Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Asic devaluating bitcoin
by
Stephen Gornick
on 03/07/2013, 17:35:04 UTC
Hello, i think asics are devaluating bitcoin and will continue to do so because they are extremely cost efficient (i mean electricity per gh).

You are making the classic mistake in thinking that in crypto coins that the cost of production has anything to do with the market price.

If there was no limit as to how many bitcoins could be mined, you would have a point.   Production would increase, and the flood of additional bitcoins would suppress the exchange rate until mining no longer is lucrative -- and an equilibrium would be reached.  

But with mining, difficulty adjusts and thus no matter how much additional mining capacity comes online, roughly the same amount of bitcoins are produced day after day.

So the amount of mining occurring (hashing capacity) doesn't drive the price, but instead is simply a reaction to price.

Because of how efficient ASIC mining hardware is, the cost of electricity is a trivially low percent of the mining revenue.  This contrasts how with GPUs the cost of electricity does now (... or soon will) exceed the revenue.  

So ASIC has (or will) demolished the profitability when mining using GPUs, but it has little to do with the exchange rate.  (other than, perhaps, miners investing their coins to buy ASIC hardware, and in turn ASIC hardware vendors flooding the market with coins when cashing them out for R&D and manufacturing costs.)