You get a 600% raise at work, after just 10 months, but you threaten to quit anyway

I truly do not understand the supposed pain of miners.

The price of bitcoin has increased by 600% just this year alone.

Traditionally we used to hope that after a 'halving' we might see a doubling of the price. Since the last halving, when the price was $600, it has gone up by 10x.

But, let's really talk about what has happened this year. This year, we got segwit finally launched and the price has skyrocketed.

There is already some serious talk about a $25k bitcoin in the not obscenely distant future if hedge-funds and other big players bring money in; now that they can see that bitcoin is stable, not going anywhere, and is highly resistant to change.

So, what, exactly, the fuck do miners have to complain about?

Their job is simple. Do a full SHA256 hash (by full, I mean on any random input data, not ASICBOOST hacked pseudo-SHA256).

That's it. Do that one simple job, and reap the rewards.

Bitcoin has a highly competent development team and a very exciting technological roadmap which will lead to ever higher and higher price levels for the block reward.

In addition to the price of bitcoin rising, so has transaction volume and, with it, the fees that miners collect.

If there is some fear that secondary network layers will steal fees from miners, that is an absurd interpretation of how things work.

First of all, most transactions that will occur on secondary layers will be transactions that would never be practical or worth bothering with on the layer-1 chain. The point being, they aren't 'stealing transactions and fees' away, these are transactions the layer-1 chain would never want at fees so low miners would never bother to collect them.

Second, when secondary layers function, they do so by pushing settlement transactions to the main blockchain, where fees are paid; and at nice price premium for miners to collect.

Between the increase in the value of bitcoin, increasing transactions, and improved fee revenue, miners are making an obscene amount of money compared to where they were just 10 months ago.

Additionally, if they truly hate bitcoin for some philosophical reasons, they can freely mine any other SHA256 coin if they so choose.

I don't get it, but I'm quite tired of hearing from people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and earning more at an astonishing rate, keep bitching and moaning about 'high fees'.

We have Roger Ver, a man probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars, bitching because he cannot send a transaction on the bitcoin network for a penny.

Meanwhile, I send transactions for 8 cents all of the time, and they are confirmed (albeit slowly), and a 50 cent fee transaction gets processed quickly. The network continues to function well and generate incredible wealth and opportunity.

Finally, these people do not understand set theory at all.

As bitcoin expands into additional layers those layers are bitcoin as well! It's an aggregate ecosystem. As bitcoin expands to include things like the lightning network and sidechains, these are not things 'separate from bitcoin' they become part of the overall bitcoin ecosystem. It is fundamentally how all networks scale to exponential levels.

So, we have hubris, technical illiteracy, and mindless propaganda driving a bunch of people to quite literally work against their own economic self interest!

Submitted October 24, 2017 at 08:03PM by jratcliff63367 http://ift.tt/2yLAveB