Quote from: Greyhats on July 31, 2023, 03:35:04 PM

Im gonna attempt to explain mining difficulty with a metaphor

You and a lot of other people are standing at a bar, the queue is exactly one person deep. The bar tender goes around the queue take drinks orders and fulfilling them let’s say clockwise. When you get your drink you stay in the queue and drink it. Difficulty represents the time you have to wait to order your drinks. If a new person joins the queue you will have to wait longer and ultimately drink less in an evening. If a person leaves the queue you will wait less time and be able to drink more in the evening. This scales up(adding to the queue) and down(dropping from the queue). There will also be the few alcoholics who will never leave the queue, and they want more booze than they can imagine wanting.

Is my understanding correct?

I think the joke(miners death spiral) is that those alcoholics will always be there, drinking from the firehouse or waiting patiently for the bartender to serve them.

I doubt that this explanation is complete, but it seems to be in the ballpark of something kind of decent.

Let's say if the guy is waiting for his next drink but people keep joining in the cue, so there are ways that he can shorten his time or stop his time from getting longer, and what would that be? Maybe he has to bring a BIG thug friend with him, like a guy from the Mafia, then he gets back to his original time, even if there are more people waiting, he still has to wait, but the fact that he brought some extra muscle into the mix is going to work for him for a while, until the next guy brings his mafia friend.. etc etc.

and every so often (after 2016 drinks are served) the bartenders are added or subtracted based on whether drinks were served every 10 second or if it took longer.

Whatever.. I am fucking this up.. it was your analogy in the first place.. and I am just trying to suggest that there was something incomplete about it.

Quote from: philipma1957 on July 31, 2023, 05:35:10 PM

Quote from: Greyhats on July 31, 2023, 03:35:04 PM

[edited out]

No not quite correct.

The wait adjustment for drinks in your example is close to instant. In mining btc it is as long as 17 days.

Well for the analogy, use 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes. The time does not have to be exactly the same in order for the analogy to be potentially workable.. even though it seems that the analogy has other flaws.

Quote from: Gachapin on July 31, 2023, 06:59:43 PM

Quote from: Biodom on July 31, 2023, 03:19:42 PM

Quote from: Gachapin on July 31, 2023, 12:55:01 PM

Quote from: Out of mind on July 31, 2023, 06:48:10 AM

SEC Asked Coinbase to Halt Trading of All Cryptos, Except Bitcoin.

this one is from Reuters:

SEC asked Coinbase to trade only in bitcoin before suing crypto exchange
https://www.reuters.com/technology/sec-asked-coinbase-stop-trading-cryptocurrencies-other-than-bitcoin-prior-suing-2023-07-31/

with this obvious stand of the SEC on ~~crypto~~ security tokens, Bitcoin should double against these scams within an eye blink... if the market was rational ... but well...

Don't be like that....if bitcoin is strong it does not matter if there are other 'tokens'.
Besides, there are other tokens that are similar to bitcoin in the way they are issued with some of them mentioned here from time to time.
Think about it: if they "cancel" everything else, bitcoin would certainly be next in US, probably for decades...just like trading in gold was.

afaik nobody wants to cancel anything there. But if you issue or sell a security, you have to follow the law in this day and age.
And the Howey Test is clear & easy to understand. If you choose to ignore it, accept the consequences.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the wild west times of this market, and made money. But I'm not too sad that these days come to an end, and that scammers cannot fleece newbs left and right by selling lies and shit anymore.

Sure there are coins that are obviously no securities. But I don't expect much from a federal agency. And I think it takes time for them to work through thousands of coins in order to decide what they are. Luckily everyone know Bitcoin quite well nowadays.

Even though I don't really like how shitcoins have exploited various systems, and some of the exchanges, including Coinbase went down a path of blindly listing every piece of shit that exists, I still have trouble cheering for the SEC in these kinds of matters.

But hey, whatever, you do you.

Quote from: philipma1957 on July 31, 2023, 07:02:51 PM

Quote from: Biodom on July 31, 2023, 05:10:41 PM

[edited out]

Yeah I think we range 10 to 17 or 18 days a jump.
Most are between 12 and 16.

His example is kind of poor.

As being an alcoholic drinker is not being a profitable miner.

I make profits consistently since 2018 every month I made some coin above expenses.

Calling miners alcoholics is saying miners lose consistently. The reality is we don't.

You are taking the analogy too personally Phil.

Work with it.

Work with it.

For sure the analogy has flaws, but calling miners alcoholics is not one of the flaws.

#justsaying

Quote from: philipma1957 on July 31, 2023, 07:10:15 PM

Quote from: Biodom on July 31, 2023, 05:10:41 PM

Using you bewildering analogy...the question is: will there be enough "alcoholics" to secure the chain properly?
Phil posited that in 80 years there would not be.
Personally, I don't know as we NEVER had more than a few weeks difficulty decline and btw, those periods were always the local bottom (so far), like Oct-Dec 2018 (cycle low), then China ban (May-July 2021) and summer bottom.

The caveat is that the current fee structure won't work in 2080 or even 2056 or even 2052.

There will be changes or BTC will not fair well. As LTC/DOGE is structured to last better than BTC.

Obviously I am not the only one that sees these issues. I only wish I could stick around to see how it shakes out.

Yeah.. stick around and find out that you weren't quite the Nostradamus that you wanted to be.

What else is new?

Cheesy

Quote from: Greyhats on July 31, 2023, 07:53:40 PM

Quote from: philipma1957 on July 31, 2023, 07:02:51 PM

[edited out]

Hold your horses there cowboy Grin

I think am getting closer to an understanding.

In my analogy the alcoholics left at the bar are miners who don’t leave, the core, like when massive amounts of hash rate turned off there so far seems to be a core of miners who keep mining or a % of hash rate. If core stay then block reward share increases for them because the difficulty goes down(less miners competing ) I can’t comment if they are profitable or not but would assume they are or they would be part of the group who turned their gear off. The losers are people who have left then though right? They stopped receiving their share of reward.

In the analogy the bar tender is the blocks, the evening is the epoch. The drinkers are the miners. The drinks are the reward.

Also apologies if this a trigger to any recovering alcoholics it’s just where my mind went when thinking about mining difficulty.

Edit: spelling

The more you defend your analogy.. the more it seems to suck... even though it is better than nothing, and surely it is better than what Learn Bitcoin had come up with on his own.

Wink