Bitcoin's block reward halves every 210 000 blocks (210k * 10 minutes = 4 years), this block marks Bitcoin entering its 5th epoch with a block reward of 3.125 BTC down from its original of 50 BTC.
Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.
No, GPUs are literally millions of times less power performant than equivalent ASICs for sha256 mining. In the GPU days, mining was talked about in terms of megahashes per second, and ASIC miners these days are talked about in terms of terrahashes per second.
I don't think so, partly because the total reward + fees was only 5-6x that of a typical block and partly because almost all blocks are now mined by pools that share block rewards among their members usually based on hash rate, so one would have to be in the pool that mined the block as well. Also the fact that GPUs are less efficient than using specific mining hardware/ASICs for most Proof of Work cryptocurrencies.
Any interest I might have in this is tempered by the fact that Bitcoin mining accounts for about 0.2% of global carbon emissions - roughly the same as the country of Greece. As long as Bitcoin is based on a proof-of-work process, I think the world would be better off without it.
I do believe there are many better proof systems available at the moment, and I thought its emissions would be higher than 0.2%. Though if fossil fuels account for the majority of global carbon emissions, and banks providing the majority of fossil fuel investments, banks should surely account for a much larger portion of global emissions.
There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.
Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.
You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.
So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.
Lightning Network design is horrible, and it's literally impossible to onboard millions of users without increasing the L1 blocksize to an absurd amount.
The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.
Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.
I think you would be shocked to know how that compares to the emissions of the US military which some argue forms the security backing the US dollar. [1]
“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”
Sure, the US$ is backed by a large military-industrial complex (as well as the power to tax and the productivity of the people and companies of the US), but if we switched from the US$ to BTC as the national currency we'd still need a US military - it's not like the only utility a military has is to keep the currency afloat.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.
It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.
The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).
What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.
The problem is how energy is produced. You're offering solutions at what I think is the wrong end. Pigouvian tax things causing the problems at the point of extraction and let the free market respond to that. The negative externalities have to be realized by the market.
I suppose one could say video games are a net positive as they entertain humans.
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.
> Abraham broadly estimates the gaming industry produced between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 to create video games. That includes energy bought from local grids and used to keep the lights on and computers powered as developers make games.
> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.
So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.
Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few.
Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.
Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.
Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.
As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.
>Computer chips do not need to use energy useful to humans, BTC and also deep learning algos just to name a few.
>Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground
Could we get a title change that adds a bit more context? Something like:
Bitcoin passes reward "halvening" milestone at block 840000
You could sort of argue that the halvening concept is common-ish knowledge for tech people with passing familiarity, but hardly anyone outside the crypto space knows the significance of the number 840000.
adding basic context is not editorializing and nothing should be considered "common knowledge" considering how vast and complex the whole domain of technology etc
I still don't get why I would want to hold a bitcoin for anything other than speculation. If I want some form of currency to actually use there are plenty of less volatile options.
One situation is if you live in a country with highly inflationary currency, it's a hedge against loss of value even in the short term. This argument goes for any inflationary currency, including USD, in the long term. This stems from Bitcoin's inherent design of provably predictable scarcity.
If it's possible to buy Bitcoin in such a country, I would assume it would be possible to buy dollars, bonds or stocks. But maybe not.
My guess is that inflation-protection in a 3rd world country is only a very minor reason for Bitcoin ownership, i.e. the vast majority of Bitcoins are owned for different reasons. Which has implications for its future price.
> it's a hedge against loss of value even in the short term
If BTC with such a volatility can be considered an inflation hedge, then anything else can be as well. There's no intrinsic guarantee that BTC will keep going up, its protocol only defines the supply and not the demand, hence not its price either.
Actually I'm not convinced that BTC is favored as an inflation hedge instead of even USD-based stablecoins for people with currencies devaluating faster than USD.
Yeah it is fair to say it depends on the choices someone has. If I can stick USD into a high interest savings account though it seems like a much safer way to keep value.
Can't be taken away from you / frozen. Which isn't a problem for most if they have multiple bank accounts, but for some controversial figures it can be essential.
Hard to say why you would hold bitcoin. If I were to guess, it sounds like you live in an area that has had a safe currency for a long time and the prospects for your currency look good in the future. Otherwise, you would have a different view or at least understand why.
Spending tiny amounts using Bitcoin's Lightning Network for digital (SaaS) services is something I'm exploring. It's an interesting application when you need an international payment system for settling cross-border payments. (I'm not a fintech expert, but like I said, I'm exploring the possibilities...) When something costs only a few cents (sats in Bitcoin-speak), the variability of the full price of one Bitcoin is minimal. And when something is a few cents, the transaction fees using any other method makes the whole idea hard to imagine.
tl;dr: international payments for digital goods using the Lightning Network is (arguably) a valid use for Bitcoin that is not speculation.
For accepting crypto payments wouldn't I be better off accepting a stable coin? Most companies I saw in the past were nominally accepting crypto but going through a service that would just pay out the USD equivalent.
I guess with software margins there is a bit more room to move with price fluctuations. For ecommerce though accepting and holding a currency that moves this much could quickly erode the smaller margins.
It's not holding but using, but remittances (or in general, money transfers between places where at least one end isn't well connected to the international banking system) are one use case.
Instead of finding a company active on both ends (which will have to be a major company like Western Union, with major fees), you can find two separate (potentially local and small, think "coner store money exchanger") entities to get fiat (regular) currency into Bitcoin on one end and out of Bitcoin on the other end. If there is no single company that does business at both your source and destination location/community, there's a good chance you're out of luck.
You have to trust those two exchangers to not defraud you, but these two don't need to trust, or even know, each other.
Of course, other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins etc. would also work for this, but network effect means Bitcoin is the coin where you're most likely to find participants on both ends.
People have always loved gambling. Crypto is nothing but a game of musical chairs. Also, smart people fall into cults like everyone else but they tell themselves they are into it for rational reasons (techology).
That it'll become the main world reserve asset and suck in all the stored value in the world like a black hole? Then, you're bang on - that's the only reason I hold it.
The primary argument for holding bitcoin is as a store of purchasing power to counter every government and central banks addiction to printing money.
The economic theory is that money printing is the primary cause of inflation and bitcoin, as the first purely fungible commodity with a fixed total supply that is perfectly inelastic to demand, is an ideal hedge against inflation.
Imagine if gold went up 100x in price. New gold mines would be opened. People would come forward with their gold jewelry, etc which would increase the supply of gold.
If bitcoin goes up 100x, it’s supply cap and inflation rate would remain unchanged.
If you believe the government or central banks will stop printing money, then the argument for bitcoin collapses.
Given some weak assumptions, it can be proven that Bitcoin can't beat the performance of S&P 500 in a long enough time horizon.
The gist of it is this: Bitcoin can't perpetually grow faster than world wealth. If we assume, say, 3% inflation-adjusted growth in world wealth, it means that Bitcoin cannot perpetually make more than 3% annually. Stocks, bonds, real-estate don't have this constraint because they pay cash to investors.
At some point in the future, Bitcoin will be down over the last decade while S&P 500 will be up significantly. Bitcoin holders will start to think - wait, why am I holding Bitcoin instead of S&P 500?
Edit: Hacker News says I'm posting too fast so I can't reply to comments below.
Even if your argument were logical, “at some undetermined point in the future, this investment will underperform a different potential investment” is all you’d be proving.
I'm not sure that argument is rigorous enough to be called a proof. We have no guarantee that the S&P 500 will grow faster than world wealth.
It's plausible it will, but one could reasonably purchase something like gold or BTC to hedge against scenarios where it doesn't.
Perhaps you should give an estimate of bitcoin's worth compared to world wealth. Because my guess is bitcoin is worth a lot less then world wealth, meaning btc growth could outpace average world wealth growth for some time.
Bitcoin is about 0.3% of world wealth, gold 3%. My estimate is that peak Bitcoin is anywhere between the current 0.3% and 1.5% (implied price $325k). After this peak is reached, and there's a chance it has already been reached, it won't recover for decades or forever. And my guess is that this peak Bitcoin will happen within a decade.
This doesn't really make sense. Bitcoin is deflationary but the market cap has no ceiling, it's just based on what people are currently willing to pay for a coin.
> Bitcoin is expected to go through a "halving" within the next day or two, a preprogrammed event that could impact production of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
> A halving, which occurs about every four years, was designed by bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, to effectively reduce by half the reward that miners of the digital token receive. The idea is that by cutting in half the amount bitcoin miners currently make for their efforts, fewer bitcoins will enter the market, creating more scarcity of the cryptocurrency.
ah it's orange site, you're supposed to be aware of everything and context is frowned upon
edit: this is sarcasm if not clear but it reflects how often stuff gets posted here without an indication what is interesting about the topic (and it's poor form!)
The only way I can foresee a cryptocoin actually holding value is if spending the coin meant spending processing cycles and RAM doing things like this:
You're not the first person to think of that idea. The problem is how you can assign and reward workloads in a trustless way. Proof of work is easy to verify and you don't need to trust anyone. How would you do it for Folding@home or whatever?
You'd need multiple verifications with the same (or similar) result ... but that isn't trustless since Sybil attacks would still be possible. ... and proof of work tends to be the solution to Sybil attacks.
You're talking about Gridcoin. It didn't do too great economically, for reasons that become obvious when you think about it for a while. It was a great way to fund research, but you can't actually build a global economy on BOINC tasks.
It's value easily eroded by High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) so none on times of war, whereas the Internet was created to be resilient even in war, and I see value in the "cloud" running on diffuse infrastructure instead of corporate infrastructure.
EDIT: The global Internet I mean. Assuming HEMP doesn't hit everywhere at once, just the USA, for (unfortunate) example.
Anyone have a sense on when realistically mining becomes totally impractical for the reward? I seem to recall reading somewhere that with the current technology it would take till around 2100 to mine them all, but surely somewhere between 2030 and 2040 the reward to power consumption will get out of whack such that nobody will do it?
It will never become cheap enough to do a 51% attack because there are multiple parties that all would be interested in doing a 51% attack competing against each other.
Furthermore, Bitcoin is "self-healing" in the sense that an attacker does not gain persistent control; they lose control if they lose 51% compute vs the rest of the planet (unlike, say, Ethereum with proof of stake).
Miners make money from the transaction fees as well as the block reward. If fewer people mine, then the difficulty level drops and allows people with lower computer power to get the rewards.
Readit News
Interestingly there must have been a lot of people that wanted to get a transaction in the halving block, including fees and subsidy it resulted in a total reward of over 40 BTC for the pool that mined the block, ViaBTC.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_bitco...
There is an argument to be made that Bitcoin could end up producing more carbon emissions if it already produces this much with a much lower transaction capacity than most banking systems. However, systems like the Lightning Network <https://wiki2.org/en/Lightning_Network> build on top of Bitcoin by settling transactions before they ever reach the blockchain, slashing fees and bundling possibly hundreds or thousands of transactions into one, so the number of payments that actually occur could be much greater than it seems.
Okay, the banks might cause more carbon emission than blockchains. But, the banking system serves the whole world, providing services for 8 billion people. But Blockchain is still a niche thing.
You might say, no, Bitcoin is not niche, Blockchain is used by a lot of people! Then, you are wrong again. The media is talking about Blockchain all the time, but it is indeed a niche thing. No one is using, say Bitcoin, to buy real physical stuff, cryptocurrency is not taking part in the people's real life.
So, my point is, if Blockchain is adopted by the world and replace the banking systems, it will definitely emit much much much more carbon, I am saying orders of magnitudes more.
According to The Atlantic, the US military alone counts for 5.5% of global carbon emissions.
https://archive.is/DVWZs
The world will likely move onto using rollups on other chains like Ethereum instead, which scale better, and pays gas to validators to get included into the blocks.
Seems like the Bitcoin community is looking into rollups on Bitcoin, but it'll be impossible to get trustless Bitcoin on them, even with BitVM, without a hardfork.
“There are no solutions, only trade offs - Thomas Sowell”
[1] https://archive.is/DVWZs
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. As long as someone somewhere in the world keeps mining it will continue to exist.
It would take the equivalent of a world war effort to, maybe, get enough people to stop mining, that a 51% attack could be successfully carried out. At which point the community would just fork and continue on.
The only realistic option is to outcompete it. Build something better, where even the most greedy bad actors want in on the new thing, not because it’s better for the environment, but because it’s better for them (and happens to also be better for the environment).
What people can do though, is try to get gas-powered leaf blowers banned in your neighborhood, and expand from there.
Or gold mining?
Gold mining provides a resource that is used to build other products.
Bitcoin itself is not required for a transaction, any other form of currency could replace it. The mining provides no value, it is not a good usage of the compute power. Evening finding ET would be better than what it’s currently doing. That power could be used for all kinds of things, versus solving a block of data with trial and error.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/features/video-games-are-fi...
Compare this to the linked wiki article:
> A 2022 non-peer-reviewed commentary published in Joule estimated that bitcoin mining resulted in annual carbon emission of 65 Mt CO2, representing 0.2% of global emissions, which is comparable to the level of emissions of Greece.
So, bitcoin mining results in CO2 emissions comparable to twice that of the entire video game and movie industries combined.
Sam Altman should go to Saudis and plug GPUs directly as petroleum gets out of the ground, and then transfer the trained bits to any country he likes. Blockchain mining was a favorite for Icelanders who have in excess geothermal energy.
Energy is expensive or not cheap, only on places in the world in which it is not abundant. Factories of robots (see Jeff Bezos), or computers mining numbers, or computers training statistics can be located anywhere we like.
Also BTC is a blockchain, which support less than 1.000.000 tps, so not very useful.
As soon as we want to put identities on a blockchain, thousands of identities per person or even millions, legal agreements hundreds and thousands per person every day, property transactions in the magnitude of a grain of sand, millions of property transactions per person every day, then 2 transactions per second on the whole blockchain does not cut it.
Icelander here, our main power generation is from hydroelectric not geothermal, it's a common misconception.
Also most of the mining here has moved on to easier places like Sweden and Norway. And for cooling / humidity reasons not solely electrical prices.
It was also just foreign owned companies most Icelandic folk don't like it here (I think it makes good use of our remoteness and shit latency however)
Hows that help carbon emissions?
Yes, better off without it, but it really makes no difference whatsoever...
Bitcoin passes reward "halvening" milestone at block 840000
You could sort of argue that the halvening concept is common-ish knowledge for tech people with passing familiarity, but hardly anyone outside the crypto space knows the significance of the number 840000.
It's not a superpower. It's just awareness of the need to provide context like you've described.
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My guess is that inflation-protection in a 3rd world country is only a very minor reason for Bitcoin ownership, i.e. the vast majority of Bitcoins are owned for different reasons. Which has implications for its future price.
If BTC with such a volatility can be considered an inflation hedge, then anything else can be as well. There's no intrinsic guarantee that BTC will keep going up, its protocol only defines the supply and not the demand, hence not its price either.
Actually I'm not convinced that BTC is favored as an inflation hedge instead of even USD-based stablecoins for people with currencies devaluating faster than USD.
Then explain why the US government has confiscated so much of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
tl;dr: international payments for digital goods using the Lightning Network is (arguably) a valid use for Bitcoin that is not speculation.
I guess with software margins there is a bit more room to move with price fluctuations. For ecommerce though accepting and holding a currency that moves this much could quickly erode the smaller margins.
Instead of finding a company active on both ends (which will have to be a major company like Western Union, with major fees), you can find two separate (potentially local and small, think "coner store money exchanger") entities to get fiat (regular) currency into Bitcoin on one end and out of Bitcoin on the other end. If there is no single company that does business at both your source and destination location/community, there's a good chance you're out of luck.
You have to trust those two exchangers to not defraud you, but these two don't need to trust, or even know, each other.
Of course, other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins etc. would also work for this, but network effect means Bitcoin is the coin where you're most likely to find participants on both ends.
I’d love to be convinced. If I hear a single convincing argument I’ll beat that drum all day alongside you.
But all you’ve given is:
- gambling exists
- “musical chairs”
- cults exist
So, hand-waving. Help me out here.
That it'll become the main world reserve asset and suck in all the stored value in the world like a black hole? Then, you're bang on - that's the only reason I hold it.
The economic theory is that money printing is the primary cause of inflation and bitcoin, as the first purely fungible commodity with a fixed total supply that is perfectly inelastic to demand, is an ideal hedge against inflation.
Imagine if gold went up 100x in price. New gold mines would be opened. People would come forward with their gold jewelry, etc which would increase the supply of gold.
If bitcoin goes up 100x, it’s supply cap and inflation rate would remain unchanged.
If you believe the government or central banks will stop printing money, then the argument for bitcoin collapses.
The gist of it is this: Bitcoin can't perpetually grow faster than world wealth. If we assume, say, 3% inflation-adjusted growth in world wealth, it means that Bitcoin cannot perpetually make more than 3% annually. Stocks, bonds, real-estate don't have this constraint because they pay cash to investors.
At some point in the future, Bitcoin will be down over the last decade while S&P 500 will be up significantly. Bitcoin holders will start to think - wait, why am I holding Bitcoin instead of S&P 500?
Edit: Hacker News says I'm posting too fast so I can't reply to comments below.
Bitcoin can consume the entire value that's stored in the dollar.
Does your model hold if it does 80% of that over the next, say 50 years? The S&P will be priced in bitcoin for a start.
> Bitcoin is expected to go through a "halving" within the next day or two, a preprogrammed event that could impact production of the world's largest cryptocurrency.
> A halving, which occurs about every four years, was designed by bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, to effectively reduce by half the reward that miners of the digital token receive. The idea is that by cutting in half the amount bitcoin miners currently make for their efforts, fewer bitcoins will enter the market, creating more scarcity of the cryptocurrency.
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edit: this is sarcasm if not clear but it reflects how often stuff gets posted here without an indication what is interesting about the topic (and it's poor form!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_pr...
But in more general sense, less like https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and more like AWS...
It's the only way to have value, actually holding computing power in a distributed network.
EDIT: The global Internet I mean. Assuming HEMP doesn't hit everywhere at once, just the USA, for (unfortunate) example.
Furthermore, Bitcoin is "self-healing" in the sense that an attacker does not gain persistent control; they lose control if they lose 51% compute vs the rest of the planet (unlike, say, Ethereum with proof of stake).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM
https://www.crypto51.app/
Mining never becomes uneconomic because the difficulty adjustment makes mining easier and easier as miners drop out.
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