It mostly has to do with what the price will be then, but many people will be surprised not to see an immediate drop in difficulty, so it's probably a good time to refresh everybody's memory on what happened on the previous halving.

The 2020 halving took place on the 11th of May , difficulty was 20.6T,  price was in the 8-10k range and stayed that way until October, so it had no major impact on what happened right after the halving.

So what was the next epoch difficulty post-halving? 25T, that's roughly 20% increase despite the 50% drop in reward, then two weeks later it dropped back to the pre-halving levels of 20T and stayed there until 4th of July epoch change, so nearly 2 months with no downside action on the difficulty which was contrary to what most people believed would happen.

However, two months were long enough for many miners to capitulate and accept "defeat", because the 4th of July epoch had a massive difficulty drop from 20T to 14T which is a 30% drop in difficulty, and that was the lowest difficulty we have seen since then.

The takeaway from the previous halving is

1- Do not expect an immediate drop in hashrate
2- Noway on earth we are getting a 50% drop in difficulty (not half miners have to leave, and those who stay would just accept fewer rewards and move on)

If I had to guess what's going to happen the next halving is even "worse" or "better" depending on how you look at it, because back in 2020 there were no U.S investors' money, no large mining corporations like we have today, most miners did not have long-term cheap electricity contracts (they do now), so the current large U.S players will be able to resist for a lot longer until one of 3 things happen.

A- One large player falls and lets the others enjoy his rewards.
B- All of them reduce their cost by downclocking their gears to the most efficient point.
C- Price goes up to make up for up for the halving.

I don't think C is going to happen soon enough after the halving, A is somewhat likely but B seems the most reasonable outcome at least for the 6 months period post halving, and my guess is we won't see anything more than 20% drop in difficulty, so if diff is at 80T prior to the halving, a few months later we might drop to 65T and that's the lowest it's ever going to be.

I wouldn't rush to replace the PSU just yet, this could be a mix and match issue between the 3 hashboards although the kernel log states that they are all of the same exact type, but to be 100% that is not the problem you are going to have to try a few combinations

You already tried 1 and 2 so you know they mix well.
You need to try 1 and 3, if they mix well, then you know 2 and 3 can also mix.

Then you want to do one last test, with all 3 hash boards on boards just measure the output of the PSU, you may want to open the top cover so have easy access to the leads (be extra careful tho).

the reason why you need to do this test is the fact that you reported all 9 jacks output >12DC which means they all are fine, so it's possible that the PSU fails only when on-load, if you see voltage drop somewhere, then you can be sure it's a bad PSU.

It's also possible that your AC voltage (input side) drops at some point due to the adapter you using or the wires feeding that socket being to small for the current.


NO! 3000w PSU is too much for the S9 SE, it's just a waste of money, anything above 1500w is going to be more than enough.

I understand your idea, it's basically a commitment scheme that consists of two phases, commit and reveal, it's like writing a letter and putting it in a locked box, only to come in the future and reveal the key to that box, given that box has been there since 2012 for everyone to see, it's only becomes a matter of giving someone the keys so they can verify what is/was inside the message which you couldn't have changed since the box was put in place you can't access (in your example the transaction on the blockchain)

Oh, past that 100th block in your example this approach is no longer viable, if it's just a random message someone checking there would be no way to know the upper bound of the message, we would need a completely different approach to prove that after block 101 a message was indeed signed in block 50.

There should be some creative ways that won't be straightforward, maybe something like the above suggestion by vjudeu which I would need to evaluate in the time (3 am here)

He is asking about 'reducing blocksize,' not increasing it. The points you listed are related to increasing the blocksize. I think the last person to ever bring up anything of that nature was Luke, with his proposal to reduce the blocksize to 300KB, with a growth function that takes it to a max of 30MB or so. That was actually a very good proposal that unfortunately did not see the light.

But yeah, honestly, I have yet to see any serious voices wanting to reduce the blocksize just to limit the blockchain growth. I don't think such 'ideas' would have any community support, especially not with the current fees.

You can, but only if you plan a head before signing the message, otherwise, it's not possible.


You can use time-locked transaction to prove that you signed a message between two time intervals.

Say I have to sign a message tomorrow (not earlier and not later than tomorrow)

1- prove the lower bound on the signing time:

- I include the block hash of the first block tomorrow (this proves I couldn't have signed the message earlier than tomorrow)

2-prove the upper bound on the signing time

- I include the txid for a time-locked transaction that only unlocks tomorrow night which has not been included in a block yet (this proves I did not sign the message after tomorrow)

Given that not every node's clock is synced well with the rest, you are going to count on 'Bitcoin's Median Time Past', so this can't be narrowed down to the exact second, but is somewhat accurate.

You're correct, Leo. Running your node on your local computer is undoubtedly more cost-effective. The reason I used cloud prices is that they offer a more accurate representation of the total cost. Running a node involves more than just 'disk space'; it includes factors like electricity, bandwidth, and wear and tear on other hardware components, affecting their lifespan. Additionally, the heat generated by your PC might contribute to your AC bill. All these small details, along with the host's profit margin, are factored into cloud prices. Assuming a 10% profit for the host, if running your node on the cloud costs $10, doing it locally would roughly amount to $9.

Some people want larger blocks, I have not seen someone discuss smaller blocks for ages unless it's done as a part of some sarcasm like this one




Ordinals do slightly contribute to larger blocksize although by nature those transactions are not large, but more transactions = larger blocksize (although not always), but ordinals are not to blame, the block size based on consensus can be as large as 4MB on the desk, while it's possible on paper, it's going to be very difficult to construct a large amount of block at 4MB not even 3.5MB unless it contains some weird transactions, but one would assume that the worst case scenario would be 576MB of daily added size, roughly 200GB a year which is obviously very unlikely to happen since most blocks are "natural" and they won't fill 4MB worth of transactions, take last year's average and it would be roughly 1.75MB, say 2MB and that would be an average of 100GB added per year.

For cloud storage, you are looking at an average of $10-$20 a year, the VPS I use charges $2/month for an extra 200GB SSD so that would be an extra $12 a year (you can certainly find cheaper offers), for normal disk storage 'which is good enough for the use case' it's probably 1/3 the price.

As it stands right now, you can get a decent VPS with 1TB storage for $12 a month, I suppose many folks who run a full node have not yet faced disk issues yet, and storage would only become cheaper over time, so + 100GB a year is not a concern IMO.



 

Cost and energy are the center of all things mining.

1- Cost:

The main reason why BTC is as secure as it is today is not the technology limitations, if mining manufacturers had unlimited funds they could create an equivalent amount of the current hashrate in a few months, being costly to acquire enough hashrate to threaten the network is an important aspect to BTC's security.

2- Enegery:

Even with the assumption that hash power is free to produce and acquire, the next main challenge would be the energy required to run it, if we were to magically make every miner consume half the energy they consume now, we would take away half the security strength in that regard, and it's only a matter of time before you get double the number of miners injected into the network which would bring the energy needs back to where they started.


Eventually, you will get to the same equilibrium regardless, imagine a new hash function where computers are not even an option, your hashrate is determined by the number of potatoes you keep in boiling water, eventually, the cost of potatoes and the energy to heat water is respect to the mining rewards would be almost exactly inline with the current value combination we have with SHA256 miners running on electricity.

 

I can't say I don't enjoy the extra reward  , that would be straight-out lying  , although I would prefer steady medium fees than these crazy spikes of 300-500 sats Vbyte, i'd rather see fees stay steady at 10-20 sats/Vbyte, this would boost the mining rewards as well as make the network usable, I mean even 30-40 sats being the baseline is certainly better than 500 sats/Vbyte yesterday, 20 sats/ Vbyte today and then 100 sats/ Vbyte sats tomorrow, too high a fee is bad, and when it's coupled with "unpredicted" fee it gets worse.

I see only BTC address in talkimg topic, but I made joker aware of this topic and he would come here to comment, I think he would accept another currency since that is the best for everyone given the high fees.

@Turbartuluk, thank you so much buddy for the great contest, it was fun playing with you fine members of the German community.

0% is just some marketing stuff, it won't last forever, many pools did it when they first started, and it's only a matter of time before they change that unless they treat the pool as a charity then that would be a different story, in their last block they traded a 7.556BTC block for a 7.412 BTC block that's 1.9% which is higher than many PPLNS pools (not sure why you compare a PPLNS to a PPS pool in the first place).

 

So now it's two choices, we are getting to something, yes, I have always said the same thing, if you don't like how things are, start doing something, run your own client, email mining pools, and exchanges, don't just sit here and complain, it's the same thing I say to those who want larger blocks and those who are today nagging about Ordinals and demanding core devs to change the protocol just to ban ordinals.

I hope that the two of us are talking about the exact same point here, I am ONLY opposing the "If you don't like how things are with BTC, go use xyz" I am only against this particular stupid statement, why? because I think it's stupid, but any other rational argument against those who want to change the protocol is always welcomed.

Now in this context let me quote DooMAD reply to mine




In another topic discussion block size, I said

If we stick to this notion of "you dislike how things currently operate, you go else where" this means there is nothing more to discuss on bitcoin, we use it as is, and wait for everyone to be a millionaire.


But people talking about big blocks are not trying to impose anything, they know neither you nor them can change the rules, they are just having a conversation, you should stick to debating the pros and cons or ignore them, telling them to move else where is the textbook definition of " this is my blockchain, you are not allowed to oppose shit".

Those are discussing an ongoing "issue" in Bitcoin , telling them to go use BSV as if you think they don't know that already is pretty funny, again you here is plural (English sucks where everyone is referred by "you" )



How do you know? What if I point to a person who is a better coder than the average core dev and still wants bigger blocks? Did you not say it is a free world and every voice counts? Why is it suddenly Luke's voice is more important than stompy?


I would trust stompix over Luke every day of the week, because despite the former not being a part of the core team, he does not propose censorship and writes a bunch of b.s on thier pool page, or tell people it is not okay to store arbitrary data on the blockchain when he himself stores his catholic prayers on the blockchain.

Also, I am not saying their impact are equal, of course not, but they should both be treated equally, people will accept everything core throws at them, but when someone else says anything it is always "go away, use xyz coin, your opinion js stupid unless core devs propose it"

Now let me ask you a question, if theymos  started a thread suggesting "bigger blocks", would you or anyone else tell him to "go use BSV"?  

What if it was Greg Maxwell?

Do you honestly think 4MB blocks is enough and that we should not go above them?


I disagree, just because many people blindly worship core devs does not mean core devs are bad, i think for the most part they are genuine people who want whats best for bitcoin, and then among them will be people are somewhat biased due to whatever personal reasons they have.

But again, blocks have not increased in size isn't the sole responsibility for core team, as i said again, if a few large pools and exchanges wanted to increase it, core will have to follow, it just seems like the majority of the powerful entities have no issue with how bitcoin currently is, and I agree with them, i do not see the need for a change now given how I view and treat bitcoin.

If everyone else opt-in for larger blocks and core rejects (which they can't anyway) then we can blame them, until then, everyone seems happy about it except a few dozen folks.

Oh ok let us use this argument against everyone who complains about ordinals then, if you don't like how btc is currently dominated by brc-20 transactions go ahead and migrate somewhere else, how does that sound? Why do some people think it "their" bitcoin and nobody has the right to demand a change?

All of you saying this  would not say the same thing if block increase was proposed by core devs, but when an average person talks about it you start pointing fingers and ask them to migrate, why did you not say the same thing about Segwit then? Did any of you tell corr devs to fuck off if they did not like how btc was prior to segwit? 

Just for the record, I hardly transact on BTC blockchain, I am heavily invested in mining, I never encouraged block size increase, but I find it funny as hell the way some people here think they have the right to change the protocol to ban ordinals and also think others have no rights to demand something else.

The "if you want bigger blocks go to xyz" comments are going to age like milk when core devs increase block size, people will be quoting these comments for laughter.

Btw the way when I say "you" i don't mean you blackhatcoiner I am talking in general terms to everyone who falls into this category.

Royse, its saturday 9:50AM UTC, the week is over, I am removing my signature after this post.

It was a great pleasure working with you on Yomix campaign, thank you and looking forward to seeing you again.

But there is a 5 pages context to that part you quoted, not sure why would you qoute a tiny portion of a huge context, but ya, anyway.

 
Yes, using 1980s standards it is pretty big.


I never said I wanted big blocks, I said if I MUST take the action i would only raise blocksize big enough to kill alts not to compete with visa, but then again this argument of " if you want big blocks go to BCH or BSV" is pretty naive, honestly.

I assume, most of you saying this would be repeating the same stuff if the larger block blockchain was longer and kept btc ticker on all exchanges, you would be asking the small blockers to go use BCH if they wanted small blocks.

The way I see it is that most people don't even care about blocksize, they just want that version of bitcoin that exchanges call btc and is worth 40k, be it 4MB or 40MB makes no difference to the majority.

I wonder what would be the excuse when btc blocks are raised some point in the future, are you going to still say it is bad solution and ditch bitcoin or you will accept it?

 
Really? Then why segwit? Why did blocks go from 1MB to 4MB if bigger blocks are a bad solution?

Not sure if this was meant to be an argument or a joke, please elaborate.


How did you conclude that i forget what block size is? I literally mentioned that in my previous post , but ya anyway, blocks have been capped at 4MB long before taproot, you could construct a block that large without taproot, it would just have to be a weird combination of transactions, but ya again, not sure what is the point of bringing this up.




Mining pools enforce the code, they have more power than core devs, pools can use other client versions or even the same core version modified to thier wants and they would sustain it, core devs can't do shit without majority pool support.

But as i said in my last post, it is easier and more natural for core devs to propose the change and not the opposite, and ya its possible that some devs are biased due to some personal benefits

Exactly what I would do, raise the block limit to kill doge, eth, Solana, trx and every other major altcoin.



Change is "hard", by itself, there is a reason why many major projects today still rely on Fortran libraries, a language that is nearly 70 years old (probably older than 99% of forum members), you can still get a decent high-paying job knowing Fortran, there is also a reason why many of these multi-billion projects still use old un-optimized code that works, change is certainly hard and the outcome could be terrible if one thing goes south, heck, there is a known difficulty bug that doesn't take into account the duration it takes to solve the first block of every epoch, it has been there since the first client Satoshi wrote, and nobody bothered fixing it, because it ends in a hard-fork.

If you ask the average IT manager how they feel when they touch one tiny group policy you will understand that change is indeed hard, so ya, let's not make it seem like it's a matter of dev cores performing a double-click and wala! block size is now 100MB with nothing broken along the way.

With that said, the blocksize change isn't as "difficult" as many would make it sound, at least not the forking part of it, actually, it's probably easier now than before in that regard, probably 95% or so of blocks are found but known pools, so some coordination between core, pools, exchanges and major wallets operators is not impossible, it's pretty doable and could be done slowly, and safely.

But then again, it's too much work that nobody seems to be interested in just yet, and when I say nobody I mean somebody whose words matter (not the bunch of us arguing on this topic  ), but say Antpool, Foundry, Binance, Coinbase,  Trezzor and CMC decided they wanted to increase blocksize, do you think core would oppose them? if they did, do you think they can actually stop them from forking the network and keeping the longest chain and BTC ticker on all major exchanges and wallets? Would Core want to stay obsolete with a client nobody who matters uses it? how long would it take before all other nodes come to realize that they are stuck on an old obsolete blockchain that nobody mines on?

It's true that if code devs took the initiative and started to lobby for bigger blocks -- it would be a lot smoother and easier to happen than if Binance stated that, but again, that won't be easy, how long it took Taproot to activate? proposed around 2018? merged in 2020? activated near the end of 2021? so 3-4 years for a soft fork to take place, took a lot of lobbying and patience, doing a controversial hard fork is gong to be a lot more difficult.

Maybe it's possible the core devs spoke to major pools about a block size increase and pools denied their request? have you tried contacting these major pools and asked if they would be interested in raising the size to 12MB? why is it always core devs to blame?

If you live in a country of a population of 7 people with 2 running for president, your voice has a strength of 1/5, if there were 5 miners each running their node, your voice/code would have the same voting power, so where do things differ?

-In government elections, you can't legally and honestly buy more votes whereas in BTC you can buy them with $
-In government elections, you only have limited options, usually two jerks whom you know are going to fuck you over, you chose the one who is less likely to **** on your face  , whereby in BTC, you may just run a node that says you own 99% of the supply.
-In government elections, if your guy loses, you can try again in 4 years, nothing major, whereas in BTC if enough people oppose the current "rules" you break the community into two (ya elections do break community in some cases in some countries)

So ya, not sure what you guys are trying to get to with this government stuff, but you can find many similarities as well as many differences, to me, the main difference between the two is that the winners in BTC election are likely to have good intentions after all, they invest a lot of money and time and they would want what's best for BTC even if it goes against my point of view, I would still somehow benefit from losing, whereby in government elections, there is a huge chance that those getting the votes (including mine) are actually going to screw me over, steal my money and make my life worse.

This is one of the reasons why I am not all-in super maxi YOLO shit, I don't attack those who think blocks need to be huge, I mean aside from the sick minority who want to destroy Bitcoin that exists on both sides, I believe the majority of them are genuine people who want what they think is best for BTC, it just so happens that their view on things differs from mine.



That is an interesting point you have right there, and I would personally say I care more about the value of BTC than the "utility" BUT, only after defining what "utility" actually is, you may think utility is BTC being a great medium of exchange, cheap and instant like credit cards, and that's fine, someone else may say the best utility for BTC is the store of value or the ability to transfer it without going through one or more centralized entities.

Interestingly enough, if I asked you the same question, I would be very surprised if you said you care more about the "cheap and fast" aspect than you care about the "value", because I know you are someone who perfectly understands what bitcoin is, and what are its limitations, it's technically not possible for BTC to beat any traditional medium of exchange in terms of speed and price.

The reality is, BTC was never intended to do such a thing, I don't understand why many people think BTC took a different path, it's probably people's different ways of interpreting the white paper.


Every single aspect of the abstract of the white paper still holds true, you can still transact BTC without going "through a financial institution", the white paper doesn't say you would transact for dirt cheap, does it?  

Obviously, it doesn't mean BTC can't be a lot cheaper to use than it is now, so none of that does justify why blocksize shouldn't be increased, all the arguments against that are rather weak today, so whatever excuses some people had back then and were somewhat valid -- are probably totally meaningless and useless now.

The real question however is, can we keep the same level of security, reliability, and smoothness with a block size increase of say 300% where blocks become 12MB on disk, will that break the bank or burn the hardware of any node out there? certainly not, but will 12MB solve all the scalability issues? also no

So now it becomes a matter of what people who own Bitcoin actually want. are the majority of people upset about the fees? are there enough people ditching BTC for its high fees? these questions are hard to answer, if I were the BTC's CEO and had to take action, I would cut block rewards and time in half then increase the block size enough to suck the volume of all major altcoins and stop there.