it was the noise the biggest reason average Joes can't follow up with mining...

Its nothing to do with being thick skinned, its to do with never being able to discuss anything on a form without people becoming instant dicks.....or arguing about semantics, or people who live on the forum going around like some kind of jumped up forum police! ....not everyone is online 24 hours a day, if its a repeated thread....here's two option's for you 1: dont read it, 2: dont reply! Its that easy!!!!!!
See this has already taken us way off topic.....

well forgive me, to err is human. continue elaborating on your point that is a bit skewed. i agree with the premise that the network has became centralized. how could we avoid it though? isn't it still decentralized to some extent since no one person or entity can dictate the network or reverse transactions?

I'm not sure it can be avoided....its almost in built in that as power requirements grow it becomes more clustered together to the point the clusters start merging into one....
Is it even possible to mine all the available coins !??
Can we estimate how much power will be needed to hash at that point !??

Dude you need to learn some more about bitcoin, because those are some seriously noob questions.

Speaking of centralisation, why don't people get off of BTC Guild and join some other pools.

I wonder what the commonality is in these cases?


Strange. Especially when the whole argument hinges upon the very premise that is being semantically analyzed. It is a mystery.

needed != used

The power needed to mine the last few coins isn't any different from the power needed to mine the first few coins,
the power actually used to mine the last few coins though, that's another story.

Will the network be in the exahash range?
Who knows, I don't really care, hopefully it's high enough to keep attackers away, that's all that matters.

LoL. you're not in nano editor anymore. you can talk in english

This year I just installed heated floors in the house.  Mmmmmm!  Feels so nice.  Then it occurred to me - why didn't I just put 100 miners in the basement!!!  I would have earned some money and had the same damn warm floors!!  Holy crap - that is a great new company.  Floor heaters which serve as bitcoin miners at the same time.  I am still working out what to do with these in the summer.

lay pipes to siberia. sell the heat.

God you forum folk are so stereotypical..... I was operating under the premise that a forum is were someone one would approch to decuss ideas and gain knowledge from people would might be in the know.....instead it seems to be a place to gain iditoc retorts from pseudo intellectuals.....

OP: learn to use the search function. this subject is brought up ad nauseum 2 or 3 times a month.

/thread

Nice try but not quite there....my whole argument actually  hinges on the fact that the network is becoming more centralised. I think we have already clearly established I wildly over estimated with the word "millions" ...an estimate it was never the less.... But if you want to keep going over the same points that's fine...

I refer you to my earlier post....if it bothers you ......don't read it ....quite simple really ;o)

millions of people with free electricity (small but free, like USB stick) will be the backbone of bitcoin network, any single entity operating a large farm will go broke

Oooooooh don't use the word million......we've been there already !

That explains the popularity of Bitcoin in San Francisco. Ironic Hipsters.

Where exactly did I state them as fact ..............? once again you people read what you want to read ! .... so lame

Read OP.... this again.... read further... oh wow, OP is childish.  Every counterpoint is a fucking ad hominem.

Here:
... the irony...

Why is the network not decentralized now? Anyone can buy an ASIC miner, thousands of such units will replace thousands of GPUs.

Is it the price? So what, more people know about bitcoin, existing miners might be richer, more chances of bigger budgets to keep the same individual number of miners.

Is it the co-location in mining farms? Each miner can be pointed to a different pool if needed, some miners are even split across different beneficiaries, each having this option.

Is it the mining pools? Hasn't this been the case for like always? Deepbit was the scare, now it's btcguild. If you're worried, promote a free fee p2pool node.

So why exactly is bitcoin centralized? Is it because you can't afford an ASIC miner?