Bitcoin Fails To Produce 1 Block For Over An Hour (coindesk.com) 189
It took more than an hour to mine a block of bitcoin (BTC) on Monday, leaving thousands of transactions stuck in an unconfirmed state. CoinDesk reports: According to on-chain data from several block explorers, the interval between the two latest blocks mined by Foundry USA and Luxor was 85 minutes. According to Mempool, over 13,000 transactions were pending before the latest block was mined.
Last week Bitcoin underwent a difficulty adjustment to ensure block confirmations kept taking place every 10 minutes. With mining difficulty surging to 35.6 trillion it becomes more expensive to mine bitcoin, which heaps pressure on a mining industry that is dealing with soaring energy prices and a crypto bear market. Tadge Dryja, founder of the Lightning Network, tweeted that an 85-minute interval between blocks can be expected to happen once every 34 days, not taking into account difficulty changes.
Last week Bitcoin underwent a difficulty adjustment to ensure block confirmations kept taking place every 10 minutes. With mining difficulty surging to 35.6 trillion it becomes more expensive to mine bitcoin, which heaps pressure on a mining industry that is dealing with soaring energy prices and a crypto bear market. Tadge Dryja, founder of the Lightning Network, tweeted that an 85-minute interval between blocks can be expected to happen once every 34 days, not taking into account difficulty changes.
This is the future of currency (Score:2, Troll)
Yeah right
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Not liquid, a property of something that is not money.
You got the metrics wrong, the situation is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
If I pay my bank's credit card from my same banks checking account using their website it takes 2-3 days for the transaction to settle. one hour settlement is still a huge improvement.
You have the wrong metric. The actual metric here is how long it is taking to confirm the transaction. So your credit card analogy is really, you swipe/tap your card/phone/watch, it then takes the credit card company one hour to respond to the merchant with "approved".
So its not a few days becomes an hour, its a few seconds become an hour.
Actually, its worse for bitcoin. Verifying a transaction is often not done on a single block cycle. Some merchants want to see three or more block cycles with the transaction.
Re:You got the metrics wrong, the situation is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
You have the wrong metric. The actual metric here is how long it is taking to confirm the transaction. So your credit card analogy is really, you swipe/tap your card/phone/watch, it then takes the credit card company one hour to respond to the merchant with "approved".
Disagree, you have the wrong metric. The credit-card to merchant confirmation isn't "settlement" so much as it is an "IOU later, maybe." The transaction can be unwound at any time UNILATERALLY by the credit-card company. The merchant doesn't actually have the money when the payment processor says "approved."
OP is correct, cryptocurrency transactions, due to their finality, are far more comparable to the process of funds going from the books of one bank to another bank, which is measured in hours to days (esp. when crossing banking systems or jurisdictions). In fact, I wired some money (one big bank to another big bank) from the EU to the USA last year, and while the transaction was visible within an hour or two in my account status, it took well over a week to actually clear (i.e. the point in time where you could actually withdraw that transferred amount in hundred dollar bills and set them on fire in front of the bank teller if you so desired).
Re: You got the metrics wrong, the situation is ba (Score:4, Informative)
It is statically good enough for the to let you have the goods. The promise of an upcoming bitcoin transaction not so much.
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the process of funds going from the books of one bank to another bank, which is measured in hours to days
Is there anywhere that it takes less than three days?
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Re:You got the metrics wrong, the situation is bad (Score:5, Informative)
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The question is whether it will get rolled back possibly.
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Disagree, you have the wrong metric. The credit-card to merchant confirmation isn't "settlement" so much as it is an "IOU later, maybe." The transaction can be unwound at any time UNILATERALLY by the credit-card company. The merchant doesn't actually have the money when the payment processor says "approved."
Correct, it is not settlement.
But you don't have to wait for settlement to happen at the supermarket checkout. You have to wait for approval only until you can grab your stuff and leave the store.
So this is the time that matters if you want something to be an actually useful payment system/currency. If settlement is instant (or fast enough) like cash, this is enough. But if settlement takes days, you need an additional approval step fast enough when you are using a payment method
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In other words merchants know within seconds that the payment is overwhelmingly likely to be delivered to them in the future; they don't have t
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You have the wrong metric. The actual metric here is how long it is taking to confirm the transaction. So your credit card analogy is really, you swipe/tap your card/phone/watch, it then takes the credit card company one hour to respond to the merchant with "approved".
Disagree, you have the wrong metric.
You are ignoring the fact that the block containing the transaction is used by the merchant as the "approved" signal. Again, in reality, many want to see the transaction in several block cycles.
So yes, you are thinking about this wrong. "Settlement" is irrelevant here. "Approval" is what prevents the goods from changing hands for an hour.
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Re: This is the future of currency (Score:2)
If I do this with my bank it happens faster than I can verify.
I've used a credit card at a shop, had it decline due to balance, transfered money with my banks mobile app and immediately retried the payment, successfully. It was all over in less than a minute, including getting out my phone and logging in.
You're with the wrong bank.
Re: This is the future of currency (Score:2)
Whoa. Here if it's not within seconds I get anxious and call up customer care. Across banks.
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If I pay my bank's credit card from my same banks checking account using their website it takes 2-3 days for the transaction to settle.
Don't confuse your bank's incompetence with an underlying technical limitation. If I pay my bank's credit card it takes milliseconds for the transaction to settle, just like when I transfer internally within my bank.
The only form of payment that takes longer than a day to clear here are those which use and verify a paper trail or move funds via an international clearing system such as SWIFT.
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Re: This is the future of currency (Score:2)
No they are not. All money is fiat. Itâ(TM)s money because the government says so. Actual M0 money (notes and coins) in the US is about $5.5 trillion compared with the c$21 trillion M1 money.
Therefore the claim that bank accounts represent paper money is not true.
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A store of value? A BTC, a store of value? What value? It is around 19.5K right now, yes? It was 67000 just a little while back. If you bought it as 67K and haven't sold it, you lost 47500 or so, you lost 70% of your money. What store of value is that? From 0 to 67000 to 19500 and probably to 0 again in the next couple of years. Store of value.
Re:This is the future of currency (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a store of perception.
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Never said they were right. That's just what the Bitcoin maximalists claim.
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That's why 'Dollar Cost Averaging' (DCA) is recommended, you buy a little each week, not dump your life savings in at once at the 'All Time High' (ATH)
I kinda wish I had dumped all in at once, I'd had my eye on Bitcoin since the whitepaper first came out, but didn't invest until it was already $2500, and kept buying until $15000.
BTC is a speculative investment vehicle (Score:2)
A side effect of this speculative investment vehicle is that it can be used to transfer money globally, usually.
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And I have a piece of lint here valued at a million, so that's even a million times more valuable than the dollar.
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Yeah, but I bet that took more than an hour to mint.
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I have no idea how long it took it to lint, that stuff just shows up eventually. I don't exactly understand the process how it's done, I just throw it in the washer and it happens after a while, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
In that sense, it's not unlike mining bitcoins for most people doing it.
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Wrong. Total USD value is 2,040 Trillion. Total BTC value is only 360 Billion. USD is worth over 5000x BTC.
Re: This is the future of currency (Score:3)
Except btc is more like stock. If someone tried to sell 10,000btc, they would not get market value for it, the entire market would drop on value due to over supply.
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USD is the same. Although it would be hard for someone to sell 2,000 trillion dollars, if they did, it would crater the value of the USD.
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That's not that much different from the Dollar. That would tank too if China decided to sell all their USD reserves/bonds
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Re: This is the future of currency (Score:2)
Energy
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If only it was convertible and we could get that energy back, our energy price crisis would be gone.
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They lost 67K when buying the bitcoin. The hope is to recover some, all, or more, of that money when selling it.
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I'm old enough to remember when it was propagated as digital cash to replace your dollars. Didn't some coffee shops and pizza places accept BTC?
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Re: This is the future of currency (Score:2)
A store of value that fluctuates wildly over short periods of time. ...
See, (Score:4, Funny)
bots get constipated also.
Because (Score:5, Insightful)
The bitcoin and blockchain technologies are FUCKING DESIGNER GARBAGE.
Its about the 0's, not the 1's (Score:3)
Bitcoin needs to end FFS. It's spending countless resources to create 0's and 1's that mean nothing and do nothing.
To be fair it is only creating the 0's, the 1's are waste product.
Another Web3 fail (Score:2)
I would like to pay for these hamburgers with bitcoin. You'll get your confirmation in an hour or so, *wink*.
Hahahaha!
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Okie dokie Wimpy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Modern-day Wimpy [wikipedia.org]: "If you lend me the money for a hamburger today, I'll gladly repay you tomorrow... when the block confirms!"
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Great, just give me your digital signature, and I can verify with any node that you have the funds, and see that no other transaction has already been submitted. You also have no way to know if the next block is going to be in 1 second or 1 hour, so you have no easy way to plan to scam with a double spend.
Or should I just take a check? or a possibly counterfeit bill?
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And just like with a counterfeit bill, your best bet with bitcoins is to find a bigger fool before someone notices that it's just bunk.
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Sure you periodically get ripped off but that's the price you pay for money laundering^X^X the future
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Bonus points if that "bank" caters to cons and the illegal drug market while claiming to be mainstream.
Better invest in ugly monkey picture NFTs (Score:3)
You can trade those ugly pictures any time within minutes.
At least you can print that picture out on paper and brag about it that you own the URL to the picture.
All your friends will be jealous that you did invest your life savings into this new technology where you can own the URL to something.
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At least you can print that picture out on paper and brag about it that you own the URL to the picture.,
Correction, you don't actually own the URL. You own an instance of the URL stored on the blockchain.
Great (Score:2)
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It never was.
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Ethereum does not have an "economic structure". ETH isn't money.
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Depends on the purpose for your blockchain system. Is it a proof of concept? Doesn't really have to be functional or uti8litarian. Is it a plan to create the next insanely great thing? It only has to work long enough to be famous or notorious. Is the purpose to create a new, unique, magnificent method of transferring value? Well it just has to work. And that is a kinda flexible goal. Can mean whatever you want.
Bitcoin has collided with a series of unfortunate circumstances:
- Energy prices and pressure on el
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Etherium. :-) It just moved away from solving hard problem in a targeted time frame as part of the blockchain's maintenance.
This is the dumbest thing I've read all month
Well, let's take a look at your post, I'm sure it will be dumber.
1) Bitcoin has never worked by "solving a hard problem in a targeted time". That's why we are seeing an 85 minute block.
"solving a hard problem" is referencing the proof-of-work concept where -- hold on -- it is calibrated to be hard enough that the network, not an individual, will solve the problem in about 10 minutes. 10 minute is that "targeted time" for the difficult task of solving the hash problem at hand. So how hard is the "work", well. your computer cannot do it in an economical manner, your GPU cannot, ... only highly specialized ASIC designs specific
Bank run! (Score:2)
Time to pull out all your electrons from the exchanges!
Not a problem - difficulty will adjust downward (Score:2, Informative)
itcoin Fails To Produce 1 Block For Over An Hour
Blocks are produced too quickly, the system will automatically adjust difficulty upwards.
Blocks are produced too slowly, the system will automatically adjust difficulty downwards.
The system is self correcting in either direction.
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This is a statistical outlier, not a problem of network difficulty.
Mining is a statistical endeavor, not unlike playing lottery. It takes 10 minutes ON AVERAGE to mine a Bitcoin block. Actual mining time for each block varies.
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This is a statistical outlier, not a problem of network difficulty.
That claim was not made. My actual claim is that if one hour were NOT an outlier the system would recalibrate itself back to 10 minutes.
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From the summary:
Looks like this had nothing to do with the difficulty change, and is in-fact inherent to the platform as it is expected to happen on a regular basis.
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From the summary:
Looks like this had nothing to do with the difficulty change, and is in-fact inherent to the platform as it is expected to happen on a regular basis.
I never claimed it was. My claim is that if one hour blocks were to occur on a regular statistically significant basis the system would recalibrate itself back to an average of 10 minutes.
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You miss the point - if its not related to the difficulty change, then its not related to the difficulty, its independent of it and inherent in the system
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2016 blocks could become a practical eternity if mining drops. I would be curious if changing it so it adjusts every 200 blocks, but using the last 2000 blocks average time would work.
Arbitrary difficulty (Score:3)
So this regulation-free form of "money" has to have an arbitrary mining difficulty that someone has to regulate.
Am I understanding this correctly?
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has to have an arbitrary mining difficulty that someone has to regulate.
Am I understanding this correctly?
No. No person has any control over the difficulty. The difficulty is deterministic: determined by a calculation based on how long the mining took - by the N-1th block; Every node on the network can have calculated the next difficulty and have to in order to make sure the next block is valid.
The adjustment value is Automatically determined by the network based on How long those blocks took to mine
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Not really, No. Theoretically a miner with a huge amount of hashing power could drop the difficulty only at great cost to themself - they would have to maintain that reduction for a considerable period of time to achieve the maximum reduction 2016 blocks (Roughtly 2 weeks) which may lead to others rushing to turn on more hashing power, and lose out on average their share of block rewards for all those blocks, Unless the
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So this regulation-free form of "money" has to have an arbitrary mining difficulty that someone has to regulate.
Am I understanding this correctly?
The only error is in thinking it's something to occur in the future.
The expansion of the bitcoin supply has already been regulated, by someone who isn't even identified yet alone accountable for the outcome, and cannot be adjusted for actual economic conditions.
It's basically the worst way to implement a fiat currency.
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No it doesn't. You're just clueless as to how Bitcoin operates.
Re:Arbitrary difficulty (Score:5, Insightful)
The blockchain is ruled by consensus, votes are assigned by whoever does the most work. In theory, whoever owns the biggest mining setup can do whatever they want and everyone else will tag along or the blockchain splits and chaos reigns. There's some momentum behind the existing system because it's more difficult to get everyone to update than it is to have them not touch anything.
The culties believe everyone will act for the good of the blockchain, others believe whoever can arrange things to their own advantage will do so, and yet others believe no matter what you do, it's never going to do what the culties claim it will - which changes based on whatever Bitcoin has most recently failed to do.
Unless you're a cultist, a gambler, or a criminal, you probably just want to walk away and not even bother reading another article about Bitcoin ever again.
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it's like everyone on here is a boomer
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You mean "someone who saw through the whole scheme because he's old enough to have seen it before"? Yeah, probably.
But I guess every kid has to touch the stove himself, there's no point in telling them not to.
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You might want to read this again, I think you identify the wrong people as the stove touchers.
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I keep seeing stories like this the talk about how people have made adjustments to how Bitcoin works. But it obviously raises the question who's making the decision on what those adjustments will be.
The core development team makes decisions about changes to the bitcoin network. They eventually release an update.
Miners then decide whether to switch from the old network to the updated network, or not.
Users then decide whether they wish to conduct transaction on the old network or updated network.
v0.3 (Score:3)
Is it just me or does it seem like digital money is stuck at version 0.3? Either not everything is implemented yet or there are some serious flaws.
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Bitcoin is.
1908 (Score:2)
Is it just me or does it seem like digital money is stuck at version 0.3? Either not everything is implemented yet or there are some serious flaws.
Why not both?
I like the following analogy. Blockchain is like the internal combustion engine in 1908. Bitcoin is like the Ford Model T car of 1908. The Model T was just the first user of the internal combustion engine to get the attention of the public at large. Bitcoin is just the first user of the blockchain to get the attention of the public at large. Like the Model T, Bitcoin will be replaced by something better.
Bitcoin's position is particularly bad in that regard as the switching cost for users
Still.. (Score:3, Funny)
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..much faster than growing a tulip!
Well, post crash, the tulips can still make the garden smell nice.
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For now.
Pyramid Scheme - Waste of Vital Energy (Score:2, Insightful)
Is the math right? (Score:2)
I'm no statistician, but his math looks wrong. Going straight from the probability of a block taking 85 minutes to "expected days"; I don't think that's quite right, any more than the "10 minute average" is the actual block time.
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Is this news? (Score:2)
What is a bit coin (Score:2)
Still beats U.S. banking (Score:3)
I regularly see transfers take 5 days moving through the traditional banking system.
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Dunno why you were modded down - imho, this is a legit question if you honestly don't know.
Basically, they can just increase the limit to a new value with a simple network upgrade. The current claim is that they won't do that, but once we get closer to the max mint limit, I'm personally quite sure that view will change.
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Oh, also worth mentioning that the current idea is that once the system runs out of new coins to mint via mining, the transaction fees will be enough to sustain miner interest. If you didn't know this already, block finders also receive a transaction fee reward on top of the newly minted bitcoin award, which is why txns that self-assign higher fee rates are put on the chain sooner than those with cheaper self-assigned fee rates.
Again imho, this is all wishful thinking, and bitcoin will see a steady exodus o
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I could be wrong, and it all works out without a minable limit increase ...
True, miners could act in the best interest of the bitcoin ecosystem instead of their personal financial gain. :-)
Another option, bitcoin could switch to a non proof-of-work system. That will likely become a political necessity at some point.
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The current claim is that they won't do that, but once we get closer to the max mint limit, I'm personally quite sure that view will change.
It won't change. The "miners" will be paid via transaction fees (note: they are already partially paid via transaction fees).
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Blocks will always be mined at an average interval of 10 minutes, but rewards per block mined will diminish over time. Right now it's 6.25 new Bitcoins plus a small transaction fee. This number of new Bitcoins per block will half every four years until 2140, when the last of 21 million will be mined. Then only transaction fees will remain as rewards.
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Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]
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Miners still get txn fees. Fees will likely go up.
Fees will grow as new coins no longer issued (Score:2)
If perpetually mining blocks is required to process transactions then what's going to happen when all the 21 million or whatever total bitcoin are mined? Even if difficulty is scaled to slow down the eventual exhaustion of bitcoin that would necessarily require longer and longer block time intervals.
The system recalibrates itself automatically to issue the bitcoin rewards at a somewhat predictable times.
The rate of coin creation is slowed down periodically with cutting the reward in half at periodic intervals. Its all "scheduled". We will get to zero new bitcoins at a somewhat predictable date, barring ecosystem collapse.
In addition to the reward of new coins, there are also transaction fees. The design of the system is that once there are no more coins to reward miners with the fees will need to
Re: What happens after they're all minted? (Score:2)
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Not likely. BCH and BSV alone ought to show you than Bitcoin is a technological has-been.
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And if I really, really, really, really believe it hard enough it just MUST come true!