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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @Ed_Relight 27 Aug 2023 \ parent \ on: Inquiring about the halving bitcoin
The transaction speed and cost doesn't depend on the mining hashrate, the difficulty adjustment takes care of that.
So, no matter whether it's only one CPU in the whole world, or the whole world mining Bitcoin, there is a fixed amount of blocks created. The only thing that more mining power does is increases the network security against the 51% attack
This makes a lot of sense, thank you. So if I understand correctly, more mining rigs does not necessarily increase the speed of transactions, and visa versa. Instead, it really only increases the security of the network, as it would make a 51% attack harder to achieve?
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Correct, they don't.
The PoW Blockchain is, at a glance, a very inefficient system. Bitcoin could have been millions of times faster running on some AWS node and using a simple database.
But that's not very secure, is it? A single point of trust/failure is a bad thing to have for such an important thing as money. Hence, the point of PoW is to make it extremely costly for the attacker to get enough hashpower to add fraudulent transactions to the ledger, and having hashing power of 400000000000000000000 hashes/second certainly helps ;)
I'd recommend reading the Bitcoin Whitepaper, it's very short and explains a lot:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
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Thank you! I’ll give the whitepaper a read! I looked into it before hut I think i will have a deeper understanding reading it now.
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