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Keep in mind Bitcoin miners (and Ethereum miners et al.) keep producing a not-insignificant number of coins every day, at least a % of which are typically sold
by nugget 9y ago
Keep in mind Bitcoin miners (and Ethereum miners et al.) keep producing a not-insignificant number of coins every day, at least a % of which are typically sold to pay taxes, electricity, and other operating costs. A constant stream of new investment is needed to offset that sales pressure.
- branchless 9y agoIf only someone else needed bitcoin. For example sovereign issuers of fiat currency insist that taxes are paid in their fiat currency. Because that's what really makes a currency once we get past the facile "a unit of exchange" chat.
- bluecalm 9y agoIt's not even taxes. If you get a dollar it means someone else borrowed it and they have to give it back at some point or a powerful entity with and army, police and legal system will go after their assets. Your dollar will always be valuable to someone with debt. BTC are just pretty tokens once the craze is over. There is no reason for anyone to give you anything for it.
- branchless 9y agoNot quite. You don't have to borrow a dollar for any old thing. Yes you need to eat and the shop sells food in dollars, but we need to extrapolate more. The shop wants dollars because they too have to pay their taxes. You could find a shop that takes bitcoin. You buy all your food there. Life is good, you are sat with your girlfriend eating croissants from this store. There's someone at the door. It's the government. Taxes time. Your point about the state having a monopoly on violence is critical. They want their taxes, they will send you a letter. Then another letter. Eventually they send a guy with a gun. I don't necessarily have a problem with the state having that monopoly. I'm not some raving libertarian. But the failure of bitcoin advocates to understand this distinction is wearing.
- TekMol 9y agoAfaik about $20m in bitcoins are created via mining per day. If that is insignificant or not is an interesting question.
- donkeyd 9y ago$20m when? Since the value changes significantly each day.
- TekMol 9y agohttps://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/miner-revenue-value https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/miner-revenue-value About $20m yesterday. You have to subtract the transaction fees: https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/transaction-fees-value https://charts.bitcoin.com/chart/transaction-fees-value About $2m yesterday.
- kaoD 9y agoPretty close. Around $13m right now at $7k/BTC. Until 2020 this is the formula: 12.5 * 24 * 6 * price
- darkstar999 9y agoWhat needs to happen to the price of Bitcoin for GPUs to become available to gamers again?
- dragontamer 9y agoBitcoin is mined by ASICs. Etherium is mined by GPUs at the moment. So its Etherium that needs to crash for GPUs to become available on Ebay. Etherium has been crashing too, but it seems to be a little bit more stable than BTC actually. So keep your eye on Etherium prices instead. Maybe Monero (supposed to be a CPU-coin, but some GPUs mine Monero just fine). Those are better representative of the GPU-mining market.
- darkstar999 9y agoWell they rise and fall together, so I don't see a difference at this point.
- dragontamer 9y agoETH has risen from 0.05BTC to 0.10 BTC in the past two months. Sure, the whole cryptocoin market is crashing, but ETH has crashed less than BTC has.