10 ms·

Bitcoin Hash Rate Rapidly Growing Despite Price

106 points by deegles 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
Is mining equipment purchased and paid for in advance? If so, this sounds like a few years ago in oil and gas. Prices dropping but quantities supplied rising due to sunk costs in drilling contracts.
- herendin 8y ago
  That advance investment in infrastructure must be a very important part of this effect. Those sunk costs probably are most important thing here. ASIC lead time is months and not the only advance investment. But betting on future price, speculation, also is important. Also there maybe could be influence from changes in energy pricing.
- kuroguro 8y ago
  Yep, major ASIC sellers require up front payments in some cryptocurrency, last time I checked.
- rcxdude 8y ago
  Generally yes. I would expect most bitcoin mining operations would continue for a while after they stopped making a return on investment, until they were no longer making a profit on the cost of electricity. However, electricity is a fairly large part of the cost of mining, and there is a treadmill on the hardware side as well as better ASICs are developed (the ASIC developers skim the cream of this as well, units sold to customers have likely already been used, sometimes heavily).
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > mining operations would continue for a while after they stopped making a return on investment Marginal return. The ASICs could have been bought for $10 with the expectation of making $1 a year and paying out 50¢ for electricity (a 5% yield). Now it’s making 51¢ a year (a 0.1% yield). Not enough to make economic sense, but enough to keep running the rig; 0.1% is more than zero. Broadly, I was pushing back against the author’s inchoate claim that “the continued growth in hash power demonstrates a strong, continued belief in Bitcoin by miners worldwide.”
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Profits aren't even required if you're laundering money. You might pay a 30-50% fee for any laundering scheme, so if you can only lose 15% of your money by running in the red rigs you're still accomplishing your goals
- ballenf 8y ago
  And the delayed effect of R&D into better ASIC design has an even longer delay than purchasing or manufacturing of existing designs. An article about an ASIC startup that made HN mentioned an 12-24-month lag, IIRC, between design and mass production at scale. So we're not even past the point of seeing the effect of the peak bitcoin value.
maerF0x0 8y ago
Also this article seems to miss that you can take illegal money, buy hashing equipment and launder it via mining... I'm sure having crypto in the news has got more crime bosses' attention? Obviously I have no proof of this being the case.
- magnetic 8y ago
  If you can buy hashing equipment with your money, doesn't it mean you've already "cleaned it"? If not, what kind of business provides you with hashing equipment from dirty money?
  - leakybit 8y ago
    I believe that business is called Bitmain
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    I have no idea what I am talking about, but I imagine you can exaggerate the returns and downplay the costs on an operation like bitcoin mining to squeeze in your dirty money. Like they would with any cash heavy business where it is hard to determine the actual costs and revenue.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      You still need to buy the equipment, and that is expensive. This makes zero sense.
      - mattnewton 8y ago
        It’s the same process with buying a cash buisiness, you bootstrap it with debt or clean money. You are assuming that the criminal only has access to dirty money, but it’s not that hard to take out a credit card, a loan, and/or have some savings.
        TomMarius 8y ago
stopshadowbans 8y ago
There are plenty of people out there who disagree with modern monetary policy. For many of us, a private cohort of unelected individuals levying a tax on us via inflation is immoral. We believe pro-inflation policies are the cause of the widening inequality and never ending wars we see today. Bitcoin is the only voice we have against such policies in todays world. I mine because I believe in bitcoin. I will continue to mine regardless of the exchange rate.
- Retric 8y ago
  Bitcoin is far from the only coin and thus only voice.
  - stopshadowbans 8y ago
    It’s the most secure, most developed, most widely accepted coin with a vibrant ecosystem of support.
    - leesec 8y ago
      Ethereum would like a word.
      - freejulian 8y ago
        Second layer solutions would like to speak to Ethereum about bloatware.
  - freejulian 8y ago
    Most coins are shit coins with armies of people trying to pump and dump.
- mr_spothawk 8y ago
  I think it was Noded 0.18.0 [1] (maybe 17) which reminded me of the notion of distributed money as "ethical" money. What's nice about BTC (it appears to me) is that it's the largest platform with the most buy-in & mindshare. If that changes we'll have a different set of options available to us. Until then, it's the best option that the planetary civilization has to constrain a set of powerful actors who appear to be above reproach by law for their morally deficit behavior (historically, and presently). 1 - https://noded.org/podcast/noded-0180-Q-A/ https://noded.org/podcast/noded-0180-Q-A/
ttoinou 8y ago
At Bitcoin’s peak, a single block was worth almost a quarter million dollars and miners may view the current market as a way to accumulate more Bitcoin at lower prices Don't understand that last sentence. They create money via using electricity and amortizing ASICs, not the other way around
- snarf21 8y ago
  My take was that if they already bought the ASICs, mining may make sense at break even for electricity so they can continue to accumulate and hold bitcoin if they think it will pop to 20K+ or more in the future.
- downrightmike 8y ago
  The miners are more than likely expecting that the future value is worth much more than the electricity today. Bitcoin went from 1k to 20 k inside of a year. If that happens again, or more, they would be able to sell at 10x the electricity cost.
  - thewizardofaus 8y ago
    Speculation. Might go closer to zero as well.
  - tatersolid 8y ago
    > If that happens again... It won’t. It’s a bubble. No real commodity or currency increases 20x in value in a year. It’s funny-money, Just like the dotcom Boom in the late 1990s. Bitcoin is basically unused as a currency except by criminals, and has no functional advantages over other payment systems for honest people. Just like stock of pets.com in 1998.
    - krageon 8y ago
      Have you tried sending money internationally with any reliability? Randomly getting shut down by PayPal, waiting for insane amounts of time before normal bank transfers get through, etc. Even if you completely ignore any other aspect of it, this is a legitimate use case that works well.
tboyd47 8y ago
Halving is scheduled for 2020. Miners probably have lots of dormant equipment they already purchased and are gradually turning on. They must increase hashpower if they want to maintain the same return, but it's in their best interest not to do it all at once to keep difficulty low for as long as possible. Price is probably not a big factor in the short term.
- cdiddy2 8y ago
  I sort of doubt that, you would want to use the mining equipment as soon as you get it because more efficient equipment would/could come out between now and then making your profits a lot less or even your equipment obsolete
  - tboyd47 8y ago
    This is true. They could also be mining a different coin or chain then switching over. All speculation I guess.
    - bwbw223 8y ago
      Not with bitcoin - ASICS are the only profitable way to mine. They only work on sha256 coins, and generally crypto currencies that use the same POW have similar difficulty/profitability.
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  Miners would be insane not to run their mining equipment. It gets obsolete rather quickly.
pastor_elm 8y ago
Simplest explanation: Big players are willing to operate at a loss to gain marketshare. Then when bitcoin hits $100k you're dominating the market and bringing in the big bucks.
- nwah1 8y ago
  Simpler explanation: computing power per dollar is continuing to improve.
  - craigc 8y ago
    I don’t think that explanation makes sense. It isn’t about regular computing power, it is about the hash rate of the mining hardware. They use specialized hardware (ASICs), and if you look on this page you can see a breakdown of the hashrates: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison The top one (other than the Dragonmint miners which are not listed) is the Antminer S9 which you can see was released over two years ago. If you are aware of some new mining hardware that is much faster please let me know.
- vkou 8y ago
  If you're spending $1 of electricity to mine $1 of coins, why not just spend $1 to buy the coins outright?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gomox 8y ago
    Freshly mined coins have a premium because they are clean (i.e. you are 100% sure they haven't been robbed before, which can create problems) and untraceable (i.e. there's no way to link them to the original assets used to purchase the miners). Other than that, a person might not have access to the equivalent volume of BTC but have easy access to energy/miners. Additionally, depending on how you predict hash rate and BTC price to evolve, mining might have a better ROI.
1996 8y ago
Indeed I noticed too. Profitability halved compared to 4 weeks ago. There are various possible causes, such as miners having to use equipment they ordered before, but 6 months after the peak, and given the costs of power, it seems unlikely. Mining remains widly profitable. A side effects is that it increases the security of the network. My best explanation is that we are noticing the runup to another peak. Money can't buy enough coins through mining equipment anymore, and therefore will eventually buy existing coins directly, causing another peak.
craigc 8y ago
What I would love to see is a breakdown of locations of miners over time. I wonder if the increase is in places where electricity is cheaper and/or subsidized. I do not believe the increase has anything to do with better mining hardware since the top mining hardware has not really changed much in over two years. My guess is either: 1. Most people have already invested in the hardware and are therefore okay mining at a loss with the hope that the Bitcoin price will rise again in the future. OR 2. A lot of miners are using renewable energy in which case it wouldn’t make sense to stop. For example, if you are using wind or solar or hydro energy, then the energy is still going to be available even if you turn off your mining hardware.
- scotty79 8y ago
  > For example, if you are using wind or solar or hydro energy, then the energy is still going to be available even if you turn off your mining hardware. That's only true if you can't sell the energy for more than bitcoins mined for that energy. And buy bitcoin for that money ... :)
  - craigc 8y ago
    Good point. I was assuming that it would be a surplus of energy that you are not able to sell.
- 21 8y ago
  Or: 3. VCs invest in miners, and the investment money is used to pay the costs until the price rebounds.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    It would be cheaper and significantly easier to just buy coins though.
    - 21 8y ago
      It's not such a clear cut decision. You can only buy once, while the miner can produce for many years, especially now when the ASIC tech reached the state-of-the-art so progress is slower.
HashBasher 8y ago
Bitcoin hashrate is a lagging indicator. It takes months to get the equipment and set it up. This is probably a result of the Dec boom.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Also, mining equipment is continually getting better. Large scale parallel ASICs like these are still a relatively recent field, with lots of remaining room for improvement. It's far less stagnant than current x86 processor speed. Mining is very much a red queen's race.
api 8y ago
I've heard repeatedly that in some cases Bitcoin is mined at a loss. This can be done to get money out of countries with capital controls or to launder money. They don't mind taking a haircut... it's the cost of doing business.
ur-whale 8y ago
One of my theories to explain this phenomenon (actually discussed in a previous thread) is that bitcoin mining might very well be a roundabout way to launder money, or at the very least a mechanism by which you can circumvent capital movement control: use local money to buy mining h/w + power, get clean, freshly minted BTC from that. If that is actually the case, then the "operating at a loss" part is not really an issue: I suspect all means of money laundering have a sizable built-in cost. [edit]: both theories are discussed at length in other comments below.
lancewiggs 8y ago
Supply has going up (many producers), and demand has fallen relative to that - as evidenced by the price falls and margin collapse for miners. In the real mining industry we see the same effect, where there is a commodity price (for say Nickel or Iron), and the suppliers, faced with very high capital costs, will continue to produce until their marginal cost is underneath the marginal revenue. At this stage they slow or mothball mines, smelters and refineries. That comes at a huge cost. The last mines left are the ones with the most efficient costs/tonne, which is combination of access to ore, the type of ore, the closeness and efficiency of smelters and refineries and so on. A big part of it is the scale of the operation, and how up to date the equipment is, but also how well it is all operated. Aluminium refining is particularly relevant, as electricity is one of the main input costs. We have seen refineries close down and sell their power back during extended periods of high electricity prices and relatively low aluminium prices (e.g. when Enron dove up Ca. prices). Newer/larger aluminium plants are fr more efficient, but the price of electricity is everything. (I've led turnarounds at very large nickel and alumninium smelters/refineries and helped others with their turnarounds on mines/operations) In the case of bacon mining the main factors are, once the computing equipment is acquired, the price of electricity and the conversion efficiency per kWh.
- antiphase 8y ago
  Tell me more about this bacon mining.
  - bwbw223 8y ago
    I’m interested too- it sounds like something I might try this morning...
jenniferwalker 8y ago
Paxful, localbitcoins and coinbase scammed of my bitcoins when i was trying to sell them a few weeks ago. I lost $3,000 worth of bitcoins to thos as*holes! Until I came across cryptoexmart. I sell bitcoins on their platform and I get paid almost instantly. Their website is cryptoexmart. com
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Hash rate increases are great. I wish they'd do a massive jump that takes miner profitability out of reach even if it were 100k/coin. The amount of power used on bitcoin miners isn't good for the world, unless it funds alternative energy infrastructure that eventually gets repurposed for other reasons, but I doubt that is the case.
nobrains 8y ago
I think the reasons are as follows: 1) The supply of the miners are usually delayed by a month or two in some cases. So people buying miners when bitcoin was 18,000 to 12,000 in Jan, would be receiving their miners in March or later. 2) Prices of miners have fallen because of the price of bitcoin. You can buy an s9 miner for just USD 600 right now (https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=000201806281743005275bf20LAJ062E https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002018062817430...) which might have resulted in people increasing their investment in miners, increasing the hashrate.

106 points by deegles 8y ago

Is mining equipment purchased and paid for in advance? If so, this sounds like a few years ago in oil and gas. Prices dropping but quantities supplied rising due to sunk costs in drilling contracts.

herendin 8y ago
That advance investment in infrastructure must be a very important part of this effect. Those sunk costs probably are most important thing here. ASIC lead time is months and not the only advance investment. But betting on future price, speculation, also is important. Also there maybe could be influence from changes in energy pricing.
kuroguro 8y ago
Yep, major ASIC sellers require up front payments in some cryptocurrency, last time I checked.
rcxdude 8y ago
Generally yes. I would expect most bitcoin mining operations would continue for a while after they stopped making a return on investment, until they were no longer making a profit on the cost of electricity. However, electricity is a fairly large part of the cost of mining, and there is a treadmill on the hardware side as well as better ASICs are developed (the ASIC developers skim the cream of this as well, units sold to customers have likely already been used, sometimes heavily).
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > mining operations would continue for a while after they stopped making a return on investment Marginal return. The ASICs could have been bought for $10 with the expectation of making $1 a year and paying out 50¢ for electricity (a 5% yield). Now it’s making 51¢ a year (a 0.1% yield). Not enough to make economic sense, but enough to keep running the rig; 0.1% is more than zero. Broadly, I was pushing back against the author’s inchoate claim that “the continued growth in hash power demonstrates a strong, continued belief in Bitcoin by miners worldwide.”
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Profits aren't even required if you're laundering money. You might pay a 30-50% fee for any laundering scheme, so if you can only lose 15% of your money by running in the red rigs you're still accomplishing your goals
ballenf 8y ago
And the delayed effect of R&D into better ASIC design has an even longer delay than purchasing or manufacturing of existing designs. An article about an ASIC startup that made HN mentioned an 12-24-month lag, IIRC, between design and mass production at scale. So we're not even past the point of seeing the effect of the peak bitcoin value.

maerF0x0 8y ago

Also this article seems to miss that you can take illegal money, buy hashing equipment and launder it via mining... I'm sure having crypto in the news has got more crime bosses' attention? Obviously I have no proof of this being the case.

magnetic 8y ago
If you can buy hashing equipment with your money, doesn't it mean you've already "cleaned it"? If not, what kind of business provides you with hashing equipment from dirty money?
- leakybit 8y ago
  I believe that business is called Bitmain
- mattnewton 8y ago
  I have no idea what I am talking about, but I imagine you can exaggerate the returns and downplay the costs on an operation like bitcoin mining to squeeze in your dirty money. Like they would with any cash heavy business where it is hard to determine the actual costs and revenue.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    You still need to buy the equipment, and that is expensive. This makes zero sense.
    - mattnewton 8y ago
      It’s the same process with buying a cash buisiness, you bootstrap it with debt or clean money. You are assuming that the criminal only has access to dirty money, but it’s not that hard to take out a credit card, a loan, and/or have some savings.
      - TomMarius 8y ago

stopshadowbans 8y ago

There are plenty of people out there who disagree with modern monetary policy. For many of us, a private cohort of unelected individuals levying a tax on us via inflation is immoral. We believe pro-inflation policies are the cause of the widening inequality and never ending wars we see today. Bitcoin is the only voice we have against such policies in todays world. I mine because I believe in bitcoin. I will continue to mine regardless of the exchange rate.

Retric 8y ago
Bitcoin is far from the only coin and thus only voice.
- stopshadowbans 8y ago
  It’s the most secure, most developed, most widely accepted coin with a vibrant ecosystem of support.
  - leesec 8y ago
    Ethereum would like a word.
    - freejulian 8y ago
      Second layer solutions would like to speak to Ethereum about bloatware.
- freejulian 8y ago
  Most coins are shit coins with armies of people trying to pump and dump.
mr_spothawk 8y ago
I think it was Noded 0.18.0 [1] (maybe 17) which reminded me of the notion of distributed money as "ethical" money. What's nice about BTC (it appears to me) is that it's the largest platform with the most buy-in & mindshare. If that changes we'll have a different set of options available to us. Until then, it's the best option that the planetary civilization has to constrain a set of powerful actors who appear to be above reproach by law for their morally deficit behavior (historically, and presently). 1 - https://noded.org/podcast/noded-0180-Q-A/ https://noded.org/podcast/noded-0180-Q-A/

ttoinou 8y ago

At Bitcoin’s peak, a single block was worth almost a quarter million dollars and miners may view the current market as a way to accumulate more Bitcoin at lower prices Don't understand that last sentence. They create money via using electricity and amortizing ASICs, not the other way around

snarf21 8y ago
My take was that if they already bought the ASICs, mining may make sense at break even for electricity so they can continue to accumulate and hold bitcoin if they think it will pop to 20K+ or more in the future.
downrightmike 8y ago
The miners are more than likely expecting that the future value is worth much more than the electricity today. Bitcoin went from 1k to 20 k inside of a year. If that happens again, or more, they would be able to sell at 10x the electricity cost.
- thewizardofaus 8y ago
  Speculation. Might go closer to zero as well.
- tatersolid 8y ago
  > If that happens again... It won’t. It’s a bubble. No real commodity or currency increases 20x in value in a year. It’s funny-money, Just like the dotcom Boom in the late 1990s. Bitcoin is basically unused as a currency except by criminals, and has no functional advantages over other payment systems for honest people. Just like stock of pets.com in 1998.
  - krageon 8y ago
    Have you tried sending money internationally with any reliability? Randomly getting shut down by PayPal, waiting for insane amounts of time before normal bank transfers get through, etc. Even if you completely ignore any other aspect of it, this is a legitimate use case that works well.

tboyd47 8y ago

Halving is scheduled for 2020. Miners probably have lots of dormant equipment they already purchased and are gradually turning on. They must increase hashpower if they want to maintain the same return, but it's in their best interest not to do it all at once to keep difficulty low for as long as possible. Price is probably not a big factor in the short term.

cdiddy2 8y ago
I sort of doubt that, you would want to use the mining equipment as soon as you get it because more efficient equipment would/could come out between now and then making your profits a lot less or even your equipment obsolete
- tboyd47 8y ago
  This is true. They could also be mining a different coin or chain then switching over. All speculation I guess.
  - bwbw223 8y ago
    Not with bitcoin - ASICS are the only profitable way to mine. They only work on sha256 coins, and generally crypto currencies that use the same POW have similar difficulty/profitability.
bufferoverflow 8y ago
Miners would be insane not to run their mining equipment. It gets obsolete rather quickly.

pastor_elm 8y ago

Simplest explanation: Big players are willing to operate at a loss to gain marketshare. Then when bitcoin hits $100k you're dominating the market and bringing in the big bucks.

nwah1 8y ago
Simpler explanation: computing power per dollar is continuing to improve.
- craigc 8y ago
  I don’t think that explanation makes sense. It isn’t about regular computing power, it is about the hash rate of the mining hardware. They use specialized hardware (ASICs), and if you look on this page you can see a breakdown of the hashrates: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison The top one (other than the Dragonmint miners which are not listed) is the Antminer S9 which you can see was released over two years ago. If you are aware of some new mining hardware that is much faster please let me know.
vkou 8y ago
If you're spending $1 of electricity to mine $1 of coins, why not just spend $1 to buy the coins outright?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gomox 8y ago
  Freshly mined coins have a premium because they are clean (i.e. you are 100% sure they haven't been robbed before, which can create problems) and untraceable (i.e. there's no way to link them to the original assets used to purchase the miners). Other than that, a person might not have access to the equivalent volume of BTC but have easy access to energy/miners. Additionally, depending on how you predict hash rate and BTC price to evolve, mining might have a better ROI.

1996 8y ago

Indeed I noticed too. Profitability halved compared to 4 weeks ago. There are various possible causes, such as miners having to use equipment they ordered before, but 6 months after the peak, and given the costs of power, it seems unlikely. Mining remains widly profitable. A side effects is that it increases the security of the network. My best explanation is that we are noticing the runup to another peak. Money can't buy enough coins through mining equipment anymore, and therefore will eventually buy existing coins directly, causing another peak.

craigc 8y ago

What I would love to see is a breakdown of locations of miners over time. I wonder if the increase is in places where electricity is cheaper and/or subsidized. I do not believe the increase has anything to do with better mining hardware since the top mining hardware has not really changed much in over two years. My guess is either: 1. Most people have already invested in the hardware and are therefore okay mining at a loss with the hope that the Bitcoin price will rise again in the future. OR 2. A lot of miners are using renewable energy in which case it wouldn’t make sense to stop. For example, if you are using wind or solar or hydro energy, then the energy is still going to be available even if you turn off your mining hardware.

scotty79 8y ago
> For example, if you are using wind or solar or hydro energy, then the energy is still going to be available even if you turn off your mining hardware. That's only true if you can't sell the energy for more than bitcoins mined for that energy. And buy bitcoin for that money ... :)
- craigc 8y ago
  Good point. I was assuming that it would be a surplus of energy that you are not able to sell.
21 8y ago
Or: 3. VCs invest in miners, and the investment money is used to pay the costs until the price rebounds.
- garmaine 8y ago
  It would be cheaper and significantly easier to just buy coins though.
  - 21 8y ago
    It's not such a clear cut decision. You can only buy once, while the miner can produce for many years, especially now when the ASIC tech reached the state-of-the-art so progress is slower.

HashBasher 8y ago

Bitcoin hashrate is a lagging indicator. It takes months to get the equipment and set it up. This is probably a result of the Dec boom.

CydeWeys 8y ago
Also, mining equipment is continually getting better. Large scale parallel ASICs like these are still a relatively recent field, with lots of remaining room for improvement. It's far less stagnant than current x86 processor speed. Mining is very much a red queen's race.

api 8y ago

I've heard repeatedly that in some cases Bitcoin is mined at a loss. This can be done to get money out of countries with capital controls or to launder money. They don't mind taking a haircut... it's the cost of doing business.

ur-whale 8y ago

One of my theories to explain this phenomenon (actually discussed in a previous thread) is that bitcoin mining might very well be a roundabout way to launder money, or at the very least a mechanism by which you can circumvent capital movement control: use local money to buy mining h/w + power, get clean, freshly minted BTC from that. If that is actually the case, then the "operating at a loss" part is not really an issue: I suspect all means of money laundering have a sizable built-in cost. [edit]: both theories are discussed at length in other comments below.

lancewiggs 8y ago

Supply has going up (many producers), and demand has fallen relative to that - as evidenced by the price falls and margin collapse for miners. In the real mining industry we see the same effect, where there is a commodity price (for say Nickel or Iron), and the suppliers, faced with very high capital costs, will continue to produce until their marginal cost is underneath the marginal revenue. At this stage they slow or mothball mines, smelters and refineries. That comes at a huge cost. The last mines left are the ones with the most efficient costs/tonne, which is combination of access to ore, the type of ore, the closeness and efficiency of smelters and refineries and so on. A big part of it is the scale of the operation, and how up to date the equipment is, but also how well it is all operated. Aluminium refining is particularly relevant, as electricity is one of the main input costs. We have seen refineries close down and sell their power back during extended periods of high electricity prices and relatively low aluminium prices (e.g. when Enron dove up Ca. prices). Newer/larger aluminium plants are fr more efficient, but the price of electricity is everything. (I've led turnarounds at very large nickel and alumninium smelters/refineries and helped others with their turnarounds on mines/operations) In the case of bacon mining the main factors are, once the computing equipment is acquired, the price of electricity and the conversion efficiency per kWh.

antiphase 8y ago
Tell me more about this bacon mining.
- bwbw223 8y ago
  I’m interested too- it sounds like something I might try this morning...

jenniferwalker 8y ago

Paxful, localbitcoins and coinbase scammed of my bitcoins when i was trying to sell them a few weeks ago. I lost $3,000 worth of bitcoins to thos as*holes! Until I came across cryptoexmart. I sell bitcoins on their platform and I get paid almost instantly. Their website is cryptoexmart. com

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

Hash rate increases are great. I wish they'd do a massive jump that takes miner profitability out of reach even if it were 100k/coin. The amount of power used on bitcoin miners isn't good for the world, unless it funds alternative energy infrastructure that eventually gets repurposed for other reasons, but I doubt that is the case.

nobrains 8y ago

I think the reasons are as follows: 1) The supply of the miners are usually delayed by a month or two in some cases. So people buying miners when bitcoin was 18,000 to 12,000 in Jan, would be receiving their miners in March or later. 2) Prices of miners have fallen because of the price of bitcoin. You can buy an s9 miner for just USD 600 right now (https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=000201806281743005275bf20LAJ062E https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002018062817430...) which might have resulted in people increasing their investment in miners, increasing the hashrate.