<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub1uvtfvcegcn9kds68r8he57emc480vqtx8t22kpsctxgjxae44gvsksaxrt</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1uvtfvcegcn9kds68r8he57emc480vqtx8t22kpsctxgjxae44gvsksaxrt</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2014-10-25&#xA;📝 Original message:On 25 October 2014 21:53, Alex Mizrahi &lt;alex.mizrahi at gmail.com&gt; wrote:&#xA;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; We had a halving, and it was a non-event.&#xA;&gt;&gt; Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Yes.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; When the market is rapidly growing, margins can be relatively high because&#xA;&gt; of limited amounts of capital being invested, or introduction of more&#xA;&gt; efficient technologies.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; However, we should expect market to become more mature with time, and a&#xA;&gt; mature market will result in lower margins.&#xA;&gt; The halving can do much more damage when margins are relatively small.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; Besides that, there is a difference in ecosystem maturity:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; 1. Back in 2012, miners weren&#39;t so focused on profits, as Bitcoin was&#xA;&gt; highly experimental: some were mining for the hell of it (it was a novelty&#xA;&gt; thing back then), others wanted to secure the network, others did it&#xA;&gt; because it was hard to obtain bitcoins by other means. But now miners are&#xA;&gt; mostly profit-motivated: they buy expensive dedicated mining equipment and&#xA;&gt; want to maximize profits. As you might know, at one point ghash.io&#xA;&gt; reached 50% hashrate, and miners didn&#39;t care about it enough to switch to a&#xA;&gt; different pool.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; 2. Back in 2012, we didn&#39;t have multipools. Multipools automatically&#xA;&gt; switches between mining different alt-chains to maximize miners&#39; profits.&#xA;&gt; Miners who use multipools do not care how their hashrate is used as long as&#xA;&gt; they profit off it.&#xA;&gt; Particularly, check https://nicehash.com/ -- you can easily buy hashrate&#xA;&gt; to attack a smaller alt-coin, for example.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; If the halving will result in a significant hashrate drop (and we did&#xA;&gt; observe hashrate drop in 2012, although it wasn&#39;t that big), it might be&#xA;&gt; possible to buy enough hashpower to attack Bitcoin.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&#xA;This is a good point, imho.  Miner sophistication has increased drastically&#xA;in 2 years.  Sites like ( http://www.coinwarz.com/ ) can heavily influence&#xA;mining, 1-2 orders of magnitude on significant levels of hashing.&#xA;&#xA;I think this is more prevalent with scrypt than sha256, litecoin is set to&#xA;half reward in 9 months, and it will be interesting to observe what happens&#xA;there.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; _______________________________________________&#xA;&gt; Bitcoin-development mailing list&#xA;&gt; Bitcoin-development at lists.sourceforge.net&#xA;&gt; https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20141025/9e83bd0e/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>