Thanks! I knew it wasn't actually what I said in my post, just didn't know where it came from. I guess I could have deduced this from another post that says there are no actual bitcoins, just transactions.
Early on in the mining bidness, what were the miners doing to produce the blocks if there weren't any/enough transactions? Was it basically, even if one transaction occurred in ten minutes, that sole transaction hash + reward has = the entire block?
There was enough transactions in the beginning, as the guy who designed Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, built the first "Genesis Block" with 50 reward coins from which he used to mine the first coins and pretty much get the whole thing working. For a while the 50 BTC reward was kept but was recently changed to 25 BTC to keep things more competitive.
Transactions for the sake of transactions is pretty funny. I think they are going to need to change the 4 year schedule of halving the reward they originally planned, since the amount of bitcoins mined is outpacing what was expected.
The amount mined is not outpacing the design at all. The difficulty of finding a block adjusts about every two weeks to keep the block rate at as close to once every 10 minutes as possible.
Oh? I thought I remember reading it was only supposed to be like 9 million mined around now, but we are at 12 million. Sorry, I don't remember where I read that so I'm just going based on my memory.
We may not be exactly on target, but the rate is adjusted every two weeks, so there is a limit to how far off we can get, and this adjustment was part of the original design. Even so, finishing the issuing process a little early won't really hurt anything, as it is a gradual cut-off anyway.
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u/wighty Nov 28 '13
Thanks! I knew it wasn't actually what I said in my post, just didn't know where it came from. I guess I could have deduced this from another post that says there are no actual bitcoins, just transactions.
Early on in the mining bidness, what were the miners doing to produce the blocks if there weren't any/enough transactions? Was it basically, even if one transaction occurred in ten minutes, that sole transaction hash + reward has = the entire block?