[ExI] proto-bitcoin

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:25:54PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote:

> Can you explain how it becomes more difficult to find bitcoins even
> with increasing computing ability?

There is a lot of papers on Bitcoin already. I would start
with Satoshi's original one.
 
> the only thing that comes to mind would be golomb rulers
> 
> hmm... just looked at the wiki page for bitcoin, seems there are a
> fixed number of bitcoins awarded for witnessing the transaction of
> bitcoins.  There's nothing mathemagical about these hashes like there
> is with Mersenne primes, is there?
> 
> so the decreasing return in exchange for increasing work in 'mining'
> is just a design/implementation feature.  That does suck, but it's

"Just"? "Suck"? It's an essential feature, and shows a lot of
foresight on part of the designer.

> more honest than credit card companies just stealing n% of the
> seller's profits from each transaction.

Mining is never meant to be profitable. Only bleeding edge
adopters got lucky there.

The value of Bitcoin is that it's a P2P transaction currency,
and a distributed mint.