Bitcoin's block reward halves every 210 000 blocks (210k * 10 minutes = 4 years), this block marks Bitcoin entering its 5th epoch with a block reward of 3.125 BTC down from its original of 50 BTC.
Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.
No, GPUs are literally millions of times less power performant than equivalent ASICs for sha256 mining. In the GPU days, mining was talked about in terms of megahashes per second, and ASIC miners these days are talked about in terms of terrahashes per second.
I partially heat my 900sqft SFH mining monero... since [compared to resistive space heater usage-offset] there is no additional energy usage, it's effectively free crypto.
Of course this means you can only earn half of the year. Mine ejects its heat under desk toes.
I don't think so, partly because the total reward + fees was only 5-6x that of a typical block and partly because almost all blocks are now mined by pools that share block rewards among their members usually based on hash rate, so one would have to be in the pool that mined the block as well. Also the fact that GPUs are less efficient than using specific mining hardware/ASICs for most Proof of Work cryptocurrencies.
Even if it did make more sense in straight EV terms no one is running that calculation of you're in three business of renting GPUs you'd rent them out either way unless it was a really high probability of success.
An increase in fees wouldn't increase the probability of success it would increase the reward when there was success which is still an extremely low probability event.
Any interest I might have in this is tempered by the fact that Bitcoin mining accounts for about 0.2% of global carbon emissions - roughly the same as the country of Greece. As long as Bitcoin is based on a proof-of-work process, I think the world would be better off without it.
I do believe there are many better proof systems available at the moment, and I thought its emissions would be higher than 0.2%. Though if fossil fuels account for the majority of global carbon emissions, and banks providing the majority of fossil fuel investments, banks should surely account for a much larger portion of global emissions.
There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.
Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.
You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.
So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.
Lightning Network design is horrible, and it's literally impossible to onboard millions of users without increasing the L1 blocksize to an absurd amount.
The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.
Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.
I think you would be shocked to know how that compares to the emissions of the US military which some argue forms the security backing the US dollar. [1]
“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”
Sure, the US$ is backed by a large military-industrial complex (as well as the power to tax and the productivity of the people and companies of the US), but if we switched from the US$ to BTC as the national currency we'd still need a US military - it's not like the only utility a military has is to keep the currency afloat.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.
It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.
The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).
What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.
The problem is how energy is produced. You're offering solutions at what I think is the wrong end. Pigouvian tax things causing the problems at the point of extraction and let the free market respond to that. The negative externalities have to be realized by the market.
Ugh this guy was trying to argue that only HOAs can control leaf blowers. Only an American would forget the existence of actual government when talking about central authorities who can enforce rules.
Unless you are a person capable of bringing about systemic change, thinking small is the limit of what most individuals can contribute.
Instead, people typically dismiss the small change they could bring into reality, and take the easier route, like talking about how big change is needed, and change nothing.
I suppose one could say video games are a net positive as they entertain humans.
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.
Gold mining, which is primarily open pit strip mining, is massively more polluting than just measuring its carbon footprint.
Gold mining completely destroys large tracts of land, poisons enormous water supplies and leaves huge areas completely uninhabitable for basically ever.
Gold mining has polluted 40% of US rivers and 50% of lakes.
If Bitcoin could replace gold’s store of value use case and environmental footprint, it would be a massive win for the environment.
Any energy usage seems like a waste if you don't understand the benefits.
Bitcoins energy input is used to protect the monetary energy it contains from being stolen, by anyone. The value in the monetary units of fiat currencies is continuously being stolen through supply inflation which dilutes the same value across more units, halving the value every decade. This is what always happens when money is proof-of-work for most, but not for a select few who can create it effortlessly (the banking system).
> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes energy bought from local grids and used to keep the lights on and computers powered as developers make games.
> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.
So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.
That's a good point, but I'm not sure it's quite as drastic as you think.
There are about 400 million current and last-gen consoles that have been sold, all-time. I'd wager most of them spend 95% or more of their time unused.
Steam shows about 20-30 million players online at any given point. Let's pretend this represents 50% of the PC gaming population (a vast underestimate of Steam's market share in the US and EU, not sure about other markets like China). What fraction of those are gaming PCs? Gaming laptops? Laptops with integrated graphics that really aren't meant for gaming?
Let's say that your typical PC gamer uses 300W when playing video games. That's probably on the low end for a gaming PC, but an overestimate for any laptop. 300W * 24 * 365 * 60 million is about 160 billion kWh. That translates to, um, 33000 tons of CO2? So like 3 orders of magnitude smaller?
I'm not even going to bother with the mobile game population because the power draw on those is like single-digit watts so even if there are 100x more players, the numbers are around the same order of magnitude.
Even if my estimates of number of PC gamers at any moment and the wattage of the typical device are both off by 10x, that's still way smaller than the estimate of how carbon-intensive it is to make games.
Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few.
Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.
Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.
Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.
As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.
Interesting, one question i had, was hydroelectric due to mountains/hills glaciation or in the sea like the UK. I googled it, it seems like the former.
Geothermal always seemed to me, it's a pretty difficult source of energy to extract for factories n stuff. Like, a factory can melt steel, but no one wants the ground he stands on to melt as well.
Hydroelectric is a much easier source to work with. Humans have used rivers as a source of energy for thousands of years.
>Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few.
>Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground
It reduces it. Instead of taking a barrel of oil, moving it to a different place and burning 10% of it in the process, or even 20%, it can be easily be used right there use 20% less, and cheaper as well. No need for ships to be built, sailors to sail and so on. Less emissions, not zero but a reduction, and cheaper.
Just moving bits around seems like a lot easier, efficient and cheaper than moving physical stuff around.
Could we get a title change that adds a bit more context? Something like:
Bitcoin passes reward "halvening" milestone at block 840000
You could sort of argue that the halvening concept is common-ish knowledge for tech people with passing familiarity, but hardly anyone outside the crypto space knows the significance of the number 840000.
adding basic context is not editorializing and nothing should be considered "common knowledge" considering how vast and complex the whole domain of technology etc
I disagree: I'd rather see people use the original title (when it's not clickbait) and leave a comment with the context that they feel is important. That places your sense of what context is important on the same footing as everyone else's and doesn't allow the submitter to shape the discussion more than is warranted.
I still don't get why I would want to hold a bitcoin for anything other than speculation. If I want some form of currency to actually use there are plenty of less volatile options.
One situation is if you live in a country with highly inflationary currency, it's a hedge against loss of value even in the short term. This argument goes for any inflationary currency, including USD, in the long term. This stems from Bitcoin's inherent design of provably predictable scarcity.
If it's possible to buy Bitcoin in such a country, I would assume it would be possible to buy dollars, bonds or stocks. But maybe not.
My guess is that inflation-protection in a 3rd world country is only a very minor reason for Bitcoin ownership, i.e. the vast majority of Bitcoins are owned for different reasons. Which has implications for its future price.
Again, not for you. Just because something undermines the tools of hegemony your comfy lifestyle depends on does not mean it's not a feature for other people with other priorities.
You can fuck all the way off with your opinion on my lifestyle or how comfy it is. I, and everyone else who doesn't live in some sort of anarchistic dreamland recognizes that denying resources to people whose priorities include terrorism and dictatorships is a good thing.
You want to push for reforms to the current system that makes it easier to bring wealth to developing nations then I'd be all on board. To throw out the whole system in favour of something that enables oppression and hoarding of wealth only benefits those who already have power and wealth.
Anarchism sounds great when you think of being free to do whatever you want. It becomes less fun when you remember it also means the freedom to die in a ditch.
I'm not an anarchist by any stretch of the imagination, so to turn it around, "you can fuck all the way off with your strawman characterizations of my personal politics".
Upstack, and far less incendiarily, I merely advocate for alternatives (to the colonialist racist USG /s). Monocrops are as bad in government as they are in food production.
> it's a hedge against loss of value even in the short term
If BTC with such a volatility can be considered an inflation hedge, then anything else can be as well. There's no intrinsic guarantee that BTC will keep going up, its protocol only defines the supply and not the demand, hence not its price either.
Actually I'm not convinced that BTC is favored as an inflation hedge instead of even USD-based stablecoins for people with currencies devaluating faster than USD.
Yeah it is fair to say it depends on the choices someone has. If I can stick USD into a high interest savings account though it seems like a much safer way to keep value.
Can't be taken away from you / frozen. Which isn't a problem for most if they have multiple bank accounts, but for some controversial figures it can be essential.
Because they gained physical access to the machines holding the coins? Surely you understand the difference there right?
If all of your money is being held by random companies, it's not really your money is it? Cryptocurrencies give you all the autonomy of cash, while still allowing you to send it to anyone over the internet.
> reality should know that someone can obtain any of your property
There you go, was that so hard?
Bitcoin isn’t some magical panacea, the reality is it’s as easily stolen/taken/lost in 99% of cases as anything else.
Sure, there might be some ultra tiny percentage of folks who are truly secure with it, but there is virtually the _same_ number who are ultra secure with other non-bitcoin stored value systems.
People either left the keys sitting around where the US government picked them up, or they handed it over willingly. If your key is secret, your coins cannot be taken away from you.
> If your key is secret, your coins cannot be taken away from you.
Governments have a legal monopoly on the use of force, and they have the means to employ it. If you can access your bitcoin, and a government can access you, that government can access your bitcoin.
> You don't have that option with digital fiat, even if you wanted to.
Yes, you could, you just need to acquire the digital fiat anonymously through one of many methods. Then burn all record of it and watch your money disappear the same way as taking it to the grave, just no death required. Or go ahead and die if you must, but you’ll still not prove that Bitcoin is any different or any less “takeable”.
Technically true! However, if you want to be dead and have nothing to pass on to your heirs, there are many other options which are easier and more fun.
You could possibly get around this by sharing the keys without sharing that they are keys like teaching your young children to sing a song or some other activity that matches the mnemonic phrase but can be passed off as a weird family ritual or something and only later revealing the secret to trusted beneficiaries.
Working people could save money in a currency that didn’t inflate. If you start looking for signs of Bitcoin, you see them everywhere. Every convenience store near me has the option to buy BTC with a crypto ATM or point of sale system. It’s far easier for someone with some extra cash to buy crypto than stocks.
What you're talking about is using money to buy a commodity as an investment. If the currency WERE the commodity, and assuming a deflationary environment, working people would find they would have a decreasing share of the currency to begin with. In other words, the reason working people currently have enough money to buy BTC as an investment, is that they are using a non-deflationary currency.
Also note that buying stocks is only marginally more difficult than opening a bank account, and investing in major index funds via ETFs is almost as good as a term deposit (with minimal long term risk of realising a loss UNLESS you are forced to access the money at some time relatively soon after purchasing).
After you have created the account, buying more is easier than using a BTC ATM.
Given the risk of a) BTC going to 0 and b) being scammed and/or otherwise losing all of your BTC I'd say everday people are much, much better off putting their money in index funds.
If you were to choose between a little bit of inflation and a little bit of deflation, you should choose a little bit of inflation. Deflation means people have a greater incentive not to spend, so dissuades investment and thus innovation and progress. It leads to wealth hoarding and feudalism.
Not at all, but it's a dominant view for a variety of reasons. A base concept is to keep money moving into other investments and discourage saving. I suspect the ongoing inflation rates will make this view less attractive in the future.
Not required, but a deflationary asset used as currency discourages borrowing, and companies and governments love borrowing.
If you knew that inflation was going to rapidly increase, the smartest thing you could do would be to take out as many loans as you can and buy usable assets, like a car and a warehouse full of canned beans.
Imagine you take out a loan to buy a car. Tomorrow, hyperinflation happens and the currency has lost 99% of its value. You can now pay off your car with a can of beans.
Inflation is also an avenue for a government to steal the excess value produced by an economy over time. Probably just a coincidence though.
> Inflation is also an avenue for a government to steal the excess value produced by an economy over time
What's the incentive here? "The government" (unless we're talking monarchies or dictatorships?) usually isn't some monolithic, self-interested entity capable of benefiting from things like "stealing" via inflation. Who's the evil mustache-twister behind all this?
The way this is usually trotted out makes it sound like Nancy Pelosi—because there's almost always a Nancy Pelosi hot take—is siphoning $20's out of IRS revenue streams, and laughing her way to the bank.
It lets you increase taxes without actually increasing taxes. People get upset when you increase taxes (sometimes upset enough to create their own country), but less so when you increase the money supply a little bit.
By moving the goal posts of how CPI is calculated, the government can take in more, or pay out less.
Social security, Medicare, etc are indexed to inflation.
Tax brackets are indexed to inflation.
So when the government needs more money, it can create it by paying less to elderly, poor, and sick people, or taking more taxes without the population aware.
There are better ways of calculating inflation. But they allow less shenanigans.
You know what would really make it hard to siphon money off to a black budget project, or to the business of a politician’s brother-in-law that gets the contract? A deflationary asset where there’s a cryptographically secure immutable ledger of all transactions.
> You know what would really make it hard to siphon money off to a black budget project, or to the business of a politician’s brother-in-law that gets the contract? A deflationary asset where there’s a cryptographically secure immutable ledger of all transactions.
I’m not sure how Bitcoin is simultaneously completely transparent, bringing daylight to big bad government fraud and also a privacy-protecting, regulatory circumvention tool. These things seem at odds.
If scam artists and criminals can obfuscate their transactions sufficiently to avoid being tracked down, I’m confident any half-competent government could do the same for its black budget spending.
That's not the point either of us are trying to make, though. Can Bitcoin be used to mask the source or destination of money? I think the answer is an obvious: "yes" considering one of its most prominent use-cases is exactly that.
And if the answer is an obvious "yes", then the whole thing about "immutable ledgers stop governments from spending money sketchily!" is obviously incorrect.
We already know, to the dollar, how much the black budget in the US is. The question was: is that money being used by politicians to enrich themselves? Bitcoin was offered as a solution. It is not.
That's an issue with the concept of a "black budget", not the payment mechanism.
The government corruption bitcoin stops is really bank corruption, but the central banks (including the fed) work hand in hand with the governments (control them in fact), so it's a kind of joint effort.
The corruption works like this:
When the Fed was formed in the early 20th century, it came to an agreement with the government to be able to print off unlimited amounts of money, providing it was in the form of loans and under the agreement that it would destroy the money when the loans were repaid. All under the Keynesian guise of "elasticity of money". The fly in the ointment is that the banks can charge interest on this money they print - if they didn't it would be a free-for all, because interest is what disincentivises debt.
What this led to was the doubling of the money supply every decade for the last 100 years, as the banks are incentivised to lend as much money as possible.
Each time you double the number of currency units, the total value of the money is diluted across double the number of units and so the value of each unit is halved. If you do this too quickly, people lose confidence in the money and you fall into hyperinflation, but if you throttle it just right, they don't catch on. It helps that the value of consumables (cars, food, toothbrushes etc) goes down by around 5%/year due to technology-driven manufacturing efficiency gains. This means that they can devalue the currency by 5% each year without prices going up. They then devalue it by a further 2% or 3%, simply because they can. This 2% or 3% is the CPI that's reported.
By holding interest rates lower than the free-market rate, banks both gain a monopoly on lending, and also ensure that people are incentivised to take on more and more debt - even though the money is destroyed when an individual debt is repaid, the total debt continuously increases.
The outcome of all this is that every year, the banking system is charging interest on every single dollar, euro, pound etc in existence. And it printed them all out of thin air. This has given it more power than you can even imagine and leads to all kind of evil and corruption. What's the best way to lend money? Start a war. Even better if it goes on for years and you can fund both sides...
It also results in the "Cantillon Effect" - an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the already rich without anyone noticing until it's too late.
This is because the newly printed notes take their value from all the existing currency units i.e. the value in the money in your pocket/bank account/pension/wages is being sucked out into the new notes they print off. You could bury your money in a concrete bunker a mile underground and they can still steal it. If you don't get a 7% nominal pay rise each year, you're actually getting a pay cut.
I highly recommend reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island" by Edward Griffin for all the history and details. This is a global problem.
The message in Bitcoin's genesis block reads "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."
Bitcoin's purpose is to shutdown the central banking scam, and is probably the only thing that can stop global domination by the bankers. Because its supply is hard capped, the more fiat currency the banks print, the more the price of bitcoin goes up. Over time it becomes more and more attractive as storage for large amounts of value. See Thiers and Greshams' laws for the result.
People worry about an AI machine taking over the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4), but its already here in the form of large human systems - an organisation with hive intelligence whose overall reward system is to make as much money as possible and a constraint of keeping the people happy (it does this largely by deception). And we gave this monster a money printer.
I'll leave you with a quote from F.A.Hayek (nobel prize winning economist who wrote "The Road To Serfdom" back in the 40s - he saw this coming):
"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBIidtaUCzs
There's I think supposed to only ever be 21 million bitcoin. Bitcoin rewards for mining halve every ~4 years. Eventually they will stop; there will be no new bitcoin.
People will also lose bitcoin; this already happens. Famously, no one knows where ~1m bitcoin supposedly mined by Satoshi are, they are assumed to be permanently out of circulation. So not only is there a cap on maximum bitcoin, and over time less new bitcoin will be injected into circulation, existing bitcoin will also be removed from circulation over time.
This presents a strong incentive to hold bitcoin instead of spending it, since scarce assets become more valuable with increased scarcity. If a bitcoin is likely to be worth more tomorrow than it is today, you're less likely to spend it. Which has the compound effect of reducing bitcoin in circulation further.
Hard to say why you would hold bitcoin. If I were to guess, it sounds like you live in an area that has had a safe currency for a long time and the prospects for your currency look good in the future. Otherwise, you would have a different view or at least understand why.
Spending tiny amounts using Bitcoin's Lightning Network for digital (SaaS) services is something I'm exploring. It's an interesting application when you need an international payment system for settling cross-border payments. (I'm not a fintech expert, but like I said, I'm exploring the possibilities...) When something costs only a few cents (sats in Bitcoin-speak), the variability of the full price of one Bitcoin is minimal. And when something is a few cents, the transaction fees using any other method makes the whole idea hard to imagine.
tl;dr: international payments for digital goods using the Lightning Network is (arguably) a valid use for Bitcoin that is not speculation.
For accepting crypto payments wouldn't I be better off accepting a stable coin? Most companies I saw in the past were nominally accepting crypto but going through a service that would just pay out the USD equivalent.
I guess with software margins there is a bit more room to move with price fluctuations. For ecommerce though accepting and holding a currency that moves this much could quickly erode the smaller margins.
The idea I'm looking into is for a high margin thing that can absorb price fluctuations. Re: stablecoins, I did notice that one of the YC Request for Startups was for stablecoin-focused startups, but I don't have a strong opinion about stablecoins, yet.
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#stablecoin-finance
It's not holding but using, but remittances (or in general, money transfers between places where at least one end isn't well connected to the international banking system) are one use case.
Instead of finding a company active on both ends (which will have to be a major company like Western Union, with major fees), you can find two separate (potentially local and small, think "coner store money exchanger") entities to get fiat (regular) currency into Bitcoin on one end and out of Bitcoin on the other end. If there is no single company that does business at both your source and destination location/community, there's a good chance you're out of luck.
You have to trust those two exchangers to not defraud you, but these two don't need to trust, or even know, each other.
Of course, other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins etc. would also work for this, but network effect means Bitcoin is the coin where you're most likely to find participants on both ends.
People have always loved gambling. Crypto is nothing but a game of musical chairs. Also, smart people fall into cults like everyone else but they tell themselves they are into it for rational reasons (techology).
It has no underlying fundamentals. Its value is 100% speculative. Gold is somewhat similar, in that it's value is mostly speculative, but it does have some inherent utility/value.
Bitcoin has value for the same reason that vintage sneakers or Pokemon cards have value; that is there is a fetish for them and thus some belief that at some later time, someone will want to buy it for personal reasons (either due to their own beliefs or sentimentality).
Actual currency, on the other hand, derives its value from the willingness of the issuing sovereign to accept it back in payment of taxes.
> Fiat currency holds value because it is backed by a sufficiently large group with guns.
Yep that's what I said: payment of taxes.
> Crypto currency holds value because it is backed by a sufficiently large group with encryption.
I disagree. There is no reason for bitcoin to hold its value. Miners expend real resources (which they pay for) to obtain bitcoin because they speculate that someone will pay more for it further down the line.
People buy bitcoin for the same reason.
The price of bitcoin could go to zero without any compromise of the underlying encryption.
The purchasing power of a currency issued by a soevereign can only go to zero as a result of the collapse of sovereignty (ie. no more guns, or being outgunned). This is the very definition of hyper inflation in terms of a currency: when a government cannot provision itself in exchange for that currency.
Now what makes bitcoin special and different from any other coin? Take something like Litecoin, far below previous peaks. Surely it is not worse with encryption than bitcoin?
“Actual currency, on the other hand, derives its value from the willingness of the issuing sovereign to accept it back in payment of taxes.”
And yet the purchasing power of the dollar has fallen by 99.5% since moving off the gold standard. Bitcoin claims to hedge against this steady decline in value which is caused by money printing.
If you believe they will stop printing money and diluting the value of the dollar, the argument for Bitcoin fails. If not, Bitcoin’s hard supply cap and perfectly inelastic supply when faced with changes in demand make it a compelling hedge.
Purchasing bitcoin on any random date in history and holding it for four years or more has outperformed every single index, ETF, stock, commodity, real estate every single time.
Betting on a single index even being around in 100 years is risky. Betting on the dollar lasting 100 years is risky. Betting on Bitcoin lasting 100 years is also risky.
I think looking at 5, 10, or 20 time horizons is more practical and I have high confidence that Bitcoin will continue to be the best performing asset on those time horizons.
The reason I said 100 years is because the US went off the gold standard in 1933 (although it had a weird modified version until the 70s).
There are individual stocks that have been around for over 100 years. The Dow Jones has been around since 1884. Stock exchanges have been around since the 1500s.
Indexes that apply to the averages of top, say, 200 stocks in a given country's econonmy will definitely be there in 100 years, absent a collapse so monumental that money itself has no meaning.
Bitcoin is a freakish sideshow by comparison. Might as well buy baseball cards.
That it'll become the main world reserve asset and suck in all the stored value in the world like a black hole? Then, you're bang on - that's the only reason I hold it.
The primary argument for holding bitcoin is as a store of purchasing power to counter every government and central banks addiction to printing money.
The economic theory is that money printing is the primary cause of inflation and bitcoin, as the first purely fungible commodity with a fixed total supply that is perfectly inelastic to demand, is an ideal hedge against inflation.
Imagine if gold went up 100x in price. New gold mines would be opened. People would come forward with their gold jewelry, etc which would increase the supply of gold.
If bitcoin goes up 100x, it’s supply cap and inflation rate would remain unchanged.
If you believe the government or central banks will stop printing money, then the argument for bitcoin collapses.
Given some weak assumptions, it can be proven that Bitcoin can't beat the performance of S&P 500 in a long enough time horizon.
The gist of it is this: Bitcoin can't perpetually grow faster than world wealth. If we assume, say, 3% inflation-adjusted growth in world wealth, it means that Bitcoin cannot perpetually make more than 3% annually. Stocks, bonds, real-estate don't have this constraint because they pay cash to investors.
At some point in the future, Bitcoin will be down over the last decade while S&P 500 will be up significantly. Bitcoin holders will start to think - wait, why am I holding Bitcoin instead of S&P 500?
Edit: Hacker News says I'm posting too fast so I can't reply to comments below.
Even if your argument were logical, “at some undetermined point in the future, this investment will underperform a different potential investment” is all you’d be proving.
I'm not sure that argument is rigorous enough to be called a proof. We have no guarantee that the S&P 500 will grow faster than world wealth.
It's plausible it will, but one could reasonably purchase something like gold or BTC to hedge against scenarios where it doesn't.
Perhaps you should give an estimate of bitcoin's worth compared to world wealth. Because my guess is bitcoin is worth a lot less then world wealth, meaning btc growth could outpace average world wealth growth for some time.
Bitcoin is about 0.3% of world wealth, gold 3%. My estimate is that peak Bitcoin is anywhere between the current 0.3% and 1.5% (implied price $325k). After this peak is reached, and there's a chance it has already been reached, it won't recover for decades or forever. And my guess is that this peak Bitcoin will happen within a decade.
Is there any particular reason we should assign any weight to this guess of yours? People have been calling “peak bitcoin from which it won’t recover” for at least 5 cycles now.
My belief is that it would be shocking if Bitcoin's market cap got close to gold, because gold has substantial fundamental value (which prevents the price fron collapsing) and a long tradition.
Another reason is that the narrative that Bitcoin's price will at least double or triple won't be believable if Bitcoin gets to 1.5% of world wealth. When hodlers realize that they will not double their money, the rationale for hodling disappears.
If you don't think bitcoin can even get close to gold, then you really don't understand bitcoin yet. Smashing golds market cap will happen in less than 6 years. And that's just the start.
You claim that gold has "fundamental value" and imply that bitcoin doesn't.
If you don't understand why bitcoin has fundamental value, then I'd bet you don't understand why gold has either. If you understand why gold has fundamental value, it's self evident why bitcoin has it too (far, far more in fact).
I just don't have time unfortunately, it's a large subject.
But if you're genuinely interested in learning why bitcoin is fundamentally much better money than gold or fiat, or in fact anything else then I highly recommend listening to at least the first 9 episodes of this podcast series - one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever heard:
If Bitcoin was much better money than fiat, people would use it.
My country's currency is much better money than Bitcoin. I can pay basically everywhere with contactless payments, I did this 5 times today and it couldn't be any simpler. I can send money instantly to anyone in my country for free.
Volatility is minimal because the central bank actively tries to minimize it. Bitcoin or gold don't have this stabilizing mechanism, so they will always have worse volatility (assuming a responsible central bank).
Losses due to inflation are negligible if you have your money in a savings account and use other assets (stocks, bonds, real estate) for long-term saving.
If you want to use Bitcoin for long-term savings, the competitor is not fiat but stocks / bonds / real estate. And I don't see a good argument for Bitcoin. In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks are guaranteed to outperform Bitcoin given some weak assumptions.
> Volatility is minimal because the central bank actively tries to minimize it. Bitcoin or gold don't have this stabilizing mechanism, so they will always have worse volatility (assuming a responsible central bank).
> In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks are guaranteed to outperform Bitcoin given some weak assumptions.
In a sufficiently long time horizon, stocks will be priced in bitcoin. Rather than an index fund giving you 7% but with a 7-10% devaluation of your fiat (i.e. net return of -3% to 0%), it will return you 7% with no devaluation of the underlying money (net 7%).
Bitcoin is first proving itself as a store-of-value (fundamental for any money), then once it's growth has reached the point that it is stable enough to be used as a unit of account and medium of exchange, it will be, through demand from the people. Any volatility will be measured against bitcoin, not the other way round.
If I need to go through 10 podcast episodes to understand why bitcoin is better than gold, that makes me seriously question whether bitcoin is better than gold. Things that are actually better shouldn't need that long of an explanation.
Example: Why is gold better than fiat currency? Because the government can't print more of it, thereby devaluing all the currency you possess. Sure, there's much more detail than that (on both sides), but the basic proposition can be stated in one sentence.
So if you can't say that for crypto, then it does sound like you don't have a very strong argument.
Why is bitcoin going to suck in all the stored value in the world? Because it's better money than fiat (or gold).
Why is it better money, well to explain that we need to answer the question, "what is money?". And that topic is so broad Robert Breedlove has a 453-epsiode podcast channel discussing the subject.
So please accept the 10 episodes I point you to as a quick summary, carefully selected by myself after 1000's of hours of research into the subject. You're welcome.
This doesn't really make sense. Bitcoin is deflationary but the market cap has no ceiling, it's just based on what people are currently willing to pay for a coin.
The market cap is just the last price multiplied by the number of the asset in existence. There is no restriction on last price for either SP500 or bitcoin.
It can. The misconception that people generally have is believing that purchasing securities is a zero-sum game when in fact it's generally a positive sum game. When you buy a bitcoin (or security), the money you spent doesn't disappear so the amount of bitcoins and fiat in circulation do not change as a result of this trade. There's nothing stopping a bitcoin from being worth a million dollars or a dollar being worth a million bitcoins, it's just a function of supply and demand.
> Bitcoin is expected to go through a "halving" within the next day or two, a preprogrammed event that could impact production of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
> A halving, which occurs about every four years, was designed by bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, to effectively reduce by half the reward that miners of the digital token receive. The idea is that by cutting in half the amount bitcoin miners currently make for their efforts, fewer bitcoins will enter the market, creating more scarcity of the cryptocurrency.
If you have cheap electricity and a $5,000 AntMiner you can mine profitably. I would expect the halving to push out those who have more expensive electricity, not necessarily the smallest operators.
Assuming that miners are rational actors, the hash rate should settle at a point where the expenses to mine a block (energy, hardware depreciation, etc) equal the rewards (block reward and fees), so, if the price of BTC and the fees stay constant, halving the block reward should reduce energy waste.
Conversely, energy waste is proportional to, the BTC price.
Energy waste could also be reduced by instituting a global tax on Bitcoin mining. The cost to miners would remain the same (because it's still equal to the rewards), but a part of what would be spent on wasted energy is now spent on taxes instead. Unfortunately this is highly dependent on avoiding tax cheating.
Just BTC mining? Not all uses of energy? It makes more sense to do a fossil fuel tax, which penalizes all activity that doesn't justify its environmental cost, as opposed to playing whack-a-mole with whatever uses are least popular right now.
Crypto mining is unique in that the absolute consumption provides no benefit at all. The "work" consists purely in demonstrably having spent a certain amount of value, and the energy is purely an unit of accounting. So if you could manage to make this unit more expensive for EVERY miner, the accounting system would work as before, the safety properties of the system would be unchanged, and less energy would be used.
I can think of no other use of energy where this situation holds.
Not really, it just means what it means: a block rewards 2 times less than before. What happens regarding the number of miners growing or shrinking depends on a lot of factors. If you're so sure it's gonna increase the mining power, then I suggest you invest in it right now.
ah it's orange site, you're supposed to be aware of everything and context is frowned upon
edit: this is sarcasm if not clear but it reflects how often stuff gets posted here without an indication what is interesting about the topic (and it's poor form!)
The only way I can foresee a cryptocoin actually holding value is if spending the coin meant spending processing cycles and RAM doing things like this:
You're not the first person to think of that idea. The problem is how you can assign and reward workloads in a trustless way. Proof of work is easy to verify and you don't need to trust anyone. How would you do it for Folding@home or whatever?
You'd need multiple verifications with the same (or similar) result ... but that isn't trustless since Sybil attacks would still be possible. ... and proof of work tends to be the solution to Sybil attacks.
And you'd need to be sure that the work being done wasn't some real-world scam... I see the point of how difficult it would be - I'm just saying that's tremendous value.
There have been very recent developments in homomorphic encryption - essentially doing addition and multiplication on encrypted data without revealing the inputs or outputs, and zero-knowledge proofs, thus enabling general trust-less computing.
You're talking about Gridcoin. It didn't do too great economically, for reasons that become obvious when you think about it for a while. It was a great way to fund research, but you can't actually build a global economy on BOINC tasks.
More of a decentralized compute marketplace rather than a PoW/emission mechanism, but if general compute is what you're looking for, then there it is.
PoW requires that the "work" have a few special properties, which makes it really difficult for it to be something useful. I feel like we're kind of past the whole "looking for a better PoW" phase though now that most consensus runs off really mature PoS mechanics.
Try thinking of a useful problem that allows everyone in the world to endlessly generate puzzles worth solving, whose difficulty can also be ratcheted up and down to regulate block timing.
It's value easily eroded by High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) so none on times of war, whereas the Internet was created to be resilient even in war, and I see value in the "cloud" running on diffuse infrastructure instead of corporate infrastructure.
EDIT: The global Internet I mean. Assuming HEMP doesn't hit everywhere at once, just the USA, for (unfortunate) example.
While that's a fair point, I can't update the original comment anymore to make clear that I was discussing intrinsic value. I'm always on a haste to be honest.
Anyone have a sense on when realistically mining becomes totally impractical for the reward? I seem to recall reading somewhere that with the current technology it would take till around 2100 to mine them all, but surely somewhere between 2030 and 2040 the reward to power consumption will get out of whack such that nobody will do it?
It will never become cheap enough to do a 51% attack because there are multiple parties that all would be interested in doing a 51% attack competing against each other.
Furthermore, Bitcoin is "self-healing" in the sense that an attacker does not gain persistent control; they lose control if they lose 51% compute vs the rest of the planet (unlike, say, Ethereum with proof of stake).
Miners make money from the transaction fees as well as the block reward. If fewer people mine, then the difficulty level drops and allows people with lower computer power to get the rewards.
> every miner would have to win every block to stay in business
To my understanding that'd be true if the energy cost was $2M per miner, but I think jpcfl was suggesting $2M total. i.e. that an individual miner would spend $100 on energy for a $100 expected return, which may be a 10% chance at $1000 or a 100% chance at $100.
Could adjust $2M up slightly for whatever portion was done by crypto-mining malware or dabblers with higher expected energy costs than return, and down for the portion done by professional miners who will be expecting a slightly positive return even after factoring in other costs.
If I spend $2M to mine $2M of gold, and the value of that gold increases by 2x over the next 10 years, then I think I could stay in business. That would actually be a pretty solid business.
The value of BTC has increased nearly ~200x in the last 10 years. I don't anticipate it will do this again, but I'm sure some of these miners think it will continue to grow at some rate (plus, they have already capitalized on the last 10yrs of growth).
That wasn't my point. My point was that they could stay in business.
My original point was that it was in the ballpark of $2M. Could be more, could be less, all depending on a number of variables--I believe one of those variable just doubled.
I'm not sure what the cost is now, but back in 2012-ish when I briefly looked into mining, it cost about $1 in energy to mine $1 worth of BTC. I used your logic and decided it didn't make sense to invest in mining, so I didn't. I wish I had, or at least purchased some BTC, but I was a broke college student just looking to capitalize on the hardware I already owned, and I didn't really know a thing about investing (other than investing in a 6 pack of beer to meet girls at parties--my ROI was not great, BTW, so I don't recommend this strategy).
I sympathize! I considered running a miner in 2012, with the positive side effect of heating my office. Decided I didn't want to listen to the fan noise for negligible returns.
> it cost about $1 in energy to mine $1 worth of BTC
This is the crux of it (we may be saying the same thing!). There is no 1:1 relationship between mining cost and reward on a single block. If there was, no one would do it, because they do not win every block. And all blocks you compete on cost the same, win or lose, but of course the blocks you don't win, pay zero.
There's a (very) roughly 1:1 relationship between a miner's overall cost and reward, averaged over many blocks. If reward increases (BTC price spikes), more competition comes online and your win frequency drops.
So if the question is "how much energy (cost) did it take to mine this specific $2MM block", the answer is closer to "The average block reward divided by the winning miner's win frequency", which is e.g. 5% for one of the bigger miners (I did not check this block or this miner). This was a high reward block, so the real miner cost might have been more like $50K. Less for energy alone.
But it's like the guy who buys a $10 lottery ticket every day. He needs to win a few hundred dollars per month to maintain the habit (gambling addiction notwithstanding!). Today he got lucky and won $700 on the $10 ticket.
> There is no 1:1 relationship between mining cost and reward on a single block
Ah, I see what you mean.
I think I've been mixing up my costs. When I wrote the original comment, I was thinking about the total energy cost for mining this block, i.e., the energy cost of all the nodes that worked on it. But the truth is, I have no idea about the economics of BTC mining. I was just being facetious :)
The average electricity used per block mined is around 3 Gwh which costs in the $200-400k ballpark collectively (I know they seek cheaper electricity, but I'm unsure how cheap or what discounts they get.)
(Approximated by Bitcoin's reported .5% share of global electricity consumption, which is around 25k Twh. A block is mined every ten minutes. Hopefully I didn't make any order-of-magnitude errors!)
ViaBTC, the winning pool, has about 13% of the global hashing power so perhaps spent $40k plus their other expenses.
But it's on a halving block, so whoever did it has bragging rights in a way. In twenty years they can point to it and say "I did that." I fear that ordinal inscriptions will start making the blockchain unwieldy, but I'm not educated enough to know if the mining cost of adding them is a good enough defense against such spam on the bitcoin chain.
The amount of the fee is kind of up to the sender. If the fee is not high enough, miners will not include the transaction in the blocks. But there's no upper limit on how high the sender can set the fee.
Edit: Since a block has a limited amount of space for transactions, transactions with more bytes have to pay a larger fee to get picked up by miners. This one looks really large.
Bitcoin Average Transaction Fee is at a current level of 16.50, down from 19.38 yesterday and up from 2.046 one year ago. This is a change of -14.88% from yesterday and 706.6% from one year ago.
When you make a transaction on the Bitcoin network (and really every other cryptocurrency), you tack on a fee to the amount of coin you want to send. Miners prioritize higher fee transactions when deciding which transactions to include in the next block. Therefore, to guarantee your inclusion in the next block, you would choose to increase the fee you pay.
So, for this transaction, they chose to pay a $5000 fee to guarantee their placement in this block.
New protocol launch coincided with this block - in chasing becoming the first use of the protocol, users spent thousands to use it or create an asset via the protocol.
Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.