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mocha_sweetheart OP t1_j1y1p9i wrote

Reply to comment by tjr5zz in Driverless cars and electric cars being displayed as the pinnacle of future transportation engineering is just… wrong. Car-based infrastructure is inefficient, bad for the environment and we already have better technologies in other fields that could help more. An in depth analysis by mocha_sweetheart

>Using bitcoin as an example, you can only mine 6.25 coins per block--roughly every 10 minutes.

Who, exactly, is stopping the rich from just opening multiple accounts and multiple miners for each one? They have the money, they have the resources, they have the land, and there sure as hell isn't stopping from just making bot bitcoin wallets etc.?!

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tjr5zz t1_j1y6hiw wrote

You misunderstand the protocol. They have as much mining power as the universe allows, they can only mine at most 6.25 coins per block.

In a year and half, that will be reduced to 3.125 bitcoins per block.

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tjr5zz t1_j1y7omf wrote

My answer sounded condescending upon review. Sorry. I'll tell you a tale of a man who found out about bitcoin in 2010. This man thought it was impossible to have a decentralized currency because any digital thing can be duplicated. He had made thousands of copies of digital files before so how could this be any different. Yeah, that was me. I was ignorant. Eventually I learned.

The reason they can have as much mining power as they like is because as the hash rate increases, something called the difficulty increases along with it. In fact, the hash rate HAS steadily increased over time, yet the bitcoin protocol and rules are steadfast. The hashrate increases, it becomes more difficult to perform the hash. It's baked in.

If they tried to cheat and not abide by the difficulty, all the non-mining nodes would reject the blocks. They would fork off into their own chain that is no longer bitcoin and nobody would care or accept their transactions/blocks.

If you google the whitepaper, you can read how that works.

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tjr5zz t1_j1y7wqa wrote

If you decide to start with bitcoin, I suggest not having an investing mentality but rather a using it mentality. I mean if you choose to invest that's fine but use it first and understand the hype cycles at least.

I recommend getting Phoenix Wallet and Muun for your phone and Sparrow for your pc. Just start right out using the lightning network with Phoenix and Muun.

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