
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless - smacktoward
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/guid/7131BE3C-F4E7-11E8-AD71-A9FA5576A6EF
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londons_explore
I totally agree with this article.

Anyone who needs a hand getting rid of any unwanted (and now 'close to
worthless' bitcoins) can send them to my disposal facility:

bitcoin:1GCEvj54xSr3Hu1DPg2GKw2VkDgSaX5SB7

Not many incoming transactions? I guess not many users think they're worthless
afterall...

~~~
londons_explore
Thanks kind HN'er for the 0.01 BTC. I shall dispose of it carefully for you.
:-P

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WheelsAtLarge
Bitcoin will live on. It might get to a fraction of a penny but bitcoin will
live on. My opinion is that the mining algorithm will change so that mining
will be less energy intensive but it's still early days for it so don't count
it out.

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londons_explore
If bitcoin ends up worth a fraction of a penny, mining will become far less
energy intensive automatically. The market around bitcoin mining will make
that happen without any intervention.

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sharemywin
From the article the cost to mine is around $5000.

wouldn't that mean the price should hover around the cost to replace?

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aeternus
The cost to mine is dynamic. Anyone suggesting a static price has a poor
understanding of the protocol.

Fewer miners mean difficulty will adjust downward and those still mining will
have a higher probability of getting the block reward.

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Sir_Substance
I think you already know this, but for the benefit of others who don't, the
author addresses this, but gets it wrong:

>However, the number of miners cannot fall below a certain level, because
without the miners providing the computing power to maintain the ledger, the
bitcoin blockchain will not remain viable.

That's not actually correct. The difficulty of mining can drop to basically
zero. The entire throughput of bitcoin as it stands today could be calculated
on a single 2005 era cellphone if the difficulty dropped far enough, which it
would if enough miners left the network.

Of course, if there was only one single 2005 era cellphone running, someone
malicious could online /two/ 2005 era cellphones and then use their majority
share of the network to start double-spending, so you do want enough compute
power that it's not trivial for a single actor to beat it out.

There is an interesting lower threshold on mining difficulty that we haven't
hit yet, and that's the point where GPU mining becomes viable again. There's
quite a lot of small-time GPU rigs out there that have been mining some of the
more interesting altcoins like monero and etherium that could switch over to
bitcoin if enough asic miners leave the network.

So I'm not convinced on the authors "critical tipping point" thesis. There's a
potential floor there he doesn't seem to be aware of.

~~~
gus_massa
If the drop is smooth it would not be a problem. There can be a problem if
there is a very abrupt drop and until the next difficulty recalculation the
block generation rate would be too slow.

This is similar to what happened with the creation of the Bitcoin Cash fork.
Just after the fork, the hash rate in the Bitcoin Cash was 1/10 of the
previous rate, so each block would need like 2 hours instead of the usual 10
minutes. They expected something like this, so in the fork they added an
special rule to reduce the difficulty automatically if no one finds a block
for a long time. (This rule is not in the main Bitcoin.)

~~~
Sir_Substance
>If the drop is smooth it would not be a problem. There can be a problem if
there is a very abrupt drop and until the next difficulty recalculation the
block generation rate would be too slow.

That's always been a weakness in the difficulty recalculation algorithm. There
are a few other ones out there that can do much faster re-targeting in
interesting ways, such as gravity well[1]. I'm assuming that if we faced a
sudden exodus of that scale that dramatically wedged block generation, we'd
see a hard-fork to change the recalculation algorithm. The hard-fork would
certainly win because anyone who refuses the hard-fork can't mine blocks due
to the difficulty being too high for the network.

[1] [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/21730/how-
does-t...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/21730/how-does-the-
kimoto-gravity-well-regulate-difficulty)

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3KQgt0Cl
Aaaaaaand the author is now buying Bitcoin.

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mimixco
The real value of Bitcoin is naturally going to settle around the cost to make
it, like anything else. And that isn't zero.

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hndamien
Still a multiple of my sell price.

