Haha, no way. What you're describing is the Voldemort case of any respectable crypto. I shan't even paraphrase it to a more understandable form

Rates is easy: c3.8xlarge is around 0.3 USD/hour, g2.2xlarge around 0.1 USD/hour. Slightly lower in fact, but let's compare them by max rate.

Hashrate is more difficult. I don't know exactly how to read the miner logs, the hashrate values seems to change quite a bit over time.

Additional complication: when I opened a large number of concurrent c3.8xlarge instances in the same region, the per instance rate seemed to be lower than when I only had one or two instances in that region running.

Question for those more knowledgeable on mining / EC2 matters:

I don't have the exact numbers to support this claim, but by my estimations of the last few days, EC2 mining via GPU/g2.2xlarge instances seems to be more cost-efficient than EC2 mining via c3.8xlarge. Is that at all possible?

I had about 30 c3.8xlarge instances running yesterday, and replaced them with about 30 g2.2xlarge instances. The total hashrate seems to be lower (hard for me to add it up, but maybe about half of the CPU instances), but cost is closer to 1/3 of the CPU instances.

Just asking, hoping someone with more experience in this can maybe confirm this intuition, or tell me if I'm most likely wrong.

Yeah, that's not how it works...

Warning ominously that the mere discussion "hurts the coin", then happily jumping into the discussion explaining why emission change is bad.

(Important note, by the way: I'm sure everyone in this discussion is aware of it, but maybe not every silent reader is: this is about the *speed* of the emission, not the total number of emitted "units") Just to be perfectly clear.

Discussions like this are a necessary part of a community project like this, in my opinion. A bit like the Scottish referendum, I think: it's necessary to have it, and after it's done, every side should accept the result.

It's true that there was already a vote on this matter about half a year ago, but the community was much smaller back then, the proposal unworkable in a way (return mined coins), and it was mainly addressed at miners afaik.

So I think *having* this discussion is fair enough. We're not a religion where "the code" is some unquestionable gift from the gods. On the other hand, I understand the concern that a *never-ending* discussion on this topic will hurt the value.

So, I'm fine with postponing this discussion when a) the current attack (or "attack") is long forgotten, and b) we have secured more funding for the devs. But eventually, this discussion will have to be had, because I know I'm not the only one who is in this project for the long run , who is worried about the prospect of emission being as fast as it is.

One more remark on this topic:

Big props to you, smooth, for your reactions on the previous pages.

As far as I know you've stated before that you are actually (more or less) against adjusting emission speed. Still, you're giving a very fair representation of both sides (or point out misrepresentation of one by the other). That's not at all to be expected, especially in online discussions, in my experience.

What I'm saying is, if we ever get to the point where the community / devs / stakeholders /miners make a decision on this matter, it's good to know that you're probably going to be in a position to guide that discussion. Even if the result is a resounding 'no change', I'll be happy to know there was a fair discussion and decision.

You're right of course, ET. There wasn't ever really a compelling reason for most of the "early adopters" (which includes everyone on board now, even those that bought in at a higher price) to spend big with BTC. Some spending to encourage merchant adoption - check. Other than that, the usage cases in favor of Bitcoin still are outlined clearly, but they're not fully realized yet (lack of ease of use, security, and inefficiencies at the fiat/crypto interface), or they're not picked up yet in those cases where it would be a major case (restrictions of capital flow).

For now, I'm happy that it is already useful for a number of cases: sending fast, secure payments to other private end-users. Making non-recurring payments without providing much personal detail. Making payments that cannot be blocked (e.g. donations to WL).

The rest is speculation, and it's absolutely okay like that. We're collectively betting on, or against, a future where the above paragraph isn't true anymore. For the past 6 months or so, we've been in a correction on the previously established "consensus". Still, trading at a $5.5B market cap isn't too shabby as a collective expression of the belief that Bitcoin will be a major force in the future.

Agreed then.

And I'll even add, "50% of what?", which is a tricky question: a majority of users? a majority of funds? a mining majority? (in my own understanding, "economic majority" is not necessarily identical to "fund majority", but also includes network influence and "soft influence" like community standing - but because of its fuzzy definition, you can't really put "economic majority" in that sense into a vote)

Also: do we require a simple majority or an absolute majority?

Not impossible to come to come to a solution on those topics, but I'll freely admit, it'll be a pain to agree on the decision making process on this matter.

Not the point. Maybe users will adopt Bitcoin, maybe they won't.

I'm simply pointing out the 'moving goalposts' type responses: A year ago, it was more or less considered a fact by the skeptics that merchants and payment processors (like Paypal) would never adopt Bitcoin. If I have a bit more time, I'll go dig out the posts.

Turns out, that wasn't the case. Merchant adoption is actually picking up quite nicely. Paypal getting on board (cautiously, but still) is pretty big. So now the new argument is: "Okay, so maybe *merchants* are interested, but consumers simply don't care."

Right now, I tend to agree  - user adoption is lagging behind.

What I don't agree with however is the notion that it needs to stay like that, for some rock solid logical reason ("fees will always be higher" etc.).

To me it simply looks like we took one major step in the right direction (merchant adoption, payment options), which means one major risk factor is removed (that you can't spend bitcoins). The future will tell if and how user adoption will kick. Might take some additional incentives, or improved security for users, or maybe just better exchanges, but there's no coherent reason why user adoption cannot happen, imo.

Which essentially means, if it would come to that, you recommend to go against an economic majority because it is different from your minority view (EDIT: in this scenario. Not saying your view is necessarily the minority view). Yes, makes sense.

It's really pretty simple: if the change of the original rules is perceived as so terrible that a large number of early buyers are sufficiently turned off, then a) there won't be an economic majority supporting the change, and b) if there would be an economic majority in support of changes, the early buyers in the minority can still sell. Wondrous how markets work like that.

One word: moving the goalposts.

(Okay, more like three words.)

I don't entirely agree. There is no need to rush this topic, and I'm pretty sure that right now is not the time to seriously look into it, but in principle, I'd welcome if the 'emission' discussion is re-opened at a point in the not-too-distant future.

I summarized my view on the matter about a week ago in a discussion in the speculation thread as:

I'm skeptical about altcoins in principle, but reserve to keep an open mind in case there's an interesting niche demand that appears to be served well by some alt.

That said, "unobtainium" (wow. much name. such clever.) must be the least inspired attempt at alt creation I've seen in quite a while. Basically, Litecoin, but with lower inflation - yeah, that looks like a real Bitcoin killer...

Seriously though, I strongly suggest you get out of it. Some alts, with a very well defined profile and a competent dev team, might make sense. Unobtainium doesn't.

Beautiful discovery. Wish I had found it

Judging by how long the rallies lasted lately, I'd say most if not all bulls are kinda 'prema', if you catch my drift.

First remark: interesting discussion. Thanks.

Second: Agreed, but I didn't intend to distinguish "malicious" (or "benevolent") as moral categories.

Inside the economic system of one individual crypto, an actor will be economically irrational if he attacks the network to the point of destruction: he is going to experience a net loss if he destroys the value of the currency that he is paid in. The network value post-attack times his share of the network he gained through the attack must be higher than the cost of the attack for him to consider the attack economically viable.

For an outside actor, this doesn't hold. He could either have a higher level economic motivation that allows him to take the cost of an attack (e.g. removing a competitor crypto, to strengthen his preferred crypto), or he could be what you called a "joker type personality". I claim that from the practical point of view of the network that needs to be defended, the two are indistinguishable. This is the case I meant by "malicious actors".

The defense against the first type is keeping the total network market value in balance with the cost of an attack. If the former is a lot higher than the latter, a (controlled) attack becomes profitable. "Outside" attacks (joker type attackers, or competitors) can only be deterred by strengthening the network further, to the point where the attack is prohibitively expensive for the attacker on its own.

I'm pretty sure the Monero network is far from the second type of security yet (the Bitcoin network might be close to it, for anyone other than a government organization or extremely large company), but I suppose your point could be rephrased as that the network isn't even secure in the first sense so far.

Some would add that, if a (relevant) majority is malicious anyway, no system based on higher authority is going to rein them in anyway.


EDIT: meandering dangerously close to off-topic, I am... sorry smooth.

I think Nekomata was under the impression that you are defending BCX behavior, as morally justified, which I'm pretty sure you are not.

You are (correctly, imo) pointing out that security in an open-source decentralized environment can't be achieved through an appeal to a higher authority, based on a claim of moral superiority, which in some posts seems to be the implicit premise.

In crypto, security can be achieved as a collective effort only, which is a scary thought only if one assumes that the majority (of users, computing power, etc.) is malicious.

Thanks for the answers re: EC2. I understand your point now, smooth. Some of my instances were outbid over night, not to return, so I guess the "persistent" setting is the way to go.

A question for the CryptonotepoolUK guys: Is the XMRminerToDevFund AWS upgraded to the latest version? Or doesn't that really matter because it's pooled mining?

EC2 related question:

Will my instances get automatically "renewed" and keep running as long as my max price is high enough to beat the competition?

Hm. Don't think so... I remember it being at mid-60 KH/s, and now it's at ~76.

I added a few more instances. Really wish I could see the actual hashrate inside the instance :/