{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2014-10-25\n📝 Original message:\u003e We had a halving, and it was a non-event.\n\u003e Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?\n\u003e\n\nYes.\n\nWhen the market is rapidly growing, margins can be relatively high because\nof limited amounts of capital being invested, or introduction of more\nefficient technologies.\n\nHowever, we should expect market to become more mature with time, and a\nmature market will result in lower margins.\nThe halving can do much more damage when margins are relatively small.\n\nBesides that, there is a difference in ecosystem maturity:\n\n1. Back in 2012, miners weren't so focused on profits, as Bitcoin was\nhighly experimental: some were mining for the hell of it (it was a novelty\nthing back then), others wanted to secure the network, others did it\nbecause it was hard to obtain bitcoins by other means. But now miners are\nmostly profit-motivated: they buy expensive dedicated mining equipment and\nwant to maximize profits. As you might know, at one point ghash.io reached\n50% hashrate, and miners didn't care about it enough to switch to a\ndifferent pool.\n\n2. Back in 2012, we didn't have multipools. Multipools automatically\nswitches between mining different alt-chains to maximize miners' profits.\nMiners who use multipools do not care how their hashrate is used as long as\nthey profit off it.\nParticularly, check https://nicehash.com/ -- you can easily buy hashrate to\nattack a smaller alt-coin, for example.\n\nIf the halving will result in a significant hashrate drop (and we did\nobserve hashrate drop in 2012, although it wasn't that big), it might be\npossible to buy enough hashpower to attack Bitcoin.\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20141025/d828d84e/attachment.html\u003e"}