Hacker News Reader

> Bitfury recently released an analysis, that predicts that 95% of current miners, would find mining to be unprofitable at blocksize of 8MB.

I don't understand this. Due to what would 95% of current miners find mining unprofitable at 8MB blocks?

View on HN

8mb blocks would mean that the bitcoin blockchain, would grow by 35 gigabyte a month. Compare this to the total blockchain size of about 120gb right now. This increases the cost of mining, by requiring miners to keep up on harddisk space. This cost can be amortized, as you can scale your processing independently of your harddisk space, making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.

There's an old idea that solves the storage issue completely - utxo commitments.

Literally the only real throughput limit is end user's download bandwidth, which means 500MB blocks or so for 10Mbps download. Spv clients are fine for those unfortunate to have monthly limits.

>making it even more profitable to mine for big investors, than smaller fish.

Both storage and bandwidth are utterly insignificant cost items in a mining operation.

>This increases the cost of mining, by requiring miners to keep up on harddisk space

miners typically mine in pools. so they don't need to download the blockchain because the pool is doing it for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com