

How I stopped being afraid, and learned to love Deflation - kiba
http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/one-apple-today-two-apples-tomorrow-or-how-i-stopped-being-afraid-and-learned-to-love-deflation

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nasmorn
Is this bitcoin article wave an organized thing like the erlang articles of
old? Or do people really find it that interesting?

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Typhon
It's a matter of fashion. Right now, bitcoin is new, shiny, and fashionable.
It won't last. I predict that in a year, we won't hear about bitcoins anymore.

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hugh3
Ehh, not really. It's not that "we're" interested in bitcoin, it's that
"they're" interested in bitcoin. Remember, the sensible thing to do once you
own bitcoins is to start spamming all your friends to tell them how awesome
bitcoin is.

I'd be interested in seeing the stats on who keeps voting these bitcoin
articles up, cuz I suspect there's an organized or at least self-organizing
voting ring going on.

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JoachimSchipper
Somewhat to my surprise, it doesn't appear that they've triggered the voting
ring algorithm yet. (I remember that swombat's Twitter followers did trip it
at least once - it can be tripped without scripting.)

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sfgfdhgfdshdhhd
When miners can't produce coins anymore, will there still be enough honest
people contributing compute to secure the transactions?

Right now the deflation makes it very worthwhile for a miner to participate.

Wouldn't transaction costs need to be quite high? Would anyone use a system
where one pays 10% for every transaction to be hashed?

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wcoenen
The network rules are such that the difficulty is adjusted to keep block
production to approximately 1 block per 10 minutes. If miners drop out, the
difficulty is reduced.

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tzs
That doesn't help with what the GP is talking about, as by design there cannot
be more than 21 million bitcoins.

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wcoenen
Miners provide a crucial service: they generate a sequential log of
transaction blocks. Consensus is reached by accepting the block chain which
represents the most work. Miners are rewarded for that work in two ways:
transaction fees (chosen by those doing the transactions) and "mined bitcoin".

The question here was "what if the mined bitcoin becomes negligible" (which
will happen as we approach 21 million bitcoin). The worry is that the
transaction fees will become too high or the miners will all stop mining, and
the block chain gneration will stop. As I said, this is not a problem because
the block difficulty will automatically re-adjust.

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sfgfdhgfdshdhhd
Wouldn't that reduce security? When only 1% of current miners contribute would
it be possible for someone with control over a huge GPU cluster or botnet be
able to attack the system?

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wcoenen
If the attacker could amass more computing power than the remaining miners,
then yes. He could reverse his own recent transactions, and suppress new
transactions by others by ignoring them when generating blocks.

