The electricity demand (and here I mean the overall cost of the electricity, so improvements in $ per kilowatt just mean you need to use more electricity) in proof-of-work systems fundamentally scales linearly with the overall valuation of the coins in the network, which means proof-of-work systems can never scale as large as their fanboys would have you believe.

Those are now being driven by massive AI demand and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future. So how would costs go down?

Which in normal times, are something taken for granted, but once it does happen, the edge case collapse the entire system.

edit: the earlier language is not exact, the scenario is an exponential drop of value that results in exponential drop in miner willing to mine until this discrepancy can be resolved. i.e. the system is not protected against extreme volatility (e.g. -99% over a block cycle)

The goal in proof of work is to find a block hash less than a given value. That value is determined by the network difficulty. The lower the value, the more difficult it is to find a block, and thus the more expensive it will be to mine.

Difficulty is adjusted once every two weeks to target an average block time of 10 minutes. If the average block time during the preceding 2 weeks is less than 10 minutes, it means that blocks were too easy to find (i.e. the difficulty was too low relative to total hash rate of the network). Conversely, if the average block time was greater than 10 minutes, the difficulty was too great.

This is how it the network has maintained a roughly 10 minute block time as the hash rate of the network has grown over the past 16 years. The difficulty (i.e. cost) of finding a block is constantly being adjusted.

They may be hoping it goes back up.

Which is when exactly, and how likely is that to happen? It hasn't happened yet in ~14 years, but I guess "never say never". There is a lot of money saying it won't happen very soon though.

There are usually some fixed costs involved and you need cash flow. Without cash flow, your business can shut down pretty damn fast. With cash flow, your business can stay around longer, maybe long enough for the economics to shift.

This sort of thing happens with oil. There are oil producers which sell at a loss. There was even a brief moment when the price of an oil barrel went negative, which meant that if you gave somebody a barrel of oil, you had to pay them for the privilege of taking that oil off your hands. Oil producers did not all shut down when that happened.

I am a little doubtful of the $19k figure anyway.

> It would actually make more sense to sell all their bitcoin, flood the market with coins to do the price, wait for large miners to collapse and then restart mining at hopefully lower prices.

This kind of market manipulation is not so straightforward.

The cost of producing bitcoin is a combination of the marginal cost (running the miner you already have, i.e. mostly power) and paying for the miner that you bought.

If you buy a miner expecting a certain profitability but then the economics change, you can both end up with a loss long term (never able to recoup the cost of the miner) and still be better off continuing to mine (because the cost of the miner is a sunk cost, and as long as the revenue is larger than the marginal cost of running it, you'll at least recoup some of it).

I for one don't.

Thankfully, it all worked out in the end very well. I don't know how anyone would put in the effort/money to get a major crypto farm going and plan to just cash out every month to pay bills. What's the point? I always thought of it as a long-term bet on the price going way up, which it did.

If bitcoin miners are smart enough to have anticipated this, and decided not to hold onto bitcoin and just let it drop; and also to have repurposed their equipment, sold it to bigger fools, or have just run it into the ground, none of these ideas make any sense.

Why would they, though? The real answer is that governments and monopolists are propping up bitcoin through simply handing tax money to bitcoin holders, and in the case of the latter (also government tit-suckers) leveraging themselves to pump up bitcoin markets when they are down. I'm sick of humoring this because it was once mildly interesting technically. It's a criminal scheme and everyone involved needs to go to prison. When I hear a politician say the word bitcoin, I'm going to do everything in my power to damage that politician.

What does this mean, sorry?

> the edge case collapse the entire system.

If you mean that if it reaches a certain point, the entire system will collapse, it means you don't understand the difficulty adjustment. If it's too expensive to mine, then some miners leave, which makes blocktimes be longer, but not to worry because the consequence of that it just that difficulty will go down, which means that you need less hashrate to mine (and maybe some of those miners that leave will come back because it is profitable again for them). This means that it is essentially impossible for all miners to leave at the same time; some of them stay even if at a loss, and some of them are just hobbyists that can already feed their miners with solar power (so there's really no loss for them in leaving them connected).

Competing for it is more of a game that has a cost to participate in.

The problem with BTC going down is that it's a double whammy of not only BTC going down but also the cost of its shovels going up

Before: BTC pays $100k but a shovel costs $300

Now: BTC pays $70k but a shovel costs $$??

Bitcoin asked the right questions but came back with the wrong answers

As price per coin goes up, more folks will find mining profitable and invest in mining operations. Difficulty goes up until it's no longer attractive for anyone to add to the global hash rate.

As price per coin goes down, less of those operations are profitable and fewer new people will find it to be a good investment. Difficulty stays the same or goes down. Due to capital expenses, difficulty is more sticky in the downward direction than upwards.

There is of course some marginal price action in between where there is in theory selling pressure from miners when it's less profitable to mine (to fund operational expenses and debt), but I don't think it's super material to the overall market volume these days.

Bitcoin's supply won't increase as costs go down, unlike other assets.

Let's call this cycle A and cycle B.

If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder.

This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter.

This isn't completely critical as there is I believe a small damping effect, so it isn't completely lethal to bitcoin, but a key thing about bitcoin mining is that whether other people are mining or not doesn't actually affect your own profitiability.

Other people dropping out doesn't actually mean you get more bitcoins per hour/watt, it only affects the next difficulty adjustment as a secondary effect.

For mining it is just necessary that it happens.

The amount of work in mining is way higher than is required to prevent another party from being able to overwhelm the Blockchain. It is that high because of the subsidy of the mining reward means if Bitcoin has a high value the reward is worth a lot.

This is factored in with the halving of the reward. Either the price will increase exponentially or the mining reward will drop. Causing mining to reduce to those who can be profitable from fees. Which rewards those who can mine most efficiently, it becomes a supply and demand calculation in a market where there are relatively low barriers for competitors.

In practice it’s not much of an issue because bitcoin is not use for commerce but it’s a store of value and it some of the trades are not even on chain.

If you’re wrong, you lose your stable-coins.

Let us know how it goes :)

Um. That's a causative relationship, even if it's mediated, but it's still causative. And generally, the relationship is even more direct: the suppliers are quite reluctant to sell at the price lower than their costs unless they expect the prices go up soon enough™, so the lower boundaries for the prices exist.

If you don’t have busts, at some point your system will abruptly/violently cease to exist.

As the other poster mentioned though, many miners won't be using oil-based energy sources, so it does make one wonder about cause and effect. Maybe a dip in BTC would've done it regardless of oil?

More accurate: The price for an _option_ to buy/sell oil was negative, not the price of the barrell itself.

The way bitcoin exists, the provider accepts bitcoin; it doesn't accept other crypto. I would rather bitcoin, or something equivalent to exist than not.

There is also the case of people who hold value in bitcoin because it is more stable than their banks; go figure. This was the case in Argentina and Venezuela. That was also a gray area, but I think it would morally acceptable to do that even if it was prohibited

(Obviously the equipment doesn't go away. You can start it again. But if you can't make a buck doing something, you won't do it.)

In that circumstance you might sell your right to some oil for almost nothing rather than deal with the consequences of accepting it. You might even pay someone to take it off your hands.

Options is “right but not obligation”. Physically settled futures are an obligation at maturity.

Ethereum uses proof of stake now though (since 2022). Which happened in part because Ethereum is effectively centralized, or at least significantly more-so than Bitcoin.

Other than that, it is probably tradition at this point, like with Gold.

Now, it doesn't necessarily lower the cost of an attack because you can adjust the required output to a cost that is suitable.

Compared to doing some work to getting 1 BTC per month, which you can then individually decide what to do with, instead of a lump sum you could cash out at any moment.

Mining Bitcoin requires both hardware and electricity, and the cheapest electricity is solar. There isn't any severe scarcity of the raw materials to make solar panels, or of sunlight, so Bitcoin miners can buy as many solar panels as they want and it would only increase the economies of scale for producing them for other purposes too.

Solar has inconsistent output. There is none at night and it varies based on weather during the day. Mining hardware wants a fixed constant amount of power. The logical thing for miners to do is to somewhat overbuild the amount of generation they need and then sell any surplus to the grid, and sell to the grid during the day and buy it back at night. The same incentives hold if the miners and the generators are two different parties, and the result is to increase the amount of generation capacity by more than the amount of consumption and have "too cheap to meter" during periods of above-average generation. (You were never going to get "too cheap to meter" during periods when generation is low and demand is high.) And even during short periods when demand significantly outstrips supply, then their incentive is to stop operating those few days out of the year because the spot price of electricity makes mining unprofitable then, which allows the generation capacity installed to do mining be used to support the rest of the grid and inhibits the price of electricity from rising above the point where mining becomes unprofitable even for people who already have mining hardware. It's basically a buffer that buys electricity when it's cheap and sells when it's expensive.

Bitcoin has a volatile price. When the price is high, miners buy hardware and increase or pay someone else to increase generation capacity. When the price declines, the mining hardware becomes idle but the power generation capacity still generates fungible electricity that can be used for any other purpose. The result is that miners pay to install a lot of generation capacity during the boom, and have the incentive to prioritize investing in more generation rather than newer/more efficient mining hardware because it's the thing that's still worth something if the price declines, and that generation capacity then gets offloaded into the grid during the bust, with the result that grid prices go up some during the boom and down by even more during the bust. By the next boom some of the generation added last time has already been sold to non-miners or locked into long-term contracts so now they're back to adding new capacity again.

"Incentive to fund increases in generation capacity but then not use all of it" has what effect on average prices?

Your mining rate is simply your hash rate vs the hash difficulty.

Conceptually, it's analoglous to rolling random numbers in (0,1) until you get to a number smaller than 1/X, where X is large.

How long it takes you to do that, isn't dependent on how many other people are also trying to do that, if you get 1 hit per hour, then lots of other people getting hits doesn't actually stop you getting your 1 hit per hour.

Now, that's not quite the whole truth, as there's a small amount of time needed for propagation of the previous chain, but with an average hit globally of ~10 minutes, that's not actually a big factor.

What could happen to incentivise people is increased fees if blocks get less common due to dropped miners, there'd be more competition to get into blocks if they start filling up.

That combined with the fixed costs such as depreciation as othes mentioned, keeps the risk of this form of failure to a minimum.

> Or that to scale everyone would need to store a petabyte size blockchain That is addressed in the whitepaper (SPVs and pruning)

Yes, it does but lacks depth, the problem here is they are diversifying not pivoting and by virtue of game theory for each miner they stand to win on others exit, as the mining difficulty goes down, but this is creating a loss-loss situation.

GP probably didn't mean that hardware though, but rather the facility, electricity supply, cooling, etc.

I have been paying for my VPN with lightning payments; it takes less than one second to go through.

I probably should look this up in wikipedia first.

(Both instruments are not that popular in my country, so my daily language is to put both of them as synonym, while they are different animals in some details)

HN quote of the day!

I guess you could share the power supply and cooling infra, but I am dubious the savings are enough to have half your silicon idle all the time.

> ... according to Checkonchain's difficulty regression model

It's a guess based on oil costs (as a proxy for energy costs). Personally I think it is completely worthless.

Generally a dangerous thing to have as synonyms regardless, otherwise you end up with a coal barge in the east river https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery

Especially since the "sell shovels during a gold rush" has been used to apply to nVidia

Regarding this story: I guess for most private participants, physical delivery is not possible/excluded

> Miners who successfully create a new block with a valid nonce can collect transaction fees from the included transactions and a fixed reward in bitcoins. To claim this reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included in the block, with the miner as the payee. All bitcoins in existence have been created through this type of transaction. This reward is halved every 210,000 blocks until ₿21 million have been issued in total, which is expected to occur around the year 2140. Afterward, miners will only earn from transaction fees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (emphasis mine)

Block reward stays constant, amount of work required (on average) to get a block reward is dynamic in order to make it so that total number of rewards given out over a length of time stays roughly constant.

So if too many block rewards are claimed in a given time frame, difficulty is increased to slow things down. If not enough are claimed then difficulty decreases to make it easier to get one.

> The power needed to get a given amount of money doubles whenever the reward is halved.

Yes, by that moment it does.

And some miners still stop mining if mining became too unprofitable.

And the difficulty will decrease because less miners are mining.

And the power needed to get a given amount of bitcoin will decrease. (Not necessarily to the level before halving, ofc)

Or your comment was about this part of the grandparent comment:

> keep minting at the predetermined rate

?

If so, I think you misunderstood what they were trying to say (or their wording was misleading). It's a predetermined rate. Not a constant rate. It's predetermined to be halved at (roughly) certain moments. Halving happens about every four years, and pouring more power into mining won't make it happen significantly sooner or later. That's what they were trying to say.