Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken. 3211 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Sending it into the Sun would have been easier than Mars, work with the gravity well, not against.
The sun is the most difficult body in the solar system to get to, because you need to cancel out all of the orbital velocity that you already have by virtue of launching from Earth.
Perhaps he could ask SpaceX nicely to hitch a ride on the maiden flight of Falcon Heavy, which is (hopefully) being tested on 6/2/18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c
3.8 billion light years away, or one-third of the distance across the observable universe
Due to the expansion of space, the observable universe is 93 billion light years across, so that's ~4% rather than a third.
This is certainly not to detract from the impressiveness of the observation, however.
That's an awful lot of juice. Should that be suffixed with "Probably" ?
Possibly. It's a difficult estimate to make, but this is the source of that estimate: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
What's the most inefficient and slow database you can think of?
A blockchain is worse than that by several orders of magnitude. Currently, a single bitcoin transaction is estimated to consume as much energy as 15 average American households do in 24 hours.
Which is how smart contracts work.
Or don't, as it turns out, because it's impossible to write 100% flawless code.
I heard a story tonight of a friend of a friend who remembered they had a handful of bitcoins from the early days when they were worth dollars each, and sold them at December's high.
Lucky boy. I think the "I forgot about them" aspect is the key to the good fortune here.
Nonetheless, I can't help thinking much of the crypto schadenfreude here is from those who (repeatedly) missed the chance to pay of their mortgages by risking only a few tens/hundreds/thousands of quids.
Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but you don't gamble with hindsight.
What are the odds that if you had some bitcoins that you'd mined (or bought to buy drugs) in 2010 that you still have them today, as opposed to either losing them or cashing out when it hit $100?
It's worth pointing out that Falcon Heavy isn't just designed for LEO.
Neither was Saturn V...
Saturn V could carry 140 tons, but couldn't carry it very far.
Both being LEO figures, Saturn V could lift 140 tonnes precisely as far as Falcon Heavy is designed to lift 64 tonnes.
Boeing looked at the market when Airbus was designing the A-380 and said ...NAH
My understanding is that it wasn't because the concept was flawed; it was that the market wasn't big enough for a second option.
Unless the only thing produced in the Netherlands is electricity, the GDP is not based on the amount of electricity. The 140 Terawatthours mentioned in the article would cost a few hundred million euros.
"Uses as much electricity as the Netherlands, produces as much value* as Dominica"
* Just kidding. Cryptos don't produce anything of value.
Being a liquid propellant rocket, the Falcon Heavy static fire tests will be conducted in its launch orientation, i.e. vertical.
Some more coverage of the preparations:
Rocket goes up (28 December 2017)
Rocket goes down (29 December 2017)
It becomes harder to mine the more mining power the network has. It does not depend on the number of mined coins.
The block reward halves every 210,000 blocks, which is about four years. This doesn't make mining more difficult in itself but it absolutely does make it more difficult to earn the same number of bitcoins, even if the network hashrate doesn't change. It's also means that if you know how many coins have been mined, you can easily determine what the current reward is. The reward began at 50 and has halved twice so far and the next halving will likely occur in less than three years.
The network adjusts the difficulty to keep an average rate of one block in 30 minutes.
One block is mined every 10 minutes on average. Because the mining is a bunch of random busywork, you might have two blocks mined within a few seconds of each other, or no new blocks for an hour or more. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, which is two weeks at the average block discovery rate, but is generally shorter than that in periods of mining power growth. If the network falls in a heap at some point, you have to wait until the end of the current 2016 block period to adjust it, which could take some time...
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