Source: http://www.ufblog.net/category/bitcoin/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:25:35+00:00

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§3.44 — From the perspective of the miner, bitcoins are immanent remuneration for primary production, or resource extraction. They function as digital gold. As the simulation of a finite resource, it is natural that their production rate should exhibit declining marginal returns. Each increment of mining effort confronts an increasingly challenging environment, under conditions of steady depletion. For Bitcoin, as for gold, economic dynamics automatically counter-balance industrial exertion, as prices adjust in response to supply constraints. This process of continuously revised bitcoin price discovery cannot be determined within the protocol, but occurs at its edges, where economic agents trade into, and out of, bitcoins – synthesizing the Bitcoin commercium with its outside.
§3.45 — Within the protocol, adjustments are restricted to supply modifications, modeling the depletion of an abstract resource that is advanced as a general commodity (i.e. money). Bitcoin splits its schedule of decreasing returns in two, separating its measures of reward and difficulty. This double contraction – while clearly redundant from the viewpoint of austere abstract theory – enables a superior degree of flexible calibration, in response to a dynamic environment, volatilized above all by rapid improvements in computational engineering (and product delivery). By dividing bitcoin output compression between two interlocking processes, the protocol is able to stabilize the rate of block validation in terms of an ‘objective’ (external) time metric. The difference between these two modes of nominal reward restriction reflects a schism in time, between the intrinsic, intensive, absolute succession of the blockchain, and the extrinsic, geometricized order of pre-existing (globalized) chronological convention. Integrated reward is a complex chrono-synthesis, occurring at the boundary where Bitcoin’s artificial time – proceeding only by successive envelopment (of blocks into the chain) – meets the social-chronometric time of measurable periods. ‘Ten minutes’ means nothing on the blockchain (in itself), until connected by an interlock that docks it to a chronometer.
§3.46 — Are not all blocks time-stamped? it might be objected. To avoid confusion at this point, it is critical to once again recall the difference between the ordinal and the cardinal, succession and duration. Time-stamps are ordinal indicators, without any intrinsic cardinality, and with merely suggestive cardinal allusion. They implement an ordering convention. Metric regulation of periods is an entirely distinct function. ‘Chain’ means series (and nothing besides).
§3.47 — The bitcoin reward rate halves, stepwise, in four-year phases, on an asymptotic progression towards the limit of BTC 21,000,000 – the protocol’s horizon of zero-return. Taken in isolation, this exponential decline looks smoothly Zenonian (asymptotic), or infinitesimalizing, until arbitrarily terminated at a set point of negligible output. It is scheduled to pass through 34 ‘reward eras’ in the last of which – with block 6930000 – BTC issuance reaches zero. Due to the power of exponential process, 99% of all bitcoins are issued by Era-7 (during which 164,062.5 bitcoins are added to the supply).* The end of Bitcoin’s mining epoch is anticipated in the year 2140. After this point, at a date so distant that it belongs to the genre of science fiction, continuation of the system requires that mining-based block validation incentives are fully replaced by transaction fees. Evidently, the transition process cannot be expected to await its arrival at this remote terminus, which marks a point of completion, rather than inauguration.
§3.48 — The reward schedule is further tightened by increasing difficulty of the hashing problem. Rather than executing a pre-programmed deceleration, Bitcoin’s rising difficulty responds dynamically to technological acceleration, and balances against it, thus holding the block validation rate roughly constant. Even as the reward rate tumbles – when denominated in BTC – the block processing rate is approximately stabilized, at a rate of one block every ten minutes, regardless of the scope and intensity of mining activity.
§3.49 — ‘Difficulty’ modification is a synchronization. The Zenonian time of intensive compression that determines the BTC reward-rate is – taken on its own – wholly autonomous, or artificial. As already noted, its chronometric ‘ticks’ are block validation events, registered in serial block numbers (and their ‘epochs’). They have no intrinsic reference to the units of ordinary time. It is only with the stabilization of the block-processing rate that the time of Bitcoin is made historically convertible, or calendrically intelligible, through the latching of block numbers to confirmed or predicted dates. This is a supplementary, synthetic operation, which coincides with the protocol’s anthropomorphic adoption. The time of the blockchain is intrinsic, and absolute, but its history is a frontier, where it engages ‘us’. As the blockchain is installed, and thus dated, an artificial time in-itself – consisting only of absolute succession – is packaged as phenomenon.
§3.5 — It can easily be seen that bitcoin mining is an arms race, of the ‘Red Queen’ type.** Since the total bitcoin production rate has zero (supply) elasticity, local advances in production can only be achieved at the expense of competitors. In consequence, inefficient miners are driven out of the market (as their costs – especially electricity bills – exceed the value of their coin production). This brutal ecology has forced rapid technological escalation, as miners upgrade their operations with increasingly specialized mining ‘rigs’. In the course of this process, the standard CPUs initially envisaged as the basic engines of bitcoin mining have been marginalized by dedicated hashing hardware, from high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) – originally designed for application to computer games – through field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Bitcoin has thus stimulated the emergence of a new information technology industrial sub-sector.
* For a more detailed description of the Bitcoin reward schedule, see.
Fort a compact, chronometric representation of mining difficulty, see.
*** The doctrine of the univocity of being is derived from Duns Scotus, and passes into modernity by way of its implicit contribution to Spinozistic ontology, as re-activated by Deleuze. It can be formulated in various ways. Most basically, the meaning of ‘being’ is insensitive to its application, and unaffected by differences of kind. Thus, the being of any being is no different from that of any other. God is not a flake of dandruff (and differs very significantly in kind from one, whether the distinction is entertained from a theist or atheist perspective), but the being of God has no difference whatsoever from that of a flake of dandruff – and even if God is held not to exist, the being denied him is the same as that of any existent thing. In other (more ‘Heideggerian’) words: ‘Being’ is not susceptible to ontic qualification. In its pure conception, therefore, what is said by ‘univocity of being’ is exactly equivalent to ontological difference.

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