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Bitcoin Miners Bail, While Cryptocurrency Capitalization Drops 83% Since January (coindesk.com)
"Bitcoin miners hit hard by the cryptocurrency's crash may be throwing in the towel," reports Bloomberg:
The Bitcoin network's hash rate, one way of gauging the computing power dedicated to mining the digital currency, dropped about 24 percent from an all-time high at the end of August through Nov. 24, according to Blockchain.com. While the decline may have partially resulted from miners switching to other cryptocurrencies, JPMorgan Chase & Co. says some in the industry are losing money after Bitcoin's price tumbled. "This suggests that prices have declined to a point where mining is becoming uneconomical for some," JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a Nov. 23 report, in reference to the falling hash rate...
The break-even cost to mine a single Bitcoin using Bitmain's Antminer S9 rig was estimated at $7,000 in a Nov. 16 report by Fundstrat Global Advisors, though the level is probably lower for some miners with access to cheap electricity and equipment... A big miner shakeout could be bad news for chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Nvidia Corp. who supply the industry, along with mining-rig designers like Bitmain Technologies Ltd. that are pursuing initial public offerings.
The price of bitcoin dropped 37.4% just in the month of November -- its worst monthly decline in seven years, since August 2011 when it fell from roughly $8 to $4.80. And the decline in bitcoin also dragged down 24 of the top 25 largest cryptocurrencies, reports CoinDesk. "What's more, the average performance of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization was -30 percent, while the average performance of all 25 was -37 percent..."
"The total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has now lost over $690 billion and 83 percent of its value since reaching its all time high north of $820 billion this past January, according to CoinMarketCap."
The break-even cost to mine a single Bitcoin using Bitmain's Antminer S9 rig was estimated at $7,000 in a Nov. 16 report by Fundstrat Global Advisors, though the level is probably lower for some miners with access to cheap electricity and equipment... A big miner shakeout could be bad news for chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Nvidia Corp. who supply the industry, along with mining-rig designers like Bitmain Technologies Ltd. that are pursuing initial public offerings.
The price of bitcoin dropped 37.4% just in the month of November -- its worst monthly decline in seven years, since August 2011 when it fell from roughly $8 to $4.80. And the decline in bitcoin also dragged down 24 of the top 25 largest cryptocurrencies, reports CoinDesk. "What's more, the average performance of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization was -30 percent, while the average performance of all 25 was -37 percent..."
"The total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market has now lost over $690 billion and 83 percent of its value since reaching its all time high north of $820 billion this past January, according to CoinMarketCap."
And the article references nvidia as taking a hit in this one, which is equally ignorant, as ethereum ASICs pushed GPU mining out completely a few months ago. It's why nvidia and its board partners are reported to have large warehouses full of unsold GTX 1060s, which were the most economical card to mine ethereum on before ASIC hit the market.
I disagree. While it may use public key signatures it's a lot more sophisticated than that. There are several key difference. Among these is the actual storing of value in the signed transactions as opposed to a signed transaction referencing an external contract.
Let me give an example. If you and I wanted to sign a contract, I could sign the contract in the usual SSL method of signing a contract that is provably linked to my private key. To be specific, it is provable that the person behind a specific public key is the only person who could have signed it (assuming their private key is private).
That contract might say I promise to pay you $100.
But that doesn't mean I actually have paid you $100. It just means I promised to do it. Now perhaps you could take that promise to a third party like my bank and treat it as a demand note (i.e. like a check). But the actual transfer of wealth isn't assured just by that signature. It takes something else to make it real.
With bitcoin, the memo itself actually transfers the bitcoin! If I say I am doing it, I actually just did it.
What makes bitcoin clever is that it figured out a way to store wealth in the bits. A way you could actually deposit real money into the system to make electronic transactions real money transactions.
It's quite a bit more sophisticated than SSL. But you are right that public/private keys are required. But they are not the "magic".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So were the Bolivian bolivar, the Zimbabwe dollar, or the Yugoslavian dinar right up until they weren't. A fiat currency isn't a guarantee of safety either. The drop in bitcoins value is absolutely horrendous, but some of those currencies were losing that much of their value every single week, or even more quickly. I think post-WWII Hungary holds the record at some several quadrillion percent inflation per month. That's an amount so large that if you average it out, a Hungarian pengo would have lost more value than bitcoin has over this last year in between the time it started and finished being printed.