Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
⭐ Merited by d_eddie (1)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hold your horses there cowboy
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 because the difficulty goes down. 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.