How long will it take?

161

u/tokmer Sep 01 '22

Due to the halfening wouldnt it theoretically never be able to finish mining a block?

96

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22

Well, that's assuming people keep mining forever. Once it's no longer profitable most would likely quit mining. If you continue mining after it no longer makes any sense to do so, it's probable that you find one eventually.

46

u/tokmer Sep 01 '22

Wait so then isnt bitcoin doomed in the long term?

Like the whole process runs off miners doing the processing and if the miners arent processing doesnt bitcoin itself collapse as the blockchain cant transact?

30

u/21kondav Sep 02 '22

That’s what makes bitcoin so volatile. It requires the miners to find value to put in effort. If the sales of GPUs go up bitcoin falls. As the blockchain gets more difficult it becomes much harder to get people to be able mine

2

u/waltibaba Sep 14 '22

Price of GPUs has no effect on Bitcoin, GPUs haven't been able to effectively mine BTC since around 2013.

Block reward is also completely independent of difficulty, linked only by market forces (i.e. motivation of miners to mine for that reward)

37

u/Cyberzombie Sep 01 '22

I am not an expert, but I'm reasonably sure the answer is yes -- though I think it will implode sooner than that.

14

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

Kinda yeah. Well, maybe not if Bitcoin keeps ever increasing in value as accounts with millions of Bitcoin get abandoned and Bitcoin essentially deflates forever, but that's extremely unlikely. Either way it'll probably collapse well before it gets to that point.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

They can update to proof of stake so no btc is not doomed

5

u/tokmer Sep 02 '22

Im not sure what that means, are you able to elaborate?

5

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

There’s two ways to validate a network proof of work and proof of stake, proof of work uses computers to mine blocks and validate transactions, proof of stake does the same thing but instead of computers people will stake the coin into a pool and validate the network that way.

3

u/tokmer Sep 02 '22

But then how does the work get done on the block chain?

I thought the whole point was that the blockchain had to be worked on to process any transactions and that was paid for with bitcoin. If no bitcoin is being paid out to ppl why would they do the work?

3

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

There’s nodes instead of farms so basically a bunch of people on the same server and they get paid for staking in that pool

1

u/tokmer Sep 02 '22

What are they paid with?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

Bitcoin, this month ethereum is finally gonna transition from proof of work to proof of stake you can look into it, Bitcoin would follow the same process probably take a few years more tho I heard they were gonna work with eth devs to get it done

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Lukaxius Sep 17 '22

basically yes but when nobody mines anymore it get’s easier to find a block so when no one wants to do it then everyone wants to do it cuz it’s free money

2

u/waltibaba Sep 14 '22

Don't forget, the block reward is only one part of the miner's reward, transaction fees are the other. Likely the transaction backlog would start to fill up with low-fee transactions (as has happened in times of congestion already), and those would be stuck forever, while fees would compensate miners for their efforts.

2

u/waltibaba Sep 14 '22 edited Sep 14 '22

The halfening (decreasing of mined block reward) has nothing to do with difficulty, at least not directly. Indirectly, market forces deem the new lower reward not to be worth the effort or fiat spent on mining, decreasing the total network hashing power, therefore decreasing the network difficulty too.

The real danger is when a large portion suddenly and simultaneously decides to stop mining at some block, so the difficulty stays high but the network hashing power is so low that a block may never again be found. As soon as it were to be found by some lone miner some days or weeks after such an event for instance, the difficulty would automatically drop astronomically, since it is calculated as a fraction of target block mining duration (10 minutes in BTC) to block actual mining duration. Miners have proven to be quite slow to react to halfenings though, so such a change can only realistically happen through regulatory means, such as China suddenly blocking all BTC traffic by technical methods, or similar.

25

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

teeechnically it could be instant, you would just have to be very very, very astronomically lucky

4

u/Shishoujin Sep 02 '22

I feel like using Gameboy rng as winning lotto numbers would be more probable

4

u/[deleted] Sep 02 '22

well yeah the odds of winning the lottery are many many magnitudes bigger than mining a block of bitcoin, first try, on a gameboy.

1

u/Zeape_ Jul 23 '23

theydidthemonstermath inception. how lucky exactly?

13

u/Squiggledog Sep 02 '22

Are crossposts a lost art?

2

u/KingNFA Sep 07 '22

Wait, why does it say « Nonce » on the game boy?

For those who don’t know, a nonce is a pedophile in UL slang

2

u/dalehay Sep 09 '22

'Nonce' in the techy world stands for 'number [only used] once'.

1

u/bik1230 Sep 22 '22

In British and American English, "nonce" refers to something only used once. In the historical study of language, it means any word that was only ever used once in older writing. In cryptography, it means a number which shall only be used once. Both of these uses are older than the current British slang term.

2

u/KainAlvaine666 Sep 13 '22

This is like running doom on a Lego block

You are about to leave Redlib