Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which reportedly achieve approximately 0.06 joule per gigahash. They also use immersion cooling which gives them an insane PUE of 1.02. So the mining capacity of this DC alone is ~650 Phash/s! We saw an increase of ~200 Phash/s in the last 30 days, so presumably they are at only operating at 1/3rd of their capabilities so far:<p>40e6 (watt) / 0.06 (joule/gigahash) / 1e6 (petahash/gigahash) = ~650 petahash/second<p>BitFury's immersion cooling tech:<p><a href="http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/" rel="nofollow">http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s</a> (shows the fluid boiling - starts at 0m42s)<p><a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/BitFury-Launch-Energy-Efficient-Immersion-Cooling-Data" rel="nofollow">https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...</a><p>BitFury's 16nm chips:<p><a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitFury-Announces-Mass-Production-Fastest-Effective-16nm" rel="nofollow">http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...</a>
Slightly-more-available link <a href="https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty" rel="nofollow">https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty</a><p>Hash rate has increased by 41.9% over the same period, so the difficulty has kept the time-to-generate relatively fixed - just the way it's supposed to work.<p>The real news is that someone or someone(s) have added ~200PH/s worth of processing power to the network in the past 30 days. This is probably from some high-power ASIC miner being released, or from some consolidated mining concern going live.
The billion dollar question is how we can have completely decentralised (and not merely distributed) consensus without proof of work. It's a difficult question, and various proposals like Proof of Stake (not secure) and Consensus Ledger (not secure, not decentralised) have all failed technically and on the market.
Bitcoin feels a bit like the gold standard. Massive mining operations dumping huge volumes of resources and energy to acquire some thing that is only mildly useful. It seems quite wasteful.
Once the 16nm chips become a commodity, it will make sense that the hashing power would get more distributed.<p>I hope figures out how to get a solar powered, interchangeable bitcoin miner in a box at a positive ROI. It may seem impossible now, but solar prices are falling faster than expected.
An interesting though exercise:<p>Does the new capacity make a bitcoin more valuable or less valuable?<p>Intuitively seems like more valuable, but the average cost in energy to mine the marginal block has gone down (otherwise the new miner wouldn't be mining) and that's often though of as the floor on BTC value.<p>Seems like having a stronger network is a net plus, and since they're probably not near the 50%+1 threshold it probably is in fact a stronger network. Although maybe they will get close if marginal miners are forced to turn off if the price of XBT drops and BitFury is enough more efficient.<p>Although BitFury is probably not a bad actor, technically a 50%+1 attack is not obviously illegal (IANAL), although a government might step in ironically enough. It seems to me these types of more centralized setups do introduce some tail risk to the system.
No one is afraid of the ecological cost of crypto currencies ?<p>We are in a world where the energy has a frightening ecologic cost and people to spend it in gigantic quantities just to create a virtual money...
looking at the chart there are plenty of places there was more increase in difficulty in 30 days. In the whole 2014 difficulty seemed to have multiplied 40 times! I understand the magnitude is a whole different story now though..
More powerful miners beget higher work needed to mine. A small cadre of people with ultrpowerful mining gear have pushed a more difficult task on the rest of us.
Some alternatives. Permacoin(<a href="http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf</a>) has mostly the same security properties, but effectiveily non-outsorceable, and work done is useful. We made the first open-source implementation of that <a href="https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki/tree/master/scorex-perma" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ScorexProject/Scorex-Lagonaki/tree/master...</a> .<p>I also have paper draft about better Proof-of-Stake protocol, and would like to share it with people from academias to get a feedback. Please write me ( kushti at protonmail dot ch ). I also have half-written paper draft about PoW+PoS hybrid chain.
What a colossal waste of electricity. Great, they've created a general ledger and currency formed by individual untrusted participants, but who in the aggregate are trusted.<p>What about this: Why not just diversify your risk by doing transactions or investing in currencies/assets across a diversified set of untrusted counterparties? Same net effect, and a lot less electricity wasted.