On 25 October 2014 21:53, Alex Mizrahi <alex.mizr...@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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