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China Plans To Kill Most of the World's Bitcoin Mining Operations (bloomberg.com)
The Chinese government will end bitcoin mining operations in the country in the coming months in a move that could have a massive impact on the price of the world's biggest digital currency. From a report: China has been a central player in the development of bitcoin in recent years, but Beijing has spent the last six months cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry -- shutting down local exchanges and banning initial coin offerings. Leaked documents suggest the Chinese government plans an "orderly exit" for bitcoin mining operations in the coming weeks and months. In the documents, issued to the local offices of the internet-finance regulator, authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
E-Coin will take over.
Given that bitcoin relies on mining to certify transactions, I suspect that the direction of impact could be rather surprising to some of those who believe in scarcity driven theories of economics.
Sell
Buy
Ain't no such thing as an orderly exit from a bubble. Bubbles are driven by speculative demand, people trying to make a profit by selling it to others for higher prices. People ain't in it to buy and hold. So there's going to be no price stabilizing until the speculators leave the market.
The slope of the price curve is going to be high on the upswing or the downswing. A government has two choices: inject money into the market, pumping it up, again attracting speculators. Or standing back and letting it reach organic market value.
What do you think traps the heat on the planet? Hm? CO2 maybe? What do you think happens when you have more CO2 than usual? Traps more heat doesnâ(TM)t it.
So yeah - the sun plays a part for sure. It does not play the primary part at this point in time.
Wasn't bitcoin always one big cluster due to the fact it eventually takes the power output of nuclear plants just to mine new coins. An activity which consumes vast physical resources for no tangible benefit, which makes the interest rates of the banking system look very reasonable in comparison. I am sure that the fact that it consumes vast resources and stressing infrastructure on something with no tangible value to society is a part of the reason China is taking it off line. A lot of hype over a fundamentally broken model, that is really not a currency anyway, but a wildly fluctuating and unstable mess, any real currency that acted this way would be a laughing stock.
The mining pools are run out of China. The physical location of the devices doing the hashing is wherever the electricity is cheapest. For example, people heat their homes in Quebec with electricity so some are mining there now and heating with the waste heat.
The mining equipment won't vanish. If you have sunk the cost of buying the equipment, you won't turn it off because electricity got more expensive. Right now $1 worth of electricity gets you about $10 worth of crypto currency. If the price of electricity goes up 9x it still will make sense to mine. It just won't make sense to buy new equipment.
Transaction times won't be affected. The total hashing power won't decrease. It's rate of increase might slow. BUT, even if the total hashing power fell, the currencies have what is called a difficulty level. That will decrease and a currency like bitcoin will continue to create a new block every 10 minutes.
And sell them to gamers and designers.
time to dump and don't buy any till it drops alot
epic waste of energy.
Will a hard firewall force an auto fork say they do an DPI block of bitcoin.
They're not killing them, they're just driving them out of China. The same mining operations will just re-home to other countries where electricity is cheaper and regulations are fewer. If you spent 3 seconds reading the article, that point is quite clear.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies supersede traditional fiat money systems, and so threaten government power. I suspect China will not be the last nation to come out against decentralized blockchain-based currencies.
Just like Sessions is going to stop everyone from growing pot in the US? Haha yeah right.
Huge mining operations are already up and running, and more planned, in Canada, Iceland, Sweden and Russia. This will not disrupt Bitcoin.
https://www.hiveblockchain.com...
it's in my head
Bitcoin mining is a huge waste of electricity and considering the infrastructure over there, it's not surprising they'd rather you don't "mine" anything.
We know you do. We also know you're not smart enough to make the connection between authoritarian government and lack of free speech, which is why we don't allow you to prevail.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
...authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
Let's all welcome China to the First World! We're going to redefine the phrase to include them now. How very American of them, to use electricity pricing, land use (zoning), taxes, and environmental protection regulations to crush something they don't like. We're so proud of them.
Being a capitalist dictatorship sure sounds so much better than being a communist dictatorship, don't you think? Remember kids, it's not an edict from the Powers That Be. It's just a change in zoning. Nothing to see here.
That's right! Sell all your Bitcoin and put it into Telsa stock. You can't lose!
Sometimes I wish their government was in charge here
They secretly are!
I know, you get the same crap when you bring a load of useful internet info showing how HIV doesn't reall cause AIDS! People just dismis it!
The difficulty level is set I think every 14 days or so.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
If all chinese BC mining farms went offline then after that time cost to compute for non chinese farms would drop to compensate
Impact: fun 14 days then normal.
The nice thing about BlockChain - it is active all over the world. Removing China as a player just strengthens everyone elses position. New Ming farns have popped up all over Europe and USA. So removing China won't be missed from the new 10nm and 7nm systems coming online in Japan, USA, and the middle east.
The biggest, and maybe only problem that will arise will be the difficulty being too high when they shut down the farms, leading to a period of slow block solves until the difficulty adjusts. The network will work just fine without the chinese mining farms
And the blockchain network will be more secure. Bitcoin has deviated from its original design in two ways and both compromise blockchain security. First, miners are no longer a diverse group of ordinary users and their personal computers, mining is dominated by a relatively small number of ASIC farms. This makes 51% attacks more plausible, we had one pool get to 50% a few years ago. Secondly, ASIC mining is concentrated in a single country, 70% of the hashate give or take. This obviously destroys the notion that bitcoin is beyond government meddling. These ASIC miners are dependent upon cheap government controlled power.
It sucks to have invested money in ASIC hardware and colocated you gear there but this move would help to get bitcoin back on track. Hopefully closer to the globally and widely distributed mining that is necessary for blockchain security, something we do not have today.
Coming to a location near you, a shipping crate full of Chinese bitcoin mining hardware. Destination: the cheapest building with cheap electricity is their target.
The problem is not cryptocurrency in general or bitcoin in particular. The problem (from the chinese government point of view) is that they don't control bitcoin. They are in the process of creating their own cryptocurrency, and in order for that to work, they will need to kill other versions.
Find me some mining hardware that will make enough money to make back my investment before its obsolete. It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
Especially after you pay to have that heavy ASIC device shipped from China to wherever your are. Maybe you can pay to have heat sinks removed and have domestically manufacture heatsinks attached after the ASIC blades arrives. Either way, hurts you profitability and makes ASiC obsolescence that much closer. :-)
"we" ? :)
I'm surprised the title isn't "China Plans to Kill Most of the World's Bitcoin Mining Operators".
You would earn fractions of a cent daily mining with GPUs these days, grandpa.
Nice example of something you can't say in China. Haha
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene ...
Stop yourself, don't do it. Take either of these two paths:
(1) You were going to buy a GPU anyway for some non-mining reason. Go ahead, buy the GPU. Maybe, **maybe**, buy a model up one level of performance/price from what you would have otherwise bought, if its a low to midrange model. Say if you were otherwise planning on a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ***maybe*** get a GTX 1060 6GB, ****maybe****. If you were otherwise getting a high performer, say a 1070 Ti for that 4K monitor, do *****not***** go up a level to a 1080 Ti. Then let the GPU mine when you are not using the machine. Use a watt meter to determine the total power consumption of your machine to determine power usage, do *not* trust online references that say your GPU uses so many watts. When your GPU is mining other parts of the computer are also drawing power, especially the CPU which may also be mining. You want to know the total system power and make sure your mining proceeds exceed that amount. Be sure to use above baseline residential power rates in your calculations, do *not* just look at your current bill and expect the current rate. If it is not profitable to mine do *not* fall into the trap that "the coin price will eventually rise and make it profitable", that is a losing game. Instead, take whatever money you would spend on power and just buy the coins directly, you will have more coins that way if the price rises. But above all else, do not get into the mindset of joining the mining scene, that is a path to losing money. Stay in the scene "the GPU I have anyway can make some coin when I'm not using it".
(2) Take whatever money you were willing to spend on a GPU for mining and just buy coins with that money. You will likely do better that way if the price rises. Many miners fall into the trap that they are profitable and pat themselves on the back. They do not consider the opportunity cost of the alternative of just buying coins directly. The following are very rough estimates but the point will nonetheless be clear. Lets say you spent $500 on a GPU last summer and another $500 on a GPU last fall. At above baseline residential power rates maybe you have about an extra $1,000 after factoring in power. Congrats your GPUs are now paid. However your friend bought $500 worth of bitcoin in the summer and another $500 in the fall and now has $3,000 worth of bitcoin. You are at net $0, he is at net $2,0000. If you are willing to gamble on increasing coin prices you may be better off just buying coins directly. Things are not as simple as a mining rig being profitable, the opportunity cost of the just buy directly must be considered. Many other things must also be considered before joining the mining scene.
We can take all these unused ASICs rigs and use them to build a wall to keep out all those dirty Mexicans!
If the price of a transaction goes up, that would bring the price of bitcoin down (makes it more expensive to use, and therefore worth less).
If bitcoin were rationally priced that would be true. But bitcoin is a very long way away from being rationally priced. Right now it's a speculative bubble and the "value" of a bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) has become untethered from sanity therefore the normal rules of supply and demand are temporarily suspended.
Last time I checked parts of Canada had the highest electricity rates in North America. A storm damaged power lines at a cabin and it was without power for months. Ontario Hydro still charged him $100 delivery fees every month even with ZERO usage. Even after the news picked up the story they still wouldn't budge.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Because it takes a lot more effort to debunk something than it does to cherry-pick some data and string it all together with some hand-waving arguments. What you're saying is no different than has been said by a thousand other cranks, from ESP to Free Energy and everything in between.
Except bitcoin is selfish wasteful libertarian finance porn with no social redeeming value beyond pontificating in the line to see Last Jedi for the 4th time. I'm all for a decentralized block chain currency that is as carbon neutral as, say, pornhub, so if that protocol gets excuse the expression hashed it would be worth looking at. This particular tulip bubble is way too electricity hungry. Design a proof-of-work that isn't purely jerking off and there might be something there.
This will just force mining operations out of China and into other countries where electricity/equipment/data center prices are cheaper than the resulting bitcoins.
This is just simple economics folks. I don't see this stopping bitcoin at all, although it may force some players out of the mining market (to be replaced by other players in other countries to take up the slack).
British Columbia has pretty cheap electricity rates, although data center land prices are pretty high depending on location. Equipment costs are fairly flat across the board, the only thing that tends to differ is the setup costs (shipping, installation etc).
Although normally I'd agree with you, I think China would be prone to seizing the equipment and destroying it to prevent it from being used, since what they would prefer is for Bitcoin to go away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Won't it just adjust difficulty to offset the temporary loss of miners?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Damn. And me with no mod points today.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Do people use Bitcoin to complete transactions for material goods or has Bitcoin become an investment vehicle?? I.e. What percentage of Bitcoin transactions pay for pizza (or Teslas or houses) and what percentage are people saying "I'll just buy low and sell high and make a killing like everyone else". I assume there's no way to look at the blockchain and determine this ... that would pretty much kill the idea of anonymity.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Perhaps this will decentralise mining operations further around the world. Perhaps there will also be a flood of cheaper mining equipment too as a result of mining operations ending in China.
Could be a fantastic opportunity for more smaller players to get on board.
They've completed their pump-and-dump scheme.
What is the point of using a currency 'free of government interference' if said government can kill it off anytime they want?
water vapor and methane do as well (and if i'm not mistaken, are much more potent greenhouse gases than CO2?)
Not to dispute AGW, but trying to reduce something as ridiculously complex as climatology to a single variable is disingenuous at best.
The sell-off that will result is not going to be pretty but after that, good riddance so the worst thing to happen to BTC ever: Chinese miners. They lied about ASIC production numbers, backed out on deals to sell them, and basically took over the entire network through lies and fraud. Nobody in the community will miss them.
Sort of. Methane is much more potent per-mol than carbon dioxide, but it's a matter of quantity and persistence as well. Methane doesn't last long in the atmosphere - it eventually degrades into carbon dioxide, which does hang around. Carbon dioxide is also released in much greater quantities than any other gas by human activity, as 'burn stuff' remains the dominant means of producing useful energy.
Lol at all the flat earthers and climate changers on slashdot lately
The smart authoritarian government allows freedom of speech. Makes it easy to monitor the speech and it allows the people to vent, with the venting directed at things besides the government such as outside forces like religion or economic system or internal divisions such as race or minor politics like abortion that doesn't really affect the authoritarian government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
do you have a degree in physics, meteorology or climate science?
The iPhone trolls strike again!
YAY wooooohooooo git 'er dun! fuck krypto-kurrency and bitkoinz.
No original data were presented, from what I could see.
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Water vapor is pretty good at it, though saturation and rain buffers some of it. But you get a feedback loop; higher temps increase evaporation which the raises temperature, etc. It's the feedback that makes it difficult.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
All of those ASIC based mining rigs will be moved to locales with a combination of cheap electrical power and reliable access to the internet backbone. Whether the same people operating those rigs today will continue or sell off their equipment doesn't really matter, so long as a large percentage of those rigs find a new home in a reasonably short period of time. If anything this will be a buying opportunity for BTC ahead of the next price breakout. And if that doesn't happen those of us with GPUs sitting idle might just get back into the game as mining difficulty will still be based on a new batch of coins being minted every ten minutes for the next 100+ years.
The price of gold is what people are willing to pay for it and gold has an intrinsic value due to the fact is is a relatively rare, useful metal.
That is true of literally every asset. Neither gold nor bitcoin are special in that regard. You are stating the obvious. Furthermore do you actually know what the term intrinsic value means? It is value determined through fundamental analysis disconnected from its market value. Usually this is calculated by doing a present value calculation of all future income from the asset. Gold is a metal and as such has no intrinsic value any more than does a hunk of quartz. If has no ability to generate future income on its own unlike a company or a person which does. Do not confuse intrinsic value with historical value or utilitarian value. Gold has both of those. Gold also has a market value which is what people are willing to pay for it.
However some people believe gold to have intrinsic value based on the ideas you outlined. By that standard bitcoin has intrinsic value as well. Any intrinsic value of bitcoin is based on its rarity (finite amount available) and the energy utilized to create it and its utility in facilitating transactions. Basically if gold has intrinsic value then so does bitcoin. If gold does not, neither does bitcoin. Either way intrinsic value has no relationship to whether or not those assets are rationally priced in the market.
The price of bitcoin is what people are willing to pay for it but bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it is nothing but electronic 1s and 0s that can't be used for anything besides being a bitcoin.
The argument you are making is called the efficient market hypothesis, specifically the strong form. Why this is rarely actually seen in the real world is undergrad economics 101 stuff. For it to be true you are arguing that decision makers (people) are rational and that there are no information asymmetries which is demonstrably not true. It also seems you aren't aware of the winner's curse phenomena. Basically the argument that markets are always correct and rational is clearly bunk and it's pretty clear that pricing on bitcoin isn't currently rational either. It's merely the latest in a long line of tulip crazes.
Tangential whataboutism. The thread is about actual totalitarian government and the knuckleheads that admire it, not your imaginary corporate dystopia.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"Methane doesn't last long in the atmosphere - it eventually degrades into carbon dioxide, which does hang around."
FSVO 'not lasting long' - the forcing effect of Methane is 20 times higher than CO2 over a one century timescale. On a decade scale or less it's about 100 times higher.
This means that 1-5GT of methane burping out of the Arctic ocean around the Leptav sea continental shelf would not make for happy fun times, vs 1-5GT of CO2, which would merely be a bad day on planet Earth. (I pick those locations for a reason, look them up and then 'anoxic event' for a something more worrying than mere sea level rises)
Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but the quantities are largely related to existing temperatures (warmer = moister) and the practical effect (increased clouds cover) means an increased planetary albedo (reflectivity) which reduces primary heat input so for the most part it's self cancelling.
What traps heat on the planet? First, there's water. one calorie per degree per gram. Second, there's the earth crust itself. Just 0.2 calories per degree per gram, but still nothing to sneeze at, and it's heavier than water. Third, there's the air itself. That's why the ambient temperature at the surface doesn't go near absolute zero at night, but stays only a little lower than daytime temperatures. Fourth, there's humidity. That's why in tropic regions, the temperature is only a few degrees lower at night than in daytime, while in a desert the temperature can go down by 20 or 30 degrees centigrade. Fifth? Well, I guess the other greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane also have some effect. Not nearly as much as the sun and the previous four.
Yes, we're talking about the type of authoritarian government that locks up millions of citizens, often for political crimes such as using the wrong substances that the authoritarians don't like.
It's actually pretty common for a large percentage of the population to like the authoritarians, look at America where they keep actually voting them in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
look at America
You tried to hide your habitual liberal whataboutery by not mentioning the US directly in your first reply. So much for that.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Is doing a whataboutry your argument?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm beginning to suspect you're incoherent. We're done.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!