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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.
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).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
No, and this is one of the seemingly least understood aspects of Bitcoin mining. The difficulty of mining a block adjusts dynamically based upon the total amount of compute power currently mining. The more mining power, the higher the difficulty. The purpose is so that a new block is found approximately every 10 minutes. When power is added, blocks are found faster and the difficulty increases. When power is removed, difficulty decreases.
One important aspect if how often the difficulty adjusts -- it's around every 2 weeks for Bitcoin. So if a lot of power is suddenly removed, then the rate at which blocks are found will likely dramatically increase -- and stay that way for potentially several weeks. But eventually the difficulty will adjust to match the available compute power, and orderly blocks every 10 minutes will resume.
Some alternative cryptos have differentiated themselves versus Bitcoin by having much faster difficulty adjustment periods (e.g. as quickly as every single block).
Bitcoin would only consume a nuclear power plant of energy if humans put a nuclear power plant's worth of energy into mining. If instead humanity puts it 5V @ 0.001W of power, the difficulty will adjust and that will be the consumption. ROI will ultimately drive the amount of compute power dedicated to Bitcoin.
It is actually fun the minimal amount of people who know the very least what they are talking about on all these comments.
While you are no troll, and express a legitmate doubt, bitcoin and each of the other crypto-currency coins are not "I think that", rather, their behavior are carefully described in documentation and implemented in code. In the case of bitcoin, this is addressed in a very prominent way in the whitepaper that defined the protocol - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd... (just ctrl+f for "difficulty").
On the software implementation itself, however, this is mostly interesting: since the whole blockchain thing is based on cryptographical hashes, "mining" a block comprises exactly of assembling a block which hashes to a number that is _lower_ than the current difficulty. And the difficulty is simply an unsigned 256 bit integer that gets closer to zero the higher the difficult is. The information that composes a block are the picked transactions that are taking place and couple fields the miners can change in the block headers. The first one to get a full block with transactions + all headers that hashes lower than the current difficult just "mined" the block.
And this difficult number is set in the protocol to be adjusted every two weeks or so.
You are confounding that with the rewards for each block, which halve every 4 years, which is were the 21 million bitoin to be ever created amount come from: at a certain point, when the halving takes place, the block reward will be smaller than the smallest bitcoin fraction (1/ 100 million biticoin = 1 satoshi). From these, 16 million have already been created.
-><- no
Yup. If you live in the SF Bay Area - and I'm sure, elsewhere in the country - you've seen people from the far side of the Pac Rim buying up houses, doing some fixes over 2 years or so (e.g., minimum holding period to realize certain types of home-sale gains) then selling them and storing the capital in USD held by trusts which are outside the reach of the PRC. I've seen this happen with two houses in my neighborhood....capital flight out of the PRC is very real, and it's scaring the wits out of their government.