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by _n6th
4604 days ago
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> Everybody would generally be better off to throttle the rate [...] You're wrong about this. The Bitcoin network would be _much_ worse off (verging on useless) if the global hashrate was throttled. The purpose of mining is not, as you said, to distribute Bitcoins. The purpose is to make it extremely difficult to append a forged block to the blockchain. The higher the hashrate, the more difficult forgery is. The reason that so-called miners receive Bitcoins is because the hashing takes resources (e.g. machines and electricity), so there needs to be some incentive to perform this service. The fact that it happens to distribute Bitcoins is convenient, but ancillary. (There are other ways distribution could have been done.) Read this link for further information on why you want the global hashrate to be as high as possible. Basically, if a single attacker could match the hashrate of the network, they could do very bad things: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... |
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No, it doesn't make a difference because what matters is that the target difficulty is relative to the current number-crunching capacity. A lower hashrate is just fine if nobody is able to do better than that.
Suppose that Bitcoin happened in the mid-90's when Pentium would be the fastest processor, running at 100MHz. The network would run 1000 or 1000000 times slower than today, the difficulty would basically adjust to that, nobody could overtake the network no more than today, and everybody would be as happy as today.
What keeps that from happening is the fact that the hashrate can't be throttled because of the incentives that make it profitable to maximize your hashrate and your number-crunching capacity. THus, the resulting hashrate and, consequently, the required hashing difficulty follow the bleeding edge of the technology.
The difficulty is an arbitrary factor: it's just a community decision that in order to find a good hash for a block, the hash must be lower than X, and that decision is based on the current capacity of the network to prevent some single party from "taking over the blockchain" and to keep the rate of new blocks steady.
But from blocks-per-Joule perspective there's no point requiring such a huge computational capacity.
Bitcoin itself would work just as fine if the difficulty was so easy that a Pentium I could find suitable hashes in a reasonable time: the problem is that we have better hardware than Pentium I so we're forced to raise the difficulty to match the most computationally capable parties.