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> Does the cost of mining one BTC influence the price of one BTC? Difficulty adjusts automatically to match the total mining hashrate - there's always about 10
by Devilboy 14y ago
> Does the cost of mining one BTC influence the price of one BTC?
Difficulty adjusts automatically to match the total mining hashrate - there's always about 10 new blocks mined per hour. So if more people are mining the difficulty goes up.
What is changing is the number of BTC you get for mining a block. Currently each block is worth 50 BTC. Soon that will drop to 25 BTC. If many people find mining to be uneconomical they will stop their mining rigs and the difficulty will drop.
What will change is the influx of new bitcoin into the market, instead of 500BTC per hour we'll get 250BTC per hour (on average). Will that make the price go up? Maybe.
- mrb 14y agoThe system targets 6 blocks per hour, not 10.
- nikcub 14y agoOn that note, has anybody heard of any data or estimates on the proportion of Bitcoin mining that is done with botnets? I keep hearing that a large proportion of the bigger botnets in the world are being used to mine Bitcoins (when they aren't being leased out for DDoS attacks). That changes the economic dynamic since the cost of mining is the cost of assembling the botnet (ie. cheap)