Am Mo, 1. Aug 2022, um 16:47, schrieb John Clark: > > > On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:24 AM Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> __ >>> >> Bitcoin is between a rock and a hard place. If the number of miners is >>> >> reduced the energy efficiency increases but the security declines >>> >> because it allows the elite to spend one of their Bitcoins and keep it >>> >> too. If the number of miners is increased the security gets better but >>> >> the energy required to complete an economic transaction increases. If >>> >> you use Bitcoin or anything like it and you want honesty then you're >>> >> going to have to expend a ridiculous amount of energy every time you buy >>> >> a candy bar. >>> >> *> This is not how it works. Each mining attempt also tries to fulfill the >> outstanding transactions in the network -- or at least the ones that pay >> what the miner considers to be an acceptable fee. Each block contains many >> transactions.* > > > If verifying a block takes an exponentially increasing amount of energy that > asymptotically approaches infinity,
The bitcoin protocol is designed in such a way that a new block is generated aproximately every 10 minutes. This is accomplished in the following way: mining difficulty is adjusted automatically for every 2016 blocks added to the chain. The adjustment of difficulty can be upwards or downwards and it depends on the number of participants in the mining network and their combined hashpower (the number of hashes that they can try per second). It's a distributed self-adaptive algorithm. You seem to be under the impression that mining becomes exponentially hard, but this is not the case. The reward in bitcoins per mined block is halved every 4 years, by design. The idea is to gradualy replace money supply with mining fees. Miners go from being payed in new bitcoins to being paied in transaction fees. Does the amount of energy increase exponentially with the number of participants in the network? I really do not think so, but maybe I am wrong. Telmo > and if a block is made up of many small transactions, then processing a small > transaction will take an exponentially increasing amount of energy that > asymptotically approaches infinity. > > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > vab > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1c36bc6a-723b-414d-8477-4a84de00cbf0%40www.fastmail.com.
