4 ms·
If what you say is true then that would imply that miners are losing money. I don't think that is the case. Total network hash rate has strong growth. People
by pmorici 10y ago
If what you say is true then that would imply that miners are losing money. I don't think that is the case. Total network hash rate has strong growth. People don't normally invest huge sums to turn a loss.
- danbruc 10y agoThey are not losing money, they get the block reward to sell. This in turn makes all Bitcoin users pay indirectly due to deflation but that is currently not visible because there is money flowing into the system. But you can just do the math for yourself - the network hash rate is currently 3,160 petahash per second, 300,000 transactions are processed per day, an AntMiner S9 - the most efficient currently available miner as far as I can tell - consumes 98 joules per terahash and you can buy electricity for 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. With this numbers you end up at 1.24 Dollar per transaction and that is as optimistic as it gets when looking at electricity costs. Then add costs for hardware, rent, cooling, labor, profits, ...
- pmorici 10y agoAh, you mean if you divide the block reward by transactions per block. Yeah in that case it's about $7 per transaction right now. That is why we need to increase on-chain transactions so that those fixed per block costs are amortized over a larger number of transactions.