An Electric Bitcoin Energy Question
774 sats \ 3 comments \ @Matty 16 May bitdevs
Hi, I am a security researcher seeking comments from the Bitcoin Developers sphere regarding a dimension often labelled "conspiracy" and "Unidentified Flying Objects".
My question is this: What happens to Bitcoin when fuel-less sources of abundant electrical energy are available to everyone at home, for the price of a smartphone?
Please have a wander through the top transnational #InfoSec news at The Disclosure Project Intelligence Archive which immediately falls into the above mentioned categories due to the known attack vectors I have written about over the years (forgive the use of another blockchain tool here before I knew about Stacker News), based on decades of work completed by many others, living and on the other side.
The archive itself is not news itself, yet it is currently being processed by the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and many leaders of many nations. It is all about the existence of energy technologies which meet and surpass the criteria of being clean and highly energy efficient, while having a renewable energy source leading towards the development of new, clean, fuel-less energy generators, power units and systems for personal home applications. All this is beyond known alternative energy sources known as hydro, solar, wind, biomass, geothermal and nuclear sciences.
There could be a rapid response Bitcoin team on standby designated to triage any significant news from this ongoing disclose in order to act correspondingly on time.
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1116 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 16 May
If someone has such a generator/reactor, they could probably earn more by selling the technology than mining BTC.
People often get too focused on the energy component of mining.
Capital management, energy, and operations. It takes all three to mine BTC effectively. Just having free energy does not necessarily give you a competitive edge.
You also need to have good operations (machines, internet, shelter, heat management, personnel to build, maintain and troubleshoot machines, etc.)
You also need good capital management. How many ASICs do you buy? When/what price do you buy them? Do you raise equity or debt to buy machines? Do you sell machines opportunely? What do you do with the sats you earn?
As far as attacks go, this is why we have the difficulty adjustment. If a powerful miner wants to cause havoc, they could take hash offline after a large upward difficulty adjustment and cause longer than usual blocktimes for the next 2016 blocks. Or they could bring lots of hash online and make blocks go really fast for 2016 blocks.
However, a powerful miner is unlikely to do this kind of attack because it would make them uncompetitive from a capital management and operations standpoint
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41 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 16 May
All of that is interesting, but I think the difficulty adjustment is the key point. No matter how low the marginal cost of computing goes, and there will always be a marginal cost, the difficulty adjustment can match it (at least that's my understanding).
There could be very interesting distributional effects from a small group of miners having access to substantially cheaper energy, though.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OneOneSeven 16 May
I made free login credentials for anyone that wants to check out the archive:
#526770
Finally someone asking these questions. What if these already are out there: 100 Years of Energy Suppression
Steven Greer has stated publicly that he's met with people that have built some of these energy devices, they always keep it secret and want to try and patent it themselves. He even said (paraphrasing), someone his team visited recently is already using one of these to mine bitcoin in a shed behind his house. ~1:40:00 in this video
There's so many questions that crop up with regard to radically new energy sources, we're not talking about them enough in bitcoin.
All one needs to do is look.
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