Bitcoin Forum

I've just been watching the video linked below, and it is another example of the fundametal mistake that everybody seems to make about Bitcoin mining. All of the Bitcoins that will ever exist were created when the genesis block was laid down. Miners don't mine Bitcoin, they mine blocks for the Bitcoin blockchain. In return for releasing a valid block, they are rewarded with an allocation from the initial pool, and they also receive the fees from the transactions they have included in the created block. Is this distinction significant? Well probably not for most users of Bitcoin, but if you are an investor, then I think it is. Comparison with gold, and calculations based on the scarcity of Bitcoin don't take this difference into account. Bitcoin miners create the bags to contain the 'gold' and not the 'gold' itself. A bag that used to be full, but all of the contents has been spent, is still important on the chain, and the spent contents will be included in future bags that have been mined.

Bitcoin price forecasts seem to focus on the cost of mining single Bitcoins, and I believe that this means the whole prediction is flawed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvqqChy0IYY

I think it is how people try to understand the whole thing.

Some (most actually) think - they are mining bitcoin means creating new bitcoin and the others think they are digging blocks to discover the bitcoin in the valid block.

Isn´t this just semantics? Of course you are right technically, but I don´t really see the downside
of keeping the current narrative even though it is not 100 % true. Mining is a process that is known to everyone
due to the mining of metals and other resources and therefore people can grasp this concept easily.
Besides, other terms that are used to describe the rewards for the miners are actually accurate (e.g. terms like
"block reward").

Would it not be sufficient to say that Bitcoin is limited and gold is no?

Indeed, I've never understood the "limited" argument with gold. When we become a galactic-faring species, there will be such an abundance of gold in asteroids that it will become more common than water. Bitcoin on the other hand has a hard cap of 21 million units. No matter how great and intelligent we become as a species, not everyone will have access to an entire bitcoin.

An on the other hand, and playing the devil's advocate, there is thread in the forum that goes "Bitcoin is limited, altcoins are not". You know what I mean.

I don't question the use of the word mining, or the phrase block reward. I started the thread because I think the distinction I made is important if you are along term investor, and you are looking at a possible 25 year holding. The video looked at the cost of mining an individual Bitcoin, but I think the return for an individual block creation is more significant.

There are a few flaws with your argument. Gold will never be more common than water. The abundance of water in the universe is much greater than gold. As the human race expands, we will always find way more water than gold. Furthermore, if you took all the asteroids in our solar system, the combined mass would be less than the Earth. It will probably become way more economical for us to start mining the sea bottom for gold than to mine asteroids.
Also, due to the fact that we can only communicate at the speed of light, this prevents the Bitcoin network from expanding much beyond Earth. Quantum entanglement communication devices cannot be made for the simple fact that as soon as you try to force a particle to certain state, it is no longer entangled with the other particle. If you set up a colony on the nearest star, it would take 4 years for your transaction to be communicated to the nodes back on Earth. The only way that you could get Bitcoin to reasonably work with such vast distances would be to run your own fork.

Some interesting points you raise. I don't doubt that whatever planets we colonize or mine in the future will have more gold than earth, so perhaps not asteroids but nevertheless there will be an abundance of gold in space with a technically unlimited maximum supply.

I'm of the opinion that in 5,000 years or so from now we'll find a way to do faster-than-light communication, considering our understanding in physics has only boomed over the last 200 or so years. Science has a habit of always thinking "now we get it" only for newer theories to come to light and replace older ones. Surely this will happen with quantum physics as well. In the event it doesn't, what's your opinion about using something such as a Tangle? Which could record and verify transactions off the main network and add them back to it later when they connect again?

When you say a Tangle, do you mean something like what Iota and Byteball use? That may actually work, but only when the block reward is zero and miners are only mining for transaction fees. Also, it is possible that new physics may allow for a way to have superluminal communications. However, it is also possible that the laws of nature do not allow for this no matter what we do.

Well this thread seems to have left the path that I thought it would travel, and take to the undergrowth alongside. It's become more interesting as a result, so please keep up the good work. :)

Referring back to the gold analogy, and the high cost of mining gold, there is an alternative form of mining for gold. This is often described as 'urban mining', and it is far cheaper. It also something that I enjoy if I get the chance. I look through the boxes at car boot and garage sales, and I hunt for broken gold watches, spectacle frames and other jewellery. I also bought a metal detector, but have yet to find a gold coin. It would be good if there was an urban mining technique for Bitcoin.

The closest would be discovering an old wallet that you used for faucets in 2010.
But not everybody can do such a thing.

Buying old PC's and trying to crack into any wallets that exist there? That's kind of like the same thing albeit the chance of success is drastically lower in this case.

I've got a dustbin full of old hard drives. I was going to dismantle them for scrap, but I didn't get round to it ( surprise ! ). They are in a garage, so I'm not sure if ny of them are readable.

Nice idea though. I musr resist the temptation to collect old computers.

I give. Exactly where does one find the mother lode of unlimited gold?

Bitcoin is arbitrarily limited with the difficulty and block reward adjustments whereas gold could technically (provided the right technology and enough energy) be alchemized. Not only that but by extrapolating the amount of gold found in this solar system, you'll find that there's bound to be a shit-ton more elsewhere in the universe.

By bad. I forgot that a synthetic cubic zirconia diamond is the same price as a blood diamond.

Don't worry. It will be more economical to drill a mine to the core of the Earth to obtain the "motherlode" found there than to  alchemize gold or asteroid mine. ;D

I gave you a couple of merits for that comment. Actually, it should have been -10, because you have got me started on yet another project with a domain name and an old dustbin. :)

I picked up the domain name Easy Bitcoin Mining.com (https://easybitcoinmining.com/) a while ago, and I have been trying to think of a use for it. I don't think there is any "easy" block mining anymore, but urban mining for Bitcoin would seem to be the answer. Don't bother to click the link, as it is just a holding page at the moment. Once I put together a site, I'll post a link in a new thread on this board for discussion.

Ha ha. You are an optimist.
Trying to find bitcoins like this would be like searching for a needle (if it exists) in a haystack. :)

Oh my god, it seems that I am going to engage on an long post about mining, minerals and what is a mine and what is not... But no, I am not I am just going to leave this link for you. (http://www.westcoastplacer.com/how-much-gold-is-left-on-earth/) and this quote from it:

"There is no shortage of gold on earth.  The problem is that it is much deeper than we can mine.   Current scientific theories estimate that there is enough gold in the core to cover the surface of the earth with a 4 meter thick layer of pure gold"

Please, don´t say that is a limited amount, I won´t take it seriously.

Well I started the site, but I haven't really put anything on it yet. I'll add some articles over coffee during the next month or so.
http://easybitcoinmining.com/ (http://easybitcoinmining.com/)

I'll dig out the old dustbin, and build a test rig, then I can add some photos. I probably won't find any Bitcoin, but it might generate some link juice. It does raise a question of ethics though. What happens if I do find an old copy of a currently active wallet with coins in it?