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If I understand correctly, by design PoW gets harder with time, so it becomes ever more expensive to mine BTC. At some point, it should be economically unfeasib
by bikamonki 6y ago
If I understand correctly, by design PoW gets harder with time, so it becomes ever more expensive to mine BTC. At some point, it should be economically unfeasible. Now, BTC is rewarded for transaction validation. Does this mean, that at some point in the future, it will be impossibly expensive to validate a new block, hence making it imposible to conduct a BTC transaction between two addresses?
- maxerickson 6y agoIf there is less mining, the difficulty goes down. In a bad case scenario, the block reward doesn't keep a large fraction of available hardware online.
- tromp 6y ago> If I understand correctly, by design PoW gets harder with time, so it becomes ever more expensive to mine BTC. You misunderstood (or possibly were confused with the ethash "ice age"). PoW difficulty follows daily dollar emission, which is proportional to the product of price and block reward. In Bitcoin there is a large lag (up to 2 weeks) though between changes in the latter, and changes in difficulty. Miners who can't turn a profit will stop mining Bitcoin, causing difficulty to drop. It will always be profitable for the most efficient miners.