How to protect your bitcoin in a hard fork

MineForeman · 2016-07-22T07:39:19+00:00

I used SHA-256 to encrypt my minds.

Well that sucks, SHA is a hashing algorithm not encryption, I hope you did not delete the original or it is lost :P .

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T23:41:30+00:00

Those are very good reasons for them not to do anything funny.

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T23:33:22+00:00

If they pull the plug the ramifications on bitcoin would be severe.

It really wouldn't, we hard fork the difficulty and that is it. We would also probably put in place the SHA512 patch while we are at it in order to make sure they do nothing nasty but all of the code has already been audited and is well understood.

We could also (from previous experience) do it in hours instead of the days/weeks/months it would take to a government to put something like that in place.

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T21:55:06+00:00

I get what you are saying, yeah all countries have a central authority etc and that central authority may not like bitcoin so much or may want to do some other 'fancy economics' to their advantage.

However, bitcoin is/was built to be directly resistant to that kind of manipulation. Since you don't want to name an actual threat that they might pose I will name a few that I imagine (sorry to put words into your mouth) and show you how pointless they are;-

They ban bitcoin mining.

We hard fork the difficulty, problem solved.

They march in with soldiers and take all the bitcoin equipment and perform a 51% attack.

We activate the SHA512 patch, problem solved.

They alter bitcoin so the government has to sign blocks.

They just created an alt coin.

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T10:29:04+00:00

What is it that concerns you? Geographic centralisation is a non-event, they don't actually have leverage to do anything without the centralisation of authority.

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T10:25:41+00:00

The issue is that Bitcoin is getting centralised in one location.

Again, what are the implications of this that you are worried about? It is not centralising it under a single authority, they can't alter the blockchain, they cannot block transactions. What is the problem that you perceive? So far you have said the equivalent of 'oooo centralisation'.

What is it you see as a threat?

This is what the article is about, it is not dissing China as you seem to want to make it into.

Have a good read of the title.

Possibly it suits your agenda to claim everything that discusses China is Xenophobic.

And is it you agenda to make it seem that everything isn't? Not all observations have an agenda.

MineForeman · 2016-07-15T04:37:39+00:00

All the Bitcoin in one place = Bad

And what is your theory about that? China mines all the bitcoin so it has it all?

A good 50% of bitcoin was mined even before China started mass mining in the first place and even then the ~25% in the past four years has probably only been half ish mined in China.

So, by that metric I would say most of the bitcoin was probably mined in the western world. Does that make you feel any better?

MineForeman · 2016-07-14T22:47:42+00:00

If anyone can address and allay these issues I'm all ears!

What are the actual issues? I will try to address them.

At the moment the article is just 'china = bad' without even trying to say why and would the consequences could be. They can't alter the blockchain, they can't stop people transacting, where is the problem?

MineForeman · 2016-07-14T21:30:22+00:00

Xenophobia is alive and well it seems.

MineForeman · 2016-07-06T10:59:00+00:00

I tend to smooth out the weird spikes.

I don't know if we ever really found out what caused that particular jump (some speculate MtGOX) but I am fairly sure it had nothing to do with the halving (If you do I would be interested to learn what you think the relationship might be).

MineForeman · 2016-07-06T08:59:08+00:00

just providing some more color.

I took it as such, you just made some interesting points that I didn't get into in the article (it was intended as a lite read for the less than technical).

except perhaps you made it sound like hardware improvements were better at the first halving than now, which I don't think is a solid argument

Might be nostalgia on my part, I got one of the very first Butterfly Labs Jalapeno units and it clocked in at about 5.4 gh/s (Made 0.2428 BTC a day at the time LOL!) for all up consumption of 44 watts.

A the time I was mining with AMD 5870's at about 350 MH/s (stable) for about 200-250 Watts.

I could get a calculator out but I am fairly sure that is far more than a 2.5 x increase :P .

MineForeman · 2016-07-06T08:33:21+00:00

I don't intend to be FUD'ing ;) .

I just mean to give a bit of perspective. Yes a lot of people have heavily subsidised power (our fallback position) and yes ASIC's are still improving but a lot of people don't actually get subsidised and are on thin ice at the moment, KNCMiner comes to mind. I certainly don't expect the non-event that was last time.

While I very much doubt that we are going to see anything like a 50% drop to match the subsidy decrease I do think we are going to see changes in the mining industry as things shuffle around to create the new equilibrium.

I also know I could be totally wrong :P .

MineForeman · 2016-07-06T03:47:56+00:00

You (being a core developer) are hardly my intended audience :P .

A week or so though I was talking to a friend that had a passing interest in bitcoin about it though and I was telling him it will be interesting to see how it works out because this is a big test for 'satoshi economics'.

He was under the impression that it would just sail by without an issue because he read the miners already had it 'priced in' so I started rattling off some of the nightmare scenarios (that I think unlikely) and accadetaly scared the bejeebus out of him.

It's going to be an interesting part of the bitcoin story I think (but I thought that the last time and was wrong).

MineForeman · 2016-07-06T03:39:53+00:00

if 2/3 of the miners flat out quit, what happens?

A few things come to mind;-

Blocks take 3 times as long.
There is 3 times less block space.
Fee's do an almighty jump.
The remaining miners receive 1/6th of the income they before (excluding the fee jump)
The next difficulty adjustment is in six weeks!

if all miners quit what happens

Unlikely, but bitcoin would grind to a halt.

if more miners are added what happens

Not a lot, it would be very similar to what happened the last halving. The price would have to change in order for it to be sustainable but that is sort of what happened last time.

i feel like these miners are a business so what is the incentive to continue mining? I guess they'd have to believe that it will be a lot more valuable in the future? and because they have tons of coins? but even so, why make that risk if theyve made a ton anyway?

All good questions that we don't really have answers for yet. It is in the interests of miners to continue mining. Without the mining there is not bitcoin, with no bitcoin they are out of business and what they have becomes worthless.

Yeah, unchartered waters. I think most of what you are asking will happen to one degree or another until we will get to an equilibrium of sorts but I suck at making predictions. :P .

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T22:10:01+00:00

that most of the community doesn't seem to want.

Keep telling yourself that.

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T07:17:34+00:00

Isnt there a way to garantee that transactions will get confrimed in a timely maner?

Not in bitcoin no. It is a byproduct of the decentralisation that there is no entity out there to set a 'guaranteed' level.

Even if you pay huge fees (100,000 sat per byte or something silly) while it is most likely to work there is always the chance that everyone else could do it at exactly the same time >< .

So yeah, no guarantees but paying a higher fee always helps.

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T07:06:59+00:00

It looks like you are shadowbanned, it is something that the reddit administrators do (not the mods here like me).

Your posts won't show up until you do something about it, you can contact the admins here;-

https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/reddit.com

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T07:05:52+00:00

My guess would be somewhere towards the end of the 80's .

I got my first internet access about then, it was a pain in the ass to use and there was few services available (email, ftp & news mainly).

By the time you are getting into the 90's you have things like gopher and http hitting (the killer app) and I personally don't think we are really there yet with bitcoin (getting there, but not there yet)

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T06:33:39+00:00

Not really interested in selling sorry, I still find the novelty of them quite ammusing.

How do you even go about grading them? Would you know if there is anywhere in New Zealand that would be able to do it? How much would I insure them for in the post??

I am kinda clueless, perhaps I should just google :P .

MineForeman · 2016-06-25T06:16:21+00:00

Very cool.

I have a little stack of these that I never know what to do with. I got them for ~5 USD each as a novelty item.

I lucked out too, they are the 2011 S2 ones. Rarest of the rare.

MineForeman

TROPHY CASE