1) One day charts are highly volatile and we need to see where everything averages out. Some kind of drop looks real, but capacity may come online in other places.
2) The first chart (hashrate) is over years, the second is over months - otherwise you can't see the blip.
One somewhat vexing thing:
(a) when hashrate drops a lot, you want a quick difficulty adjustment
(b) but when hashrate drops a lot, blocks take longer to mine, so difficulty adjustment takes longer to come
The reason I bolded the word "estimate" is that we are dividing noisy random variables. We'll need to see where hashrate actually settles out after all the Chinese miners shut down and maybe relocate.
Still, while a 60-80% drop is a real annoyance, it's not fatal.
In general, the global decentralization of Bitcoin mining shows a way to robustify against the famous Thanksgiving Turkey Chart.
Even the Chinese state going after mining (not really a surprise) is only causing a temporary rise in block times.
So far, pretty antifragile!
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Longevity has the potential to be to traditional medicine what crypto is to traditional finance. It changes the terms of the debate.
Starting with Bitcoin's rejection of central banking & endless inflation, the cryptoeconomy has challenged virtually every premise of the state-controlled, paper-based financial system that we've inherited.
So far? Plenty of risks, plenty of loss — and undeniable progress.
The conventional macroeconomic wisdom is that high inflation is bad, but that deflation is also bad, so a little inflation is good.
But there's bad deflation, often due to contraction of money supply. And then there's good deflation, due to genuine productivity increases.
Proof-of-work is absolute truth, proof-of-stake is relative truth. Both have their role. But for the most important transactions it's better to produce more clean energy than to give up on the undeletable history that accumulated work provides.
It's hard to express this compactly to a non-technical person, but basically: it's harder to fake the results of a massive calculation done over ten years with datacenters full of hardware than it is to convince a fixed set of humans to change their minds and rewrite history.
This is what we get when there is no absolute truth.
Using Merkle trees, we can prove the existence of arbitrary amounts of data using just one tx on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Data availability is nontrivial (IPFS?) but proof that the original photo existed would be feasible.
Google didn't *initially* compete with other companies *primarily* on its stock price but on its product.
Assets should likewise have unique features. Good example: Zcash's privacy sets & shielded transactions. electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/
> Google didn't *initially* compete with other companies *primarily* on its stock price but on its product
Note: yes, when raising capital you're competing with other companies based on your stock. But the customer for your stock isn't identical to the customer for your product.
Now, it's true that customers of product (users) are increasingly becoming customers of stock (shareholders). Robinhood makes it possible to buy stock in products you use. Crypto makes this default.
That's powerful, but also turns many off. More product culture will be helpful.