The network rules are such that the difficulty is adjusted to keep block production to approximately 1 block per 10 minutes. If miners drop out, the difficulty is reduced.
Miners provide a crucial service: they generate a sequential log of transaction blocks. Consensus is reached by accepting the block chain which represents the most work. Miners are rewarded for that work in two ways: transaction fees (chosen by those doing the transactions) and "mined bitcoin".
The question here was "what if the mined bitcoin becomes negligible" (which will happen as we approach 21 million bitcoin). The worry is that the transaction fees will become too high or the miners will all stop mining, and the block chain gneration will stop. As I said, this is not a problem because the block difficulty will automatically re-adjust.
Wouldn't that reduce security?
When only 1% of current miners contribute would it be possible for someone with control over a huge GPU cluster or botnet be able to attack the system?
If the attacker could amass more computing power than the remaining miners, then yes. He could reverse his own recent transactions, and suppress new transactions by others by ignoring them when generating blocks.
It's a matter of fashion. Right now, bitcoin is new, shiny, and fashionable.
It won't last.
I predict that in a year, we won't hear about bitcoins anymore.
Ehh, not really. It's not that "we're" interested in bitcoin, it's that "they're" interested in bitcoin. Remember, the sensible thing to do once you own bitcoins is to start spamming all your friends to tell them how awesome bitcoin is.
I'd be interested in seeing the stats on who keeps voting these bitcoin articles up, cuz I suspect there's an organized or at least self-organizing voting ring going on.
Somewhat to my surprise, it doesn't appear that they've triggered the voting ring algorithm yet. (I remember that swombat's Twitter followers did trip it at least once - it can be tripped without scripting.)
I submitted an article everytime I publish something I thought HN readers might like. I never submitted cartoons though. Also, it's not possible for me to figure out which articles get upvoted. Most of my articles don't made the front page anyway.
Bitcoin is fertile enough to have an entire magazine dedicated to it.
There's quite a few, shall we say, enthusiastic people on HN. Things with Bitcoin in the title typically get upvoted to ~20-30 points, regardless of quality (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430652). I'm willing to bet they are collecting more and more flags, though.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadRight now the deflation makes it very worthwhile for a miner to participate.
Wouldn't transaction costs need to be quite high? Would anyone use a system where one pays 10% for every transaction to be hashed?
The question here was "what if the mined bitcoin becomes negligible" (which will happen as we approach 21 million bitcoin). The worry is that the transaction fees will become too high or the miners will all stop mining, and the block chain gneration will stop. As I said, this is not a problem because the block difficulty will automatically re-adjust.
I'd be interested in seeing the stats on who keeps voting these bitcoin articles up, cuz I suspect there's an organized or at least self-organizing voting ring going on.
Bitcoin is fertile enough to have an entire magazine dedicated to it.
- cool tech
- anti-government
- geeky
- worth more if more people participate
There's quite a few, shall we say, enthusiastic people on HN. Things with Bitcoin in the title typically get upvoted to ~20-30 points, regardless of quality (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430652). I'm willing to bet they are collecting more and more flags, though.