As I understand it there is a limit to the number of bitcoins that can be mined, so what happens when they've all been mined? Presumably for bitcoins to continue having any 'value' the blocks will need to hashed in perpetuity, with ever increasing processing power required, so how will those hashing the blocks get compensated?
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Mac App Store App 'Calendar 2' Mines Cryptocurrency by Default, but Feature is Being Removed [Updated]
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I am pretty sure they are doing more than saying they are richer than others. They ARE richer than others because of bitcoin.
You may not agree but it’s already happening in non-currency activities. You’re clearly an advocate for crypto. Good for you but it’s far from guaranteed to be the future of currencies.
As the commenters above have said, there is nothing to be gained from this field. 'Block chain' was invented in 91-92 as a 'cryptographically secure chain of blocks' but after the complete failure of gold bug Ron Paul to win any significant votes in 2008 the extreme end of the libertarian crowd began using it as a decentralized money laundering system and pyramid scheme to raise money for their political ends which include anonymous bribes and brainwashing kids with uninformed ideas about inflation and deflation.
If it was truly a response to the "financial crisis" as they say, they would not advocate deflationary economics, unless they are truly insane or misinformed.
Real cryptographers are very annoyed that their work is being abused for this stuff. So critics now call it creepto-currency because it is used by so many creeps on the dark markets.
Miners job is to compete with other miners to verify transactions. It's a massively inefficient task for thousands of processors to be doing exactly the same task just to confirm a payment.
If those payments are mostly criminal activity then that's a really bad thing for the public to be involved with. If a financial institution launders money or processes transactions of criminals then they go to jail or get fined. We should not want our CPUs or GPUs being used for anything like that.
If you scale that to global levels all the creepto currencies that exist currently would completely decimate our global energy security and environmental health.
Immutability only seems like a fine idea in our head but like above it is very inefficient for a database to keep growing and growing and consuming more global resources because it is being mirrored by many nodes. The bitcoin white paper goes as far to say that the database should be pruned to save disk space and bandwidth but nobody has implemented this because they want to walk around using this 'immutability' marketing buzzword to sell creepto-currencies to gullible people.
If it was truly a response to the "financial crisis" as they say, they would not advocate deflationary economics, unless they are truly insane or misinformed.
Real cryptographers are very annoyed that their work is being abused for this stuff. So critics now call it creepto-currency because it is used by so many creeps on the dark markets.
Miners job is to compete with other miners to verify transactions. It's a massively inefficient task for thousands of processors to be doing exactly the same task just to confirm a payment.
If those payments are mostly criminal activity then that's a really bad thing for the public to be involved with. If a financial institution launders money or processes transactions of criminals then they go to jail or get fined. We should not want our CPUs or GPUs being used for anything like that.
If you scale that to global levels all the creepto currencies that exist currently would completely decimate our global energy security and environmental health.
Immutability only seems like a fine idea in our head but like above it is very inefficient for a database to keep growing and growing and consuming more global resources because it is being mirrored by many nodes. The bitcoin white paper goes as far to say that the database should be pruned to save disk space and bandwidth but nobody has implemented this because they want to walk around using this 'immutability' marketing buzzword to sell creepto-currencies to gullible people.
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If you're making a trustless system, the currency and blockchain rely on each other because you rely on people acting for profit. If you've got an internal system, sure, but that's different, and I still haven't seen a legitimate non-hype use for a blockchain there. You just use one of the way more efficient alternatives at that point.
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"with a certain standard, gold, silver or holding some other assets to back it up"
How is gold real money? It's just a yellow metal, and it's worth far more than it's actually useful for. True that anything you can't actually buy things with is not real money, but that's not the case here.
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That’s where the pokitdok concept works well. It’s about establishing a ledger that is a pointer to those systems. So the data itself isn’t in the ledger but the proof of entry is in there. I can see this becoming more mainstream but overall mainstream daily use of blockchain is still quite uncertain.
Ok, I'll have to take a look at it tonight then. Thanks. The problem is it's always hard to make sure there aren't any hidden points of trust. I just got through reading two scam papers and am not in a good mood, haha.
Miners don’t verify transactions, nodes do.
A transaction is broadcast by the sender and nodes pass it around each checking if is valid. If it is not valid the node drops it. If it is valid it propagates through the network and ends up in the queue of miners.
When a miner solves a block and chooses to include one of these valid transactions, the transaction is now confirmed and is considered by the network to be spent. The block is then passed around the network by the node, each checking that it follows the rules and when a miner receives it they then switch to solving a block on top of the new one.
Satoshi began working on Bitcoin in 2007, before the Great Recession, not after like you suggest. It was the first of its kind. Also, it has nothing to do with the mistakes that lead to the recession. People can make and take bad loans regardless. The point is just that sending money sucks, today's banks are complicated and insecure, and sending money sucks even more across borders. You don't have to be a libertarian to be afraid of giving your bank info to a random website. I'm bothered by how many utilities and other things on crappy websites have access to my bank account.
New cryptocurrencies have been making progress, such as Ethereum, which is switching soon away from proof of work to proof of stake, which does not require mining but is still trustless. Bitcoin is still the most popular just cause it's the original, but I think (and hope) it will either update or lose.
Also, inflation and deflation don't matter as long as they're slow and predictable.
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Ethereum is a little more centralized and less secure. I’d rather a cryptocurrency have a solid secure foundation first - then add features.
At that point, miners will be collecting just transaction fees. This fee is offerred by users in essentially an auction format. No matter the fee amount collected, there's an equilibrium where fees cover the network's hashing cost. If fees end up being low, then many miners will go out of business. Processing power does not have to keep increasing. And indeed, Bitcoin mining has already turned into a competition of who can get electricity at the lowest rate.
The current maximum Bitcoin ledger growth rate is about 1TB every decade[1]. Do you have a 1TB drive which you could dedicate to recording Bitcoin transactions for the next ten years? In the year 2028, will you have trouble getting another 1TB drive?
[1] ~2000000 bytes/max-practical-Segwit-block * 6 blocks/hour * 24 hours/day * 365.25 days/year * 10 years/decade
Wait. Segwit?! That's not true Bitcoin! The true Bitcoin is the one whose logo slants to the left.
(I'm kidding. I don't really care.)
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Proof of work is a security flaw by itself, though. Economies of scale for mining lead to centralization. It's only profitable if you build a warehouse, and the warehouses in China (cheap power and electronics) and Russia (also cheap power? + free cooling) are way more profitable. If it eventually becomes an oligopoly, ruled from those two countries of all places, dang.
Also, it destroys the planet, encourages hackers to steal computing resources for mining, and discourages computer parts makers from selling to researchers. I'd rather we not.
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You would be surprised at the number of sites that do just this in the background, without you ever knowing it.
How is gold really money? A 'coin' was just a defined weight of a precious metal (gold, silver or copper) in order to make exchange easier as its weight was stamped into it. This is how the whole thing of 'money' started.
Wikipedia:
Ancient India in circa 6th century BCE, was one of the earliest issuers of coins in the world.[11]
Double-die style struck coin from Ancient India, c 304-232 BCE featuring an elephant on one face and a lion on the other.
Since that time, coins have been the most universal embodiment of money. These first coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring pale yellow mixture of gold and silver that was further alloyed with silver and copper.
However, the Persian daric was the first gold coin which, along with a similar silver coin, the siglos, (From Ancient Greek σίγλος, Hebrew שֶׁקֶל (shékel)) represented the bimetallic monetary standard of the Achaemenid Persian Empire which has continued till today.[12] Also, the Persian coins were very well known in the Persian and Sassanids era. Most notably, in Susa and in Ctesiphon.
Metallism is the economic principle that the value of money derives from the purchasing power of the commodity upon which it is based. The currency in a metallist monetary system may be made from the commodity itself (commodity money) or use tokens such as national banknotes redeemable in that commodity. The term was coined by Georg Friedrich Knapp to describe monetary systems using coin minted in silver, gold or other metals.[1]
In metallist economic theory, the value of the currency derives from the market value of the commodity upon which it is based independent of its monetary role. Carl Menger theorized money came about when buyers and sellers in a market agreed on a common commodity as a medium of exchange in order to reduce the costs of barter. The intrinsic value of that commodity must be sufficient to make it highly “saleable”, or readily accepted as payment. In this system, buyers and sellers of real goods and services establish the medium of exchange, not a sovereign state. Metallists view the state's role in the minting or official stamping of coins as one of authenticating the quality and quantity of metal used in making the coin. Knapp distinguished metallism from chartalism (or antimetallism), a monetary system in which the state has monopoly power over its own currency and creates a unique market and demand for that currency by imposing taxes or other such legally enforceable debts upon its people which can only be paid in that currency.
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There's no evidence for this and all the "math" people claim he invented was around years earlier. Merkle trees were invented in the 70s. 'Block chain' was conceived of by Haber and Stornetta in 91.
It's irrelevant if they all have an unavoidable financial pyramid structure that punishes late comers and rewards early movers. Even worse to invest in a pool where most of the members are psychologically unhinged.
If you have a developed economy with goods and services to sell, deflation is a good way to screw everyone over and make a lot of people jobless. It's best if you don't listen to creepto jargon and "Austrian economics" fans. These people are genuinely insane or misinformed in the same league as Scientology.
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I don't want my "bank account" to use any more of my space than minimally necessary. There is no rational reason for a lawful citizen to spend their own money to store a record of everyone else's accounts and data - especially the data of hardcore criminals.
Ok, so same thing as cryptocurrency. Both are only worth anything because people agree that they are.
My understanding is that it's currently a computational arms race trying to get slight edge over your competitors to win that bitcoin/fee for hashing a block. Once all the coins are mined surely the incentive to provide the hashing reduces significantly, to the point where you will only have a handful of massive data centers performing all the hashing and therefore compromising the currencies unique feature?
Blockchain is based on previous ideas, but it was not invented until Satoshi's paper. I went back and read the papers by Haber and Stornetta, and they don't describe anywhere close to the same thing. It's one of those rare cases where there's no such thing as being most of the way there; everything has to be perfectly in place for it to work.
Sounds like the stock market, any new currency, or really any kind of investment.
I really don't bother with those people. Politicians like to complain about deflation, but it's really the same as having inflation and having everyone put their savings into funds/banks. It's often seen as a bad sign just because a bad economy is usually the only thing that causes it. As long as no extreme conditions are reached, it doesn't matter by itself.
You don't need to. There are edge clients like wallets that let you securely store your money. Only the neckbeards run nodes.
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I haven't bought any but have been paid in it (legally), and I've spent it on real objects I have now in real life, so I don't see what the issue is.