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Excellent.
I was getting tired of clicking through the mining link to a technical article, then back out to the technical category every time.
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The only problem is on the forums, not in real life.
Currently, the BTC unit is divisible to FAR below the point that anyone cares. And if we start getting transactions down to that point, it is trivial to extend the protocol. In fact, we will probably extend it for technical reasons a century or two before any real life transactions need the extra digits. Yes, I said centuries, and no, I wasn't kidding.
Why not worry about something that might become a problem in your lifetime rather than making up this crap?
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Or it could happen by some freak accident 5 minutes from now.
Your response was aimed at strengthening the computationally expensive argument.
Why are we using a 160 bit hash instead of something that is more resistant to collisions? Will we be able to move to a 224/256 bit hash if and when the need arises, even if it's 100 years from now?
You could use 4096 bit hashes, and still get a freak accident in 5 minutes. |
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While they are required to enforce the laws, in general, there is no obligation to any particular individual.
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I should remind everyone that there has been absolutely zero evidence of any big new arrays, FPGA or otherwise, coming online recently.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So far, there has been zero proof, even of the ordinary kind.
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 Assuming this isn't a clever new form of trolling: Don't touch your outlets. Don't even think about unscrewing the cover, much less swapping the outlet itself. Multiple outlets can be hooked to the same circuit. Keep trying different outlets until you find a combination that doesn't pop breakers when running. I hope you weren't serious about fuses, because if you were, you have shitty old wiring, and you are begging for trouble.
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Collisions don't have to break the system. If two blocks had the same hash, it would be trivial to figure out from context when one was which. Even easier would be to just avoid the issue by making sure a new hash is unique.
2^256 is an absurdly huge number. It is in the ballpark of the number of particles in the universe. I don't think we'll ever run out of blocks or hashes. And if we start getting close, it would be trivial to jump to SHA512 (or whatever).
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The market for GPUs is millions of times the size of the high-end FPGA market, and gets MUCH better press. As long as AMD doesn't do anything to make mining less efficient on their chips, we will have nothing to fear.
press ? what for ? market ? how GPU's market created/grow ? have it anyway related with FPGA ? with or without BTC mining context ? When a new video card comes out, hundreds of thousands of people know about it, and there are big events with reporters. When a new FPGA comes out, twenty sweaty engineers know about it, and the press is nowhere to be seen. you don't get it. sometimes press/PR noise don't help, but dammage effort to create something, bring it to market and etc. both because competing for cooperation, conflict of interests[how many ppl buy GPU's for mining after this project rise to full-power ? how many NSA/CIA/FSB crunch-farms become deprecated waste of power/iron/silicon ? how quick nowdays chiper's become deprecated too ? and other examples[im intentionaly not enumerate rest very obvious examples of utilisation of such project fruits]. i mean if you plan grow its "'from ground" its okay ? both as BTC backend or "just for fun" or both, but PR support frequently more dammage than help for such start-ups. thats outsider opinion and strictly IMO, but i seen many very amazinng IT projects, collapsed just because big-biz sharks wanted no danger for their high-margins outdated-garbage-shipping "business". sorry if im not understand something or explain inconsistent or do it wrong way, as well as for my "engrish". The whole point is that GPUs are likely to retain a huge advantage over FPGAs because they are a larger market. |
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The market for GPUs is millions of times the size of the high-end FPGA market, and gets MUCH better press. As long as AMD doesn't do anything to make mining less efficient on their chips, we will have nothing to fear.
press ? what for ? market ? how GPU's market created/grow ? have it anyway related with FPGA ? with or without BTC mining context ? When a new video card comes out, hundreds of thousands of people know about it, and there are big events with reporters. When a new FPGA comes out, twenty sweaty engineers know about it, and the press is nowhere to be seen. |
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SI units will win in the end.
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Because Bitcoins are traded anonymously, they will be extremely easy to steal once the malware community begins to take notice unless something is done to secure how we access Bitcoins. At the moment, we simply turn on the program and go. We can even rip them straight from the computer. There's a tutorial on this very website on how to rip your Bitcoins and back them up to DropBox. Obviously, there needs to be an additional layer of security. Files need to be secured with passwords, the program needs to require a password that CANNOT BE RETRIEVED (if it is retrievable, it is possible for an exploiter to remotely retrieve it) IF LOST, and everything needs to be encrypted.
You already have this. In fact, if you think about it, you already have as much security with bitcoin as you choose to have. The public keys that correspond to the bitcoin addresses are the passwords that can't be retrieved. |
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...they can tell exactly how much work was done...
Thats not entirely true, since the work required to find a valid hash is random, the amount of work done can only be guesed. I agree with you on the rest though. After thinking about the system for a while whan realizes that there is almost no alternative... Meh. They can tell how much work it would take to duplicate the result with any given probability. The difference between that and the actual amount of work done, over time, becomes a philosophical issue. In the real world, they are essentially the same. |
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If we run out of bits in SHA256 (and I'm not sure if we will, even if we used every particle in the universe for computation), we can just switch to SHA512, or whatever.
Bitcoin has been VERY well considered. It will take a fundamental change in our knowledge of either physics, or information theory, and probably both, to break it entirely.
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The market for GPUs is millions of times the size of the high-end FPGA market, and gets MUCH better press. As long as AMD doesn't do anything to make mining less efficient on their chips, we will have nothing to fear.
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Other options: Just send transaction IDs to the pool for verification, along with the header. 2. Get Bitcoin address for the pool.
The pool should give you N addresses: One for D=1 work, one for D=6 work, one for D=12 work. etc. D=6 work pays 6 shares. Etc. The reason for this is because your scheme uses a lot more bandwidth to transmit shares, but this is trivially corrected by increasing difficulty. But that would increase variance to unacceptable levels for slow miners. By changing the address they pre-commit to a target difficulty and the shares will be credited accordingly. The miner software can then bet setup so that it picks the diff that gets it close to 1 share per minute...which should end up being less bandwidth than currently used. Better, but not good, as load is not driven by pool, but by miners. I see thousands of CPU miners on my pool even with current difficulty, which is - from economical point of view - nonsense. So how to solve problem where hundreds CPU miners can shut down your pool with sending 1diff blocks, 1MB in size each?  With rising difficulty (expect diff over milion soon!), one share will be amost worthless. By increasing basic difficulty, you can make it better, but will people accept minimum difficulty @ 1000? Btw it's not only transfer problem, calculating complete block for every share is pretty hard, too. Forgot that pool can calculate tens of hundreds shares per second... Basically I like the idea, but those are reasons why I leaved it long time ago. If you set a minimum difficulty of 1000 for your pool, and they want to participate, that pretty much means they'll accept it. If people really can't let go of CPU mining, they can run their own mini-pool that handles difficulty 1 blocks before sending those that meet the pool criteria up to the big pool. Maybe meta-pools will pring up. Just because you can't imagine how to scale things doesn't mean that no one can. |
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It would be trivial to switch the network from 256 bit hashes to 512 bit hashes. I haven't checked the math, but I think that we'd run out of theoretical computing power in the universe before we needed to.
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No, nothing in this thread is right.
Price manipulation is possible right now because volumes are low, but it will cost you more than it costs everyone else, so you'll lose.
The scenarios involving technical manipulation are entirely founded on misconceptions. The network really doesn't work the way you imagine it does. Someone would need several orders of magnitude more computing power than the rest of the world combined to pull off a block chain manipulation, and it would gain them very, very little.
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Ok. When someone looks at a block, they can tell exactly how much work was done, and they can verify which work was done. No other scheme has that, and no other scheme will work.
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