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Is Bitcoin diving again? I can never keep track.

by PhasmaFelis 8y ago

bdcravens 8y ago
Well, you know it's not shooting up, as HN isn't currently swarming with the Bitcoin zealots from Reddit.
- Kiro 8y ago
  Never seen a single positive word about Bitcoin on Hacker News, even when price was at its peak, so if it's true what you say they must have been doing a pretty bad job.
  - celticninja 8y ago
    Never is a very bold statement. However price spikes do tend to be met with negativity if they are discussed at all. A price spike is of no technological value so HN doesn't really worry about them (unlike say Reddit where it is the overwhelming topic).
  - bdcravens 8y ago
    I've seen a lot of it. I can recognize it from a mile away, as I spend a lot of time on various crypto subreddits. (I was mining in 2011; I'm active there, under a different username with a different voice) Personally I think there's nothing wrong with what passes for typical discussion there: high optimism, but low substance. It just has no place on HN, and is downvoted accordingly. That's not a conspiracy against Bitcoin as much as a community standard here for what makes for substantive discussion.
username223 8y ago
No, it has been meandering around $3600 for a month or so (around the average electricity cost to mine one[1]). To put that in perspective, at that price the total value of all bitcoins that will ever exist is about $75 billion. That's close to the total value of Swiss Francs or Mexican Pesos in circulation[2], which still seems insane to me given that you probably can't even use it to buy lunch. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-costs-to-mine-a-single-bitcoin-in-your-country-2018-03-06 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-costs-to... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_%28currency%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_%28currency%29
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > That's close to the total value of Swiss Francs or Mexican Pesos in circulation Physical currency in circulation. Almost every modern currency is principally held digitally.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >No, it has been meandering around $3600 for a month or so (around the average electricity cost to mine one[1]). I had wondered why that $3300-3600 mark seemed to be the bottom. That seems to be a fair explanation. It doesn’t seem good. I wonder; has the demand for gold ever been lower than the cost to mine it? >which still seems insane to me given that you probably can't even use it to buy lunch. Anyone still calling it a “currency” doesn’t seem to grasp what currency is supposed to be. Crypto-commodity is much more appropriate.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    The 'price of electricity to mine a bitcoin' is clickbait. There is no fixed price as it's 100% market/demand driven. The way bitcoin works is that the difficulty of the algorithm automatically adjusts to the rate at which they are being solved so that a block is able to be mined, on average, in about 10 minutes. What this means is if there was a world where only one person was mining bitcoin using a single hand crank and a laptop for energy, it'd still take exactly as long as a world where there were trillions of people mining bitcoin using nuclear powered supercomputing complexes. So the amount of electricity required to produce one coin on average is 100% a reflection of demand. The more demand there is for bitcoin (and the more miners), the more it costs to mine a BTC. It's quite a brilliant design since it scales endlessly with no change necessary to the underlying system. For instance imagine a bunch of people started spending $3600 of electric/compute time mining coins. Suddenly the increased number of people mining would mean that that level of compute would generate fewer coins - and so the necessary compute to produce a coin would naturally grow. By contrast, imagine the price of BTC went down and thus there was a decline in incentive and number of people mining it. Suddenly the price of electric required to produce one coin would also go down. There are also some technical issues with things like the 'price of electricity to mine a BTC' such as the fact that the electric consumption per hash generated is going to vary quite dramatically depending on whether somebody is using a CPU, GPU, dedicated ASIC system, etc and then the specifics within those broad categories. The old saying likely holds here: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. People stating statistics like this are mostly just pushing an agenda. I do not mean the grandparent comment here. I mean the source he read it from. There are so many uncountable variables that just giving a number is completely meaningless, and highly misleading.

Is Bitcoin diving again? I can never keep track.

bdcravens 8y ago

Well, you know it's not shooting up, as HN isn't currently swarming with the Bitcoin zealots from Reddit.

Kiro 8y ago
Never seen a single positive word about Bitcoin on Hacker News, even when price was at its peak, so if it's true what you say they must have been doing a pretty bad job.
- celticninja 8y ago
  Never is a very bold statement. However price spikes do tend to be met with negativity if they are discussed at all. A price spike is of no technological value so HN doesn't really worry about them (unlike say Reddit where it is the overwhelming topic).
- bdcravens 8y ago
  I've seen a lot of it. I can recognize it from a mile away, as I spend a lot of time on various crypto subreddits. (I was mining in 2011; I'm active there, under a different username with a different voice) Personally I think there's nothing wrong with what passes for typical discussion there: high optimism, but low substance. It just has no place on HN, and is downvoted accordingly. That's not a conspiracy against Bitcoin as much as a community standard here for what makes for substantive discussion.

username223 8y ago

No, it has been meandering around $3600 for a month or so (around the average electricity cost to mine one[1]). To put that in perspective, at that price the total value of all bitcoins that will ever exist is about $75 billion. That's close to the total value of Swiss Francs or Mexican Pesos in circulation[2], which still seems insane to me given that you probably can't even use it to buy lunch. [1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-costs-to-mine-a-single-bitcoin-in-your-country-2018-03-06 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-costs-to... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_%28currency%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_%28currency%29

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> That's close to the total value of Swiss Francs or Mexican Pesos in circulation Physical currency in circulation. Almost every modern currency is principally held digitally.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>No, it has been meandering around $3600 for a month or so (around the average electricity cost to mine one[1]). I had wondered why that $3300-3600 mark seemed to be the bottom. That seems to be a fair explanation. It doesn’t seem good. I wonder; has the demand for gold ever been lower than the cost to mine it? >which still seems insane to me given that you probably can't even use it to buy lunch. Anyone still calling it a “currency” doesn’t seem to grasp what currency is supposed to be. Crypto-commodity is much more appropriate.
- rjf72 8y ago
  The 'price of electricity to mine a bitcoin' is clickbait. There is no fixed price as it's 100% market/demand driven. The way bitcoin works is that the difficulty of the algorithm automatically adjusts to the rate at which they are being solved so that a block is able to be mined, on average, in about 10 minutes. What this means is if there was a world where only one person was mining bitcoin using a single hand crank and a laptop for energy, it'd still take exactly as long as a world where there were trillions of people mining bitcoin using nuclear powered supercomputing complexes. So the amount of electricity required to produce one coin on average is 100% a reflection of demand. The more demand there is for bitcoin (and the more miners), the more it costs to mine a BTC. It's quite a brilliant design since it scales endlessly with no change necessary to the underlying system. For instance imagine a bunch of people started spending $3600 of electric/compute time mining coins. Suddenly the increased number of people mining would mean that that level of compute would generate fewer coins - and so the necessary compute to produce a coin would naturally grow. By contrast, imagine the price of BTC went down and thus there was a decline in incentive and number of people mining it. Suddenly the price of electric required to produce one coin would also go down. There are also some technical issues with things like the 'price of electricity to mine a BTC' such as the fact that the electric consumption per hash generated is going to vary quite dramatically depending on whether somebody is using a CPU, GPU, dedicated ASIC system, etc and then the specifics within those broad categories. The old saying likely holds here: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. People stating statistics like this are mostly just pushing an agenda. I do not mean the grandparent comment here. I mean the source he read it from. There are so many uncountable variables that just giving a number is completely meaningless, and highly misleading.