Tag: #Ph/s

Au – 💲 – ₿

Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79, making it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally.

It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal in a pure form.

Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions.

Gold often occurs in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, veins, and alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element  silver (as electrum), naturally alloyed with other metals like copper and palladium, and mineral inclusions such as within pyrite.

Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).

A relatively rare element, gold is a precious metal that has been used for coinage,  jewelry, and other arts throughout recorded history.

In the past, a gold standard was often implemented as a monetary policy.

Still, gold coins ceased to be minted as a circulating currency in the 1930s, and the world gold standard was abandoned for a fiat currency system after 1971.

As of 2017, the world’s largest gold producer by far was China, with 440 tonnes per year.

A total of around 201,296 tonnes of gold exists above ground, as of 2020. This is equal to a cube with each side measuring roughly 21.7 meters (71 ft).

Gold’s high malleability, ductility, resistance to corrosion and most other chemical reactions, and conductivity of electricity have led to its continued use in corrosion-resistant electrical connectors in all types of computerized devices (its chief industrial use).

The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments and 10% in industry.

Gold is also used in infrared shielding,  colored-glass production, gold leafing, and tooth restoration. Certain gold salts are still used as anti-inflammatories in medicine.

F I A T

Fiat money (from Latin: fiat, “let it be done”) is a type of money that is not backed by any commodity such as gold or silver, and typically declared by a decree from the government to be legal tender.

Throughout history, fiat money was sometimes issued by local banks and other institutions. In modern times, fiat money is generally established by government regulation.

Yuan dynasty banknotes are a
medieval form of fiat money

Fiat money does not have intrinsic value  and does not have use value. It has value only because the people who use it as a medium of exchange agree on its value. They trust that it will be accepted by merchants and other people.

Fiat money is an alternative to commodity money, which is a currency that has intrinsic value because it contains a precious metal such as gold or silver which is embedded in the coin.

Fiat also differs from representative money, which is money that has intrinsic value because it is backed by and can be converted into a precious metal or another commodity.

Fiat money can look similar to representative money (such as paper bills), but the former has no backing, while the latter represents a claim on a commodity (which can be redeemed to a greater or lesser extent).

Government-issued fiat money  banknotes  were used first during the 11th century in China.

Fiat money started to predominate during the 20th century.

Since President Richard Nixon‘s decision to default on the US dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, a system of national fiat currencies has been used globally.

Fiat money can be:

  • Any money that is not backed by a commodity.
  • Money declared by a person, institution or government to be legal tender, meaning that it must be accepted in payment of a debt in specific circumstances.
  • State-issued money which is neither convertible through a central bank to anything else nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
  • Money used because of government decree.
  • An otherwise non-valuable object that serves as a medium of exchange (also known as fiduciary money.)

The term fiat derives from the Latin word  fiat, meaning “let it be done” used in the sense of an order, decree or resolution.

Bitcoin – Digital Gold

The most common, and best, ways to think about bitcoin is as “digital gold”.

Like gold, bitcoin doesn’t rely on a central issuer, can’t have its supply manipulated by any authority, and has fundamental properties long considered important for a monetary good and store of value.

Unlike gold, bitcoin is extremely easy and cheap to “transport”, and trivial to verify its authenticity.

Bitcoin is also “programmable”. This means custody of bitcoin can be extremely flexible. It can be split amongst a set of people (“key holders”), backed up and encrypted, or even frozen-in-place until a certain date in the future. This is all done without a central authority managing the process.

You can walk across a national border with bitcoin “stored” in your head by memorizing a key.

The similarities to gold, plus the unique features possible because bitcoin is purely digital, give it the “digital gold” moniker.

Sharing fundamental properties with gold means it shares use-cases with gold, such as hedging inflation and political uncertainty.

But being digital, bitcoin adds capabilities that are especially relevant in our modern electronic times.

The world does indeed need a digital version of gold.

People’s Money
With 💚

Happy 13th BirthDay bitcoin

bitcoin – People’s Money

Brief history of Bitcoin

On January 3rd, 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto published the Genesis Block with the first 50 Bitcoins on Sourceforge. He also left a message on the blockchain at the time, quoting the headline in the British newspaper Times:

On January 3, 2009, the minister was on the verge of bailing out the banks.

Nakamoto started writing the white paper in 2008 and published it in October of that year.

The concept of a decentralized, anonymous, trusted currency emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, which left responsibility for the banks.

Satoshi neither supports the modern banking system nor does he like partial reserve banks.

A partial reserve bank is a bank that takes deposits and issues loans or investments, but only has to reserve a fraction of its liabilities for deposits. Basically, the bank is using money that it doesn’t own.

Satoshi wants to get rid of banks and seedy middlemen whom he believes are corrupt and unreliable. As such, he created a more community-centric digital currency.

13 years later, Bitcoin is still going strong with a market cap of nearly $ 900 billion. It is currently held by billionaires, banks, celebrities, governments, and corporations. This is evidence of how far BTC has come in its brief existence.

The precarious banking situation and economic uncertainty are also in crisis again.

The price of Bitcoin on its birthday 🎂

13 years: $ 47,310
12 years: $ 33,400
11 years: $ 7,319
10 years: $ 3,783
9 years: $ 14,764
8 years: $ 1,084
7 years: $ 432
6 years: $ 275
5 years: $ 816
4 years: $ 13
3 years: $ 5
2 years: $ 0.29
1 year: $ 0.05

Happpy Birthday bitcoin !!!

Thanks for all the teachings and wealth of Knowledge I do now have thanks to you !!!

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Bitcoin Halving

Bitcoin Halving

What Is a Bitcoin Halving?

Bitcoin’s most recent halving occurred on May 11, 2020. To explain what a Bitcoin halving is, we must first explain a bit about how the Bitcoin network operates.

Bitcoin’s underlying technology, blockchain, basically consists of a collection of computers (or nodes) that run Bitcoin’s software and contain a partial or complete history of transactions occurring on its network.

Each full node, or a node containing the entire history of transactions on Bitcoin, is responsible for approving or rejecting a transaction in Bitcoin’s network.

To do that, the node conducts a series of checks to ensure that the transaction is valid. These include ensuring that the transaction contains the correct validation parameters, such as nonces, and does not exceed the required length.

A transaction occurs only after all the parties operating in Bitcoin’s network approve it within the block on which the transaction exists. After approval, the transaction is appended to the existing blockchain and broadcast to other nodes.

The blockchain serves as a pseudonymous record of transactions (i.e., its contents are visible to everyone, but it is difficult to identify transacting parties in the network). This is because the blockchain assigns encrypted addresses to each transacting party in the network. That said, even those who do not participate in the network as a node or miner can view these transactions taking place live by looking at block explorers.

More computers (or nodes) added to the blockchain increase its stability and security.

There are currently 12,035 nodes estimated to be running Bitcoin’s code. Though anyone can participate in Bitcoin’s network as a node, as long as they have enough storage to download the entire blockchain and its history of transactions, not all of them are miners.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • A Bitcoin halving event is when the reward for mining bitcoin transactions is cut in half.
  • This event also cuts in half Bitcoin’s inflation rate and the rate at which new bitcoins enter circulation.
  • Both previous halvings have correlated with intense boom and bust cycles that have ended with higher prices than prior to the event.
  • Bitcoin last halved on May 11, 2020, around 3 p.m. EST, resulting in a block reward of 6.25 BTC.

Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin mining is the process by which people use their computers to participate in Bitcoin’s blockchain network as a transaction processor and validator.

Bitcoin uses a system called proof of work (PoW). This means that miners must prove they have put forth effort in processing transactions to be rewarded. This effort includes the time and energy it takes to run the computer hardware and solve complex equations.

Faster computers with certain types of hardware yield larger block rewards and some companies have designed computer chips specifically built for mining. These computers are tasked with processing Bitcoin transactions, and they are rewarded for doing so.

The term mining is not used in a literal sense but as a reference to the way precious metals are gathered.

Bitcoin miners solve mathematical problems and confirm the legitimacy of a transaction. They then add these transactions to a block and create chains of these blocks of transactions, forming the blockchain.

When a block is filled up with transactions, the miners that processed and confirmed the transactions within the block are rewarded with bitcoins.

Transactions of greater monetary value require more confirmations to ensure security. This process is called mining because the work performed to get new bitcoins out of the code is the digital equivalent to the physical work done to pull gold out of the Earth.

El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender on June 9, 2021. It is the first country to do so. The cryptocurrency can be used for any transaction where the business can accept it. The U.S. dollar continues to be El Salvador’s primary currency.

Bitcoin Halving

After every 210,000 blocks mined, or roughly every four years, the block reward given to Bitcoin miners for processing transactions is cut in half.

This cuts in half the rate at which new bitcoins are released into circulation. This is Bitcoin’s way of using a synthetic form of inflation that halves every four years until all bitcoins are released into circulation.

This system will continue until around the year 2140.

At that point, miners will be rewarded with fees for processing transactions, which network users will pay. These fees ensure that miners still have the incentive to mine and keep the network going. The idea is that competition for these fees will cause them to remain low after the halvings are finished.

The halving is significant because it marks another drop in the rate of new Bitcoins being produced as it approaches its finite supply: the total maximum supply of bitcoins is 21 million. As of October 2021, there are about 18.85 million bitcoins already in circulation, leaving just around 2.15 million left to be released via mining rewards.

In 2009, the reward for each block in the chain mined was 50 bitcoins. After the first halving, it was 25, and then 12.5, and then it became 6.25 bitcoins per block as of May 11, 2020.

To put this in another context, imagine if the amount of gold mined out of the Earth was cut in half every four years. If gold’s value is based on its scarcity, then a “halving” of gold output every four years would theoretically drive its price higher.

Coin Metrics Bitcoin Halving
Coin Metrics logarithmic chart of Bitcoin price action following halvings.

Halving Implications

These halvings reduce the rate at which new coins are created and thus lower the available amount of new supply, even as demand might increase.

This can cause some implications for investors as other assets with low or finite supply, like gold, can have high demand and push prices higher.

In the past, these Bitcoin halvings have correlated with massive surges in Bitcoin’s price.

The first halving, which occurred on Nov. 28, 2012, saw an increase from $12 to $1,217 on Nov. 28, 2013.

The second Bitcoin halving occurred on July 9, 2016. The price at that halving was $647, and by Dec. 17, 2017, a bitcoin’s price had soared to $19,800. The price then fell over the course of a year from this peak down to $3,276 on Dec. 17, 2018, a price 506% higher than its pre-halving price.

The most recent halving occurred on May 11, 2020. On that date, a bitcoin’s price was $8,787. On April 14, 2021, a bitcoin’s price soared to $64,507 (an astonishing 634% increase from its pre-halving price). A month later, on May 11, 2021, a bitcoin’s price was $54,276, representing a 517% increase that seems more consistent with the behavior of the 2016 halving.

On May 12, 2021, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment, resulting in further price fluctuations.

In the week that followed Musk’s statements, the price of a bitcoin plunged below $40,000 after Chinese regulators announced restrictions banning financial institutions and payment companies from providing cryptocurrency-related services.

Though these two announcements may have temporarily created a price drop in Bitcoin, there is the potential that the price fluctuations are more related to the halving behavior we have observed previously.

The theory of the halving and the chain reaction that it sets off works something like this:

The reward is halved → half the inflation → lower available supply → higher demand → higher price → miners incentive still remains, regardless of smaller rewards, as the value of Bitcoin is increased in the process

In the event that a halving does not increase demand and price, then miners would have no incentive. The reward for completing transactions would be smaller, and the value of Bitcoin would not be high enough.

To prevent this, Bitcoin has a process to change the difficulty it takes to get mining rewards, or in other words, the difficulty of mining a transaction.

In the event that the reward has been halved, and the value of Bitcoin has not increased, the difficulty of mining would be reduced to keep miners incentivized.

This means that the quantity of bitcoins released as a reward is still smaller, but the difficulty of processing a transaction is reduced.

This process has proved successful twice. So far, the result of these halvings has been a ballooning in price followed by a large drop.

The crashes that have followed these gains, however, have still maintained prices higher than before these halving events.

For example, as mentioned above, the 2017 to 2018 bubble saw the value of a bitcoin rise to around $20,000, only to fall to around $3,200. This is a massive drop, but a bitcoin’s price before the halving was around $650.3

Though this system has worked so far, the halving is typically surrounded by immense speculation, hype, and volatility, and how the market will react to these events in the future is unpredictable.

The third halving occurred not only during a global pandemic, but also in an environment of heightened regulatory speculation, increased institutional interest in digital assets, and celebrity hype. Given these additional factors, where Bitcoin’s price will ultimately settle in the aftermath remains unclear.

What Happens When Bitcoin Halves?

The term “halving” as it relates to Bitcoin has to do with how many Bitcoin tokens are found in a newly created block.

Back in 2009, when Bitcoin launched, each block contained 50 BTC, but this amount was set to be reduced by 50% roughly every four years.

Today, there have been three halving events, and a block now only contains 6.25 BTC.

When the next halving occurs, a block will only contain 3.125 BTC.

When Have the Halvings Occurred?

The first bitcoin halving occurred on Nov. 28, 2012, after a total of 10,500,000 BTC had been mined. The next occurred on July 9, 2016, and the latest was on May 11, 2020. The next is expected to occur in early 2024.

Why Are the Halvings Occurring Less Than Every Four Years?

The Bitcoin mining algorithm is set with a target of finding new blocks once every 10 minutes.

However, if more miners join the network and add more hashing power, the time to find blocks will decrease.

This is remedied by resetting the mining difficulty (or how hard it is for a computer to solve the mining algorithm) once every two weeks or so to restore a 10-minute target.

As the Bitcoin network has grown exponentially over the past decade, the average time to find a block has consistently remained below 10 minutes (roughly 9.5 minutes).

Does Halving Have Any Effect on the Bitcoin Price?

The price of Bitcoin has risen steadily and significantly from its launch in 2009, when it traded for mere pennies or dollars, to April 2021 when the price of one bitcoin traded for over $63,000.3

Because halving the block reward effectively doubles the cost to miners, who are essentially the producers of bitcoins, it should have a positive impact on price because producers will need to adjust their selling price to their costs.

Empirical evidence does show that Bitcoin prices tend to rise in anticipation of a halvening, often several months prior to the actual event.

What Happens When There Are No More Bitcoins Left in a Block?

Around the year 2140, the last of the 21 million bitcoins ever to be mined will have been mined.

At this point, the halving schedule will cease because there will be no more new bitcoins to be found.

Miners, however, will still be incentivized to continue validating and confirming new transactions on the blockchain because the value of transaction fees paid to miners is expected to rise into the future, the reasons being that a greater transaction volume that has fees will be attached, plus bitcoins will have a greater nominal market value.

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What is Hashrate ?

Hashrate

Hashrate Bitcoin network h/s
Bitcoin Hash Rate

Hashrate (Hash per second, h/s) is an SI-derived unit representing the number of double SHA-256 computations performed in one second in the bitcoin network for cryptocurrency mining.

Hashrate is also called as hashing power. It is usually symbolized as h/s (with an appropriate SI prefix).

What is hashing power or hash rate?

The hash rate is the primary measure of a Bitcoin miner‘s performance.

In 2014, a miner’s performance was generally measured in Ghash/s, or billions of hashes per second.

The hash/second unit is also part of a common measure of a Bitcoin miner’s electric efficiency in the term watts /Ghash/s, denoted as W/Ghash/s. As 1 watt is equal to 1 joule/s, this measure can also be expressed as J/Ghash, or joules per 1 billion hashes.

Bitcoin network hash rate

Bitcoin network hashrate chart

The hash/s is also used in calculations of the Bitcoin network’s overall hash rate. Because each miner or mining pool only relays a solved block to the network, the overall hash rate of the network is calculated based on the time between blocks.

While not an accurate measure of network hash rate at any given instance in time, measurements over longer periods can be considered indicative and similar calculations are used in Bitcoin’s difficulty  adjustment.

In January 2015, the network hash rate was around 300 Phash/s, or 300 quadrillion hashes per second.

If you compare a bitcoin mining device to one that is designed to mine, for example, Ethereum, you will notice a very large apparent difference in hash rates.

This is because there are many different algorithms that cryptocurrencies use. They all require different amounts of memory and computing power in order to be mined.

To put it simply, bitcoin and its SHA256 algorithm is considered by today standards to be relatively easy to compute. As a result, a mining device that is still relevant today would need to produce hashes in the terahash range and up.

If we were to compare this to Ethereum, you’ll find that most modern Ethereum mining devices (typically GPU’s) operate in the megahash range.

At first glance, you may think that the bitcoin mining device is significantly more powerful or more productive.

While it’s true that it produces more hashes (of the SHA256 variety), this is because bitcoin hashes are easier to produce computationally.

As a consequence, the network difficulty is significantly higher for bitcoin.

To make things even more confusing, some cryptocurrencies intentionally chose algorithms that can only be mined using a basic CPU.

As a result, mining devices for this network that can produce hundreds of hashes per second are considered to be high and very competitive.

So what does all this mean?

Basically, it means that looking at the hash rate alone doesn’t necessarily tell you the effectiveness of the miner.

You also need to understand the network difficulty, and what the norm is for most mining devices for that particular cryptocurrency.

How can I calculate how many hashes I generate per second?

Your problem breaks down nicely into 3 separate tasks:

  • Sharing a single count variable across threads
  • Benchmarking thread completion time
  • Calculating hashes p/sec
  • Sharing a single count variable across threads

Now that we know that not all hashes are the same we need to know how to calculate the estimated profitability of a miner based on its hash rate.

For this, will need to use a mining profitability calculators, they are available in the Internet.

public static class GlobalCounter

 {
   public static int Value { get; private set; }
   public static void Increment()
   {
       Value = GetNextValue(Value);
   }
   private static int GetNextValue(int curValue)
   {
       return Interlocked.Increment(ref curValue);
   }
   public static void Reset()
   {
       Value = 0;
   }
 }

Before you spin off the threads call GlobalCounter.

Reset and then in each thread (after each successful hash) you would call GlobalCounter.

Increment – using Interlocked.X performs atomic operations of Value in a thread-safe manner, it’s also much faster than lock.

Benchmarking thread completion time

var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
Parallel.ForEach(someCollection, someValue =>
 {
   // generate hash
   GlobalCounter.Increment();
 });
 sw.Stop();
Parallel.ForEach will block until all threads have finished

Calculating hashes per second

...
sw.Stop();
var hashesPerSecond = GlobalCounter.Value / sw.Elapsed.Seconds;

How is the hash rate measured?

Hash rate is a unit measured in hashes per second or h/s and here are some usual denominations used to refer it.

Hash rate denominations:

  • 1 kH/s is 1,000 (one thousand) hashes per second;
  • 1 MH/s is 1,000,000 (one million) hashes per second;
  • 1 GH/s is 1,000,000,000 (one billion) hashes per second;
  • 1 TH/s is 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) hashes per second;
  • 1 PH/s is 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) hashes per second;
  • 1 EH/s is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion) hashes per second.

Common Hash rate Conversions:

  • 1 MH/s = 1,000 kH/s;
  • 1 GH/s = 1,000 MH/s = 1,000,000 kH/s;
  • 1 TH/s = 1,000 GH/s = 1,000,000 MH/s = 1,000,000,000 kH/s.

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