Another respected cryptographer predicts collapse in bitcoin mining

[cypherdoc]

The sell price is lower now than in July. Are you saying that makes mining more worthwhile? I fail to see your logic here. 

looking at bitcoincharts, the lowest the price dipped in july was around $12. the lowest in august was around $7.

and either way, your post still was completely non sequitur to mine.

I'm glad you think that way. I hope miners keep selling their bitcoin in the $4-5 range. I'll keep buying them and we're all happy. 

this.

it seems that many ppl around here fail to realize that at least 50% of the population is willing to think counterintuitively, aka, buy the dips.

[Wandering Albatross]

means those with the highest coin holdings (wealthiest) are the only ones able to sign blocks and transactions, being able to do it without requiring heavy work. The reasoning is that since they have the most coin wealth, they have the most to lose, and thus they won't try to screw the network, lest they crash the price of the coin and lose everything. The idea is also that they will have the most incentive to protect it.

Prof-of-stake sounds like a good idea only until you realize that it already exists, and is called USD and Federal Reserve.

It sounds like a bad idea.  I heard of another one recently called ripple, ripple-project.org. A trust-based system but doesn't seem like a lasting idea.

[mcdett]

I read the white paper, I haven't read this entire thread.


My initial problem with the paper was the following:

1 - I don't know of any active botnets working over the gpu.  If they did I suspect that pc users would note the high amounts of heat and active cooling fans and request a fix from however supports their hardware
   a - almost all of the mining is don by gpu now (soon to be fpgas), in other words you would need about 50 standards botnet pc's using their cpu to equal one miner with a gpu
   b - for a perspective of the current cpu power in bitcoin the current fastest networked government owned super computer produces about 4.7 pflops where as the bitcoin community is beyond 53.5 pflops (factor of 10 larger in processing).  to achieve 50% of this with cpu based botnets one would need to acquire 100's of thousands of systems
2 - There is no economical analysis of other values botnets can have.  ie. it may very well be more profitable to operate a botnet to brute force a bank for account access
3 - There is no analysis of the declining rate of bitcoin production.  This is not a never ending game of producing bitcoins.  To date about 40% of bitcoins have been released.  If we were flooded with mass amounts of botnet gpu's it would help to secure the block chain, and also automatically enable competition/incentive for other botnet owners to move into the space (again securing the block chain further), it would cause normal users to exit the market (non-botnet operators), and create a renaissance of new mining innovation