In the image below, the vertical blue lines indicate the previous three halvings (2012-11-28, 2016-7-9, and 2020-5-11). Note how the price has jumped significantly after each halving.The most recent halvening happened on Friday, April 19th. It was eagerly awaited so, six weeks later, it is time to go below the fold and look at the effects.
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I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
One Heck Of A Halvening
The fundamental idea behind Bitcoin is that, if you restrict the supply of something, its price will rise. That is why the system arranges that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin by halving the reward paid for mining the next block every 210,000 blocks (about every four years), an event called the "halvening" (or more recently just the halving). It is an article of faith among the crypto-bros that, after the halvening, the price will rise. For example:
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Library of Congress: Designing Storage Architectures 2024
I participated virtually in the 2024 Library of Congress Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections meeting. As usual, there were a set of very interesting talks. The slides from the presentations are now online so, below the fold, I discuss the talks I found particulary interesting.
Thursday, May 23, 2024
"Sufficiently Decentralized"
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Mining Pools 5/17/24 |
when I look at Bitcoin today, I do not see a central third party whose efforts are a key determining factor in the enterprise. The network on which Bitcoin functions is operational and appears to have been decentralized for some time, perhaps from inception.Below the fold, thanks to a tip from Molly White, I look at recent research suggesting that there is in fact a "central third party" coordinating the enterprise of Bitcoin mining.
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Over time, there may be other sufficiently decentralized networks and systems
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Pew Research On Link Rot
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we collected a random sample of just under 1 million webpages from the archives of Common Crawl, an internet archive service that periodically collects snapshots of the internet as it exists at different points in time. We sampled pages collected by Common Crawl each year from 2013 through 2023 (approximately 90,000 pages per year) and checked to see if those pages still exist today.Their results are not surprising, but there are a number of surprising things about their report. Below the fold, I explain.
We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Fee-Only Bitcoin
Mining a Bitcoin block needs to be costly to ensure that the gains from an attack on the blockchain are less than the cost of mounting it. Miners have two sources of income to defray their costs, the block rewards and the fees for the transactions in the block.
On April 19th the block reward was halved from 6.25BTC to 3.125BTC. This process is repeated every 210,000 blocks (about every 4 years). It limits the issuance of BTC to 21M because around 2140 the reward will be zero; a halving will make it less than a satoshi.
Long before 2140 the block rewards will have shrunk to become insignificant compared to the fees. Below the fold I look at the significance of the change to a fee-only Bitcoin
On April 19th the block reward was halved from 6.25BTC to 3.125BTC. This process is repeated every 210,000 blocks (about every 4 years). It limits the issuance of BTC to 21M because around 2140 the reward will be zero; a halving will make it less than a satoshi.
Long before 2140 the block rewards will have shrunk to become insignificant compared to the fees. Below the fold I look at the significance of the change to a fee-only Bitcoin
Thursday, May 9, 2024
Elon Musk: Threat Or Menace? Part 5
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- A driver who believed Autopilot could drive him home despite his being drunk. The car drove the wrong way on the highway and killed another innocent victim of Musk's hype.
- Autopilot rear-ending a merging vehicle and killing another innocent victim, a 15-year-old.
- Autopilot slamming into a broken down vehicle on the highway. When the Tesla driver left the wreck she was hit and killed by another car.
- Autopilot speeding through a T-junction and crashing into a parked truck.
"If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company."Elon Musk, 24th April 2024