I hope and believe so also. But mining has become a lot more competitive and margins are thinner. It could get interesting but I'll be holding all the way through.

To a rough approximation, it is realistic. If you have a payroll of $500k and that gets you 10 workers of the appropriate skill level, if you cut that payroll to $250k, you can now get 5 workers of the appropriate skill level.

Of course, there is likely to be some increase in hashing efficiency over time but we are talking less than two weeks so I am ignoring that.

This is irrelevant to the point anyway.

When the halving comes, after the next difficulty adjustment comes, there will be half the value of bitcoins being produced so about half of the mining power (the least efficient half) will be shut down. This is not a big deal.

The issue is the time between the halving and the difficulty change. Up until the halving, miners will be throwing in hash power to get as big a share of the rewards as possible. This cuts profitability. After the halving, it's suddenly a different game.

Let's say that, for example, it takes an average of $7 of electricity to generate $10 of bitcoins. That's a pretty good profit margin and is probably over-generous. Now the halving happens and suddenly everyone is spending $7 of electricity to generate $5 of bitcoins. The most sensible thing to do is switch off until the next difficulty change. The problem is, this is not just for one miner but any of them who are paying over $5 of electricity to generate a bitcoin.

Now, as I say, I think this won't come to pass for various reasons but those reasons are not very solid.

Every now and then, I will lose half or all of my hashing power on the S5. Powering off and on the unit will fix it but simply rebooting from the command line or web interface (both are working fine) will not. The status line for the blades shows all 'o's. Is there a way to bring it back to life remotely or am I going to have to work out some kind of remote power control??

Edit: Dropping the clock and restarting brought half of the hashing back. The other board is all Xs now so at least that's getting somewhere.

Edit2: Another reboot and all 'o's again but my hashrate is still around 1/2 what it should be. Think I'll have to rig up an R-Pi for remote power switching.

I have seen someone bring this up on Reddit. In theory, what could happen is the block reward drops, a bunch of miners become immediately unprofitable and get switched off.

Now, because the hash-power has now dropped precipitously, the rate at which blocks are mined drops hugely. This will be corrected at the next difficulty adjustment but difficulty adjustment periods are defined in terms of the block number, not date. With a 10 minute block time, the difficulty adjustment would be scheduled for about 10 days after the halving. If, say, 50% of miners stop mining, block time could increase to 20 minutes and the difficulty would adjust 20 days after the halving. The person who brought this up on Reddit was suggesting that somewhere around 88% of miners could switch off. Long block times could also be damaging to the Bitcoin price leading to even more unprofitability and even more miners switching off. And the longer and longer before the difficulty adjustment, the more miners are likely to switch off. You could argue that miners will keep mining because it's to their benefit to maintain confidence in Bitcoin but it's a prisoner's dilemma situation and it shouldn't be assumed that miners will operate as a charity. Note that not only would long block times just be bad in general, the 1MB block limit would mean that many transactions would not get processed (removing the limit would not be especially helpful if things got that bad though)

Now, I'm pretty optimistic that we won't see this doomsday scenario but I have to admit that it has a fair bit of legitimacy.

To be fair, in the article Armstrong is talking about XT rather than BIP101

Stability achieved.

Just simple gd library stuff.

Phrased inelegantly, I admit but goods and services like any currency


Irrelevant. The point is that the supplier can issue more at little cost to themselves.


Countries is the metaphor here. Tell me where I can go nearby to spend the crisp 10 pound note I have left over from recent travels.

Nah, fiat is more like that. You have to be exchange something of value to be able to get them, there's an endless supply of them and if you don't exchange them for some shitty trinkets in short order, they become worthless.

Also, if you go to a different store, you can't spend them there.

The owls are not what they seem.

Yep. It's going to be a bit earlier than scheduled too. We've been averaging 580 seconds per block rather than 600 as mining growth has been outpacing the difficulty adjustments.

Interestingly, at current prices, there will be about $304 million dollars more worth of bitcoins mined by the next halving.

Damage and recovery is good for the Bitcoin price. It's like some kind of Sayan that gets stronger every time it's defeated but not killed. What is not good is the long, drawn-out downtrend that we saw for two years. That's broken now so I reckon a bit of consolidation then we'll see some significant upside as people load up in the run-up to the halvening.

If someone wants to write the appropriate interface and it can support the functions, sure.

Blocks-to-halvening.

To be honest, I've forgotten how the discussion started amongst images of a universe filled with pigs.

Slackware FTW.

It depends. They can be equivalent in some circumstances. The artificial scarcity introduced by copyright allowed companies to charge very high prices for music and movies.

Dyson or Hoover?