[GTALUG] Bitcoin Blockchain Crypto Surface

[Russell]

On August 2, 2017 4:12:17 PM EDT, lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 03:46:57PM -0400, Russell wrote:
>> On August 2, 2017 2:54:32 PM EDT, Lennart Sorensen via talk
><talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>> >On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 12:54:05PM -0400, Scott Frederick via talk
>> >wrote:
>> >> On 02/08/2017 09:17 AM, Tim Tisdall via talk wrote:
>> >> > It's "up to" 8MB.  The first block was about 2MB and the rest
>have
>> >> > been much much smaller: 
>> >https://cash.coin.dance/blocks#blockDetails
>> >> 
>> >> Not only that the time between blocks is very long (hours), but
>every
>> >6
>> >> blocks the mining difficulty is adjusted. The target is to have
>> >Bitcoin
>> >> cash blocks mined approximately every 10 minutes as with Bitcoin.
>> >> Initially then, the blocks will be even smaller.
>> >
>> >Hmm, seems while block 478559 was 2MB, then some smaller ones,
>478571
>> >was 4.6MB, so even larger.
>> >
>> >No idea what that means though.
>> 
>> Larger blocks mean lower fee percentages for miners. A miner has to
>be in consensus with other miners on the profitability of crunching the
>numbers on a block of any given size.
>> 
>>
>https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43
>
>OK, I had understood that part.  That seems to be the reason for the
>fork.
>
>I just don't know why there was one huge block among a lot of smaller
>ones.

Testing perhaps? Everyone has to make money while testing this concept. 

>
>I suppose maybe a lot of stuff just happened in that period.

Well some of the issues are related to the speed of the net itself. Remember all the Forex fuss with timed trades, ordinary users were ddos'd out of play and couldnt buy in. The network was actually slowed by spam at trade time. 

I'm not exactly sure what a bad seed block is exactly, but it could be one which slows the chain compile down.

>
>I don't pay much attention to the crypto currencies.  (Not nothing,
>just not much).

I'm more interested in processing cartography myself, but what are the big miners running? 

Can you trust a gamer who is also a miner running OpenCL on Nvidia in spare cycles for building your blockchain? 

Can a gpu cluster even really compete with a cpu cluster in thruput? 

With a two mb limit the little players can at least grab a bit of the field. At eight mb I think economy of scale kicks in. 

I read a couple of years ago about some miners failing because the power costs outweighed the revenues. 

Fascinating tech, but who really needs another fiat currency; digital or otherwise. 

-- 
Russell
Sent by K-9 Mail