Bitcoin Forum

Reward-Drop ETA: 2016-11-25 23:26:30 UTC (208 weeks, 2 days, 8 hours)
 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Nooooooooo!

Say it isn't so!

The last block (209999) was disputed: 318.27 Petaflops !!! It's amazing.

The question is: who discovered the last block and the first block of the secound reward era?

http://blockchain.info/block/000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e?site=slush

The first block: Slush


http://blockchain.info/block-index/322334/00000000000000f3819164645360294b5dee7f2e846001ac9f41a70b7a9a3de1


The last block: BTC Guild


Congratulations!  ;D

FIREWORKS!  ;D ;D

Last block was this user ID 45135

https://www.btcguild.com/halloffame.php

https://blockchain.info/block-index/322334/00000000000000f3819164645360294b5dee7f2e846001ac9f41a70b7a9a3de1

Introduction of ASIC miners should cut this down significantly, right?

No.

When more hashing power is brought online the difficulty adjusts up to keep the block rate at 1/10 minutes.

After a the remaining blocks of a 2016 block period have been found.
See: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

That means in the most extreme case with lots of ASICs being online at block #1 of a new 2016 block period, 2016*25BTC=50400BTC can be mined in a fraction of the time it usually takes. The difficulty adjusts after the 2016th block of the current period was found.

That equals an additional influx of 50k BTC into the markets. Becaue ASIC miners will want to offset their investments, they'll probably long to dump those coins as early as possible (especially because they are the first with that ability before everyone else receives their ASICs).
I already predict that the mere anticipation of that event by traders will cause a price slide, making it increasingly unattractive for miners to sell into the dump. The release of the early ASIC mined coins will therefore probably be delayed over a longer time frame. Nevertheless the dump will occur either induced by speculators or miners, whatever comes first.

Yes, actually. ASIC miners are so fast they will outpace the difficulty adjustment, which is capped at a factor of 4 every 2016 blocks.

But it will be short lived. Four times as difficult, then sixteen, then 64. Best-case: I'd say you have 6048 blocks or perhaps (and that's a BIG perhaps) 8064 blocks. But that would only occur if the market got flooded with lots of ASICs all in a very short period of time and they all started hashing. I'm still a major skeptic on the whole ASIC thing; I'll be surprised if we see them before late 2013 (at the earliest). If Intel were doing the design? Sure, no problem. But 20 or 30 guys working in different areas? Yeah, they'll probably get it eventually, but it will more likely be third revision silicon before we see 60Gh/s at any reasonable power draw (i.e. less than 500W).

My BFL preorder says otherwise. ;)

My bASIC preorder also says otherwise. :D

We'll see them sooner than later in 2013, (perhaps even... December for BFL! "Queue dramatic chipmunk." Not counting on it, but I'm an optimist.)

I figure we'll see an accelerated rewarding to 12.5 BTC a block. Say... 3 years and 9 or 10 months (not a big change but less than 208 weeks.) I also don't see the difficulty dropping again... the way ASIC's go it's set it and forget it. No more building, tinkering with, and running Multi-GPU rigs that need to be shut off if it's unprofitable will be a thing of the past.

I am not sure if you understand the difficulty cap.

4 to 8. 8 to 12. 12 to 16.

not 4 to 16, 16 to 64, 64 to 256.. etc.

He does understand it.

It can quadruple every 2016 blocks at tops, so first is 4x difficulty, second is 4*4 = 16, then 4³ = 64, etc...

I suppose according to predictions ASICs will take us to around 10-20x of current hashrate in a relatively short time, so that would mean about 4032 blocks = 100k BTC mined in a quick succession. Depending on how sudden the hashrate increase is.