Mining's Uncertain Future: Dave Hudson Talks Blocksize, Transaction Fees & Decentralization
“The system needs more analysis” might be Dave Hudson's motto as far as Bitcoin mining is concerned. It's not a surprising opinion for an engineer. Hudson, who's VP of Software for blockchain company PeerNova, dissects mining networks as a hobby. His leading mining blog hashingit.com teems with data-driven analysis of the mining network. Despite his work, there's still plenty left to analyze. Hudson joined Epicenter Bitcoin last week to talk about the long-term viability of the system. The process known as mining, which is the infrastructure that secures bitcoin transactions and prevents....
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There are plenty of people who believe they can predict the future of Bitcoin, but no one can really say for sure what will happen over the next five to 10 years. Some say that bitcoin will become the new reserve currency of the world, while others say issues involving scalability or regulation will eventually get in the way. Although no one can know what will happen, it's still useful to analyze where Bitcoin has been, where it is right now, and where it may go in the future. Dave Hudson, who is vice president of software architecture at Peernova and previously worked at Qualcomm, was....
Two weeks ago Ethereum launched Frontier, the first live release of the network. And Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin joined the latest Epicenter Bitcoin podcast episode to discuss where the platform is headed next. But even as the discussion revolved around the much-awaited launch, it kept bouncing back to the developer's thoughts on big picture cryptocurrency questions, including governance (how to reach decisions about protocol changes) and scalability (how the protocol can support many transactions without compromising decentralization). The question of governance has been on people's....
A recent Princeton University study finds that a cap on max block size is necessary in a situation where mining rewards are entirely made of transaction fees. Miles Carlsten with Arvind Narayanan acting as advisor have assumed that ‘miners have the capability of claiming all possible transactions available in their next block.’ Based on the game theory analysis and simulations the study concludes that orphaned blocks would increase substantially as miners aggressively fork each other. Miner strategies. Describing a ‘petty compliant miner strategy,’ the simulation suggests that if a miner....
A mood of resignation prevails across the bitcoin space as a viciously years-long debate that has taken the reputation of so many and the time and focus of all, seemingly, comes to an end. Eric Mu of HaoBTC, one of the most influential, if not the decisive, mining entity in the blocksize debate, stated today that most miners did not care about the blocksize question and those who do can easily collude/conspire, are easily alienated or cajoled or…. much more shockingly, are intimidated. Miners, from remote parts of China, were outed at the “scaling workshop” held during winter 2015 when....
There have been a few proposals to increase the maximum blocksize in Bitcoin over the past year, but the two plans that are garnering the most attention right now are Jeff Garzik's BIP 100 and Gavin Andresen's BIP 101. While Andresen has already implemented his plan in BitcoinXT, Garzik is still working on a formal write-up and the code for BIP 100. Andresen shared his thoughts on BIP 100 via an interview on Epicenter Bitcoin. Although he did not seem completely dismissive of the proposal, it's clear that he would prefer to go with his own idea for increasing the blocksize, which would....