China's Bitcoin Miners See Profit in a Bigger-Block Blockchain
It was not entirely an idle joke when one speaker at China's first miner conference quipped that if the audience decided to launch a 51% attack against the bitcoin network, they would probably be able to pull it off. Over a foggy weekend, around 250 people (the majority being miners gathered in Chengdu) filled a rather spacious conference hall to its capacity for an event called China's Miners' Conference, a mostly promotional event organized by major miner Bitmain. But, they came for more than the province's famous spicy food. As of late, Sichuan has acquired the reputation of being the....
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What’s wrong with increasing the block size limit? This is the question that a portion of the Bitcoin community has been asking almost nonstop since the controversy around this possible alteration to the protocol went into hyperdrive last year. In a recent appearance at Bitcoin Meetup Switzerland, Bitcoin Core Contributor Jonas Schnelli covered at least one possible issue with raising the block size limit too quickly: the effect larger blocks have on wasted resources for miners. It should be noted that Schnelli has decided not to take an official, public stance on the block size debate. A....
As this debate on BitcoinTalk demonstrates, the current rhubarb regarding increasing the block size limit in Bitcoin has been ongoing since at least 2013 in a public manner... as well as a heated one. The discussion between the Bitcoin core developers goes on for 26 pages. The most recent post is April 2013. It starts with Peter Todd, who still to this day opposes increasing the block size limit in the manner being proposed via Bitcoin-XT. I fear very few people understand the perverse incentives miners have with regard to blocks large enough that not all of the network can process them,....
The top (left) and bottom (right) of the Block Erupter USB. Bitcoin mining has evolved rapidly over the past few years. From CPUs, to GPUs, to FPGAs, to ASICs, the most up-to-date and powerful miners change constantly. When the first ASIC miners were shipped to customers in early 2013, miners became incredibly more powerful than before. Among the first ASIC miners announced was the Block Erupter USB: a small USB (Universal Serial Bus) that mines for Bitcoins. A History. Block Erupter USBs were first announced by friedcat on May 4th, 2013, on BitcoinTalk.org. They were small, portable, yet....
The world’s two largest economies; two of the three most populated countries on earth; much more importantly: the world’s two largest Bitcoin mining communities locking horns in a struggle for power and control over the Bitcoin blockchain. The Far East versus the West; the United States versus China: a classic battle of global superpowers that may not have a winner, but may take the world’s first global currency down in the digital crossfire. The issue of Bitcoin block size is coming to a head within a matter of days. Could a battle over block size between Western businesses and Eastern....
Bitcoin requires decentralization of miners (or mining pools) and full nodes to achieve what some consider its core property: censorship resistance. As such, the block-size dispute represents a trade-off. Bigger blocks allow for more transactions on the Bitcoin network, but take more time to propagate, favoring larger miners and pools, while the increased data transmission disincentivizes users to run full nodes. Fortunately, there are proposals to increase Bitcoin's efficiency that reduce the risk of bigger blocks. One of the most promising innovations in this regard, are Invertible Bloom....