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A comment on Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year. Parent comment

Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by curyous on Friday February 23, 2018 @07:02PM (#16450706)
Bitcoin mining seems inefficient now, but when the network is carrying 100x more or 10,000x more transactions, won't it be extremely efficient? (On a per-transaction basis)
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by proofofmoon on Friday February 23, 2018 @07:24PM (#16450812)
O(n) total world energy expenditure on Bitcoin scales to O(1) transactions, so it currently only gets worse as more energy is poured into the system for the same transaction output.

There's a few solutions proposed:

- off-chain transactions (Lightning Network) - unknown complexity

- increased block size (Bitcoin Cash) - O(n) -> some larger O(1)

- a different consensus system (proof of stake blockchain, distributed proof of stake blockchain, Tangle, etc.) - varies

It's possible that the Bitcoin ecosystem will adopt one of these solutions in the future, but there doesn't appear to be a silver bullet right now.

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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by curuinor on Friday February 23, 2018 @07:22PM (#16450801)
There have now been about a half-dozen various suggestions to get the network to carry more transactions, all of which are mostly failures, except for Lightning Network, which is now in the process of becoming a failure.
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by atomical on Friday February 23, 2018 @08:57PM (#16451169)
Lightning is DOA. Who has ever heard of opening a payment channel to buy a cup of coffee?
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by Taniwha on Friday February 23, 2018 @09:34PM (#16451308)
happens every time I wave my credit card in front of a payment terminal
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Re:Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around... by atomical on Friday February 23, 2018 @10:19PM (#16451446)
How much money did you put in escrow last time?
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