Large bitcoin mine in Ordos, Mongolia - video and photos

[Paul Jones]

I think the developers of bitcoin and the blockchain technology have already anticipated the future with quantum computers and can stay a few steps ahead of the hackers in algorithm improvements. There is always the random chance of getting lucky but hacking occurs due to human error. You have to be very diligent in the code development and make sure no one has encoded a backdoor as failsafe measure.

Quantum computing is real and will eventually replace the deep thinking/reasoning of computers like IBM's Watson for solving many difficult problems in medical research, weather & climate prediction and oil & gas exploration where the current gigaFLOPS speeds are not fast enough. My specialty was using gigaFLOP calculating speeds of supercomputers in oil and gas exploration. The computer runs were measured in CPU months, not minutes or hours, and all the computations were done in double precision because after billions upon billions of floating point calculations we were left only 3 or 4 digits of significant values. We did check-start reset after every four hours just in case the supercomputer went down and at worst would lose only 4 hours out of the CPU months of calculations. In oil and gas exploration getting the correct analysis can be worth billions of dollars in well production return on offshore Gulf of Mexico prospects. It was interesting work.

[Jon]

If necessary, bitcoin developers can release an update that will make the bitcoin network safe against a variety of threats, including private key solving via quantum computation.

There are other theoretical possibilities (like time travel) that could also threaten the bitcoin network.

I'm not a cryptographer, but I know that it's commonly argued whether a bitcoin key can be brute-forced even if all stars in the universe were surrounded by Dyson spheres, and all their energy used for computing, at perfect efficiency, and all of that computing power continued until the Heat death of the universe.

Of course this assumes zero human error or fallibility. There is a classic XKCD comic illustrating this point:

[C-Bag]

LOL Jon. But after reading about the hacker in Kingpin I will no longer doubt there are truly some geniuses out there. But I would say the vast majority are more like your cartoon no matter what tv would have us believe.

One of the points made in the comments was that the use of the next better SHA 384(?) would have to be approved by the miners. Would it just be a simple majority, or unanimous or? Does your vote relate to your computing power or?

[Jon]

Anyone on the bitcoin network (you can join too) can choose to accept an update to the bitcoin software or not. So there isn't exactly a winner-takes-all vote. But yes, it's largely about hashing power. You can consider a real-world "mine" as an example. Let's say a new mine opens up down the road. Any of the miners can leave the old mine and go work at the new one.

Recently, the bitcoin software forked off; some agreed with the fork, some didn't. Some stayed on the "core" bitcoin blockchain, and some departed to a new blockchain called "Bitcoin Cash". Similar thing happened with Ethereum.

You can fork off bitcoin and start C-BagCoin; there are even websites that will do this for you automatically in 5 minutes. Of course, to profit from this, you would have to convince people to devote their computer processing power to C-BagCoin in the hopes that the C-BagCoins that they mine will be more valuable than any other coin.

[Paul Jones]

The blockchain technology is extremely secure and is being considered as a technology to do voting without absentee ballots (my preference for over 30 years) or going to polling locations.

[Jon]

Looks like NASA is dipping their toes into blockchain technology. Published a few weeks ago: Bitcoin, Blockchains and Efficient Distributed Spacecraft Mission Control.