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thewayneThis is kind of esoteric, but bear with me.
Bitcoin transactions (buying/selling items or transferring "money" between people) are tied to the transaction ledger. To spend Bitcoin (BTC), you transfer an amount - usually a fractional amount of a BTC to another person's wallet. That transaction has to be written to the blockchain to prove BTC moving from Wallet A to Wallet B. At any given time, hundreds or thousands of transactions are waiting to be committed to the blockchain. Until they're written, the funds are in a pending state.
Writing to the blockchain is a competition, it is the mining process. It's an insane computational nightmare that gets progressively more complex. Keep in mind that the BTC algorithm will only allow X number of BTC To be mined, and we're now at a significant percentage of X: once we hit 100%, no new BTC will ever again be produced - EVER. Lots of computer(s)/clusters are mining, competing to be the ones that get to commit the current batch of transactions to the blockchain for a given transaction cycle because there's a reward: they will have produced a batch of BTC! Obviously with the current value of BTC, even though it's taken a beating this year, it's pretty valuable. If you can sell it. Just like saying my comic book collection is really valuable according to the Overstreet Guide - if people will pay that amount. Good luck there!
Normally the transaction cycle commits approximately every ten minutes. Something happened and it took about 85 minutes at one point on Monday! That's one heck of a snafu! I'm curious if a delay of 8.5 times the norm results in a reward of 8.5 times the normal number of BTC.
Now here's the bad part. Apparently the new difficulty level means that a delay like this may happen every 34 days! So about once a month there's going to be a major hiccup in the transaction system and a nasty little delay creeping in.
And there are people who buy coffee and sandwiches with BTC? I think even a delay of 10 minutes to get the confirmation back is unacceptable. With a credit/debit card, the transaction is almost as fast as paying cash, or can be even faster.
While this was specific to Bitcoin, all cryptocurrencies have some form of blockchain system, though the details of their mining operation vary.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/17/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour/
https://slashdot.org/story/22/10/17/2059211/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour
Bitcoin transactions (buying/selling items or transferring "money" between people) are tied to the transaction ledger. To spend Bitcoin (BTC), you transfer an amount - usually a fractional amount of a BTC to another person's wallet. That transaction has to be written to the blockchain to prove BTC moving from Wallet A to Wallet B. At any given time, hundreds or thousands of transactions are waiting to be committed to the blockchain. Until they're written, the funds are in a pending state.
Writing to the blockchain is a competition, it is the mining process. It's an insane computational nightmare that gets progressively more complex. Keep in mind that the BTC algorithm will only allow X number of BTC To be mined, and we're now at a significant percentage of X: once we hit 100%, no new BTC will ever again be produced - EVER. Lots of computer(s)/clusters are mining, competing to be the ones that get to commit the current batch of transactions to the blockchain for a given transaction cycle because there's a reward: they will have produced a batch of BTC! Obviously with the current value of BTC, even though it's taken a beating this year, it's pretty valuable. If you can sell it. Just like saying my comic book collection is really valuable according to the Overstreet Guide - if people will pay that amount. Good luck there!
Normally the transaction cycle commits approximately every ten minutes. Something happened and it took about 85 minutes at one point on Monday! That's one heck of a snafu! I'm curious if a delay of 8.5 times the norm results in a reward of 8.5 times the normal number of BTC.
Now here's the bad part. Apparently the new difficulty level means that a delay like this may happen every 34 days! So about once a month there's going to be a major hiccup in the transaction system and a nasty little delay creeping in.
And there are people who buy coffee and sandwiches with BTC? I think even a delay of 10 minutes to get the confirmation back is unacceptable. With a credit/debit card, the transaction is almost as fast as paying cash, or can be even faster.
While this was specific to Bitcoin, all cryptocurrencies have some form of blockchain system, though the details of their mining operation vary.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/17/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour/
https://slashdot.org/story/22/10/17/2059211/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour
no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 06:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-20 04:38 pm (UTC)Related, but different, technologies and purposes.