Quote from: d5000 on June 18, 2024, 07:04:12 PM

Quote from: MeGold666 on June 18, 2024, 06:16:52 AM

The security of the Bitcoin is in hands of the few companies, if profitability drops or they find something more profitable to mine then Bitcoin network will be doomed.

I disagree with this logic.

First, if "they" (I guess you mean the big mining companies like Riot, ViaBTC etc.?) find something more profitable, then difficulty will go down, and it will become easier for smaller players to enter mining again. Decentralization in this case will probably grow, although more slowly than in the past due to higher entry barriers.

If the diff drops, so will security - small miners will join but the security will never be as high because this small miners will never be as profitable as large scale miners and the network will be at constant threat of state sponsored 51% attack from North Korea or some other sources because it will not be enough to secure a trillion+ dollar network.

Quote from: d5000 on June 18, 2024, 07:04:12 PM

Second, this will be a gradual process. While halvings are unique events, the consequences are different for each miner, depending on its exact business model (e.g. if it relies more on cheap electricity or on other scale effect, on speculation [HODLing] or not, etc.). So the most likely scenario is that if some big miner retires from the business or goes bankrupt this would be first good for the other mining companies as the difficulty pressure will be lower (hashrate will probably grow more slowly), and will help them to stay in the business.

Which means the mining will be even more centralized than today, more power in the hands of few.
This is not good for many reasons, one of which is Government control - possible forcing of OFAC rules on mining company or straight out ban like in China.
In this situation network will again have low security.

Quote from: d5000 on June 18, 2024, 07:04:12 PM

There is also an additional point. Bitcoin mining companies are basically server farms. In periods of low profitability, they can diversify their income sources offering servers for other cloud services. This is already been done by most big mining companies, and it is also one of my reasons why I think that if profitability drops there will not be a "big hashrate crunch", but a very gradual process, because bigger miners will slowly dedicate more percentage of their farms to other cloud services once their hardware becomes unprofitable, instead of going offline completely. And that will re-balance with difficulty growth again and again.

Bitcoin mining is done on ASIC's, not on general purpose CPU.
No one in the world needs this power aside from Bitcoin and other, less profitable coins running on SHA-256.

Quote from: Wind_FURY on June 27, 2024, 06:19:15 PM

Peter Todd has actually been entertaining that idea of adding a tail-emission or extending Bitcoin's inflationary period indefinitely. But it's going to be very hard to convince the community, and many people believe that the network has ossified to the 21,000,000 total coin supply. But perhaps if the situation will be life or death for Bitcoin, the community might start to entertain a discussion of a tail-emission.

It would split the community for sure, the discussion should be done now as this tech should be running on Bitcoin years ago.
It will be too late for any action when problems arise.

Quote from: d5000 on June 19, 2024, 04:13:35 AM

However I agree with you that MeGold666's fears are probably unfounded - if profitability was that bad we would see a slower increase.

Here's an interesting info on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw6aMxaNmXA&t=416s

I suspect that hashrate was increasing only because mining companies wanted to eliminate competition.

Currently we can observe a drop in network hashrate:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#alltime

Quote from: cryptosize on June 18, 2024, 10:58:52 PM

Bitcoin will help speed up the green energy transition. Few people understand this (even among the BTC community, let alone no-coiners). Wink

Even fewer people understand that green energy is not green and it also produces waste.
Solar panels have a life span, batteries have a life span, electronics that run it have a life span, and nothing of it is degradable or recyclable.
Other "green" solutions are even worse...

The greenest solution is nuclear power plant, snowflakes will disagree.

Here is some information to all the glorifying disinformation propaganda circling around "green" energy when it comes to solar:
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power

The whole green industry is a scam to earn $$$ for companies who produce this waste.

We can argue all week about it but I let the time show it's madness.
I'm out from the forum for a longer while as I have some work to do, see you when the roof starts collapsing (if nothing changes to the Bitcoin protocol).