The headline isn’t accurate as usual, but isn’t completely wrong either.
Anyway, the article you’ve quoted is more informative than the one I posted, so thanks for that quote.
We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners, even if we ignore externalities like the cost we’re collectively paying due to pollution and carbon emissions.
Mining require increasing amount of energy and resources as time pass, so unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm or unless energy becomes free, we should expect mining to get non-profitable in more and more situations.
We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners
We have been at that point since GPU mining stopped being feasible in 2014, it’s just gotten worse. ASICs made it so the only people who could profit off mining were people who could place a wholesale sized order of hardware from bitmain, etc. Anyone else who claimed to be mining profitably was likely someone who was:
buying old hardware 2nd hand (or new hardware at MSRP) and capitalizing on free electricity in their rental
not selling their Bitcoin immediately (they weren’t making money from mining, they were making it from speculating)
lived in Quebec and could double dip (North America’s cheapest grid + free heating for 8 months of the year)
unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm
The algorithm already does this though. Every 2016 blocks if it took more than 10 minutes per block, the difficulty of mining bitcoin goes down, not up. This is why every halving event you see a radical drop in difficulty, because at a given kWh you are producing half as many bitcoin - meaning people turned off their miners because it’s less profitable. The flipside is the rate of issuance goes down, so there is a lower inflationary effect, and the price of Bitcoin usually also skyrockets (which means eventually these miners re-enter, and difficulty eventually goes back to where it was). It can never get to a point where Bitcoin mining is completely unprofitable unless the price goes to zero, because there will always be a guy with a solar panel and fully paid-off hardware who can mine it for free. Granted, it can get to a point where a lot of people have to take a huge loss on capital expenditures if the price nosedives and never recovers
The headline isn’t accurate as usual, but isn’t completely wrong either. Anyway, the article you’ve quoted is more informative than the one I posted, so thanks for that quote.
We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners, even if we ignore externalities like the cost we’re collectively paying due to pollution and carbon emissions.
Mining require increasing amount of energy and resources as time pass, so unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm or unless energy becomes free, we should expect mining to get non-profitable in more and more situations.
We have been at that point since GPU mining stopped being feasible in 2014, it’s just gotten worse. ASICs made it so the only people who could profit off mining were people who could place a wholesale sized order of hardware from bitmain, etc. Anyone else who claimed to be mining profitably was likely someone who was:
The algorithm already does this though. Every 2016 blocks if it took more than 10 minutes per block, the difficulty of mining bitcoin goes down, not up. This is why every halving event you see a radical drop in difficulty, because at a given kWh you are producing half as many bitcoin - meaning people turned off their miners because it’s less profitable. The flipside is the rate of issuance goes down, so there is a lower inflationary effect, and the price of Bitcoin usually also skyrockets (which means eventually these miners re-enter, and difficulty eventually goes back to where it was). It can never get to a point where Bitcoin mining is completely unprofitable unless the price goes to zero, because there will always be a guy with a solar panel and fully paid-off hardware who can mine it for free. Granted, it can get to a point where a lot of people have to take a huge loss on capital expenditures if the price nosedives and never recovers