
The Days of Bitcoin Mining Are Nearly over (2019) - flipchart
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-open-source/13218-the-days-of-bitcoin-mining-are-nearly-over.html
======
llcoolv
The very same claim was made after the January 2018 bubble burst... Truth is
that the hash rate is going up over time[0] and this is not really a problem.
There are also too many misunderstandings in this article for me to bother
listing them one by one.

0\. [https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/hash-
rate](https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/hash-rate)

~~~
DagAgren
Your link shows the hashrate is crashing massively at the moment, you know.

~~~
tryptophan
Crashing back to where it was in 2019?

~~~
DagAgren
Crashing more in relative terms than it ever has in the history of bitcoin.

------
RichardHeart
This article is bad. 1\. The cost the mine a resource trends towards the value
of the resource. As Bitcoin value goes up and down, hash rate tracks it going
up and down. Increases in efficiency allow you to hash more at lower cost.
However this is a red herring, as waste is required for POW, because:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory)

Thus, money wasted on hardware and electricity tracks Bitcoin price, and hash
rate itself is a function of efficiency times energy waste while staying under
BTC price profitability cap.

2\. Most blockchains are empty, and they all work "decently." As decently as
the worlds most expensive and slowest databases can be. What blockchains need
is not higher TPS or lower fees, but more users. They say the demand for
unlimited free storage is infinite, so a fee market must always exist, bounded
by storage costs (and duplication across many nodes.)

By the way, when I say most blockchains are empty, the amount of fee revenue
generated per chain per day is PITIFUL and falls of amazingly fast.
[https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc,bch_roll=7_left=Fe...](https://coinmetrics.io/charts/#assets=btc,bch_roll=7_left=FeeTotUSD_zoom=1279411200000,1584662400000)
says: BTC $342,000 in fees per day. ETH $95,000 in fees per day. BCH $130 in
fees a day

3\. 1000tps is already in production by zkrollups and optimistic rollups on
ETH. See it in production at loopring.io. There's more BTC wrapped on ETH than
in lightning on BTC.

Disclaimer: I founded the #76 highest marketcap cryptocurrency, and one of its
features is not paying miners block rewards, only fees.

P.S. Scaling is cured enough for now using zkrollups. The market for slow,
expensive databases should always be restricted to things that REQUIRE
censorship resistance, and most things do not.

------
kylebenzle
"The problem is that transaction fees easily become a significant part of the
total cost to the end user meaning that Bitcoin becomes unattractive for all
but large purchases."

This is NOT a quality of Bitcoin, only the Bitcoin implementation called
"Core". This "problem" was solved by Satoshi himself and has been activated in
the chain, Bitcoin Cash.

The whole argument in this article is baseless and assumes that for some
reason the "Core" implementation is the only one possible.

~~~
throwaway2048
Core is the only implementation anyone really cares about, a hard fork can do
arbitrary things, the problem is people need to use it, and they aren't using
bitcoin cash.

The actual bitcoin people care about has massive transaction fees (sometimes
peaking above $20+), its nearly unusable as a currency.

~~~
smabie
I mean, Western Union can have way higher transaction fees, and people still
use that for some reason.

