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Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

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Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#161
post #133
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.

Now compare it to the annual energy use for the creation/printing of money and funding of infinite wars due to the Federal Reserve having the ability to print money out of thin air at the cost of future generations.

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#162
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?

What the hell is AI token farming?

I think they mean serving inference workloads

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for correction, that is true! (Both instruments are not that popular in my country, so my daily language is to put both of them as synonym, while they are different animals in some details)

There are cash settled futures there are closer to options in that they’re purely financial, but even those don’t have optionality at maturity. Generally a dangerous thing to have as synonyms regardless, otherwise you end up with a coal barge in the east river https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery

Remembering: WTF was quite popular 20 years ago! :)

Regarding this story: I guess for most private participants, physical delivery is not possible/excluded

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#164
post #7

The headline is dramatic but this is literally how bitcoin is designed to work. Miners leave, difficulty drops, costs go down, mining becomes profitable again. The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market.

It is how bitcoin is designed to work, but it also shows very directly how proof-of-work systems can never scale to be the global monetary replacement its boosters push. If the opposite happened, and the price for some reason sky rocketed to, say, $1 million per bitcoin, it would necessarily mean that it would induce more miners until the difficulty and consequent electricity cost (regardless of the efficiency in electricity generation) also would rise to the neighborhood of $1 million per coin. At the point you're far beyond "Argentina levels" of electricity and getting into "Europe levels" of electricity to run the network.

The electricity demand (and here I mean the overall cost of the electricity, so improvements in $ per kilowatt just mean you need to use more electricity) in proof-of-work systems fundamentally scales linearly with the overall valuation of the coins in the network, which means proof-of-work systems can never scale as large as their fanboys would have you believe.

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#165
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute. Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain.

> Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute It's more like 7 transactions per second, which is still absolute crap, but that was after the original Bitcoin project was kidnapped. There aren't such limitations in the original Bitcoin (forked as Bitcoin Cash)

> Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain That is addressed in the whitepaper (SPVs and pruning)

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#167
post #133
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi thought of everything, man.

Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.

Isn't this kind of the opposite?

Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too.

Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at night and it varies based on weather during the day. Mining hardware wants a fixed constant amount of power. The logical thing for miners to do is to somewhat overbuild the amount of generation they need and then sell any surplus to the grid, and sell to the grid during the day and buy it back at night. The same incentives hold if the miners and the generators are two different parties, and the result is to increase the amount of generation capacity by more than the amount of consumption and have "too cheap to meter" during periods of above-average generation. (You were never going to get "too cheap to meter" during periods when generation is low and demand is high.) And even during short periods when demand significantly outstrips supply, then their incentive is to stop operating those few days out of the year because the spot price of electricity makes mining unprofitable then, which allows the generation capacity installed to do mining be used to support the rest of the grid and inhibits the price of electricity from rising above the point where mining becomes unprofitable even for people who already have mining hardware. It's basically a buffer that buys electricity when it's cheap and sells when it's expensive.

Bitcoin has a volatile price. When the price is high, miners buy hardware and increase or pay someone else to increase generation capacity. When the price declines, the mining hardware becomes idle but the power generation capacity still generates fungible electricity that can be used for any other purpose. The result is that miners pay to install a lot of generation capacity during the boom, and have the incentive to prioritize investing in more generation rather than newer/more efficient mining hardware because it's the thing that's still worth something if the price declines, and that generation capacity then gets offloaded into the grid during the bust, with the result that grid prices go up some during the boom and down by even more during the bust. By the next boom some of the generation added last time has already been sold to non-miners or locked into long-term contracts so now they're back to adding new capacity again.

"Incentive to fund increases in generation capacity but then not use all of it" has what effect on average prices?

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#168
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interesting part isn’t the loss per coin, it’s how long the lag between unprofitable mining and difficulty adjustment keeps forced selling pressure on the market. I follow Bitcoin from a theoretical point of view and I find it fascinating. Something that boggles my mind a lot is this: Bitcoin, which is somehow a bit "programmable", and Ethereum (which is definitely programmable) are basically the most correct c…

> I follow Bitcoin from a theoretical point of view and I find it fascinating. I find it horrible: The damage done to the planet doesn't correlate with the number of transactions. It's maximizing uselessness.

How is it maximizing uselessness? Anymore than anything else, at least?

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#169
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except people wanting to do more than 15 transactions a minute. Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.

> it takes less than one second to go through Like Bitcoin used to be before someone had the brilliant idea of destroy the possibility of zero-confirmation transactions on-chain with Replace-by-fee transactions

Re: Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops

#170
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds very similar to things like oil production, gold mining, and even farming. When the price is high, everyone wants in on the action. As supply explodes, the prices drop. Once prices get low enough, the costs to pump the next barrel of oil, find the next ounce of gold, or harvest the next acre of a certain crop; exceed the reward. When that happens, wells are shut down, mining operations suspended, and differ…

There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment. Let's call this cycle A and cycle B. If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder. This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter. This isn't completely critical as the…

I thought the rate of mining was tied to the maximum transaction rate the network can support?
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