Posts tagged with "commentary"

The hash floor post asked what renting hash to attack this chain would cost. This one asks whether an attacker could rent enough hash at all. Today, no. The number to watch is how much of today's hash is rented already.

The hash floor post as a short animated explainer. One diagram builds through it: what the chain pays, what an attacker's rent costs, and the floor where they cross. Then the four floors against today's hash, the two windows, and the lock. Drawn by code from the post's numbers, with a synthetic voice.

How much honest hash does this chain need before renting hash to attack it costs more than it takes? A floor in PH/s from today's rental prices and today's coin price, as a range, and the one ratio it turns on. The chain sits at the floor, not above it.

They bought the stage, the ticker, the fund, and most of the hash. A pleb in a spare room runs a node and checks every block against the rule. One of those is empty.

We replayed the chain's own hashrate under forty versions of bitcoin's difficulty rule, eight window lengths by five caps. A 144-block window with no cap pays a week-long 4x raid 444 coins instead of 5,906, and the miners who stay are back to pace in 5 days instead of 60. The cost, in one table.

Nine ideas for the surge in four weeks, each one fixing what the one before it broke. The ledger of doors, with the number that decided each. A 1945 result that says why the slow difficulty rule is also what makes cheating expensive. Then the test: the cap was a fifth of the surge, the window paid the rest, and bitcoin's rule loses in both directions.

The surge paid 26,112 XBT above bitcoin's schedule because difficulty recomputes every 2,016 blocks and moves at most 4x a step. Two posts here scored reward rules that patch that lag. This one replays the chain's real hashrate from our node under a fast difficulty rule instead, zero new parts, and finds it removes 83 percent of the excess on its own. What it leaves, what it costs in timestamps, why the extra-work factor removes almost nothing, and the eighty-year-old field that already ran this argument. An explainer, not a proposal.

A variant of pay by the clock appeared within twelve hours: give every seven days, or every day, a fixed budget of coins and split it equally across the blocks found in it, settled after the epoch closes. Nothing to withhold, no rich or lean blocks. What it would have paid on this chain, from our node; the five points we sent and what happened to them; Zawy's endorsement; where the settlement mechanism breaks, three ways; and the withholding math that corrects our own rule. An explainer, not a proposal.

On September 1 the chain paid 5,573 XBT in a day at 31-second blocks, because the subsidy is per block and the retarget could not catch up. Paid by the clock, 3.125 XBT per 600 seconds, that day pays 454 and every day pays about 450. What one rule would have done since activation, computed from our node, what it does to the incentive to add hash, and what it breaks. An explainer, not a proposal.

Mining Stacker says anyone who did not come out of the first days with two to five hundred coins got rugged by their own people. We asked our node which window that was, who got how many coins in it, and how much of that has moved. Twelve payout addresses of 793 crossed 300 XBT. Two are pools. Of the other ten, four have moved nothing and four have moved everything.

We went looking for AlphaPool's other addresses with our own node. What we found: none. What we found instead: the same address under three coinbase tags, which is why an explorer's pool list reads it four points low, and a pool that pays about 950 addresses at the hour its coins mature.

One pool took half the blocks of a ten-day profit window that bitcoin's own retarget rule held open, and the Knots room is now picking a coinbase-maturity number to answer it. The problem named, from a five-hundred-year-old chapter; the three harms separated; and one test, from the white paper, that scores every proposal on the table.

A US miner who received XBT before September 1 owes tax on a value no market had set. The IRS rules that apply, quoted from the PDFs; the coin's first eight days of price from the exchange's own API; and one method, applied to a hypothetical reward, with its weak point marked.

This week two exchanges relabeled the BLAKE2b coin XBT and a third still calls it BTCB2. We typed XBT into the one app most newcomers already have and wrote down what came back. Why that matters more than whose ticker it is, and which one we use.

128 coinbase tags in the first 1,818 BLAKE2b blocks, against 18 pools on the chain that kept SHA-256d. What the chart shows, what it cannot, and which law of money the names are betting on.

The first retarget cut difficulty 41%. The next two are capped at 4x each, and the arithmetic says half-minute blocks for a day, then two-and-a-half-minute blocks for three and a half days, then ten. Dated, so it can be checked.

You don't have to win the argument. You can stop participating on their terms, keep what's yours, and build.