The only thing that matters is total output.

3 x 1 TH or 1 x 3TH or 300x 0.01 TH it is still 3 TH of hashpower.

Yeah that is never going to happen.  You have been here six months and don't understand the concept of decentralized consensus. 

There are no pools that small.  They wouldn't be popular for that exact reason.  The largest pools are on the PH/s scale (i.e. thousands of TH/s).

Generally for a pool to be viable it has to have at least 1% of the network hashrate.  That means it will solve about one block per day.  Even that however is a struggle as the pool loses miners to larger pools with less variance.  Realistically the lower limit is probably at least 5%.   

No.  There is no progress towards solving a block. Each hash is like a lottery ticket.  It either instantly wins or it  instantly loses.   Regardless of if someone else solves a block your "losing" hashes are still losers.

On the efficiency aspect it is nothing compared to the prior difficulty increases.

A GPU is something like 300 J/GH.  The "worst" ASIC is ~8 J/GH so you are talking almost a 40,000% improvement.   Various different smaller process node designs dropped from the 8 J/GH to 5 J/GH to ~0.8 J/GH (Bitfury - reference clock)).

On paper we have the rest of the 28nm players showing ~0.8 J/GH and KNC estimating ~0.7 J/GH.   Seeing a trend.  Overnight we went from 300 J/GH to 8 J/GH and then over the next six months saw that fall by a factor of 10 to ~0.8 J/GH.   That "might" go down to a staggering 0.7 J/GH by next Spring.


Who is going to buy all that hashrate increases. $3 per GH works out to $3M per PH.   So to double the network again in a month would "only" require $15M in sales.  Ok no problem there.  To double it again would require another $30M in sales the following month, $60M the next month, $120M the monh after that, a quarter billion the month after that ...

Will difficulty keep going up?  Oh HELL YEAH!  Is it possible from either a cashflow or energy standpoint to double continually every month for years?  No.

The key word was huge increase in number of transactions.

If you need to make a billion dollars you could do it by selling a million widgets for $1,000 each or by selling a hundred billion widgets for $0.01 each.

KNC stopped shipping?  Don't worry they will be shipping 2.5 PH/s+ pretty soon again.


Also you do understand that exponential growth forever is impossible right?  Within a couple years Bitcoin mining would use more energy than used by the human race for all other purposes combined.  Law of large numbers takes over.   When network is 1 PH/s for the network to double in a month requires 1 PH/s more hash power today it would require >5 PH/s so even if for example ASIC companies shipped out constant volume the growth as a % would decline.  For the growth % to remain constant they would need to manufacture and ship an exponential volume.  Thousands of units per month this year,  millions of units per month next year, billions of units per month the year after that, trillions of units per month the year after that, quadrillions of units per month the year after that ...

You know you can send your own PMs for free right?

I think this comment sums it up.

"It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money."
--W. C. Fields

Ok your right.  Miners are expending massive massive amounts of cost to mine pennies worth of IXC.  They are all doing this because they are stupid.  You win.

There is no cost from the miner's perspective, there is a limit on how many free coins he/she may be able to obtain but there is no cost.

It would be like me giving you one free dollar per day and then you saying it isn't free because there are trillions of dollars and if you want more than one you will need to sell goods or service.  It doesn't change the fact that the one dollar a day is still free.

The "development" of speeding up the time between blocks is replacing a single line of code.  However what you misunderstand is that the shorter the block interval the more likely the network will remain on seperate forks for an extended period of time.  Hashing power is wasted providing no security, and users simply need to wait for more confirmations to have any reasonable level of security.

Not sure why you are waiting for 6 confirms on every tiny transaction but if you are then you should be waiting for hundreds of confirms on some worthless ultra fast block interval coin.


The only development which needs to be done is in the education department to break the "6 confirms = magical safe" myth.  Depending on the transaction value and the scenario 1 or 2 confirms may be more than sufficient and for some txs, 0-confirm is even viable.

Why pool mine then? You can simply solomine and get 100% of the block reward.

This.  By that logic no company would even consider taking credit cards.  The fraud risk of credit cards is NEVER (I mean absolutely under no possible scenario never) 0% even if you properly train employees, ask for ID (which ironically is a violation of VISA/MC rules), closely analyze the signature, and are an expert at spotting a fake card.  

If the fraud losses due to 0-confirm tx are less than the fraud losses company ALREADY absorb from credit cards then accepting 0-confirm tx would only improve the bottom line.  0-confirm isn't right for every product in every scenario but I think it will be more common that people think.  A company brokering priority access to blocks (possibly repaying pools for x tx per block) along with a contract with the pools to not substitute competing double spends could likely clean up by providing a service to merchants who need 0-confirm protection.  Will the fraud losses be zero?  Probably not but they don't have to.   Especially for online merchants where CC fraud (and mitigation costs) is 5% or more on digital goods.    Getting that to "only" 1% would be a windfall for merchants.

So far.  LTC still has negligible tx volume.  Even stupidly fast scamcoins with 30 second blocks are usually fine when blocks are essentially nothing more than a single coinbase transaction.  The goal however would be for the network to scale to hundreds of maybe even thousands of transactions a second.   Also the average block time is somewhat misleading. Mining is a possion process and the block times are going to be distributed around the average.  A not insignificant fraction are going to be significantly less than the average.

LTC may be fine or it may not we will have to see but I agree there likely is an optimal block interval and it makes the coins with ultra short block intervals of dubious value.

Well nobody would mine IXC by itself.  Nobody is going to mine a coin which is either massive unprofitable or returns <1% compared to mining Bitcoin because they always have the option of just mining Bitcoin.  The only reason there is so much hashpower behind IXC is because merge mining does make it free. What additional cost is there?   A pool or solo miner may have to run an extra client but for a pool miner there is no cost at all.  

Point hardware at a pool and either get
a) x BTC per day
OR
b) x BTC per day PLUS y IXC.

So how exactly is there a cost?

What is cheaper than free?  Nobody is paying anything extra for all that hashpower to merge mine IXC.

Bitpay has been around a while and is backed by some venture capital. I haven't used their service as a merchant but it always worked when I was buying things from other merchants.  It probably is the simplest and cheapest method to implement where customer pays you BTC and you get USD into your bank account in a few days.  I believe you can even decide to convert less than 100% so you could keep your profits as BTC if you wanted.

You want to accept BTC as payment and receive USD daily at a low cost?

Sounds like you want to use Bitpay.  They have gone to a flat pricing model so the per tx fee is 0%, $0.00, and 0 BTC.

"for Bitcoin to do".  Remember Bitcoin can't do anything.  The protocol already supports divisions down to 1 sat.  When you send "1 BTC" you are actually transfering a value = 100000000.  Most clients allow you to show balances in mBTC, uBTC or satoshis. 

There will be no formal proclemation.  If MtGox tomorrow wanted to change their exchange to show bids, quotes, and balances in mBTC they could and if they don't want to for the next decade nobody can force them.