There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment.
Let's call this cycle A and cycle B.
If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder.
This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter.
This isn't completely critical as there is I believe a small damping effect, so it isn't completely lethal to bitcoin, but a key thing about bitcoin mining is that whether other people are mining or not doesn't actually affect your own profitiability.
Other people dropping out doesn't actually mean you get more bitcoins per hour/watt, it only affects the next difficulty adjustment as a secondary effect.
The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.
That depends on each miner's energy costs, so long as (variable cost of energy - revenue from coins) < fixed costs. It's still negative cashflow either way, but the monthly losses have to be weighed against the cost of going insolvent and losing the hardware.
Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?
Training ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both.
Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.
The difficulty can only adjust by a factor of 4 which also limits the incentive change. You'd need more than 90% of miners to disappear to start seeing actual problems.
I think you're right, it's counterintuitive but less competition means less rewards to share for those who keep mining. Though transaction fees / hour shouldn't decrease, maybe your share of that is bigger.
It's the other way around, and there's no obligation to even carry transactions when mining, although it's incentivised through fees.
Your mining rate is simply your hash rate vs the hash difficulty.
Conceptually, it's analoglous to rolling random numbers in (0,1) until you get to a number smaller than 1/X, where X is large.
How long it takes you to do that, isn't dependent on how many other people are also trying to do that, if you get 1 hit per hour, then lots of other people getting hits doesn't actually stop you getting your 1 hit per hour.
Now, that's not quite the whole truth, as there's a small amount of time needed for propagation of the previous chain, but with an average hit globally of ~10 minutes, that's not actually a big factor.
What could happen to incentivise people is increased fees if blocks get less common due to dropped miners, there'd be more competition to get into blocks if they start filling up.
That combined with the fixed costs such as depreciation as othes mentioned, keeps the risk of this form of failure to a minimum.
It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail.
People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.
20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.
TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.
Staccato, which is Italian for "detached, separated".
When I see simple Italian words used as technical terms in music or art, I think "oh, this must be what English speakers feel when they work in tech - a lot of common words becoming specific concepts in that particular field".
Consider what it'd mean if there were parts of the Earth that could not be seen from the moon, it would also mean those locations could never themselves see the moon.
Ignoring the orbital period implications, I think it'd be bigger news if either US or Europe, or Asia couldn't ever actually see the moon.
There are usually no lyrics, there's an absolute ton out there, and something about the music gets my brain flowing better than other instrumental music.
They're all slightly different in terms how the construction of a computer is pitched, none of them are perfect, they all have quirks and flaws, but they're all fun.
Some like Human Resource Machine take the approachof
I wish Turing Complete wasn't quite so buggy or awkward, for a while it was by far the most promising of the bunch, but it's never quite polished and it's ended up in a bit of frustrating state.
Notable mention also to The Signal State, Shenzhen I/O, and TIS100 which are higher level than this, but scratch a similar itch.
there's ones like TIS100 which I keep meaning to revisit, but I find it very difficult to get back into these games without starting from scratch, and resetting my TIS100 progress is too intimidating.
They no doubt predate .editorconfig, but the problem as described is now better solved by .editorconfig, which can be used to configure directory and file specific configuration and works cross-editor too.
Let's call this cycle A and cycle B.
If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder.
This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter.
This isn't completely critical as there is I believe a small damping effect, so it isn't completely lethal to bitcoin, but a key thing about bitcoin mining is that whether other people are mining or not doesn't actually affect your own profitiability.
Other people dropping out doesn't actually mean you get more bitcoins per hour/watt, it only affects the next difficulty adjustment as a secondary effect.
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