Miners vs Hardfork

[SA Bitcoin Brothers]

So now with BTC falling because of the Hardfork Speculation ect. What can we do to get the best out of it. What is our duty? Thank you

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[Amph]

nothing will change for miners, if the fork happen you will do the same profit as before, perhpas you can lose a bit when the fork happen due to the hashrate cut and thus the diff retarget would need to catch it, to allow for the same profit as before

it would be like mining with half the net that have the same diff as now, i would just keep mining and support the chain you find more worthy

[iamTom123]

 I still do not fully understand what is all this forking all about. I have seen the same thing with Etherium and it did experience value decrease when it forked but now look at Ether now...it is now rising and many people are taking a close look. Hope people will buy more BTC because of its lower value and hope that BTC will rise again by next week,

[FlightyPouch]

I still do not fully understand what is all this forking all about. I have seen the same thing with Etherium and it did experience value decrease when it forked but now look at Ether now...it is now rising and many people are taking a close look. Hope people will buy more BTC because of its lower value and hope that BTC will rise again by next week,

That is the whole reason why the forking is needed to implemented, it like an update to fix bugs and stuffs. On the past days, Bitcoin unlimited is being concerned of the liquidity of the bitcoin on the market, thats why they are forking.

[leowonderful]

Just don't be influenced by anybody to mine for a cause that you do not support. I would read up on the situation about both BTU, Segwit and Lightning and decide which of those you would like to support and mine on a pool that supports it. You can also choose to just mine at the pool of your choice and ignore it like most people here if you don't care about it, although these are some interesting times ahead.

[icon73]

Just don't be influenced by anybody to mine for a cause that you do not support. I would read up on the situation about both BTU, Segwit and Lightning and decide which of those you would like to support and mine on a pool that supports it. You can also choose to just mine at the pool of your choice and ignore it like most people here if you don't care about it, although these are some interesting times ahead.

Respectfully I think ignoring it may be a mistake.  I am not going to tell anyone how they should signal (vote) but I think it is important for miners to watch over their investments and to signal the solution they would like to see implemented.

There are many different interests trying to influence the outcome, and I believe miners have a voice of significance in that process.

[philipma1957]

So now with BTC falling because of the Hardfork Speculation ect. What can we do to get the best out of it. What is our duty? Thank you

as a miner  your first duty is to not destroy  your business from fear.


The

BTU vs  Segwit

choice or fork is simple   BTU  is a kind of temporary fix which will ease the problem   of very high tx fees  and difficulty in moving your coin around.

Segwit  is more radical  and you will lose transparency of the blockchain  that you have now as sidechains would move money around quickly  but  the fees would be lost to miners.

As a miner first  Segwit  simply  looks terrible to me.

BTU looks okay.

But this is the view of a miner.

I also mine  ETH ,XMR, ZEC  so  I can mine with gpus if worst comes to worst.

I no longer buy any 256 BTC mining gear other then  some smaller stuff from sidehack.
I have also moved my gpus  al from 4gb to 8gb memory.

I sit on sidelines  and wait for things to shake out.

I do have cash to buy btc if it drops more.

[Gotimour]

So now with BTC falling because of the Hardfork Speculation ect. What can we do to get the best out of it. What is our duty? Thank you

as a miner  your first duty is to not destroy  your business from fear.


The

BTU vs  Segwit

choice or fork is simple   BTU  is a kind of temporary fix which will ease the problem   of very high tx fees  and difficulty in moving your coin around.

Segwit  is more radical  and you will lose transparency of the blockchain  that you have now as sidechains would move money around quickly  but  the fees would be lost to miners.

As a miner first  Segwit  simply  looks terrible to me.

BTU looks okay.

But this is the view of a miner.

I also mine  ETH ,XMR, ZEC  so  I can mine with gpus if worst comes to worst.

I no longer buy any 256 BTC mining gear other then  some smaller stuff from sidehack.
I have also moved my gpus  al from 4gb to 8gb memory.

I sit on sidelines  and wait for things to shake out.

I do have cash to buy btc if it drops more.

That is right. I am also not going to expand my bitcoin mining gear. I might sell some in the future.

[timk225]

I gives a damn about the coins themselves, I only care about maximum PROFIT for ME!

But they seriously need to clip the first 400,000 blocks or so off the blockchain, I do not want to download 110 GB+ of useless data every time I make a wallet (not often, but still).

[Epinnoia]

Those people who are cheap asses and don't want to pay ~1% fees can still pay less and have their blocks confirmed during off-peak hours.  And if that seems to be bad to you -- it's likely because you don't run a mining rig and pay for electricity to do so.  A $1400 Antminer S9 is about 1500watts.  A month of operation will run typically $120-$150ish in electricity costs in the USA.  The fact is, there's a cost involved in hashing.  And hashes are what secure the network.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  You can't have a network that is as secure with far fewer hashes.  And you WILL have far fewer hashes if you make it impossible for miners to recoup their electricity costs.

As the mining subsidy halves every 4 years, miners will be relying more and more on the fees rather than that subsidy to recoup their costs.  By screwing them out of the mining fees (by removing competition for quick inclusion in the chain) it will make it impossible for them to recoup even their electricity fees, let alone their equip costs.  And that spells disaster because it means that they will either shut down the hashing or send their hashes to a competitor coin thereby making bitcoin less secure.  

As you can see from this graph, the subsidy has already mostly disappeared....and every four years, it keeps halving... That is built-into the system. It was expected that as the subsidy was removed, the miners would get paid by the fees as the network became more popular. Now you want to remove the vast majority of fees as well....not too smart AT ALL.

[Andre_Goldman]

kind of ...

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-output-set

[iamTom123]

I still do not fully understand what is all this forking all about. I have seen the same thing with Etherium and it did experience value decrease when it forked but now look at Ether now...it is now rising and many people are taking a close look. Hope people will buy more BTC because of its lower value and hope that BTC will rise again by next week,

That is the whole reason why the forking is needed to implemented, it like an update to fix bugs and stuffs. On the past days, Bitcoin unlimited is being concerned of the liquidity of the bitcoin on the market, thats why they are forking.

As what I understand here, there is a clear consensus that there is a need to fix problems and it is termed as forking but what is not so clear is how the forking will proceed so there is now two main camps who are proposing different ideas on what to do. Added to the mix are the business interests of different big miners and of course they are bringing greed and selfishness to the table being only humans. This is what a decentralized currency is all about anyway.

[QuintLeo]

There has been a consensus for well over a year that SOME change has to be made to deal with the "transactions limit" for Bitcoin - the issue has been a major lack of consensus on HOW to do so.

 IMO BU is not viable, unless they figure out a way to keep their blockchain from merging back INTO the Bitcoin Core chain at some future point AND fix the "replay transaction" issue. The way their client works now, it would be possible for their entire split blockchain to get orphaned and every transaction on it to suddenly DISAPPEAR if the CORE blockchain achieved 51% of work done at any point after a "split" happened - which would shaft anyone that was holding the BU version of Bitcoin at that point.
 That's just NOT ACCPEPTABLE or trustworthy in any way shape or form to me.

 I'm not fond of the whole SegWit concept either, but it seems like the lesser evil of the current proposals.

 The EASY cure would be to just increase the maximum block size, but so far every proposal to do that has gained very little or no traction with the large pools and exchanges - VERY shortsighted of them IMO.


 At this point, it is unclear *IF* BU will ever gain enough support to force a fork, seems like every time they gain more traction they have YET ANOTHER bug, and they still haven't addressed the basic issues I mentioned above AT ALL.

[SA Bitcoin Brothers]

What would be the best thing for us miners? Not unrealistic.


BTW: I see BTC is going UP UP UP today

[Gotimour]

$10k/bitcoin means that it requires 1/10th the number of bytes to represent the same amount of value as compared to $1k/bitcoin.  The scaling is done with price.

Conversely, a 20% drop in BTC price will mean it will take 20% more bytes to send the same amount of value using bitcoin.  So this entire controversy -- to the degree it harmed price -- has actually caused some of the very congestion it was seeking to prevent.  People need to stop thinking like a free-loader and pay the fees they need to pay if they have a time sensitive payment.  Pay a little less and get included during off-peak hours.  Pretty simple really.

Those people who are cheap asses and don't want to pay ~1% fees can still pay less and have their blocks confirmed during off-peak hours.  And if that seems to be bad to you -- it's likely because you don't run a mining rig and pay for electricity to do so.  A $1400 Antminer S9 is about 1500watts.  A month of operation will run typically $120-$150ish in electricity costs in the USA.  The fact is, there's a cost involved in hashing.  And hashes are what secure the network.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  You can't have a network that is as secure with far fewer hashes.  And you WILL have far fewer hashes if you make it impossible for miners to recoup their electricity costs.

As the mining subsidy halves every 4 years, miners will be relying more and more on the fees rather than that subsidy to recoup their costs.  By screwing them out of the mining fees (by removing competition for quick inclusion in the chain) it will make it impossible for them to recoup even their electricity fees, let alone their equip costs.  And that spells disaster because it means that they will either shut down the hashing or send their hashes to a competitor coin thereby making bitcoin less secure.  

As you can see from this graph, the subsidy has already mostly disappeared....and every four years, it keeps halving... That is built-into the system. It was expected that as the subsidy was removed, the miners would get paid by the fees as the network became more popular. Now you want to remove the vast majority of fees as well....not too smart AT ALL.

Without the incentive, the mining operation will not be so profitable and the network is vulnable to attacks.

[Epinnoia]

The problem comes with transactions that take an inordinate amount of space in the block to represent them, because their inputs are from many tiny individual transactions.  Miners tend to sit on their coins until the price goes up.  Then they rush to send their coins to an exchange to sell all at the same general moment in time. 

Since miners tend to be paid in many smaller payments across time, when they attempt to send their coins to an exchange (or anywhere for that matter), the transaction ledger that is created has to represent each and every one of those input transactions.  It's NOT simply saying "Send X BTCs from wallet Y to wallet Z."  If the miner has a total of 3 BTCs that he's sending to the exchange, which came to the miner from 1,000 individual mining payouts of 0.003 BTC, that 3 BTC send transaction will need to contain the transaction IDs of each and every one of those 1,000 individual mining payouts.  That is what EATS UP SPACE in the block.

Once those coins are consolidated into a single transaction ID again, it actually makes it easier to send (smaller # of bytes required) payments from that consolidated transaction ID.

So rather than wait until the price gets to where you want to sell, miners should be consolidating their wallets during non-peak times.  If you have those 3 BTCs already in a single transaction ID, when you go to send BTC to someone next time, the # of bytes required to represent those 3 BTCs will be minimal since it will only reference the single consolidated transaction ID (rather than the thousand in my example above). 

Some of this problem has been handled already somewhat by the pools where they were paying daily but now pay weekly, for example.  But still, if you are trying to send 2 years of mining payouts (from a pool that pays out weekly) to an exchange, your transaction will need to include 104 different inputs, and will eat up significant space in the block.  Send to yourself during off-peak times, paying a minimum fee, and decrease your block footprint.