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Ummm, wait what. It costs 88k to mine a bit coin?
So then Bitcoin mining only makes sense if you also heavily invest in the energy company you're paying, and even then, it's just a modified human centipede transaction
Sssh. It is important that the world burns for some rich dude's fake money.
Value is only what people agree to. State mandated currency is no more real than any other currency.
Cool, so I can head down to the grocery store and use it?
Can you use us dollars in a grocery store in the eu? Does that mean the dollar has no value?
I'm pointing out that while global society has already agreed on the value of goverent issued currencies, they already function as one.
At best crypto has two use cases:
- illegal activities
- gambling
That is it. I can't use it as Any sort of real currency because the vast majority of people/enterprises don't recognize it. For something to be a real currency it must be usable as such.
What we have is pretend money that destroys the environment for no real reason.
Bitcoin uses a public ledger making it a terrible choice for crimes. While not everyone wants to directly accept bitcoin there are exchanges throughout the world happy to exchange it for local currency. Bitcoin is not backed by violence like state currencies. It takes time for a new form of value to gain widespread acceptance.
Gold was used as a currency for thousands of years but you can’t use it at a local grocery store either.
Bitcoin’s value is backed by math and computers and that is somehow worse than the energy and violence used by governments?
The public ledger is irrelevant. I don’t need any credentials to sign up for 1 or 1k accounts. Yes it can be tracked, but someone with a modicum of skill could make it extremely difficult.
Bitcoin is not backed by violence like state currencies.
Backed by, no, used by, absolutely.
Gold was used as a currency for thousands of years but you can’t use it at a local grocery store either.
That is largely irrelevant. Like crypto, I can’t take it to the grocery store. It no longer functions as a currency. That is cool, but don’t conflate it.
Bitcoin’s value is backed by math and computers and that is somehow worse than the energy and violence used by governments?
My dude, don’t pretend computing and math are magic. We are breaking some fucking hashes. Your perception of value of a broken hash doesn’t translate into actual utility.
than the energy and violence used by governments?
Please pass me a dose of your soma.
You are arguing in favor of government control of money and arguing I’m high? Ok buddy. Sure thing.
It has utility. Something that crypto currently lacks.
My dude, you were literally whispering math and compute as though they are magic words.
The algorithms aren't even terribly interesting.
A hash function is still math independent of your interest. Bitcoin is the first currency that has self emerged without being mandated by the state. Feel free to ignore it.
It is a boring application of existing hash functions to create a really inefficient data structure. It is impractical for just about a everything including currency, and if crypto took off the hard limits on transactions (iirc) would make its use quite difficult.
Bitcoin is the first currency
I live in an objective universe that I have relatively little control over. My employer won't pay me in it, and I can't go down to the supermarket and buy a loaf of bread with it to feed my family. No one can compel you to use any particular words, but there really isn't a basis for me to think of it as an actual currency beyond being a novelty.
The spices in my cabinet would have functioned as more of a currency in our shared history than what crypto could ever accomplish, but I don't expect my employer to give me sage, either.
Bitcoin runs on electricity, not internal combustion engines. Bitcoin’s use of energy is no more or less damaging to the environment than any other electricity user in the same area.
Cool, cool. Which of my appliances requires 535.6 megawatt-hours to run? I mean, my house is about 10, so I may be missing something.
Again your comments don’t actually address the argument at hand.
I'm sorry, let me clarify. A megawatt is a unit of electricity.
I am well aware.
The idea behind using distributed compute nodes for blockchain was that the blockchain itself would carry applications with commercial value, and the token itself would represent a share in that commercial value which would scale accordingly. There would be no reason to mine coins if those applications never materialized, so effort would always track alongside the intrinsic value of the network itself.
Bitcoin never developed any real applications, and the entire value was speculation. This meant people raced to mine coins as fast as they could, well beyond the intrinsic value of the app stack (which doesn't exist). So now the network has effectively collapsed for all intents and purposes, but it is still needed for moving Bitcoin around, so the people who have huge investments already basically have to keep throwing money at mining in order to preserve the "liquidity" of their current stash.
Bitcoin was created to enable payments based upon cryptographic proof rather than trust, and doesn’t need additional applications. Mining has always been a race which is why long ago people figured out how to mine on GPUs - it was faster than mining on CPUs. Then onto ASICS. If people mined less than difficulty would adjust downwards and mining has nothing to do with liquidity.
So then Bitcoin mining only makes sense if you also heavily invest in the energy company
Correct. Buying your own solar panels or wind turbines. Your mining rig only makes sense when your expected return from the rig is greater than the return you could get from backfeeding the grid.
Or if you can somehow make use of the "waste" heat, perhaps by heating your home, or preheating water before it reaches your water heater.
Between this and the AI bubble, there has been a tremendous flight of capital from the middle and lower classes to the parasite class.
And you're dead on with the human centipede corollary - once money enters the vortex it stays there until it gets excreted in some unholy fashion. Like private armies and rape islands.
But the period between when costs exceed revenue and when difficulty falls low enough to restore profitability is where the damage happens, both to miners and to the spot market that absorbs their forced selling.
Ohh no, the poor people investing in a useless product are not making money while they waste energy and ressources. Next you are gonna tell me that gold and diamond prices are also dropping and some poor investors wont get richer by it.
Isn't it the other way round?
Difficulty drops because miners are losing money while mining and shut down miners, which by protocol makes the Bitcoin network adjust to the resulting difficulty (happens each 2.016 blocks afair).
Let more and more miners shut down and you get an idling amount of mining power capable of attacking the network. Why would they do that you may wonder. Well, shorting BTC, attacking the network and cashing in could be a way to recoup their losses. Mining equipment isn't cheap and letting it idle makes no money.
I'm not saying this will happen soon or at all. I'm just saying it can happen. It's one of the flaws of proof of work (PoW).
more!
womp, womp
The article explains that part but the short version is:
when miners operate at loss, they start to leave.
The less miners there is the lower the difficulty to mine becomes so its cheaper to mine until and equilibrium is restored.
problem is that difficulty adjustment is not automatic and its done only once every few months so until next adjustment miners would have to operate at loss or sell their expensive equipment and exit for good.
[...]problem is that difficulty adjustment is not automatic and its done only once every few months so [...]
Last time I checked it was automatic and done each 2.016 blocks, which should ideally take 14 days time (10 minutes per block at average).
When the difficulty gets adjusted, it gets automatically set to a level, which would take exactly 14 days to mine the next 2.016 blocks.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
I'm no friend of PoW in general and even less so of the way Bitcoin implemented it (resource hungry arms race for specialized hardware compared to PoW done only by general computing devices cough Monero), but insinuating there'd be some manual adjustment is disingenuous.
Yes I incorrectly wrote "not automatic" when it should've been "not instant". Thanks for the correction also for correcting the delay.
The gist of my comment is still valid though. miners are operating at a loss because they're waiting for the difficulty adjustment to happen.
The gist of you comment is valid and points out a major flaw:
miners need to operate at a gain.
With shrinking amounts of BTC being created by the network for producing blocks (that reward getting halved each 210,000 blocks), that gain is at risk, because it can be doubted whether transaction fees can cover the gap.
With that gain being at risk, the network security is going to be at risk.
Ethereum did the right thing and aligned ETH holders and block producers by switching from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
That also reduced the ecological footprint to a tiny fraction of what it was before.
I am 100% pro Ethereum for adopting proof of work. Though for me its for ethical/environmental reasons not technical
It does sound lik e a major moan error.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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