i'm talking about mining power consumption. do you think it is justifyable to have 3MW already in btc today? i do but if price goes up by x100k, power consumption will do so, too and 300 nuclear power plants is not what i want to be needed to run bitcoin so for me it is ecologically essential to reduce the reward at some point. satoshi was maybe too pessimistic about global adoption of btc. we can only guess what the $-reward per block will be at the end of the 50BTC area. I imagine it could at least be 150.000$/block and i somehow doubt that satoshi really thought it would go that fast.

at that point, bitcoin will be the only lottery that cashes out about 100% of the money you put in as i doubt that many people will be participating at cash out rates of the established lotteries.

@deuxmill: If BTC were not limited but continue to attribute 50BTC to each block found and taken the 50BTC were at 1500$ before, what do you think the power consumption would be like if the world switches over to BTC in 20 years?

@Grant: I don't understand how people claim the BTC not to be inflationary in a phase it increases its volume by 30% in one year. BTC will be dead in 10 years for the one reason or the other. At least that's what most people believe that now try to make a profit from the rally in the BTC economy.

network take over ...

yeah sorry I know most people here think that is impossible but I'm pretty sure that with 2M$ at hands, I could do that.

impressive ... +1000 downloads in no time.
People on the market trust you more than here ...

In case people here also want the market version rather than compile for themselves, here is the link:



One issue I see is the wording that might confuse people into thinking this would be the official app by MtGox. If I were MtGox I would check my legal options. Maybe you want to put a disclaimer? Sorry for being so picky

not until i gimped it. hint to all further gimpers: the later spots overlap the older ones. we both did that wrong. my main focus was to cleanly extract the dot with the shadow but forgot to care for the overlap

sometimes you see funny patterns ...

What was the question again? How can you get more BTC per rig? How about a slightly modified rig?

The business plan goes as follows:
Set up TOR exit nodes for BTC. Everybody who wants to run his own TOR exit node but fears the trouble now can pay you to run it. The management is insanely simple from the user's perspective:
* Send coins to XY
* check at myTorNode.com/XY how much traffic it is handling

Many BTC early adopters like the TOR project and might pay coins easily.

... just an idea ...


I'm a small miner, too and know how the hassle of setting up the hardware was too much of an effort to now switch off and see how it would have been worth it when BTC hits 50$ in 2 weeks. Sorry but you can count on me mining the next months at least

... except for it being controlled by 3 pools.

But ... back to the topic: For many cases the confirmations are not as important as people think. If for example I want to pay my burger at my fav restaurant, what is the risk of double spending? The unconfirmed transaction is almost instant already and will have one conf before I've finished eating.

Not getting any confirmations either means the pools decided to introduce a mandatory fee for all transactions ... sorry .... wrong topic ... or it means I spent money I didn't have and that's fraud I could get sued for. Any small payment that is not completely anonymous is not subject to a double spending risk.

Wonder how an instawallet url in the collection box would be handled with ...

(Disclaimer: I neither use instawallet nor collection boxes but maybe someone who trusts both is willing to give it a shot?)

What if a big pool registers as a miner to a small pool. It would get paid based on the shares but not provide blocks. Pool A does that with pool B 25% its size. A throws B's size at it loosing 25% speed on solving own blocks causing B to loose 50% speed but A getting paid based on shares. A would only loose 12.5% the profit and look even good as it could pay out more than based on its solved blocks would make sense.

I'm not worried about the miners mining for such a corrupt pool. In a pool I normally know after one day if it pays what it promises to pay. I'm worried about the competing pools and solo miners.

Actually the whole point of this thread was not about discussing details of the one pool or the other but about whether there is any mechanism to track if foul play is under way. Is there any track of invalid blocks?

First off, a big pool can destroy a smaller pool by providing shares but no blocks. This game played on all non-cartel pools will make it easy for a cartel to make their pools raise to gain more than 50% in combined hashing power.

Deepbit + slush or btcguild is already more than 50%. So the entire bitcoin economy that is oh so peer to peer independent nobody ever will control it ... depends on the good will of those behind deepbit, slush and btcguild. Isn't that a bit much trust in those 3? What is wrong in my analysis? Please enlighten me you gods of more than 100 posts!


Oh guys it is not that complicated but I'll reword my sig some day so that even you will get it.
Do you realize that the peers are not the miners but the pools? The miners only do what the pool tells them to do. So according to bitcoin watch, there are seven pools accounting for 95% of the bitcoin network. That is a very bad situation. I hope to see many more pools and pool software so people just start pools with friends and communities that have a natural trust in each other beforehand.

Hi,

as an increase in the invalid block count would be an indicator of a 51% take over scenario and as I have seen how eligius got 4/10 blocks invalidated recently I wonder if there is any effort taken to keep track of invalidated blocks?

In my opinion the block chain should generally be a block tree containing also the invalid blocks with the client being able to request the longest chain, only. With this data the block explorer should also keep track of those lost blocks to run forensic analysis on them later.

Opinions?

How do you know the smaller pool is not under the control of the same mastermind?

No reason to not use a pool?? Pardon me? How about pools having the potential to attack the bitcoin network as a whole? see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Talk:Weaknesses#Pools for details.

Well ... my 2%/day are simply how performance was for 2 years now. Sure there are limits and at some point we will approximate Moore's law (that is when all PC's do mining
I just wanted to take somewhat equal assumptions as the other authors of the article.

although I would not vouch for your way of getting there, your solution is also much more in favour of mine. Thanks for looking into it.

Hi,

I've been working on that question and have a result that is far off the result previously found in the wiki:
My assumption: network growth is 2%/day
My result: 70% to never mine a single block ever.

Old assumption: difficulty growth is 10%/iteration (which is far more optimistic than my assumption)
Old result: 96% to never mine a single block ever. (which is a magnitude more pessimistic than my result)

Who's interested in proof reading? Who has another, maybe simpler solution to provide?
The Wiki link is here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_pooled_mining#Alternative_Perspective

I don't see your app particularly useful but I'm interested in the reactions of others as I also thought about doing an app that would require the keys. Actually mine would need some private keys but not necessarily with a balance on them. Guess the crucial part is that the key extraction is open source.

In your case if the extraction is open source and if users compile it from that source, things can be pretty save but expecting many will take the hassle to compile for them self is illusionary.

anyway, i'll stay tuned

Yes, please please please do this. It would be much saver having a miner mine to an air gapped wallet than being forced to mine to an online wallet.
My rigs are in a server room and I would feel saver if I could run them without a wallet worth 1000$ at a time on it each time it hits a block.

crazy shit! btc is exciting.

while i'm always pro transparency i see it's the right of the owners of this forum to delete as many posts as they want. you are free to leave. in fact i hope there will grow competition as with just one forum only, there is quite some power to manipulate the market by just randomly going offline.

Sorry but that sounds ridiculous - at first ...

So the scenario would be:
Pool (E)vil registers as a miner with Pool (G)ood. Now G assigns work to E. E assigns it on to its miners. E hands on the proof of work part to G. G still finds some blocks and distributes the reward among all according to their proof of work.
E would only need to shift as many miners over to G as there were miners there before to cut G's miners payouts in half. E's miners actually mining for G would get rewards based on E's policies that would be higher than G's miners.

Sounds like a plan for big pools that want to keep smaller pools at distance. Thanx for the inspiration
I love gitCoin's complexity in its simplicity.