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Sorry, I meant " I don't think it would become a real problem."
However, if someone with massive hashing power could push it over the boundary, then blocks would stop, and stop forever. The next difficulty adjustment will happen after 2160 blocks are found, which will never happen.
Remember: difficulty adjustment happens every 2160 blocks, not every 2 weeks
That's true, but (Correct me if I'm wrong) it's nothing that couldn't be fixed by a fork. In fact, a fork would be even easier since the "original" branch of the network would be at a standstill. Granted, the fork would have to include some measure of preventing that same situation from happening again and that may not be feasible. |
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It's a bad situation, but fortunately SHA-256 has held up well this far so it's less than likely to happen. Of course, that doesn't answer your question as to what if it DID happen. I'd imagine it'd probably end in a hard-fork that involved changing to a new algorithm. It'd be a huge disruption and put a lot of ASIC miners out of business but probably wouldn't be the absolute end of Bitcoin.
And then, of course, it becomes a question of whether or not the new algorithm is any more random than SHA-256.
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Tell that to all the Libertarians who insist BitCoin will be the end-all, be-all, of money everywhere.
Bitcoin is, after all, still considered in beta.
I apologize if new technology isn't user friendly enough for you but I hardly see a reason to disqualify the entire concept. |
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I didn't invent BitCoin. I want to use it. Why should I figure it out?
Aren't there enough computer nerds?
Because it's your money? I know BitcoinTalk is generally against using web wallets, and for good reason considering the security risks present with a lot of them, but hosting your own wallet is only more secure if you actually know what you're doing with it. If you're not comfortable using Bitcoin Core there are a plethora of web wallets out there. Of course that would require some amount of calculated risk and that's for "computer nerds". I'm personally a big Bitcoin user but I wouldn't go recommending Bitcoin to someone who wasn't willing to put in the time to learn how to use it. Bitcoin is, after all, still considered in beta. |
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and people have been able to steal bitcoins.
Right, completely unlike PayPal, credit cards, or online bank accounts obviously. Every problem you've pointed out has a solution and it doesn't seem like you have much interest in figuring that out. |
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So if I post an address on a website and multiple people sent bitcoin to it I'll be OK? I'll get all the coin?
100 addresses? That's insane. That's like going to the bank and them giving you 100 checking account numbers. WTF? I thought it was safe to post and use an address?
Yes, it's fine to use a single address if that's easier. The reason people use multiple addresses, however, is because all Bitcoin transactions are entirely public and recorded and so using a different address for each transaction is a good way to retain privacy. |
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I do not believe one can accurately calculate and/or estimate when all Bitcoins will be mined. There are many factors such as mining profitability, technological advancements in mining speed, the demand for Bitcoins, collapses of certain global economies, and countless other variables. What we do know is that the last block containing new bitcoin will be the block 6,930,000 ; we are currently on block 312,450 (at the time of this posting). The estimation given is based off block speeds being under 10 minutes per block. With even the slightest change in speed, the date could be prolonged. If calculating the average block speed at 15 minutes, it would be late 2202. Keep in mind when trying to estimate what the average block speed is, todays speed is only a small window in time. With increasing difficulty, the future could hold hour long block times if our technology does not increase. Alternatively if one were to develop an unthinkable mining rig with speeds unimaginable, they could quickly be pumping out blocks every few seconds.
Overall, to answer your question; We will never know when the last bitcoin will be mined until it happens.
If you are concerned as to what would happen once the last coin is mined, all the transaction fees would go to the pool that finds the block. The transaction fees would be divided up and serve as *hopefully* a substantial reward.
Difficulty doesn't increase linearly, it changes based on hash rate. Difficulty recalculates with the intention of keeping mining speed at (Or as close as predictably possible to) 10 minutes per block. So increasing hash rate would only cause blocks to be mined faster than 10 minutes until the difficulty retargets. And the same can be said about a decrease in hash rate. |
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I'll try again ..
First, I don't pretend to understand the 'technical' aspects of crypto at all ..
I do know that all the wallet security features are exclusively
focused on foiling access to one's wallet ..
Judging by the number of threads on this board that deal with "theft
of coins" .. foiling access is clearly not enough .. There must be some
additional security feature/procedure etc etc in order to authorize a withdrawal ..
That's all ..
The average user has got to feel that the wallet ( hot or cold ) is secure and utilitarian ..
It's got to be as intuitive as online banking and online trading ..
Just sayin ..
Triff ..
That's a perfectly valid concern. It's just that Bitcoin is such a vastly different system than the likes of PayPal or similar electronic payment methods that the same security features can't be applied. |
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the simplest best answer is cold storage.
authorization is irrelevant if a hacker got into your machine.
=====
If your 'bolded' assertion is true then crypto will remain a side show
and never attain mass adoption ..
For "SMS one time pass" to be defeated the 'hacker' would have
had to either break into my home and/or steal my cell phone and
my computer .. I'll accept that 'risk' for the minor hassle of
having to take a phone call and enter a one time password prior
to withdrawing my coins .. Better that than discovering that
"Ooops someone hacked my wallet and my coins are gone"
Triff ..
Even if, say, Bitcoin QT started requiring SMS verification before it submitted a transaction, it wouldn't stop an attacker who had your key from creating a transaction without SMS verification. I don't see how the entire decentralized Bitcoin network would implement SMS verification. So even if, hypothetically, transactions were to require some value that could only be generated by specific cell phones (And I have no clue how that'd work aside from maybe storing a second private key on the phone) it'd basically just be a 2 of 2 transaction with the second key being this SMS key. |
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Except that it isn't necessarily counterproductive to mine empty blocks to get faster propagation. The propagation time depends on the number of transactions in the block, so a miner could make an estimate of the odds of a block being orphaned due to slow propagation and weigh the potential losses of an orphaned block against the certain losses of not including fee-paying transactions.
With fees still being a very small part of the block reward, the answer may not be obvious.
True, let's look at the numbers on that. According to Blockchain.info's orphan block graph (And I qualify this by saying that I don't know how accurate this graph is) you could pretty reasonably estimate that the odds of a block being orphaned is close to 2% (144 blocks a day, around 2 or 3 are orphaned per day). So as long as transaction fees are worth at least 1/50 of the block reward there shouldn't be any significant motivation to mine empty blocks. Currently that would mean .5 BTC worth of transaction fees per block, and as you said currently the fee per blocks is generally much smaller than that. Is my math right on this? EDIT: I just realized that I forgot to account for the fact that sending an empty block does not completely remove the possibility of that block being orphaned. Unfortunately I don't know exactly how one would calculate the odds of a block containing transactions being orphaned vs. the odds of an empty block being orphaned. |
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The failsafe I guess you could say is the fact that miners benefit from including transactions in a block as that means they get paid the fee (Assuming there is one). So fortunately there shouldn't be a situation where miners are deliberately mining transactionless blocks. Occasionally it happens by pure chance but that's just the random nature of block generation. Of course I suppose you could argue that a miner might mine transactionless blocks in order to cut down on the block size for faster propagation, but that'd seem pretty counter productive. |
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