Ahead of yet another 12-14% difficulty increase coming in the next 15 hours,i the Bitcoin network has reached nearly 100 petahashes of processing power,ii less than 8 piddling months after hitting 1 petahash.
Let that sink in.
It’s insane. It’s beautiful. It’s utterly mesmerizing.
And it’s precisely why, even as I sit here in a sprawling private apartment in the heart of Old Montreal, ready to tap into a city alive with Grand Prix fever, nothing else in the world matters.
So why is this so special? I’ll let #bitcoin-assets take it from here:
Naphex:iii So.. if the difficulty adjusts itself to do sha256 for 10 minutes, isn’t bitcoin backed by TIME? *woah*
Apocalyptic: *Mind blown*
Naphex: Someone should give that to the presses to annoy all silver/gold/money bugs. So yeah maybe proof of work is the future future. How else can you pack 10 minutes of yard work ?
mircea_popescu: Yes. And time conquers all.
Naphex: Nothing else more valuable.
Naphex is right on the money, and yet, the Bitcoin-Time relationship could be deeper still. In addition to time backing Bitcoin, it could also be Bitcoin that backs time, where Bitcoin acts as the world’s metronome, relentlessly ticking no matter how bad the storm is. Amid the complete chaos of our digitally globalized society, where multiplier effects comingle with cascading effects to create ever larger black swans,iv Bitcoin is nearly as predictable as the moon itself.v Time being the construct that it is, it’s getting increasingly hard to tell the two apart.
To paraphrase Lincoln, “the best thing about the future is that it comes one bitcoin at a time.”
Hash… Hash… Hash…
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- Nearing us ever closer to 14B difficulty on Bastille Day. Who said you can’t make money in Bitcoin?↩
- It’s currently at 95,024,859 GH/s according to Bitcoin Wisdom. By the time you check it yourself, it’ll almost certainly be higher. ↩
- Naphex operates the Romanian Bitcoin Exchange btcxchange.ro and is a #b-a regular.↩
- Both positive and negative black swans, of course.↩
- As such, Bitcoin will, according to MP, soon start controlling the price of electricity. This isn’t that hard to imagine. What’s harder to imagine is what Bitcoin won’t soon control. Weird thought: can you imagine if women adapted their menstrual periods to, instead of occuring once every lunar cycle, occured once every two network difficulty resets? The difference is only about a day so it couldn’t take that many generations… ↩