Bitcoin is Worth Less Than the Cost To Mine It (bloomberg.com)

The production-weighted cash cost to create one Bitcoin averaged around $4,060 globally in the fourth quarter, according to analysts with JPMorgan Chase & Co. With Bitcoin itself currently trading below $3,600, that doesn't look like such a good deal. However, there's a big spread around the average, meaning that there are clear winners and losers. From a report: Low-cost Chinese miners are able to pay much less -- the estimate is around $2,400 per Bitcoin -- by leveraging direct power purchasing agreements with electricity generators such as aluminum smelters looking to sell excess power generation, JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva said in a wide-ranging Jan. 24 report about cryptocurrencies spearheaded by Joyce Chang. Electricity tends to be the biggest cost for miners, needed to run the high-powered computer rigs used to process data blocks to earn Bitcoin.

"The drop in Bitcoin prices from around $6,500 throughout much of October to below $4,000 now has increasingly pushed margins further and further negative for just about every region except low-cost Chinese miners," the analysts said, offering the caveat that their cost estimates may be skewed to the high side due to spotty data and conservative efficiency assumptions. The cost figures exclude equipment.

Comments

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[onyxruby]

Bitcoin costs less than it costs to mine it - but only if your paying for the electricity. Own someone else's computer and you can happily mine without worrying about pesky things like electric bills. Hell, some websites will run a miner on your computer while your browsing their web page.

https://99bitcoins.com/webmini...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/l...

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment. Those that are dishonest can better exploit bitcoin than those that are honest.

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[iggymanz]

No environmental problem, as bitcoin consumption is actually negligible, on the order of a large city (not a country as those who misquote and misunderstand the IEEE article 'absurd cost' claim, that was projection for future)]

So... bitcoin takes less power than internet porn and internet games...both unessential things.

so it doesn't matter.

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[drinkypoo]

So... bitcoin takes less power than internet porn and internet games...both unessential things.

Take those away and see how quick you get riots.

Bitcoin is shit because there are better ways to handle that problem which don't consume nearly so much electricity, therefore that energy is purely wasted. You can't have porn and games without spending power on them, but you can have cryptocurrency while spending much less power, or by spending that power to do genuinely useful work.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the key problems with cryptocurrencies. As the price falls (and/or the mining cost increases) the incentive to participate in the network dissipates and the decentralized nature of it ends up under threat. Decentralization is a nice idea but majority attacks by nation states or even malware botnets with powerful infrastructure are a huge risk as well.

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[Brett Buck]

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment. Those that are dishonest can better exploit bitcoin than those that are honest.

    The first is ridiculous, the second is correct. Correct to the point that you have to wonder if it wasn't designed that way intentionally. Already it has been shown to be vulnerable to the most obvious and blatant "pump and dump" schemes imaginable. Either the people who came up with it knew that and built it that way so they could rip a bunch of people off, or, they were so incredibly naive that it never occurred to them. Based on the comments here (basically, the target audience for pretend money, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd), I think it is probably the latter.

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[Kaenneth]

I think it was the 'your' issue.

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[Kaenneth]

A cryptocurrency powered by useful work won't actually work due to game theory; someone *will* find a way to cheat.

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[Pseudonym]

Bitcoin costs less than it costs to mine it - but only if your [sic] paying for the electricity.

This is essentially the same as the theory behind email spam. Most of the cost of spam is not borne by the person sending spam, but by the people receiving it. The cost to each individual recipient is very small, but multiplied by the number of recipients it adds up to quite large costs.

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[Pseudonym]

No environmental problem, as bitcoin consumption is actually negligible, on the order of a large city (not a country as those who misquote and misunderstand the IEEE article 'absurd cost' claim, that was projection for future)]

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are plenty of countries with populations that are smaller than "a large city"; the population of New Zealand is roughly half that of Tokyo.

I couldn't find reliable data in the time that I had to compare like with like, but a reasonable null hypothesis is that both claims are true. I can easily see how a large city could easily consume the same power as a modest-sized country.

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[mamba-mamba]

Perhaps. But if almost US$20k per coin was not enough incentive, then I am not sure how much incentive would be required. The system is actually not all that complicated. I certainly don't see how anyone can cheat other than be obtaining (by brute force) majority control of the mining operations.

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[mamba-mamba]

The mining cost is a function of the difficulty, which automatically adjusts itself to maintain the long term mining rate at one block per 10 minutes. As unprofitable miners drop out, the difficulty will decrease, and thus the cost of mining. Right now, you get 12.5 coins per block mined (plus all transaction fees on the transactions contained in that block). Eventually that 12.5 will be cut in half, and longer term, it will be zero. But by that time, so the thinking goes, bitcoin value will be stable enough to insure that miners continue to operate the network for the sake of collecting transaction fees.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? Malware specializes in installing miners on unsuspecting people's computers and cryptocurrency in general has a history of stuff like people running off with other people's coins...

The more "valuable" they become, the more they become a target for people to go after. And if individuals or small groups can't do it, you best bet countries would. There is litle to be lost if they get caught and a ton to be won if they succeed.

North Korea, which has legitemate US currency printing presses (albeit now slightly outdated), slowed their use of them in favor of pushing the use of Bitcoin at it's hyped up height due to the value of it.

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[viperidaenz]

I certainly don't see how anyone can cheat other than be obtaining (by brute force) majority control of the mining operations.

You mean how Bitmain, the owner of btc.com and antpool, had at one point 60%?

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[mamba-mamba]

How much coin did they steal?

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[Anonymous Coward]

They just ÂÂstoleÂÂ 1 million BCH , and this was before the BCHABC BCHSV fiasco

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[viperidaenz]

which automatically adjusts itself to maintain the long term mining rate at one block per 10 minutes.

Which is just one reason why btc will never replace traditional payment networks.
No one is going to wait 10 to 20 minutes for a transaction to be verified when they're at a checkout.
Nor are they going to effectively bid to have their transactions accepted by miners in what is a global limitation of less than 10 transactions per second.

Visa can process a peak or 56,000 transactions per second and regularly does 4,000 per second.
Apparently Mastercard does even more than that.
There's AMEX too, and many others. All of which operate simultaneously, as they're all methods of transferring fiat currency, not specific Visa Dollars or Mastercard Money. The customer's bank also deals with currency conversion automatically. I don't care that the thing I'm selling to a guy in Japan is paid for in Yen, I get my dollars in exchange, in less than a second. At most it costs me 2.5% in fees. Usually less.

BTC fees can be upwards of $40.

As a consumer, if someone steals my credit card number, there's a limit to how much can be taken, and most likely I'll get the fraudulent transactions reversed. Nothing lost.
If someone steals my BTC wallet, I'm fucked. Every coin in that wallet is gone forever.
If I lost it, I'm fucked, every coin in that wallet is lost from the network forever. In a network of finite coins. There are 5 wallets with more than 100,000 BTC in them. I'm will to bet someone just lost their private keys
This guy: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF put 80 BTC in there back in 2011, and some minor deposits have trickled in over the years, but never a single withdrawal. Maybe it's a "please donate" address on some website somewhere and the owner has since died.

So far ~10% of the total supply has been lost forever. An estimated 2 million btc are gone, mostly from the first few years.

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[viperidaenz]

It's pointless for them to steal a significant amount.
You can't sell it quick enough to before trust is lost and no one wants to buy it.
Who's going to want to buy a billion dollars of BTC?

They make billions every year selling mining hardware instead.

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[Cmdln Daco]

Similar to how the people who made the real money in the 1849 California gold rush were the people who sold food and equipment to the miners.

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[mamba-mamba]

From the perspective of the system, mining isn't cheating (the only person who loses is the one paying for the resources). But if that was what the OP meant, then I concede the point. From a practical perspective, there is not much point in using PC's to do bitcoin mining at this stage. Without highly optimized hardware, you just don't get anywhere. You have to use dedicated miners.

From my reading of the original poster, I though they meant something different than that. As far as I know, not one coin has ever been created except by mining it, and not one transfer has occurred except by signing the transaction with a private key. There is no way to cheat those mechanisms.

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[mamba-mamba]

Let's not forget the original post.

"A cryptocurrency powered by useful work won't actually work due to game theory; someone *will* find a way to cheat."

My interpretation of this is that the OP thinks people will find a way to trick the system into awarding coin without doing the work required by the bitcoin system. That has never happened. Exchanges have defrauded customers. And in some cases, coins have been transferred because private keys were exposed somehow. People have run miners using power paid for by someone else. If that stuff is what the OP was talking about then, I guess the point stands. People will find a way to steal anything of value. But that is not a very insightful point to make.

But nobody has figured out how to mine coins without computing the hashes required. Not a single transfer has been made (nor could it be made without destroying the system) that is not properly signed by someone in possession of the appropriate private key. The entire blockchain is public. Anyone can verify these facts for themself.

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[mamba-mamba]

I agree that bitcoin transfer method will not replace visa mastercard etc. If bitcoin ever replaces the dollar as the world reserve currency, people will still use visa (only they will be transacting in bitcoin). Buyer and seller will both trust visa, and visa will settle accounts from time to time on the bitcoin network as they see fit. However, except for the height of the mania, bitcoin transfer fees have not been anywhere near 40 dollars.Currently it is something like US$ 0.09 per transaction (which is much less than visa charges, but still, who wants to wait 10 minutes).

https://bitcoinfees.info/

It is unclear whether bitcoin will fail or continue to exist. But if an oil-producing nation unfriendly to the US decided to sell oil for bitcoin, that might be all it would need to be taken seriously as something with consistent purchasing power. Iran could achieve this single-handedly by promising to sell oil for bitcoin at price X for at least 3 months. That would peg bitcoin to the cost of crude. I think there is at least a 10% chance that bitcoin will replace the dollar as the world reserve currency some time in the next 10 years. If that happens, the value of each coin will be approximately ALL_THE_MONEY_IN_THE_WORLD / 20,000,000.

But yeah. All good points that you are making.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment. Those that are dishonest can better exploit bitcoin than those that are honest.

A lot of wealthy people got there by not considering costs to the environment, their workers, the next generation, etc, etc. I don't see environmental or economic damage from cryptocurrency to be a top tier problem, mostly since don't the amount of coins or similar eventually approach zero? Basically the problem, afaik, tends to solve itself. The mere fact that the cost to find another one often exceeds the cost of the electricity would seem to indicate the problem is close to being solved now for this one variant.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget the original post.

"A cryptocurrency powered by useful work won't actually work due to game theory; someone *will* find a way to cheat."

I think you missed the important word "useful". Yes, a cryptocurrency powered by wasteful, useless, but easily-measured work (bitcoin) does work. If you try to base the currency on useful work then the usefulness will be harder to measure and it will probably be easier to cheat.

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[jrumney]

on the order of a large city (not a country as those who misquote and misunderstand the IEEE article 'absurd cost' claim, that was projection for future)

There are many countries that would have lower electricity consumption than a large city. So there is no reason both cannot be true.

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[mamba-mamba]

So the OP was saying that bitcoin only is viable because the work is useless? And that any effort to harness the computing power for useful work instead will necessarily introduce a method of cheating? I don't think that is what they meant. But I could be wrong.

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[TheRealMindChild]

better ways to handle that problem

Ok, then let us all know. Let us all know your better way to achieve transactions in a distributed, trustless system?

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[jrumney]

There are many countries that would have lower electricity consumption than a large city.

... In fact, 80% of the world's countries use less electricity than Los Angeles.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Clothing, actually. Levi and Strauss, to be specific... sound familiar?

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[arth1]

Bartering using precious metals and official IOUs for them has worked fairly well throughout history.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Funny you should mention it, but looks like another 2,500 bitcoin just went out of circulation forever....
https://gizmodo.com/crypto-exchange-says-it-cant-repay-190-million-to-clie-1832309454

Guy with the keys died.

The exchange holds roughly 26,500 bitcoin, 11,000 bitcoin cash, 11,000 bitcoin cash SV, 35,000 bitcoin gold, nearly 200,000 litecoin and about 430,000 ether

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[Anonymous Coward]

Consideration as to the cost to the environment is built in if you price power power properly.

This is what carbon tax is all about. Forcing buyers to pay the full price of the externalized costs (pollution).

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[Anonymous Coward]

You're out of your goddamned mind, but at least you're fun to listen to.

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[iggymanz]

I agree bitcoin is shit

bad investment

too iliquid to be money because of bottlenecked architecture

now not even worth mining in most places

plenty of things humans do are unnecessary, good food and booze, the frequent sex that effective contraceptives allow, etc.

doesn't matter what anyone considers "useful work"

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[sjames]

I think that was the meaning. Even if the OP didn't mean that, it is likely true.

The work producing bitcoin is based on a rather narrow category of problem that is difficult to compute but trivial to verify. That trait is necessary to prevent cheating. You either did the work or not and it's trivial to determine.

The problem is that that necessary characteristic isn't shared by anything useful.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You have to keep your cryptocurrency somewhere and exchange them at some point and both of those have weaknesses.

There's a newer post about a kid who simply SIM swapped a phone and stole over five million. And there are definitely ways to exploit just about every stage of crypto creation....

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[pslytely psycho]

Jesus, you're gonna give the grammar Nazi's a fucking heart attack....uh, hmmm....nevermind, please continue....

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[dryeo]

Two problems with bartering precious metal and official IOUs. The economy expands faster then the supply of precious metal, causing a shortage or the supply of precious metal expands faster then the economy, causing inflation.
This isn't even counting the problems with IOUs (printing too many) or the problems with more then one precious metal (price difference changes)

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[dryeo]

Wasn't the original example country Iceland? Lots of cities larger in population then Iceland.

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[arth1]

Two problems with bartering precious metal and official IOUs. The economy expands faster then the supply of precious metal, causing a shortage or the supply of precious metal expands faster then the economy, causing inflation.

No, that causes deflation, not inflation.
Inflation: Your money decreases in value, so there's little incentive to save but instead spend it quickly.
Deflation: Your money increases in value, so there's little incentive to invest money, only time and other resources.

In a growing economy, mild inflation is generally beneficial, but in a stable society, mild deflation cements the stability.

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[dryeo]

My understanding is that the influx of precious metals from the new world to Spain created inflation.
https://history.stackexchange....
Though Wiki seems to show more nuances, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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[Lanthanide]

Just look at XRP. It's less centralised than bitcoin and consumes 0.1 TW/hr per year to run.

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[rtb61]

At the end of this thread, the moral of the story, don't grind bitcoin at the cost of energy, grind the energy instead. Which I know, means solar panels and batteries but hey it is a tax free income, anything you don't pay on an electricity bill is entirely a tax free investment. Better to invest on generating electricity on your own roof than grinding bitcoins under it, ;D.

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[Zorpheus]

That's not any better with bitcoin though.
The whole rising bitcoin value phase is just insane deflation.

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[AmiMoJo]

You can't really use other people's computers to mine bitcoin, they are too slow to do any useful work. You need dedicated, application specific hardware. The various web based stuff focuses on lighter, easier to mine coins, most of which are just scams anyway.

This story is good news. It might stop people wasting energy on bitcoin, and it means that there will be more cheap GPUs on the second hand market. You can pick up a cheap Geforce 1060 class mining card for $70 on AliExpress. It doesn't have any connections for monitors but with a simple modification to the driver you can use it along with an on-board GPU (e.g. Intel) with only a minimal performance loss, or even in SLI with another Nvidia card.

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[SeaFox]

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment. Those that are dishonest can better exploit bitcoin than those that are honest.

Isn't this true about any form of currency? Or, to be more precise, about any wealth-generating activity? Using finite resources in an irresponsible/dishonest way is always more profitable than "doing the right thing". That's why we have issues with deforestation in South America, environmental devastation from strip-mining in North America, hazardous waste pollution in China, etc. More ecologically friendly ways of maintaining adequate farmland, removing mineral resources, and reducing/disposing of industrial waste would all have a negative impact on the profit/reward for the effort. Naturally, people who care nothing about these things and are able to do so with impunity are going to be at an advantage.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> Bartering using precious metals and official IOUs for them has worked fairly well throughout history.

You can ask how well this works, the countries who are REFUSED to get their gold sent back from "storage" in other countries.

Like Venezuela.

Bitcoin - the only unconfiscable money.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> majority attacks by nation states or even malware botnets with powerful infrastructure

Not so much, nation-states don't have ASICS ready. Nor botnets can do that because normal computers can't be used to mine Bitcoin.

I suppose Chinese government could confiscate all the equipment, but that seems rather unlikely and everyone would be aware and take precautions.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> Own someone else's computer and you can happily mine without worrying about pesky things like electric bills

No, only ASICs can mine Bitcoin, normal computers can not.

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[Anonymous Coward]

if the work was sufficiently useful, then the cheat might be a good thing.
For example, using a steam engine to pump water rather than a 'work' necessarily involving a bucket.

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[johnsie]

I does noes grammer

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[jythie]

That the system is distributed and trustless is not a requirement of the problem, it is only a particular class of solution.

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[Anonymous Coward]

on the order of a large city

Even if this were the case, it's in gross excess of what should be needed to process less than ten transactions per section.

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[drinkypoo]

Deflation encourages cash hoarding. And the ultra-rich are ALREADY hoarding cash!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Even though crypto-mining isn't really taking huge amounts of power currently (compared to everything else in the world), it's still the use of vital resources to "make" fictional currency that doesn't exist. It isn't like mining something of actual value, or even like the production of physical money. It's absurd and should be outlawed and prosecuted world-wide. We don't live in a world where morons should be allowed to waste even relatively small amounts of natural resources on something like this.

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[haeger]

Curecoin would like a word with you.
https://curecoin.net/

I don't actually care about the "coin" bit, but if it gets people to fold proteins, I'm all for it.

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[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that the influx of precious metals from the new world to Spain created inflation.

Of course it did. That was the equivalent of dumping a bunch of newly printed fiat money in the economy. The productivity of the Spanish economy didn't rise, the amount of goods didn't rise, only the supply of money.

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[greythax]

mild deflation cements the stability.

That might work in a society with no credit at all, but deflation would be devastating for most people. Lets say you own a house that cost $200,000, and you are paying a 30 year mortgage on. Now lets say your currency, over a number of years, deflated 5%. I.E. every dollar now purchases $1.05 worth of goods compared with a few years ago. Congratulations, your house is now worth $190,000 but you are still paying $200,000. This is one of the reasons why the fed avoids deflation at all cost.

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[Anonymous Coward]

mild deflation cements the stability.

Only if you're using 'cement' in the 'cement overshoes' sense.

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[arth1]

It depends on how you define a stable society, I guess. In an utopic stable society, there might not be mortgages, but a strict earning-precedes-spending ethos. In which case living below your means and saving up is advantageous, as your money will increase in value as you wait for being able to afford a house.

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[arth1]

Deflation encourages cash hoarding. And the ultra-rich are ALREADY hoarding cash!

Indeed. Which is why I think a deflationary system cannot work without progressive capital gain taxes, to make it easier for those at the bottom to save, and harder for those at the top to hoard.

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[drinkypoo]

Doesn't help with legacy cash. We also either have to tax wealth and not just income, or at least bring back inheritance taxes to a nice high rate... Or just use inflation. Tying the minimum wage to inflation (and also making it a living wage) would at least reduce the impact there. And we could drive inflation by printing money and handing it out as UBI. Any plan for the future that doesn't include UBI is doomed to fail anyway, unless we outlaw automation :p

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[CapS]

Which is just one reason why btc will never replace traditional payment networks.
No one is going to wait 10 to 20 minutes for a transaction to be verified when they're at a checkout.
Nor are they going to effectively bid to have their transactions accepted by miners in what is a global limitation of less than 10 transactions per second.

Visa can process a peak or 56,000 transactions per second and regularly does 4,000 per second.
Apparently Mastercard does even more than that.
There's AMEX too, and many others. All of which operate simultaneously, as they're all methods of transferring fiat currency, not specific Visa Dollars or Mastercard Money. The customer's bank also deals with currency conversion automatically. I don't care that the thing I'm selling to a guy in Japan is paid for in Yen, I get my dollars in exchange, in less than a second. At most it costs me 2.5% in fees. Usually less.

BTC fees can be upwards of $40.

As a consumer, if someone steals my credit card number, there's a limit to how much can be taken, and most likely I'll get the fraudulent transactions reversed. Nothing lost.>

How long does your bank take to actually complete money transfer transactions? For most things, the transaction takes *days*. Even with a cashier's check you can't be guaranteed that the money is transferred in a timely manner. That's why when you're selling your car, most people are unwilling to except a check or a cashier's check. You do it in cash or at a bank (with two accounts at the same bank).

All that Visa/MasterCard/AMEX/etc are doing is just buffering the money transfer as credit. The true payment to the creditors can take a long time.

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[Ries]

Bitcoin peak mining:
60.000.000 TH/s

Best miner:
1TH/s = 0.1kW

So
6TWh*365*24 = 52560TWh/year = 52.560.000.000kWh/year bestcase.

And that is not including cooling, other shitcoin or anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So bitcoin used, at peak, same as the 48’th country out of 219 countries.

I seriously doubt porn and internet games use more power than bitcoin.

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[viperidaenz]

There is a level of trust, where both parties trust the centralised system.
With a decentralised system, you have to trust the system. which only gives you and answer in bitcoin when the block becomes part of the chain. Which only happens every ~10 minutes. Which means a wait time between 10 and 20 minutes.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Wait? people refuse cashiers cheques? that makes no sense? they are cleared by any bank I've ever dealt with immediately, they are as good as cash

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[Riceballsan]

Even there though, those business models are also likely to die. Bitcoins divy up by how much work is done... you can mine 24/7 on a typical cpu setup of your mid line PC, and you'll be lucky to average 1 cent every 2-3 days per computer running it. In short... the time and effort to try and get people to download and use mining malware is also going to start reaching diminishing returns to the point that it isn't worth bothering with. If you can sucker the thousands of people needed to do your malware mining at a profitable rate, you probably could have just thrown a 1% chance of success ransom scam or something at them instead and made 10x more.

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[Riceballsan]

From my understanding... bitcoins throw an algorythm, and the first computer to crack the algorythm gets the coin right? Wouldn't it be feasible to do something like gene folding or something or similar with the same goal?

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[Trogre]

Why's that? Was there really not much gold in them thar hills?

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[Anonymous Coward]

This happens anytime someone takes out a loan for a car, and the world hasn't ended yet. Most people buy a house to have a place to live, not as an investment vehicle. House flippers can kindly fuck off.

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[Anonymous Coward]

But your house is not worth any less in trade value so whats the problem? The fact you didn't get a morgage which accounted for deflation?

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[DarthVain]

I won't argue that it hasn't worked out as a currency due to transaction limitations... However there is more to it than efficiencies and transaction times.

Things where for example the aforementioned credit companies decided to "cutoff" Wikileaks, and Paypal for various reasons, but mostly because they could. The idea (ideal really) behind these BC based "currencies" would be the inability for anyone to control it.

That said, you are right that unless a "currency" can maintain a certain threshold of realistic transactions it isn't going to much much use for anybody... Other than as a speculative investment of course :)

Anyway the idea is laudable, but the implementation still needs considerable work. I think one of the problems is that speculative nature. Rather than transaction being used for exchanges in goods, transactions are being done for the sake of the currency only back and forth. While I don't think the current model would work anyway even if it wasn't being abused in this way, it probably certainly hasn't helped in gumming up the works (i.e. lengths of blockchains and their growth).

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[Kaenneth]

That is exactly what I meant.

The problem is who, or what defines 'useful'.

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[Kaenneth]

There is a third requirement, a solution must always be available.

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[codebonobo]

Bitcoin costs less than it costs to mine it - but only if your paying for the electricity.

The report is deeply flawed. They don't take into account the efficiencies of scale with ASIC manufacturing, the sunk costs from green energy, and the fixed contracts for extremely cheap electricity.

Hell, some websites will run a miner on your computer while your browsing their web page.

This has nothing to do with Bitcoin as you can not efficiently mine Bitcoin with GPUs for the last 6.5 years .

The biggest problem with bitcoin is that there is no consideration as to the cost to the environment..

Proof of work is the most efficient means to come to secure consensus and thus it is far better for the environment than Proof of Stake or fiat currency- http://www.truthcoin.info/blog... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... .

*Bitcoin Is Worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Fixed that title for you.

Re:*Bitcoin Is Worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

So obviously if I offered you 100 bitcoin you would turn it down. No wait you wouldn't! Now you know you are full of shit.

That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[RyanFenton]

Listen - I understand all the ideals of cryptocurrencies - from distributed power, to limited supply, to anonymity.

They're a worthwhile idea to explore - but every virtue they hold has a vice - and for the same reason I find biofuels competing with food crops to be a bad tradeoff - I find expending fuel into the environment to be a similar bad tradeoff.

That's hardly the only concern - but it's enough for me to consider it an idea that really needs to go back to the drawing board as a currency.

That said, it's still a resource that will be speculated on - so good luck to those that care about that aspect, I suppose.

Ryan Fenton

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great.

Anonymous Person who feels so self-important that he signs his posts

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[The Evil Atheist]

Do you know what the meaning of anonymous means, you anonymous retard?

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like someone is little butthurt over losing money on bitcoin

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

XRP, XLM, nano, etc, are currencies that avoid the massive energy consumption (not to mention abysmal transaction throughput) of bitcoin and its clones. They have their own tradeoffs, but they're moves in the right direction.

Re: That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you are missing the shitshow that other AC pointed out which is account name Ryan Fenton signing posts Ryan Fenton

-a gay fucking idiot anonymous coward

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what juxtaposition looks like when it's used in humor?

Completely different Anonymous Person with tongue permanently in cheek.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's not a dumb worshipper of Scientism, and comprehends that logging in to Slashdolt doesn't preclude anonymity, nor does "signing" a post.

- Elizabeth II, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Regina, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

First... You cannot speak on cryptocurrency until you own some cryptocurrency, till you mine it, till you speak with others about your adventures. Not a HODLer, not an authority. aka: Not you.

Second... the "Environment"... it costs more for the US Gov alone to merely print and ship banknotes out to banks, than cryptocurrency burns in a year. Don't believe it? Go read the FED Reserve datasheet on those costs. Then go add in every other countries Govt, all the Banks, all the retail, everything.

Cryptocurrency is 100 times less harmful than Fiat.

Everyone else are disgusting Statists.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, you faggot retard.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you can't keep ignoring it.
It now takes the power of a country the size of austria to run the bitcoin network.

And we've not even hit a tiny fraction of the transactions any other financial system has...

Guess who will be paying for more electricity generation to supply that power?
That's right. You the taxpayer. You the power consumer.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

He signs his name to make sure everyone knows he's the goatse guy.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true, you're a boofer.

What he said is also true.

So you're an idiot, that can't do basic research to disprove your own false beliefs.
Lol.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fenton is a complete ignorant displayed sooooo many times.
Anyone who listens to that govt shill is a retard.

Difficulty adjusts all in time.

Re:That's cool - I can keep ignoring it.

[Anonymous Coward]

this has got to be the single most retarded thing I've ever seen posted on /. and that's with some amazing competition, well done you complete and utter fuck knuckle, in-bred, mouth breathing, paint chip eating moron!

Sometimes more, sometimes less, not news

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking at the raw data about mining cost from a site like the one below gives you a better idea of what is happening:

https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Everything is worth what someone will trade for it

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"*Bitcoin Is Worthless "

Everything is worth what someone will trade for it. Nothing more or less.

Some kinds of money-like commodities have some inherent desirability factor. For instance, gold is pretty and can be used to make lots of desirable stuff: Jewelry, electrical connectors that don't corrode, ...

The only such factor for Bitcoin is that it's hard, progressively harder with time, and eventually impossible, to create more and thus dilute the perceived value of what is already being traded.

IMHO the cost of making more rising above the price where it's traded, without substantially increasing the transaction costs of trading it, is likely to make its price rise. Don't be surprised to see its price start tracking the cost of mining.

Re: Everything is worth what someone will trade fo

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing with bitcoin is, what people will pay for it is actually less than what people say other people are paying for it. Please research the incredibly glorious scam that is Tether.

Feedback mechanism?

[Michael Woodhams]

I had the impression there was some sort of feedback mechanism in how much bitcoin you get for mining a block. TFA doesn't talk about this. This would mean that if your mining costs are substantially higher than others, you'll be unprofitable no matter what the bitcoin price is doing.

Perhaps it is just a supply/demand thing? The more miners there are, the lower the chance you get to mine the block, so the lower the expected return you get in bitcoins. Then for a fixed bitcoin reward, the number of miners will bring the expected return in equilibrium with bitcoin value.

Could someone with knowledge please talk about feedback mechanisms?

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[mamba-mamba]

Not exactly. The feedback operates to adjust the difficulty of mining. The way it works is that if blocks are mined faster than once every 10 minutes (on average), the difficulty is increased slightly. If it takes longer than 10 minutes, the difficulty is reduced slightly. As machines go offline due to poor profitability, the difficulty will likely have to decrease to keep the mining rate constant. This has pretty much worked as designed over the inception of bitcoin. Despite all the hash power people have thrown at bitcoin, the rate of new block creation has stayed consistent on average. The difficulty is not updated super often. Here is a chart of difficulty vs time.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comp...

How much bitcoin you get for mining a block (the reward) is pre-determined by the implementation. It goes down by half every so often. Currently, the reward is 12.5 bitcoin. The "reward" represents the creation of new bitcoin. Once all bitcoins are mined, the reward will be zero. In addition to the reward, miners also collect fees from all the transactions contained in the mined block. Eventually, the only incentive to mine bitcoin will be to collect the transaction fees.

If you haven't already read the whitepaper, I recommend it. It is not that long, and not that difficult to understand for people familiar with hashes and cryptography and whatnot. It is 9 pages.

In my opinion, most coverage of bitcoin, even in the technical press, is woefully uninformed. The ONLY reason bitcoin takes so much energy to maintain is because the price rose so high, and the difficulty therefore increased. Now, as some of the mania is dying off, things should be a lot more sane, and non-profitable miners will bow out.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[TeknoHog]

You are generally correct on the supply/demand thing. The mining reward per block is mostly constant, halving every four years, and people will mine as long as it's profitable for them.

There's an important feedback mechanism in the difficulty level of mining. The network adjusts this to maintain the block interval at 10 minutes. When prices increase and more miners come aboard, blocks will be found more frequently until the difficulty adjustment kicks in. Conversely, difficulty will drop when there are fewer than 6 blocks per hour mined.

Sudden drops in mining power can be a problem. You need to keep the blocks coming to keep the whole thing running, but difficulty adjustments are not immediate. This has occasionally happened with smaller altcoins.

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[phantomfive]

I had the impression there was some sort of feedback mechanism in how much bitcoin you get for mining a block.

It becomes easier when fewer people are in the mining pool. But a lot of people already bought their equipment, so there is no reason to drop out of the mining pool. Better to partially get back your investment than to lose it all.

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[AHuxley]

More that everything thats easy to mine is done.
What is left of the advanced math needs an ASIC to pay back with the cooling and day to day power costs.
Solar? Free hydro?

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that, soon after the competition mostly bails out, one or more of the "creative" operators out there will find a way to extract a lot more value out of their "unprofitable" mining operation(s) than has been advertised from the start, at which point, bitcoin crashes spectacularly.

Re:Feedback mechanism?

[chuckugly]

The difficulty to find a suitable hash adjusts in response to the time it is tending to take to find the solutions. So if less effort is being put into mining, the difficulty should adjust down. It does not just adjust in one direction.

SELL ASAP!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

@HODLers:

Look @ the situation objectively & realize BITCOIN is dying!!!

There is no public interest for it anymore & all attempts @ bringing back the interest (by shills) is keep failing!!!

Make no mistake:
When BITCOIN dies in front of the whole public, nobody will say, ok let's try another cryptocurrency this time!!!

Whatever cryptocurrency you are HODLing, SELL ASAP (or LOSE ALL your investment)!!!

Re:SELL ASAP!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

thx just bought 2 bitcoins

Re:SELL ASAP!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

ok let's try another cryptocurrency this time!

Brett Buttfuck is a Trumptard, not a scientist etc

[Anonymous Coward]

Take everything this Brett Buttfuck chatbot says with a bottle of vodka, he's a cocksmoking traitor of no value or consequence.

What the fuck do the editors do here?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think the editors are supposed to edit what they post... just try and read that summary it's like msmash has a fucking a fucking stutter!!!
Or do you get a little ctrl-v happy and double pasty
How hard is it to not paste a dupe in the same fucking summary??

I hope you don't get paid for what you do... or more to the point don't do (ya know edit what you submit)

Re: Everything is worth what someone will trade fo

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... what people will pay for [bitcoin] is actually less than what people say other people are paying for it.

That's usually true of everything (presuming they're honest).

If they were willing to pay as much as or more than something is currently selling for, they wouldn't be talking - ESPECIALLY talking up the price. They'd be buying some more. They'd keep buying until they're out of loose cash or it's gone above what they're willing to pay for it again. Then they might answer some more questions. B-)

Re: No One Curr

[Anonymous Coward]

Only retards wear their faith like a badge for all to see. Only retards believe their opinion of faith matters and others need to care about MY nondiety. Go fuck yourself loser.

Re:Everything is worth what someone will trade for

[mamba-mamba]

The system is designed in such a way that the mining rate of one block every 10 minutes will be maintained (over the long term average) regardless of how many miners are in operation or what their hashing capability is (over a very wide range). This has worked so far. As miners drop out, the difficulty will likely reduce, meaning that the probability of any one miner getting a reward increases. It doesn't really work the way you think it does.

It is not "progressively harder with time." The hardness is adjusted to maintain a constant mining rate which is independent of hashing power on the network.

It might be a good idea to read the whitepaper which is only 9 pages long.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

Re: No One Curr

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU had nothing to do with any of that did you?

Headline doesn't understand how mining works

[thecombatwombat]

This is exactly what's supposed to happen. Over time, mining *new* coins gets more expensive. Of the coins mined, I'm pretty sure a very small percentage were from this year. The many others that were mined earlier for much less cost still "exist" in the sense that bitcoin is "found" when mined.

The system is working exactly as intended, nothing more to see here.

Bitcoin may be worthless, or it may go to $40k this year, either way, this has much less to do with it one way or the other than this article seems to think.

Re:Headline doesn't understand how mining works

[Ramze]

The mining farms pay very close attention to that value because if the cost of mining the very next coin is higher than the coin is worth, they will shut down their mining operation and liquidate. Not right away, of course, but after they've decided that the new norm isn't profitable.

If all the mining farms shut down except for those in China and a few other rare locations where energy is cheap, then there's a very real concern that China, or at least one of only a few agents in China, could control the Bitcoin network - which could lead to forks, fake transactions, or the shutdown of the network entirely.

The key point of the article is that mining coins for profit doesn't appear to be sustainable any longer. If the value of Bitcoin in terms of dollars doesn't go back up, people will start turning off their bitcoin miners which also conduct transactions for the network. We could wake up one day and find there is no network to make a transaction on if the value goes down much farther.

Re:Headline doesn't understand how mining works

[Luthair]

This is exactly what's supposed to happen. Over time, mining *new* coins gets more expensive. Of the coins mined, I'm pretty sure a very small percentage were from this year. The many others that were mined earlier for much less cost still "exist" in the sense that bitcoin is "found" when mined.

The system is working exactly as intended, nothing more to see here.

As I suspect you well know, that isn't the entirety of what was supposed to happen. Bitcoin was also designed to be deflationary, the value of a bitcoin was meant to increase along with the difficulty. Since the two have been disconnected for some time that doesn't exactly sound like a system working as intended to me.

Re:Headline doesn't understand how mining works

[tomknight]

Perhaps I'm not alone in thinking a currently should be stable....

Unless power is free

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a case of a researching stealing supercomputing cycles to mine, but I know there have been university students mining on a smaller scale using "free" power provided by the school. As long as the schools don't crack down, I can't see this form of mining going away.

wassup wassup wassup

[Anonymous Coward]

bitconneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

The ultimate dupe

[sootman]

"The drop in Bitcoin prices from around $6,500 throughout much of October to below $4,000 now has increasingly pushed margins further and further negative for just about every region except low-cost Chinese miners," the analysts said, offering the caveat that their cost estimates may be skewed to the high side due to spotty data and conservative efficiency assumptions. The cost figures exclude equipment. "The drop in Bitcoin prices from around $6,500 throughout much of October to below $4,000 now has increasingly pushed margins further and further negative for just about every region except low-cost Chinese miners," the analysts said, offering the caveat that their cost estimates may be skewed to the high side due to spotty data and conservative efficiency assumptions. The cost figures exclude equipment.

New Slashdot feature: rather than making readers wait a couple days for a dupe, dupes are now included in the initial entry.

Rather than making readers wait a couple days for a dupe, dupes are now included in the initial entry.

Re:The ultimate dupe

[raftpeople]

It was their new Deep Learning AI that figured out how to sneak in the dupe in the original submission.

Heh heh

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"Bitcoin is Worth Less Than the Cost To Mine It"

Heh heh, not if you steal the electricity and the computing time.

I mean, that's what I heard.

That proverb about gambling...

[Applehu Akbar]

It has been said that gambling is a tax on low IQs. Given the amount of Bitcoin that has been simply lost on discarded thumb drives, corrupted disks, forgotten passwords, and in stolen 'wallets', I would call Bitcoin a tax on people who are slack about IT security.

Re:That proverb about gambling...

[johnsie]

"It has been said that gambling is a tax on low IQs." Tell that to the couple who just won $200M

NOT NEWS !!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The DIFFICULTY adjusts, this behaviour is NOT news, it's fucking EXPECTED, price will tail cost in down markets, and lead cost in up markets, you fucking morons.

So go back to your piss on cryptocurrency Govt and Bankster masters until you actually learn something...
Search Youtube: Larken Rose

Same with physical currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

A penny costs more to make and administrate than it is worth.

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[arth1]

A penny costs more to make and administrate than it is worth.

The real value of a penny isn't the face value, but as a lubricant for transactions.

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[dryeo]

How so? As far as I'm aware, only country is left which actually mints and circulates pennies, and that is due to corruption (metal company paying off politicians)

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Philippine Centavo

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[jeremyp]

Britain still mints and circulates pennies.

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[dryeo]

So they do. Along with the AC's reference to the Centavo.
Still seems like a waste of resources, even nickles and dimes are only useful for change. When I was a kid, there was candy that cost 2 for a penny and a nickel or dime went quite a ways. Now a pack of matches probably costs more then a dime, if you can find one.

Re:Same with physical currencies.

[dryeo]

Seems not to be circulated judging by the mint numbers. 18 million since '95.

This was true in 2011

[Anonymous Coward]

And it will be true in 2027.

How is this news?

OK, what?

[msauve]

"...JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva said in a wide-ranging Jan. 24 report about cryptocurrencies spearheaded by Joyce Chang..."

I'm curious. What's the pecking order between leading and spearheading?

Re:OK, what?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Leading is higher. The leader controls the resources, the spearheader is the project owner. To use a computer example, a CIO might lead a new initiative to rewrite some internal tool, while an Architect or Sr. Engineer would spearhead the project.

millennials, meet Mr Ponzi and his scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Crypto currency may well be geeky, but it's the greatest Ponzi scheme ever. Unlike most such schemes, there is absolutely nothing of value underpinning it.

Like the carbon offsets scam that was pioneered by Enron, the only value of a bitcoin is its completely artificial supposed scarcity, and as soon as people stop believeing some other guy is a bigger idiot who will buy it at a higher price, it will lose all of its imaginary value and be exposed as being less of an asset than a single sheet of blank paper which has the tiny bit of inherent value that you can print on it. A bitcoin has ZERO inherent value. A billion Bitcoins have no more actual value than one Bitcoin, unlike actual investments. If you invest in something like silver or pork bellies then a hundred of the thing is worth more than a single of the thing and each of the thing has an actual value aside from its speculative investor value.

hahaha no shit

[Anonymous Coward]

When Bitcoin gets backed by some gold, nuclear weapons and an aggressive foreign policy, then it will have real value. Until then, it's monopoly money.

good fuok miners

[Anonymous Coward]

now maybe gf card makers will get back to selling the rest of us affordable cards

Ponzi Scheme

[theblkadder]

Is still a Ponzi scheme. News at 11.

Re:Ponzi Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it is. Satoshi is sitting on this billion-dollar pile of bitcoin created from the "investment" of subsequent "get rich quick" contributors. Why is the identity of Satoshi unknown? Because s/he wants to stay out of prison.

Re:Ponzi Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand what a ponzi scheme is so shut the fuck up.

Re:Ponzi Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

"You don't understand what a ponzi scheme is so shut the fuck up." ...said every Ponzi schemer, ever.

"I'm not a Ponzi, you're the Ponzi!"

Nano

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently discovered nano.org which doesn't use more electricity than a windmill for the entire network.I thought this would ruin security. Interestingly, an independent security audit deemed it the most secure coin they've ever reviewed. Could be a game changer, but I can't stomach to purchase anything in such a bear market.

Re:Nano

[johnsie]

rofl... They all say they are the next big thing or a "game changer". https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Energy

[greylion3]

So, currently it's only economically feasible to mine bitcoin if energy(electricity) is very cheap at your location.
That would be Iceland, Norway, and other places with very cheap hydro/thermal power.

Cheap electricity in China is a bit of an oddity:
China has built huge aluminum smelting capacity.
Most aluminum smelting plants in China are powered by coal, heating steam to then heat the aluminum. (steam is my guess)

The heat of the aluminum after smelting can be used to power a steam turbine which spins a generator, but since the heat is not constant, batteries and circuitry are needed to smoothe out the output.

It isn't very practical to use the (post-smelting) heat to pre-heat some of the (scrap) aluminum going into a plant, and the electricity from the generator would only be enough to power maybe one electrical aluminum smelter at one plant, so instead, most of the electricity is put on the power grid, minus what's used at the plant for non-heating purposes.

Re:Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Most aluminum smelting plants in China are powered by coal, heating steam to then heat the aluminum. (steam is my guess)

The heat of the aluminum after smelting can be used to power a steam turbine which spins a generator, but since the heat is not constant, batteries and circuitry are needed to smoothe out the output.

It isn't very practical to use the (post-smelting) heat to pre-heat some of the (scrap) aluminum going into a plant, and the electricity from the generator would only be enough to power maybe one electrical aluminum smelter at one plant, so instead, most of the electricity is put on the power grid, minus what's used at the plant for non-heating purposes.

You have absolutely no idea on how Aluminium smelting works (I work in a smelter) Most smelters in China are powered by coal powered electricity generation, Aluminium's main two ingredients are Alumina (refined from Bauxite) and electricity, not heat, heat is a waste by-product...

Not in Winter

[Solandri]

I think bitcoin is stupid, and eventually destined for a value of $0. But in winter, the mining cost is essentially zero. 100% of the electricity your computer uses to mine gets converted into waste heat. Except in winter you typically have to heat your home, that heat is useful instead of waste. So all mining does in winter is heat your home with your mining rig, instead of with an electric heater.

Re:Not in Winter

[Ormy]

Using electrical resistance heating (also known as Joule or Ohmic heating) has a COP of exactly 1.0. Which means for one Joule of electricity you get one joule of heat.

Heat pumps however can have a COP of 3 or 4, by pumping heat in from outside (yes even if its below freezing outside, do some research on heat pumps) you can get 3 or more joules of heat introduced to your living space for only 1 joule of electricity used.

Electric resistance heaters are being phased out in some countries (e.e sweden, denmark) because of their poor performance compared to heat pumps.

Electrical resistance heating is still more suitable in many industries because the heating can more finely controlled and cycled more quickly.

Re:Not in Winter

[stinerman]

This is exactly why I run Folding@Home in the winter months.

And I still could make a small fortune

[No Longer an AC]

if only I had bought it when everyone (including me) believed it was a crazy, stupid idea.

I'm not bitter. Anyone could make a killing in numerous investments if they knew beforehand when they would reach their peak and when was the right time to buy and sell. HIndsight is 20/20.

And just to be clear, I still think it's a crazy,stupid idea.

apartment scams

[bradley13]

There's also the scam of renting an apartment, where the utilities are included in the rent. I have a friend whose family owns a vacation apartment. Someone rented it for a summer, stuffed it full of miners, and burned an astounding amount of electricity. At the end of the month, they disappeared. When the quarterly utility bill arrived, well...

Re:Everything is worth what someone will trade for

[goose-incarnated]

Everything is worth what someone will trade for it. Nothing more or less.

Not true; only true among those people who didn't do any studies in economics. Trivial counter-examples: lots of people are tricked into paying thousands of dollars for stuff that is later found to be worthless (fraudulent gems, bridges, etc).

Just because someone scammed someone else out of money for worthless glass does not raise the value of the glass to the level of rubies and emeralds.

Right

[bigdavex]

This is how markets work, right? The price settles around the cost to produce.

1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

[Anonymous Coward]

Those do not look like donations. They appear to be "cuts" probably from some micropayment site that links to other sites offering bitcoin in exchange for ad clicks.

Wasted energy ...

[Martin S.]

About the worst possible store of value you could conceive.

Re: Grade Four English Special?

[Cipheron]

You obviously skipped the classes on being a decent human being however.