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Let's say a mining cartel (or a single large miner ) were to privately mine BIP 110 (not releasing blocks) at whatever hashrate gives them greatest work (versus public BIP 110) along the entire time -- all just to grief BIP 110.
When this hypothetical mining endeavor eventually broadcasts their blocks, and bexome the public BIP 110 tip, what could and/or would the response be at that point in time?
The color is based on the scale legend for the level of hashing (as a percent of global hashrate) in that country.
Russia does 16.417% (175 EH/s) of global hashrate:
https://data.hashrateindex.com/network-data/global-hashrate-heatmap
Dammit ... just after I vowed to move to a warmer climate ...
(though I think I made the same vow last March after a similar blizzard as well)
“Bitzero is working with us to use our Western Area Power Administration hydroelectric power to reflect the company’s zero carbon mandate,” Fox said. “The additional heat produced from the data center facility will be used for our MHA Nation’s Greenhouse Project currently under construction.”
First Block mined by the Datum/Ocean Mining
#705749
https://mempool.space/tx/8f7932dfa8632cc5c5e1760299adf442945dbb31573be1d628a7bcd5df26da9b
How awesome! They (Just for Krypto) sponsored the Mining Conference Minnesota over the weekend where Ocean announced DATUM, on Sunday.
Proof-of-work (PoW) mining is what permits bitcoin to be resistant against centralized control.
Mining exists to cement the ordering of transactions.
That's it. That's the entire reason that Bitcoin mining exists.
That means neither any government, nor any mining pools or mining cartels with less than 50% of the hashrate have the ability to change the ordering of the transactions.
In over a dozen years, there has never been a transaction ordering issue outside of a single incident in 2013 when a new release of the software changed the behavior and a chain split occurred (and one person used that opportunity to change the ordering of his transaction such that an exchange got cheated on a confirmed (six confirmations) deposit transaction that no longer existed when the chain split got resolved (i.e., the ordering of the transactions was changed).
While there are shitcoins with PoW mining as well, those are not as resistant, or are unresistant -- due to them requiring a significantly smaller set of resources in order to pull off the double spend attack. Even a determined attacker (e.g., the U.S. gov't) would not be able to pull off a mining attack against bitcoin (at least, not one that would be a surprise when it was executed).
As far as an article on it ... the following explains the double spend problem. But it mentions "mining" exactly zero times:
https://www.babypips.com/crypto/learn/what-problems-did-bitcoin-solve
But try to find a way to solve the double spend problem without PoW mining and you end up with crap like proof-of-stake (e.g., Etherium) which doesn't actually solve the "multi-dimensional problem of decentralised consensus that Bitcoin and its Proof-of-Work-based consensus mechanism solved".
Grandpa probably can't or won't do the research to truly understand why bitcoin mining must exist, but maybe he can understand that if there was a way for bitcoin to work without bitcoin mining and be just as resistant to centralized control, that would have occurred by now. And thus, we embrace bitcoin the way it is -- because there is no alternative.
But most miners aren't set up to power off when the grid needs additional power -- except for some in Texas, and maybe a few others elsewhere. It is technically possible to do, most everywhere, but there is investment and operational costs borne by the miner to make that happen, and essentially no benefit to the miner for doing that -- unless there are agreements in place benefitting the miner for not taking that power.
What is missing is the desire by the producers to take advantage of this opportunity to make use of this "rolling reserve" power source. That may come eventually but the generation plants quite like it being able to charge whatever they want and not have to partner with (i.e., rely on) anybody else to help with the supply.
See the introduction, here:
Running a solar-powered Bitcoin/Lightning Node & Lottery Miner — Introduction
#201134
https://medium.com/@ne0nblack/running-a-solar-powered-bitcoin-lightning-node-lottery-miner-introduction-12005bd06960
The link for this post uses a read-only front-end for Twitter, which can be easier to read for viewing a full Twitter thread. The Tweet that kicked off the thread is:
First Impressions- ePIC UMC Control boards Universal Mining Control (UMC) board from @ePICBlockchain arrived earlier today.
Thanks to @ReuvenSoraya for sending these over for testing!
Here are some close-up images of the front & back.
https://i.postimg.cc/1Sj79TvM/image.jpg
https://twitter.com/altair_tech/status/1660023473073184769 [Nitter]
What I mean is ...
Can't the site be a bit more forgiving and simply help out the noobs and say something to the effect of:
"Each ball corresponds to one of the 2048 seed words from BIP-39, which is used with any wallet or cold storage device that supports BIP-39."
(or whatever the procedures are to go from shaking this thing to sleeping peacefully because your keys were generated with a exceptional randomness).
I.e., ELI5
https://web.archive.org/web/20110525214120/https://techland.time.com/2011/05/23/report-police-confuse-bitcoin-miners-power-use-for-weed-grow-op/
Referenced in the above article:
https://www.bitcoinminer.com/cyber-bitcoin-mining-grow-ops/