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> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense. They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the user
by trickstra 7y ago
> it’s users have to pay for the tremendous energy expense.
They are. How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? And so far it seems like the users are happy to pay what it costs. The fact that you don't see the benefit doesn't mean there isn't any for them.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> How else do you think miners pay for their electricity? With speculation on currency (it's the primary use of Bitcoin) and theft - the latter less so, given the very high centralization of hashing power, but it was and still is common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for.
- keymone 7y ago> common for a wannabe Bitcoin millionaires to run mining software on computers and electricity they do not own or pay for Define “common” and provide sources for your claims please.
- jacobush 7y agoMonero Javascript miners are common to this day.
- krageon 7y agoThey're an easy way to donate to people in places where it is hard to transfer money. What exactly is the argument you are making here? Presumably the people running those things are definitely paying for their power one way or the other.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThey get delivered through ads and sites directly in order to steal further resources from unsuspecting site visitors.
- krageon 7y agoThe days when this was either widespread or not blocked by mainstream browsers are behind us. At this point it is mostly scaremongering for no good reason.
- keymone 7y agothe thread is about Bitcoin mining using stolen energy
- noxer 7y agoMiners more or less entirely pay the cost with the blockreward which means the users pay way way less fees for their Tx than it would actually cost in energy. If we assume max 7Tx/s 1 block can hold 4200 Tx One block gets the miner 12.5 BTCs that's a 0.003 BTC "subvention" per Tx that would otherwise have to be pais as fee. In other words the cost is paid by inflation which hurts most who holds and not who uses it. People don't care about a little inflation because the price gains where way way over that. But in the long run this system can not work. Every halving requires the BTC price to at least double (assuming the same mining cost). Problem is mining cost goes only up the halving is finite it goes to zero blockreward. Since the price can't go to infinite it's obvious that this system has to crash at some point we just don't know when.
- maxerickson 7y agoThere's some question of what a crash looks like. If the block reward goes away but there are enough fees to cover a reasonable difficulty, the crash will just be the end of the enormous investment in chasing the block reward, the network might still be secure enough to be usable. I haven't checked the math, but this article says the block reward is ~$45 per transaction, vs ~$0.70 in fees: https://cryptoslate.com/each-transaction-costs-the-bitcoin-network-45-large-improvements-needed-to-beat-visa/ https://cryptoslate.com/each-transaction-costs-the-bitcoin-n... If that is the case, it seems likely there will be a devastating crash next time the reward halves.
- trickstra 7y agoWe will see in May.
- noxer 7y agoBTC can survive if the price at lest doubles before or after the halving. This is what happened in the past. It can happen again maybe even multiple times but certainly not forever.
- maxerickson 7y agoA doubling leads to the rewards staying about the same. Whether that needs to happen for bitcoin to survive is not at all obvious. It would likely be sufficient for bitcoin to survive, it just isn't clear that it is necessary, maybe ⅓ of the reward would keep folks interested.