dont worry, 2020 will not be the end.

The increase of mining difficulty is largely affected by two things

1) Increasing number of miners
2) Advancing technology (most importantly the amount of J/GH)

The rate of which technology advances in mining is pretty predictable, as we quickly follow the computer technology (recent miners are at about 28/24nm right now and we're quickly advancing to 14nm to keep up with computer chips. By next year ASIC chips will probably be as small as computer chips, thus the technology in ASICs will slow down compared to how fast they currently advance in technology.

This will make it more profitable to mine with the 14nm chips, as it will take a while before there will be more efficient chips. Theoretically that would mean 14nm miners would be guaranteed to be profitable, however there are a few catches to this.

First of all, because many people will expect the 14nm miners to be profitable, many more miners will buy that hardware. As well as we can expect bitcoin to be more popular in the first place, and by extension more people will be interested in mining them. More miners mean more difficulty and thus the 14nm miners may not be as profitable anymore just because there are too many miners using them.

Second there's the fact that electricity is much more expensive in Europe ($0.30~$0.45 per kWh) than it is in Asia and America ($0.08~$0.15 per kWh). Therefore we can assume large 14nm mining farms will be build in Canada, Russia or China which will be able to stay profitable while miners in other countries will not be able to be profitable because of overly expensive electricity.

Maybe I should start a kickstarter campaign to fund a private mining farm with 14nm chips in canada with chips to be designed privately. Investors being stakeholders of the mining farm ofc. This would be pretty interesting.

The end of Moore's law has been predicted since the early 1980s, just like 300 baud was the max modem speed.

Perhaps the "experts" are right this time, but I wouldn't count on it.

I'm running a core node, 21gb isn't a lot of data to hold right now. With current SSD and hybrid SSD drives, storage isn't even a concern, and probably will be likely to improve in both reliability and longevity.

Bandwidth? Yeah, no, a full node doesn't even begin to bump up to my limit even now. It would take 16x larger of a transaction size maximum to brush against the throughput limitations of a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem.

Since I'm running my node on a dedicated 512gb SSD, maybe my kids will need to upgrade it after I'm gone.

As an aside, how do you find the Bitcoin Core client 'not viable for many people'?

Fixed that for you.

Computer chips were once vacuum tubes. Do you think these people could have imagined the modern microchip?



I doubt it. The past always seems incomprehensible to the people of the future, I see no reason why THAT rule would not apply in 2020.

I'm not very well educated on this subject, but I know it would be possible to crack private keys if you just had enough computing power (like, a lot). Is it possible to estimate a time frame for this using Moore's law?

well done zimmah

QT connects to multiple nodes and will only connect to nodes that are "trusted" by the network, eg not ones that relay invalid TX or other TX that should not be relayed.