[ExI] proto-bitcoin

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Sat Apr 20 03:49:02 UTC 2013


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > The difficulty with comparing the difficulty of mining a Bitcoin with the
> > difficulty of verifying a Bitcoin is that the difficulty of finding a
> > Bitcoin goes up. You see, the creator of Bitcoin was familiar with
> Moore's
> > law, and didn't want deflation in the face of increased computing
> ability.
> > So each year that passes, it is more difficult to mine a Bitcoin.
> >
> > Granted, as the prime numbers you search get bigger, it gets more
> difficult
> > to find prime numbers, so your point may hold some water, however
> verifying
> > that it is a prime number also gets much harder, so the ratio doesn't get
> > much different.
> >
> > The ratio for Bitcoin changes. The ratio for primes probably doesn't
> change
> > as much.
>
> Can you explain how it becomes more difficult to find bitcoins even
> with increasing computing ability?
>

My understanding is that the length of the hash becomes longer... so if on
day one, you have to find a 20 digit number that hashes to
10000000000000000001 (Not that this is the actual pattern)

Then five years down the road, you have to find a 40 digit number that does
the same. Ten years down the road you have to find a 60 digit number that
does the same. So the number of random numbers you have to hash to find the
resulting pattern goes up exponentially, just like your computing power
does.

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?
>

It isn't as magic as a prime number, but you can't reverse a SHA-1 hash by
any known method. I can't start with 100000..0001 and tell you which
number, when hashed will result in that result. It is a one way function.
That is the magic of the SHA-1 hash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1

The article doesn't do a lot to explain exactly how it works, but I'm
assuming something in the footnotes would if you really were interested.
Many people have looked for ways to reverse it, but to no avail apparently,
or someone would have a very successful bitcoin mine, which hasn't seemed
to have happened.

so the decreasing return in exchange for increasing work in 'mining'
> is just a design/implementation feature.


Yes. Exactly.


> That does suck, but it's
> more honest than credit card companies just stealing n% of the
> seller's profits from each transaction.
>

Why does that suck? It means that the original bitcoins will not be
devalued by later coins mined with more exotic equipment. There is also a
limit on how many coins total will ever be minted.

-Kelly
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