<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub1swfeusu3ua9trup00qcnrgc2yndksyvgku4epk5tec7u4fmrez6qxpul5t</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2014-10-25&#xA;📝 Original message:&gt; We had a halving, and it was a non-event.&#xA;&gt; Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&#xA;Yes.&#xA;&#xA;When the market is rapidly growing, margins can be relatively high because&#xA;of limited amounts of capital being invested, or introduction of more&#xA;efficient technologies.&#xA;&#xA;However, we should expect market to become more mature with time, and a&#xA;mature market will result in lower margins.&#xA;The halving can do much more damage when margins are relatively small.&#xA;&#xA;Besides that, there is a difference in ecosystem maturity:&#xA;&#xA;1. Back in 2012, miners weren&#39;t so focused on profits, as Bitcoin was&#xA;highly experimental: some were mining for the hell of it (it was a novelty&#xA;thing back then), others wanted to secure the network, others did it&#xA;because it was hard to obtain bitcoins by other means. But now miners are&#xA;mostly profit-motivated: they buy expensive dedicated mining equipment and&#xA;want to maximize profits. As you might know, at one point ghash.io reached&#xA;50% hashrate, and miners didn&#39;t care about it enough to switch to a&#xA;different pool.&#xA;&#xA;2. Back in 2012, we didn&#39;t have multipools. Multipools automatically&#xA;switches between mining different alt-chains to maximize miners&#39; profits.&#xA;Miners who use multipools do not care how their hashrate is used as long as&#xA;they profit off it.&#xA;Particularly, check https://nicehash.com/ -- you can easily buy hashrate to&#xA;attack a smaller alt-coin, for example.&#xA;&#xA;If the halving will result in a significant hashrate drop (and we did&#xA;observe hashrate drop in 2012, although it wasn&#39;t that big), it might be&#xA;possible to buy enough hashpower to attack Bitcoin.&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20141025/d828d84e/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>