From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>
To: Jefferson Carpenter <jeffersoncarpenter2@gmail•com>,
Bitcoin Protocol Discussion
<bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Upgrading PoW algorithm
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:36:44 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180118163644.GA11829@fedora-23-dvm> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <58fa85b8-cba3-ee34-8c96-41c6c7bfbf9c@gmail.com>
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On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 04:31:52PM -0600, Jefferson Carpenter via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Bitcoin's difficulty will be maxed out within about 400 years, by Moore's
> law. (After that - supposing the software does not crash when difficulty
There's no reason to think Moore's law will last for 400 years; if it did
mining Bitcoin blocks would require astronomical energy levels. I haven't
actually done the math, but having to convert a mass-energy equivalance of a
planet or two per block is probably an accurate lower-bound even with quantum
computers. Once we're at that point, the problem is the speed of light: we'll
run out of energy in our 10 minute light radius, and thus need to get it from
farther away, at which point the 10 minute block interval forces a hard fork
anyway because mining no longer is in consensus.
tl;dr: This is a topic for sci-fi writers, not bitcoin-dev
Also: https://xkcd.com/605/
--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-01-18 16:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-01-17 22:31 Jefferson Carpenter
2018-01-18 16:36 ` Peter Todd [this message]
2018-01-19 20:54 ` Jefferson Carpenter
2018-01-20 6:30 ` nullius
2018-01-20 18:36 ` Melvin Carvalho
2018-01-21 15:29 ` Glen Peterson
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