careinke wrote:
Some people are slow learners. Take heart, it's still very early, and you are still welcome.
Welcome to buy into a ponzi scheme near the top. No thanks. That's what all the hodlers want, more hodlers to join the club and push the price up because without new blood the price goes down. That's the classic giveaway with a ponzi BTW. You never hear gold investors attempting to lure new investors in, gold websites sure, but individual investors know their gains are not based on that but on the appreciation of the asset over time, like good farmland. But you are no doubt right in the assumption that most early hodlers sold out around some prior peak.
The world is littered with the wreckage of get-rich-quick schemes and BC is no higher now than it was in 2021 so what's with the big ramp? It could just as easily plummet from here as it could go up. The previous up-cycles mean nothing, there was no logic to them, just fear and greed. Dogecoin has gone from 8c to 17c and you'd swear it was raining dollar bills over on the reddit sub. They are so gullible. Even babydoge coin is up, from 0.0000000007 to 0.0000000024 or some such nonsense.
"Doge needs to break the .20-.23 resistance and then we will see it fly to .5 real quick" That's what passes for financial analysis over there. Throw in a meme of elon musk (their God) and you have 50 comments, six months ago it was 2 comments. Kids full of hopium playing with their mobile phones.
The BC space is little different but the BS sounds more intelligent because typically more educated and wealthier people bought into it during the last big pump of 22. But it's all nonsense, trading virtual money tokens back and forth with no real world effects other than the outrageous electricity bill. And whose paying that? Who's paying for 1% of the globes electricity supply? The hodlers of course, who else.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/quest ... of-bitcoinThe miners pay for the energy use directly, but the whole network pays indirectly. As @AndrewChow described, the miners provide a service to the network. They secure the ledger and provide the transaction ordering necessary for users to converge on a shared ground-truth. In exchange for this public service, the miners are reimbursed via block rewards.
... It is financed via monetary supply inflation and thus a levy on all holders of bitcoins.
You ask how this cost can be paid without anyone losing money. There is no such thing as a free lunch: the Bitcoin ecosystem pays an on-going maintenance cost for the network to continue running. There is no guarantee that the value of the overall Bitcoin ecosystem is stable or increases.
So everyone who buys bitcoin is paying this bill and everyone who hodls it too.
Then there is the purely speculative mining
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/busi ... ution.htmlTexas was gasping for electricity. Winter Storm Uri had knocked out power plants across the state, leaving tens of thousands of homes in icy darkness. By the end of Feb. 14, 2021, nearly 40 people had died, some from the freezing cold.
Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
The computers were performing trillions of calculations per second, hunting for an elusive combination of numbers that Bitcoin’s algorithm would accept. About every 10 minutes, a computer somewhere guesses correctly and wins a small number of Bitcoins worth, in recent weeks, about $170,000. Anyone can try, but to make a business of it can require as much electricity as a small city.
In Texas, the computers kept running until just after midnight. Then the state’s power grid operator ordered them shut off, under an agreement that allowed it to do so if the system was about to fail. In return, it began paying the Bitcoin company, Bitdeer, an average of $175,000 an hour to keep the computers offline. Over the next four days, Bitdeer would make more than $18 million for not operating, from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm.
The New York Times has identified 34 such large-scale operations, known as Bitcoin mines, in the United States, all putting immense pressure on the power grid and most finding novel ways to profit from doing so. Their operations can create costs — including higher electricity bills and enormous carbon pollution — for everyone around them, most of whom have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Until June 2021, most Bitcoin mining was in China. Then it drove out Bitcoin operations, at least for a time, citing their power use among other reasons. The United States quickly became the industry’s global leader.
Since then, precisely how much electricity Bitcoin mines are using in America and their effect on energy markets and the environment have been unclear. The Times, using both public and confidential records as well as the results of studies it commissioned, put the most comprehensive estimates to date on the largest operations’ power use and the ripple effects of their voracious demand.
The halving: Due in late April. When Bitcoin halves, the reward given to the contributors securing the network is reduced by 50%. So the people running the show in the article above will get 50% less for their work, but the electricity bills will go up because they will have hunt more or find less. I think come April we will see a lot of miners retire.
Bitcoin miners will struggle to survive the next ‘halving’ event amid electricity costs, debt payments https://fortune.com/2023/07/08/bitcoin- ... -payments/
What the Bitcoin halving means for the network’s energy consumption concerns https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin- ... onsumption