When you flip the chart upside down, it sunk 300% over 2 years!
As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
51–60 of 327 posts
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#52At least this might provide pressure to reduce the environmental impact of mining, if only to reduce costs.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unprofitable to operate in friendly conditions* If you can flip a switch and 10x the hashrate of a network, all under your control, and you don’t care about killing the chain in your attack, it may be a perfect exit for you if you no longer want to play the mining game. There’s actually a mining pool doing something like this on smaller PoW bitcoins https://sharkpool.cash (not associated, just think it’s interesting)
How do you cash out on this kind of attack if by your own actions you're crashing the value of the coin?
Short it.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
What investment scam can you not say this about? People in boiler room operations pumping up bogus pharmaceuticals --- for example --- aren't themselves drug researchers and can, of course, tell themselves that they worked not on a scam, but on a product that didn't in the end worked out and simply turned out to be a bad investment.
Surely you can’t call something a scam unless lying was involved. Plenty of bad investments or financial choices don’t involve lying.
How are the people in the boiler room "lying"? They're not drug researchers. They have no idea if what they're pushing is a good investment or not; all they know is that it's weird that they've somehow got their hands on it, rather than JPMC or GS. The situations strike me as fairly analogous.
We have no trouble calling penny stock pushers dialing for dollars exactly what they are, but when it comes to "cryptocurrency", we're all supposed to keep our mouths shut. That makes no sense to me. What's scary is, the instinct in a lot of places will be to take the analogy and unwind the other side of it --- maybe we should reconsider the morality of the boiler room operations! Maybe they're doing a service after all! Caveat emptor, after all!
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that even if the difficulty adjusts, there will be dormant ASICs waiting to be used. If the price lowers enough and enough ASICs are out on the bench, it’ll at one point becoming economically beneficial to turn them all on and attack the network rather than having them collect dust and depreciate.
If they’re dormant, by definition they’re already unprofitable to operate. If the price decreases further, only the most efficient miners will remain, not the least efficient of them.
I've speculated before that the Chinese government may use this to sow confusion in the event of an altercation, "hot" or otherwise, with the West - in which case, the profitability of a miner is moot, only the ability to spin up a majority of the network.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#56At what price will the Bitcoin death spiral occur? (i.e. when it costs more to produce/handle Bitcoin than the revenue generated, so best move is to just exit the crypto industry).
There was a time when the Bitcoin price was zero, yet people spent computer time mining it.
So the answer to your question is never, a Bitcoin death spiral can not occur.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin was doing perfectly fine at $100, so I think these predictions are a bit premature and have some recency bias. The price drop does lower the amount of security in the network, so it becomes cheaper to attack it. However, it also means the payoff to attack is lower.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought mining coins took power as time went on. Thus what it took to do the job in the past isn't what it would take today and thus past mining really wouldn't be comparable.
The difficulty (amount/cost of power required) goes up over time when the price goes up because more miners join the network as it becomes more profitable, which means that on average new coins are produced more often. The network targets a certain rate of production and it does this by increasing the difficulty.
If the price drops and miners leave this will happen in reverse and coins will not be produced fast enough, then the difficulty will reduce (meaning less power is required to mine a block). The network would be fine even back at $100.
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#58by the way, Techcrunch CEO was all in crypto last year
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#59BTC/USD is doing just fine. Nobody who knows anything about anything made any kinds of plans involving $20,000 Bitcoin. At ~$4k, it's still 10x where it was 2 years ago. Anybody remotely involved in BTC from it's actual inception (not the bandwagon shirt-losers of 2017) is filthy stinking rich now.
Of course if you are filthy stinking rich, it's because you participated in a distributed scam in order to defraud money from those "bandwagon shirt-losers."
You mean, like pension funds trading the stock market?
Re: As Bitcoin Sinks, Industry Startups Are Forced to Cut Back
#60Ah, the Bloomberg and TechCrunch bottom signals I’m looking for.
A year ago, I was explaining to family why crypto was a thing. This year I'm explaining why it crashed and why it's to be avoided. Also, why blockchain and crypto are not the same thing.
There are many who participated in the 2017 speculation that will actively avoid and advise against participation this go around. The bubble popped and it will be many years before we see worthy investments take shape.