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> The blocks would happen farther apart, but it would also mean that the remaining miners would have much higher change of actually finding a block, since there would be less competition.

That's not true. The chance of finding a block is the same for every hash given a certain difficulty, regardless of competition. So a miner with a certain amount of hashing power will always have the same chance of finding a block until the difficulty changes.



Seems to me GP is right:

The remaining miners make the same amount per day, until difficulty is adjusted, and then much more.

Consider this: one pool with 20% hash power. They only get every 5th block, i.e. 1 coinbase reward every 50 minutes.

Now all the other miners fall away. Now this pool will still take about 50 minutes to find a block, but it will get 100% of them, thus still being rewarded a block every 50 minutes.

However, 2 to 10 weeks later (depending when the last difficulty adjustment was) (or longer, if difficulty adjustment is capped), a block is found every 10 minutes again, and the pool gets 100% of them, thus 5 rewards in 50 minutes.

On the other hand, gp also said: > Also as there would be the same amount of transactions and less blocks, the blocks would have more collected transaction fees -> bigger reward.

If I understand correctly, that the hypothetical 20% mining pool would immediately get 100% rather than 20% of all transaction fees when the other miners fall away.

However, AFAIK the coinbase (mining reward) dwarfs the transaction fees (for now), so that should not be that relevant.




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