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From: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
To: Alex Mizrahi <alex.mizrahi@gmail.com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] death by halving
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 23:50:49 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKaEYh+YSjtA-vMWBsWrTjwenB1xxa-pJr3WTykoMGaxEAd8cw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAE28kUS5otH3q6BPETANw6PaDCrrs1+Sm+LMNnv_TK-viGRFLQ@mail.gmail.com>

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On 25 October 2014 21:53, Alex Mizrahi <alex.mizrahi@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> We had a halving, and it was a non-event.
>> Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?
>>
>
> Yes.
>
> When the market is rapidly growing, margins can be relatively high because
> of limited amounts of capital being invested, or introduction of more
> efficient technologies.
>
> However, we should expect market to become more mature with time, and a
> mature market will result in lower margins.
> The halving can do much more damage when margins are relatively small.
>
> Besides that, there is a difference in ecosystem maturity:
>
> 1. Back in 2012, miners weren't so focused on profits, as Bitcoin was
> highly experimental: some were mining for the hell of it (it was a novelty
> thing back then), others wanted to secure the network, others did it
> because it was hard to obtain bitcoins by other means. But now miners are
> mostly profit-motivated: they buy expensive dedicated mining equipment and
> want to maximize profits. As you might know, at one point ghash.io
> reached 50% hashrate, and miners didn't care about it enough to switch to a
> different pool.
>
> 2. Back in 2012, we didn't have multipools. Multipools automatically
> switches between mining different alt-chains to maximize miners' profits.
> Miners who use multipools do not care how their hashrate is used as long as
> they profit off it.
> Particularly, check https://nicehash.com/ -- you can easily buy hashrate
> to attack a smaller alt-coin, for example.
>
> If the halving will result in a significant hashrate drop (and we did
> observe hashrate drop in 2012, although it wasn't that big), it might be
> possible to buy enough hashpower to attack Bitcoin.
>

This is a good point, imho.  Miner sophistication has increased drastically
in 2 years.  Sites like ( http://www.coinwarz.com/ ) can heavily influence
mining, 1-2 orders of magnitude on significant levels of hashing.

I think this is more prevalent with scrypt than sha256, litecoin is set to
half reward in 9 months, and it will be interesting to observe what happens
there.


>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bitcoin-development mailing list
> Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>
>

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  reply	other threads:[~2014-10-25 21:50 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-10-25 18:06 [Bitcoin-development] death by halving Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-25 18:12 ` Jeff Garzik
2014-10-25 18:22   ` Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-25 18:31     ` Jeff Garzik
2014-10-25 19:08       ` Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-25 19:16         ` Gavin Andresen
2014-10-25 19:53           ` Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-25 21:50             ` Melvin Carvalho [this message]
2014-10-28 20:17           ` Ferdinando M. Ametrano
     [not found]             ` <CAAS2fgSiz-XRVQ4V+KbrTUWG4=g=WGf8c-pF4b4fFnfyU9HOqQ@mail.gmail.com>
2014-10-28 20:36               ` [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: " Gregory Maxwell
2014-10-28 20:57                 ` Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-28 21:19                   ` Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste
2014-10-28 21:43                     ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-10-28 22:43                       ` Ferdinando M. Ametrano
2014-10-29 14:34                         ` [Bitcoin-development] Death by halving (pro-active proposals) Sergio Lerner
2014-10-29 17:25                           ` Jeff Garzik
2014-10-28 21:23                 ` [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: death by halving Ferdinando M. Ametrano
2014-10-28 21:34                   ` Neil
2014-10-28 21:44                     ` Ferdinando M. Ametrano
2014-10-28 22:00                       ` Thomas Zander
2014-10-28 22:38                         ` Ferdinando M. Ametrano
2014-10-28 21:57                     ` Christophe Biocca
2014-10-25 20:27 ` [Bitcoin-development] " Adam Back
2014-10-25 20:43   ` Thomas Zander
2014-10-25 20:28 ` Thomas Zander
2014-10-25 20:49   ` Alex Mizrahi
2014-10-25 21:51     ` Alexander Leishman
2014-10-25 22:10 ` Ross Nicoll
2014-10-25 22:42   ` Melvin Carvalho

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