Pieter Wuille

What if the pro-fork community wanted to buy their way to the raised thresholds? So we're at what, 0.9 Exahash?[1] Say you want to force the change. You'd need to add three times that, or 2.7 EHash/s.[1] Let's say you buy a ton of AntMiners to cover that, at 3.3 GHash/s/$.[2] So that's a paltry, what... $820 Million? Less if you just buy the factory in Shenzhen. Basically just one winning Powerball ticket though. [1] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#cite_note-AntMin… Caveat emptor: my ability to eyeball math in the peta-exa-yotta range is spotty at best. These results may be off by a factor of... any factor.

You've got it backwards. It's the difficulty which is pegged to the price. If the price went back to $5 now, miners would turn off their equipment and the difficulty would plummet. On the other hand, if difficulty would shoot 10 times now, it wouldn't affect the price much, because most of the cost of mining would already be sunk in. Miners would sell their bitcoins even with a loss. Besides that, look at the chart: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7427.0 If anything, it seems that difficulty follows the price (Dec 2010, Feb-March 2011) on the above chart. And here: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ You'll see that difficulty was raising constantly during the past year, while the price stood still for quite a long time, and fluctuated wildly at other times. Especially this graph: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed.png Can you show me, from this graph alone, when price increases were due?

I'm not sure why the title of the article focuses on mining. China had already banned mining. This was very visible as a drop in the hash rate over the summer[1]. What has been announced now (by the Chinese central bank and a bunch of regulators) is that all crypto related transactions will be banned. [1] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

> I do know, however, that Bitcoin is undergoing a cooling of sorts on account of the block difficulty getting higher and higher. As a result, transactions now take forever to verify and fees are going up. Completely untrue. Difficulty is proportional to the hash rate. Transaction time varies as a result of multiple factors. Some reading and historical difficulty/confirmation time data: https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespan=2years&a… https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation#Confirmation_Times

A penny stock that skyrockets and holds value is no longer a penny stock. Bitcoin is 8 years old and has hit $1000 USD twice now over multiple years. The "market cap" is currently over 16 billion dollars. It would place 68th when compared with 192 countries M1 money supply (2015) data: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/… The hash rate securing the network is currently at 2.5 quintillion operations per second which is really 5 quintillion SHA256 operations every second: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Speaking of pennies... if every operation was a penny laid flat on earth, you could cover the surface of the earth, land and sea, twice over every second. Bitcoin surpassed the penny stock phase a long time ago.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

With the proliferation of ASICs over the last 6 months, the mining difficulty rate has shot up exponentially. http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ I picked up a $30 Sapphire miner about a month ago. It's one of the better hashes-per-watt miners available. At this point, breakeven for the hardware cost is about 4 months out. And that's only going to get worse as the difficulty increases, which has been happening every 2 weeks or so.

The timing of when you get the device is crucial, check out how fast the total power of the mining network is going up: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (it is the 1st graph).

...using each rig for a couple months before shipping them out. Looking at the global hash rate it's clear that this is not happening. (Before anyone asks, you cannot hide mining.) http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

I have been mining since Dec 2010. I know what I am talking about, and let me tell you that at this very moment an AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card ($400) would mine the equivalent of $400 in 50 days: 600e6 (hash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 24 (hour/day) * 50 (days) / (2^32 * 7.7e6 (number of hashes to solve a block)) * 25 (bitcoins/block) * 200 (usd/btc) = $392 So it is very profitable to GPU mine right now. In fact, it has never been so profitable since June 2011 (previous Bitcoin bubble). However keep in mind a few caveats: (a) this assumes an exchange rate of 1 BTC = 200 USD which may or may not crash in the near future, and (b) this assumes a difficulty factor of 7.7e6 which is rising quite quickly (see the charts at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, it rises by about 10-50% every 2 weeks or so, mostly due to ASICs).

It does count only unique hash values, but why should that bother me? People don't randomly generate the same 256 bit number very often (in fact, the probability is so low that it has almost certainly never happened) When I search for "bitcoin network hashrate" on google, the first link is http://bitcoin.sipa.be/, which does in fact report the N-second average rate. It reports the 7-days, 14-day, and 30-day average rate.

Looks like the exchange rate didn't fluctuate too much during this time: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5ztgSzbgBzm1g10zm2g25zv I wonder what will happen to the difficulty over the next couple days: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Considering the exchange rate remained stable, I expect the difficulty to halve.

The combined network hashrate of Bitcoin is currently right around 20,000Ghash/s: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Which is about 2,500X the processing power of an AMD 7970. Bitcoin is hashing SHA256, which is about as computationally expensive as SHA-1 (or maybe even cheaper, according to comments on the linked blog post). Much of the Bitcoin computational power comes from large mining operations controlled by individuals. Their processing power is easily diverted elsewhere, if the profit motive is there...

It’s in the Proof of Work. The „..difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour.“ The more nodes, the faster the hash rate the higher the difficulty. Here is a nice (exponential) graph showing difficulty over time since 2010 http://bitcoin.sipa.be And „The average work required is exponential in the number of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.“ The difficulty of a unit of work can be practically limitless, the difficulty to verify a unit of work is practically nil. As long as work needs to be performed and as long as the network keeps growing, both the total amount of work and the amount of work per unit of work increase. The required energy of the network increases with them as long as the machines do not get efficient faster, which is highly unlikely. Currently, the energy footprint of one BTC transaction is estimated to be 612 kWh and the estimated electricity demand increased over 10.000 % between 2015 and 2021. Digital currencies reportedly account for 112 TWh energy consumption per year in the top 10 countries. That is in the ballpark of the total electrical energy consumption of all 41,500,000 German households. (https://www.institutionalassetmanager.co.uk/2021/01/20/294669/global-b… https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ and https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption… and…

It's just law of the market. Bitcoin has limited supply (only 21M will ever be "mined" and even less in circulation due to lost wallets) and ever growing demand. Most recently Chinese got interested in Bitcoin, so the demand grew even more, while the supply stayed the same. So simply put when there are less people that want to sell than people that want to buy [3], the prices rises. Also, as other person here suggested, Bitcoin mining difficulty has risen dramatically in past few months [2] thanks to new specialized hardware (ASICs) finally arriving to its buyers. This, while does not affect the price directly, shows that there is much faith put in the system by miners, which in turn encourages people to buy even more. It's also worth noting that the $400 price is only on MtGox, which is not considered as market leader anymore. What's more, the withdrawals from MtGox are counted in weeks or even months , so it's not a viable trading platform. If you want a reliable Bitcoin price, head over to BitcoinAverage [1] which does what the name implies - averages (and takes volume into consideration) the price over all major exchanges. They even have a button to exclude MtGox price from the calculations, as MtGox is always 10-20% higher than the rest. As of writing this post, the average price including MtGox is $380. [1] https://bitcoinaverage.com/ [2] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png (network hashrate now approaching 5 Terahash per second) [3]…

And 3PH is just around the corner! http://bitcoin.sipa.be

I was a bit confused until I realized that https://miniscript.org/ isn't the same programming language as https://bitcoin.sipa.be/miniscript/.

The answer is that no one knows for sure, but you’ll be able to see when by looking at this graph, which is an estimate of the global Bitcoin hash rate: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png

Impressive numbers! Bad luck the only metric that happens to matters, miner vote, is still below 25% and seems to be going slightly down... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ver9-10k.png

> More electricity is being burned to do the same amount of work. Not true at all. The total hash rate has gone up a factor of 10^11 since the early days of Bitcoin, but total electricity consumption certainly hasn't gone up by that much. Data here: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png Most of that can be attributed to efficiency gains. More efficient miners are coming on the market all the time, and in any given year, the vast majority of increased hash rate can be explained by better hardware, not another 100-1000X in electricity consumption. This latest hash rate increase is most likely caused by the release of the latest batch of mining hardware, see, e.g., Antminer: https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020150827084021471OHYd…

Well this image proves that the bitcoin network is not only alive and well but it is growing at an impressive rate and anyone saying that bitcoin is dying is lying to you and possibly pushing his own agenda. http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png

It actually had as-high/higher rates of growth in 2011: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png

Also wrong, 'Can the government shut it down?' Should be: Q. Who can shut it down? A. Anyone who is willing to pay 51% of the monthly operating cost of all miners. Plus an initial investment to manufacture the hardware. Neither of these numbers are out of the range of Governments or Banks. And they probably won't be for a long time. This is the death of Bitcoin scenario that worries me most. And it seems no one is really worrying about it or taking it seriously. edit: Here are the numbers someone calculated at the height of the first mining bubble [1]. We're currently at less than double the hashing power of then [2]. So a current rough estimate would be to double all those numbers. [1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/1094 [2] http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png

This, of course, is making a big assumption: that the difficulty factor will stay the same. It has consistently increased, making earning those bitcoins significantly more difficult. Break-even for me occured at about 75 days for my 5850's, but also used a much lower difficulty (less than 5% of the current difficulty) for the beginning of that. (difficulty over the past 2 months: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png)

I don't think it makes any sense except for fun, Bitcoin scripts are pretty limited and there are a lot of previous work [1][2][3][4][5]. [1] https://bitcoin.sipa.be/miniscript/ [2] https://min.sc/ [3] https://docs.scrypt.io/ [4] https://github.com/sapio-lang/sapio [5] https://github.com/ivy-lang/ivy-bitcoin

A typical system with a 5970 consumes just under 500 Watts lets say, including the GPU (some examples here: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3892.0 ). That's 12kWh at let's say a $0.12/kWh residential electric rate ( http://www.bitcoinminer.com/post/2361900289/where-to-mine-electricity-… ) that's about $1.44 per day for your electricity. A 5970 hashes at just under 600 Mhash/s, per http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison so punch that 600000 number in as khps here: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php and it shows that at the current difficulty level, you should generate 50 BTC about every 3 days and 29 minutes. So in a 24 hour period you get about 16.55 BTC per day. Converting that 16.55 BTC to USD: http://bitcoin.1t2l.net/widget/?from=BTC shows you earn about $15.28 per day with a rig holding a single 5970. Then to send those BTCs to your PayPal, you use http://coincard.ndrix.com (starting again monday morning) and you lose 3% doing that conversion so you end up with $14.82 in revenue per day. Subtract the $1.44 in electricity that nets you $13.38 a day. If that were to hold, you'ld have the card paid off in well under two months. That said, ... difficulty is rising (fast! ... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed.png ). If the BTC/USD exchange rises more ( it's had quite a run http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm2g25 ), then that payout might continue at these levels. Otherwise, the payout from mining will…