Mining Bitcoin on the moon is not a new idea and it will happen sooner or later.
The idea of mining Bitcoin in the moon is not feasible at the moment, the technology is not ready yet, setting up Bitcoin full nodes with lightning would be better for a start. For miners there will need to be a lot of testing with mining rigs in LEO (low earth orbit) and this will allow for environmental hardening and testing prior to the more harsh lunar environment.
The early installs will be for marketing purposes and prototyping/testing. The not too many tons budget for the next few decades is primarily determined by governments, so private companies and individuals will need to push limits and pay by themselves if the plan should happen in the near future.
The idea is to make a sound and secure monetary system on the moon. At the same time, it will be possible to use the excessive energy from solar panels, nuclear plants and thermo-electric generators (TEG) in low-demand periods for the space powerstations which are soon to be made by the US, China, UK and Japan.
Benefits of Bitcoin mining on the moon
1. It will be a liberty engine on a natural satellite, and a safe monetary network in outer space.
It´s not possible to Clone BTC, you can fork the chain but don´t clone coins. You can also put your coins on layer 2 (try it so you can see next article), but they are not cloned like Maya.
First of all a good way to look up any Bitcoin related topics search these sites: Bitcoin.org or Bitcoin Wiki.
Let´s dig deeper into the questions of mining.
This post will be simplistic and if you want, you can look deeper into Bitcoin wiki or search the web.
Difficulty
The difficulty is changed every 2016 blocks, like many already have heard.
Let´s talk more about this change later, first what is Bitcoin’s difficulty and why is it important?
Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target. The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty. All Bitcoin miners can find the difficulty of a block since it´s a deterministic calculation based on the data of the previous blocks (one knows exactly the parameters used in the calculation). So independent miners in the decentralized BTC network can do the calculation and come to the same result.
The idea of difficulty is to keep the coin inflation/issuance and block confirmation steady within a 600 seconds interval. Miners are trying to find the correct nonce (golden nonce/ticket), this nonce results in a hash value lower than the target difficulty. Full nodes will check if the nonce/block have a double SHA-256 hash value lower than the difficulty target, if so they will accept the block.
So, what is the formula for difficulty?
Difficulty level = Difficulty target / Current target
The target is a 256-bit number (extremely large) that all Bitcoin clients share.
Each block stores a packed representation (called “Bits”) for it´s actual hexadecimal target.
Note that the Difficulty Target is a hexadecimal notation of the target hash whose mining difficulty is 1.
Still don´t get it? When the 2 hexadecimal numbers are divided, it results in difficulty or some call it difficulty level a whole number. At block height 786240 the difficulty was 4.871241e+13 or 48.71 Trillion.
Sometimes miners can get lucky and find it with significantly fewer guesses.
Just to specify Bitcoin has it´s own time protocol, so instead of using normal time like UTC I will use the block height in the following graphs. A friend has actually written a great article about living on Satoshi time.
The difficulty is the approximate numbers of hashes that miners need to perform to find a block.
Difficulty adjustment
Like stated in the start of the article difficulty is adjusted every 2016 block (approximately every = 2016 blocks * 10 min = 20160 min/60/24 = 14 days ). This is also called difficulty epoch adjustment. ‘
So, the Bitcoin network recalculate the current target, by taking the last 2016 blocks and how long it took to mine them.
So, if it took 20000 min for the last 2016 blocks the difficulty will increase, and if the difficulty is 20300 the difficulty will go lower.
The ratio is measured in percent.
If the correction factor is greater than 4 (or less than 1/4), then 4 or 1/4 are used instead, to prevent the change to be too abrupt.
The difficulty adjustment algorithm has an off-by-one bug that leads to the calculation based off of the previous 2015 blocks, rather than precisely 2016.
It´s interesting that the difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. It might be a coincidence but in 1933 there was an executive order called 6102.
I have graphed the average block time here, when difficulty adjustments happened.
As you see the start of the BTC network was a bit shaky, but it´s pretty stable overall.
Fun fact: Block 0´s timestamp is 2009-01-03 10:15 and block 1´s timestamp is 2009-01-08 18:54, so it took Satoshi Nakamoto +5 days to mine the first block. Check it here
The largest difficulty increase happened at block 68544 (2010-07-16) with +300%.
The largest difficulty decrease happened at block 689472 (2021-07-02) with -27.94%.
I hope you got a better understanding of difficulty and it´s great feature of securing 600 second block times.
Hash rate
Miners like to look at the hash rate to understand how many other online miners they are competing against. The hash rate can be described as numbers of hashes “guesses” per second in relation to mining. The higher the hash rate, the more competition.
To understand about the hash rate you have to understand it´s represented in Hashes per Second or H/s equals one double SHA-256 computation attempt.
The Bitcoin hash rate is a calculated numerical value that specifies an estimate of how many hashes are being generated by all Bitcoin miners trying to solve the current block or any given block. More about how to calculate it later.
All miners are competing to find the special hash value lower than the nonce, when they find it they get rewarded, it normally takes 10 min(600) to find this, as already discussed.
Since the Bitcoin blockchain have evolved a lot and have a lot of participants the hash rate has become super high.
The abbreviations are SI derived units representing the number of hashes performed in a one second time frame.
Let´s take a look at the current hash rate.
Let me explain.
The current block height in the graph is: 786240
The average hash rate was: 3.485999e+20 or 348.60 EH/s
That is a lot of hashes per seconds especially because the most efficient mining rig on the market currently offer a hash rate of 255 TH/s (Bitmain Antminer S19 XP HYD). Remember this graph from last blog post?
Let´s say everybody uses the most efficient mining rig (this is not true) on the market, how many mining rigs are then right now running according to block height 786240 ?
348,600,000,000,000,000,000 (348.60 EH/s) / 255,000,000,000,000 (255 TH/s) = 1,367,058 mining rigs would be online, the number is larger since not everybody uses this mining rig.
How to calculate hash rate
The hash rate can be calculated in different ways, it depends on what time-window you are looking at, is it the average hash rate over the last 6h, 12h, 24h, 7days, 14days?
So, you can see, the shorter time period, the more variance there will be. Same can be said with the mining rigs, they don´t offer a constant rate, there is variance. So, if you have a mining rig, try to look at the hourly, daily and weekly performance.
So, the hash rate is not a constant but varies a lot, you got to remember it´s a decentralized network, with millions of mining rigs connected, some only mine in specific time periods, some mines to help capture Gas flaring, some mines when there is sun or wind and so on.
You can check the hash rate here, but even better download your own full node and check how to get the info here.
The calculations
If you want to calculate the hash rate by yourself there are different ways it can be done.
The simplest formula, if you want to check the hash rate use this:
Hash Rate = Current Difficulty * 2^32 / 600
This formula is not saying anything about how many blocks have been mined in a period, but depend on the difficulty you have been giving in the block header.
Let´s try use the numbers written before in the article 4.871241e+13= difficulty
As you can see there were two more blocks than expected in the last 6h, and this can be seen as a higher hash rate in this period.
Again it´s important to understand that miners/websites calculate the hash rate using different methods. The beauty with Bitcoin is that it´s permissionless (a public blockchain that allow anyone to participate in validating and mining transactions as well as using the system to buy, sell and trade assets), so nobody have to identify themselves so the hash rate is an estimate.
Factors that influence the hash rate variance
Miners can come and go to the network.
Mining rigs are not giving 100% accurate hashing power all the time.
Hash rate readings depend on your time window.
It´s a distributed network, so nodes might have a small latency in updating, but over time it guarantees consistency.
Timestamps can be inconsistent (not often).
Luck of the block. Sometimes people get lucky and find the nonce before the 600s block.
I hope you learned something new and now is the time to start mining if you have excess energy and want to produce your own secure decentralized money.
If you are interested in the cryptography in Bitcoin take a look at this short article (remember that BTC have moved from ECDSA to Schnorr signatures).
This leads me up to another article I have started to write.
If you know nothing about cryptographic, read some books about it. It´s super fascinating stuff.
Let me give you a small timeline of some methods for hiding secret messages, remember there are also tons of nice algorithms you can use on your computer:
405 BCE – The Ancient Greek general Lysander of Sparta is said to have received a message which was revealed by winding a piece of parchment around a rod of a special thickness – This is known as a scytale.
50 BCE – Julius Ceasar did not invent it, but used it a lot. It´s called Ceasar ciphers. A simple way to disguise messages by replacing each letter with another. This is the basis for many more complicated ciphers.
An example of a cipher wheel:
The key is 8 and I have rolled (turned the inner wheel eight places clockwise) it for you.
Find this secret message: OMB I TV EITTMB
Look at the red outer wheel and start to decode.
Write down the matching letter from the inner wheel.
850 CE – al-Kindi an Arab scholar and mathematician was the first person to describe a method to decipher encrypted messages based on how often letter are used in a language, also called frequency analysis
1800s CE – As the global electric telegraph network grew in 1800s, so did the use of codes and ciphers. Before that it was mostly by hand and pen.
Pocket cipher machines was also seen in this periods, like the one made by Decius Wadsworth (1817) but popularized bySir Charles Wheatstone.
Military started also to use these handheld systems, like the Pletts wheel (first world war), but it was fast rejected by the British army after American codebreakers (E. and W. Friedman) fast broke it.
1900s CE – Mechanical gear-and-rotor cipher machines began in the early 1900s. This really sped up encryption in an age when messages were sent around the world via telegraph cables and radio communication.
First world war proved that secure messages by mechanical gear-and-rotor cipher machines saved lives.
1908-1924 CE Example of a experimental cipher machine (Sir Perry Scott’s cipher machine 1908)
The flawed insecure Kryha Machine (1924).
1923 Ce Electric typewriter – The Famous Enigma machine protected commercial, diplomatic, and military communication in Nazi German broken by famous Alan Turing (Bletchey Park) with the help of French secret service and the Polish Cipher Bureau.
1930 CE – T52 was an online machine used by Luftwaffe and German Navy units, which could support the heavy machine, teletypewriter and attendant fixed circuits. Broken by Arne Beurling.
1937 CE – Electric typewriter TYPEX an adaptation of the commercial German Enigma with a number of enhancements that greatly increased its security.
1936-1940 Portable cipher machines like the Hagelin C-36.
1940s CE – The Lorenz company designed a cipher machine based on the additive method for enciphering teleprinter messages invented in 1918 by Gilbert Vernam in America. The Lorenz machine was often used for the most secret messages.
1941 CE – The SG-41 or Hitler mill troubled many in Blechley park.
After this period many machines were produced but here are a few of them.
1943 CE The 5-UCO or BID/30 was an electronic One-Time Tape (OTT) cipher machine, or mixer, developed in the UK during WWII and used for Top Secret Ultra messages during the war. After the war, the machine was used by the British Commonwealth, the US and NATO. The machine was suitable for fully synchronous secure telegraphic data over the HF radio bands.
1962 CE – AVLIS or BID/610 was a fully transistorized online/offline cipher machine, introduced in 1962 by Plessey in Liverpool (UK). The machine was used by British and Canadian forces and also by NATO. It was the UK’s submission for NATO evaluation TROL and was approved on 17 April 1962 for NATO information of all classifications, including TOP SECRET.
Read here a fun/tragic story about the last rotor cipher machine.
1960s CE – Delphi punch-card cipher machine was the first machine to have the key (Usually strong random number) encoded on punch cards.
2000s CE – Thamer a commercial available technology that connects to personal computers in order to encrypt classified data traffic.
Chaotic pendulum and Lava lamps are seen used by some companies to create random numbers.
Now and the future – Quantum computers are able to break some of today´s encryption methods in seconds, but they also open up for the future of encryption technologies.
I hope you liked this post; I have travelled around to see some of these technologies IRL. But there is a lot more to all this, but why reveal it all – You got to have some secrets:D
By the way you should read about Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz his findings have been used in so many things in todays society, but it´s about to change.
“Image Archives permute the 4096 colors, and rather than a page of 40 lines each with 80 characters, the images are pixel grids with 416 rows and 640 columns. It contains every image that ever has been or could be created with this color palette in these dimensions, including portraits of every person who ever lived at every moment in their life, digitized versions of every work of art ever created, even those lost to history, as well as every work of art which ever could be created, and photographs of your own birth, wedding, and funeral. It contains 4096266240 (~10961755) unique images.”
As you can imagine it´s pretty useless, but then again. This becomes very philosophical, but maybe can become practical. A great article led me this way. I will dig deeper!
A question you can think about is: What can represent all and every solutions to a problem?
