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Barbie doll manufacturers don't want to use electricity, and barbie doll manufacturing isn't zero sum. It's fundamentally different. If someone learned how to
by bpodgursky 9y ago
Barbie doll manufacturers don't want to use electricity, and barbie doll manufacturing isn't zero sum. It's fundamentally different.
If someone learned how to make a barbie doll which used 1% of the current electricity usage, a couple extra dolls would get created, but electricity usage would drop a lot.
If someone learned how to make bitcoins with 1% of the current electricity usage, _miners would just mine 100x what they do now_. Fundamentally, the amount of electricity that will be wasted on bitcoin mining is driven by the price. So as it gets more efficient, it becomes worth it to waste more to match the price in the race for mined blocks.
It's horrible, and it's incredibly dishonest to compare it to any other kind of manufacturing.
- elif 9y agoI see what you mean, but in reality miners are constrained by mining hardware production speeds, and mining hardware pricing which charges a 10x more for a 10x more efficient machine. It is almost always a margin call whether buying a new machine will pay for itself, so the 100x elastic response you are describing seems unreasonable. There are also 2 factors to control the growth of miners, reward halving and the end of this weird period of high fee transactions. After transaction fees drop down, a lot of older mining hardware will be unprofitable and come offline.