Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Upgrading PoW algorithm

From: Melvin Carvalho <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2018 19:36:09 +0100

On 17 January 2018 at 23:31, Jefferson Carpenter via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> 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
> overflows - block time will start decreasing, and it will not take long
> before blocks are mined faster than photons can be sent across the planet).
>
> Bitcoin is the dominant cryptocurrency today, as the first mover: the
> perfectly fair worldwide game of inventing the cryptocurrency has been
> played and won.  However, unfortunately, it has a built-in end date: about
> 400 years from now.  After that, it won't necessarily be clear what the
> dominant cryptocurrency is.  It might be a lot like VHS vs Betamax, and a
> lot of people could lose a lot of money.  It seems to me, this could be
> mitigated by planning today for what we are going to do when Bitcoin
> finally breaks 400 years from now.
>
> Are there any distinct plans today for migrating to a PoW supporting an
> even higher difficulty?
>

Crypto algorithms have a lifetime, and consensus is no different.

Is it likely to be more than a few years?  Yes.

Is likely to be less than a few hundred years.  Yes.

Every algorithm involves trade offs and it's the job of a thoughtful dev
team to examine those trade offs and come to a consensus optimal solution.

This field is only 9 years old, and there is a large amount of R & D in
this area.  So we can evaluate what seems to working better and what seems
to be working worse, transfer that to BIPs, create code, test it, try to
achieve consensus.  The normal path that has served free software projects
well.

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