China Plans To Kill Most of the World's Bitcoin Mining Operations (bloomberg.com) 261
The Chinese government will end bitcoin mining operations in the country in the coming months in a move that could have a massive impact on the price of the world's biggest digital currency. From a report: China has been a central player in the development of bitcoin in recent years, but Beijing has spent the last six months cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry -- shutting down local exchanges and banning initial coin offerings. Leaked documents suggest the Chinese government plans an "orderly exit" for bitcoin mining operations in the coming weeks and months. In the documents, issued to the local offices of the internet-finance regulator, authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
Major impact on the price (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Major impact on the price (Score:4, Informative)
Only if rationally priced (Score:3)
If the price of a transaction goes up, that would bring the price of bitcoin down (makes it more expensive to use, and therefore worth less).
If bitcoin were rationally priced that would be true. But bitcoin is a very long way away from being rationally priced. Right now it's a speculative bubble and the "value" of a bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) has become untethered from sanity therefore the normal rules of supply and demand are temporarily suspended.
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The price of bitcoin is what people are willing to pay for it but bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it is nothing but electronic 1s and 0s that can't be used for anything besides being a bitcoin.
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Gold is used for coins, jewelry, electronics, etc. Gold even has value as just something to look at because it is visually a
Re:Major impact on the price (Score:5, Interesting)
And the blockchain network will be more secure (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest, and maybe only problem that will arise will be the difficulty being too high when they shut down the farms, leading to a period of slow block solves until the difficulty adjusts. The network will work just fine without the chinese mining farms
And the blockchain network will be more secure. Bitcoin has deviated from its original design in two ways and both compromise blockchain security. First, miners are no longer a diverse group of ordinary users and their personal computers, mining is dominated by a relatively small number of ASIC farms. This makes 51% attacks more plausible, we had one pool get to 50% a few years ago. Secondly, ASIC mining is concentrated in a single country, 70% of the hashate give or take. This obviously destroys the notion that bitcoin is beyond government meddling. These ASIC miners are dependent upon cheap government controlled power.
It sucks to have invested money in ASIC hardware and colocated you gear there but this move would help to get bitcoin back on track. Hopefully closer to the globally and widely distributed mining that is necessary for blockchain security, something we do not have today.
Re:And the blockchain network will be more secure (Score:4, Funny)
My guess is the ASIC's become a lot cheaper on ebay...
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They would probably move to Belarus> https://www.rt.com/business/41... [rt.com]
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The Chinese miners will just set up shop elsewhere. Maybe they won't move at all since local authorities in China benefit greatly when underutilized power capacity is used by bitcoin.
In theory, but its going to hurt to see their ASiCs lose their more profitable days, perhaps even no longer be profitable in the timeframe necessary to relocate.
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Chinese authorities outlined proposals this week to discourage bitcoin mining -- the computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible. Officials plan to limit the industry’s power use and have asked local governments to guide miners toward an “orderly” exit from the business, people familiar with the matter said.
In other words the miners have plenty of time to move operations elsewhere, which seems to be what is happening judging by the rest of the article.
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Yeah, within the last 24 hours, Bitcoin's price dropped over $2000 and has recovered about $800 of that (so down about $1200), and that was probably based in part on the news from Microsoft.
I'm fully expecting another decent drop once enough people realize the ramifications of this.
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ETH is enjoying the ride and separating from just following BTC around as well
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Ain't no such thing as an orderly exit (Score:3, Insightful)
Ain't no such thing as an orderly exit from a bubble. Bubbles are driven by speculative demand, people trying to make a profit by selling it to others for higher prices. People ain't in it to buy and hold. So there's going to be no price stabilizing until the speculators leave the market.
The slope of the price curve is going to be high on the upswing or the downswing. A government has two choices: inject money into the market, pumping it up, again attracting speculators. Or standing back and letting it reach organic market value.
Bitcoin hyped up disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
Wasn't bitcoin always one big cluster due to the fact it eventually takes the power output of nuclear plants just to mine new coins. An activity which consumes vast physical resources for no tangible benefit, which makes the interest rates of the banking system look very reasonable in comparison. I am sure that the fact that it consumes vast resources and stressing infrastructure on something with no tangible value to society is a part of the reason China is taking it off line. A lot of hype over a fundamentally broken model, that is really not a currency anyway, but a wildly fluctuating and unstable mess, any real currency that acted this way would be a laughing stock.
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China has a problem with it because they devalued their Yen on purpose which screwed over the savings accounts of the Chinese. So in response a lot of Chinese went to Bitcoin for their savings instead of to Mother China. Mother no likey so much you not dependent on her teat.
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Or the recent plunge in bitcoin value is because China sold all their coins, making a few billion profit.
Now they're not in the bitcoin market they can stop pumping up the price. They don't need the drain on their power grids either. Costs them money to burn coal.
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Wasn't bitcoin always one big cluster due to the fact it eventually takes the power output of nuclear plants just to mine new coins. An activity which consumes vast physical resources for no tangible benefit, which makes the interest rates of the banking system look very reasonable in comparison. I am sure that the fact that it consumes vast resources and stressing infrastructure on something with no tangible value to society is a part of the reason China is taking it off line. A lot of hype over a fundamentally broken model, that is really not a currency anyway, but a wildly fluctuating and unstable mess, any real currency that acted this way would be a laughing stock.
Laughing stock? You say this as if the cost to sustain the USD isn't measured in the trillions.
Re:Bitcoin hyped up disaster (Score:5, Informative)
No, and this is one of the seemingly least understood aspects of Bitcoin mining. The difficulty of mining a block adjusts dynamically based upon the total amount of compute power currently mining. The more mining power, the higher the difficulty. The purpose is so that a new block is found approximately every 10 minutes. When power is added, blocks are found faster and the difficulty increases. When power is removed, difficulty decreases.
One important aspect if how often the difficulty adjusts -- it's around every 2 weeks for Bitcoin. So if a lot of power is suddenly removed, then the rate at which blocks are found will likely dramatically increase -- and stay that way for potentially several weeks. But eventually the difficulty will adjust to match the available compute power, and orderly blocks every 10 minutes will resume.
Some alternative cryptos have differentiated themselves versus Bitcoin by having much faster difficulty adjustment periods (e.g. as quickly as every single block).
Bitcoin would only consume a nuclear power plant of energy if humans put a nuclear power plant's worth of energy into mining. If instead humanity puts it 5V @ 0.001W of power, the difficulty will adjust and that will be the consumption. ROI will ultimately drive the amount of compute power dedicated to Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin would only consume a nuclear power plant of energy if humans put a nuclear power plant's worth of energy into mining. If instead humanity puts it 5V @ 0.001W of power, the difficulty will adjust and that will be the consumption. ROI will ultimately drive the amount of compute power dedicated to Bitcoin.
But ROI is directly linked to the bitcoin price so if bitcoin goes up by another factor of 10 or more like some people believe then it will be profitable to have entire nuclear power plant of energy. At the $500k -$1M point, it becomes profitable to use all the energy of the USA to mine bitcoin assuming electricity prices stayed the same. As we can't realistically double our electricity use that easily, if bitcoin continues to skyrocket then the price of electricity would increase greatly.
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I'll see your fear-mongering and raise you Fake News.
Seriously though, the total power usage for BTC is based on some rather sketchy numbers and still represents a minuscule fraction of the worldwide power usage. More is wasted on lighting streets with no people on them.
Re:Bitcoin hyped up disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll see your fear-mongering and raise you Fake News.
Seriously though, the total power usage for BTC is based on some rather sketchy numbers and still represents a minuscule fraction of the worldwide power usage. More is wasted on lighting streets with no people on them.
The total power usage might be a rough estimate but the ROI is fairly easy to calculate based on the cost of electricity and the difficulty level. It's mostly a break even proposition based on electricity usage so if the price of a bitcoin goes to $1M, then it stands to reason that you could burn thru around $900k of electricity and still make a positive ROI. Bitcoin mining is really a form of arbitrage between the cost of electricity and the price of a bitcoin. If the cost of a bitcoin increases and stays there then the number on miners and the difficulty level will increase until it is once again a break even trade of electricity for bitcoin.
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it's around every 2 weeks for Bitcoin. So if a lot of power is suddenly removed, then the rate at which blocks are found will likely dramatically increase
Some alternative cryptos have differentiated themselves versus Bitcoin by having much faster difficulty adjustment periods
A problem is that trading in and out of differentiated cryptos generally has to be done in BTC.
For the most part Fiat markets only exist for a few cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, if the hash power drops by a MASSIVE amount suddenly
Re:Bitcoin hyped up disaster (Score:4, Informative)
It is actually fun the minimal amount of people who know the very least what they are talking about on all these comments.
While you are no troll, and express a legitmate doubt, bitcoin and each of the other crypto-currency coins are not "I think that", rather, their behavior are carefully described in documentation and implemented in code. In the case of bitcoin, this is addressed in a very prominent way in the whitepaper that defined the protocol - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd... [bitcoin.org] (just ctrl+f for "difficulty").
On the software implementation itself, however, this is mostly interesting: since the whole blockchain thing is based on cryptographical hashes, "mining" a block comprises exactly of assembling a block which hashes to a number that is _lower_ than the current difficulty. And the difficulty is simply an unsigned 256 bit integer that gets closer to zero the higher the difficult is. The information that composes a block are the picked transactions that are taking place and couple fields the miners can change in the block headers. The first one to get a full block with transactions + all headers that hashes lower than the current difficult just "mined" the block.
And this difficult number is set in the protocol to be adjusted every two weeks or so.
You are confounding that with the rewards for each block, which halve every 4 years, which is were the 21 million bitoin to be ever created amount come from: at a certain point, when the halving takes place, the block reward will be smaller than the smallest bitcoin fraction (1/ 100 million biticoin = 1 satoshi). From these, 16 million have already been created.
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> An activity which consumes vast physical resources for no tangible benefit
There are a ton of these that people seem to participate in anyway. Diamond mining for example. I don't think cryptocurrency mining is anywhere near as resource wasteful as that all things considered, especially the blood costs.
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> I am sure that the fact that it consumes vast resources and stressing infrastructure on something with no tangible value to society is a part of the reason China is taking it off line
I'm sure that's what their justification will be, but the simple truth behind the move is that China has had a problem with wealth fleeing the country under the table, and cryptocurrency has made that far easier to do. This crackdown is all about controlling money leaving their borders.
Mining pools and difficulty (Score:5, Interesting)
The mining equipment won't vanish. If you have sunk the cost of buying the equipment, you won't turn it off because electricity got more expensive. Right now $1 worth of electricity gets you about $10 worth of crypto currency. If the price of electricity goes up 9x it still will make sense to mine. It just won't make sense to buy new equipment.
Transaction times won't be affected. The total hashing power won't decrease. It's rate of increase might slow. BUT, even if the total hashing power fell, the currencies have what is called a difficulty level. That will decrease and a currency like bitcoin will continue to create a new block every 10 minutes.
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Find me some mining hardware that will make enough money to make back my investment before its obsolete. It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
ASIC miners are heavy, good luck shipping them (Score:2)
Find me some mining hardware that will make enough money to make back my investment before its obsolete. It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
Especially after you pay to have that heavy ASIC device shipped from China to wherever your are. Maybe you can pay to have heat sinks removed and have domestically manufacture heatsinks attached after the ASIC blades arrives. Either way, hurts you profitability and makes ASiC obsolescence that much closer. :-)
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What are you blabbering on about?
It's cheaper to have heatsinks made in China and shipped to most places in the world.
Why would you think it's cheaper than shipping alone to locally manufacture them?
Fill up a container, stick it on a boat. You'll pay a flat rate for the container.
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What are you blabbering on about? It's cheaper to have heatsinks made in China and shipped to most places in the world. Why would you think it's cheaper than shipping alone to locally manufacture them?
I was actually thinking source them locally, not necessarily manufacture them locally, thoughts and typing diverged.
Fill up a container, stick it on a boat. You'll pay a flat rate for the container.
And while in ocean transit the ASIC experiences a drop in profitability. Also I am are talking about individuals getting their hosted in China ASICs delivered to them. As for farms, containers may be more viable but again transit time and setting up a new farming site eats in the more profitable days those ASIC would have had.
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Well, it sounds like there might be plenty of used Antminer S9's on the market before long at a good price.
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1080 ti. 3.5 months breakeven at 0.15 kwh electricity prices. A few days ago.
But, surprise, you can't find one. Bitcoin insanity is fucking with my gaming!
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It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
No.... because the government paid for everything in China, they artificially inflated the hashrate and thus the
difficulties to levels where you cannot compete ( which would not have been achieved if the government wasn't paying for everything).
Now if the Chinese government stops subsidizing renewable power resulting in cheap mining operations: presumably the market will correct over time.
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I don't have to "try" it, i'm already doing it, and it works OK.
In last 4 months of mining I made 300 bucks, not counting the loss of 0.012 BTC due to NiceHash being, ahem, "hacked", with a single watercooled GTX 1080. Back in August I owned 0.048 BTC but bought a computer case with it - sold the BTC for 200 bucks. In retrospect I shouldn't have done it but whatever.
I know, it won'a make me rich but in 5 more months the card would have earned its value back, and from then on it's profit, assuming the coin v
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I am using a very simple setup but mind you, it's under Windows.
Create a Vertcoin wallet on Yobit.net then follow the instructions for One Click miner located here: https://vertcoin.easymine.onli... [vertcoin.easymine.online]
That's pretty much it. now, don't expect a lot to come using a GTX 1060, I own a GTX 1080 and plan on adding one more similar card or better (1080 Ti) to my PC (which is fully watercooled). With a single GTX 1080 I reach around 50 MH/s mining Vertcoin, which translates to around 0.5 VTC per day, all while my GPU
time to dump and don't buy any till it drops alot (Score:2)
time to dump and don't buy any till it drops alot
bitcoin is a disaster for the environment. (Score:2, Insightful)
epic waste of energy.
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In general yes. However if you use some rigs for domestic heating it's not a waste at all. A kW of electricity put into a mining rig will give you just as much heating as a kW put into an electric heater.
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and about a third of the heating if you put the energy into a heat pump.
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I don't know what it's like in your country, but I've never heard of a house in Britain heated with a heat pump. Certainly mine isn't. So it's not a useful comparison.
I have a heat pump in my car, because it's an EV. But not in my house.
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Well I know of two among immediate acquaintances and they’re not really that rare. What is the point of your annecdote?
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2 acquaintances! Wow, well unless you've only ever met a handful of people that confirms their rarity.
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Most people have heat pumps in their car, EV or not. It's usually referred to as air conditioning.
They're also very popular in New Zealand for homes. I have one that puts out 6kW of heat and consumes 1.3kW of electricity.
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It's far more common to heat houses (at least partially) with light bulbs than heat pumps. As far as I've seen anyway.
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I'm afraid you failed Thermodynamics, Anonymous Coward. Energy in = energy out + energy retained. I'm putting electrical energy in, and I'm getting heat out. And over the long term there's no energy retained. The fact that those excited electrons in the GPU heating element happen to give me useful information makes not a scrap of difference.
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Nope. You can't destroy energy with work.
Will a hard firewall force an auto fork (Score:2)
Will a hard firewall force an auto fork say they do an DPI block of bitcoin.
China's government doesn't handing over control (Score:3, Interesting)
China is not where investments are made now (Score:5, Insightful)
Huge mining operations are already up and running, and more planned, in Canada, Iceland, Sweden and Russia. This will not disrupt Bitcoin.
https://www.hiveblockchain.com... [hiveblockchain.com]
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Although China effectively banning it will make it easier for other countries to do the same.
Canada? (Score:2)
Last time I checked parts of Canada had the highest electricity rates in North America. A storm damaged power lines at a cabin and it was without power for months. Ontario Hydro still charged him $100 delivery fees every month even with ZERO usage. Even after the news picked up the story they still wouldn't budge.
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Yeah all countries with access to cheap hydroelectric as well as cold outdoors temperatures.
Canada: https://news.bitcoin.com/quebe... [bitcoin.com]
Let's all welcome China! (Score:5, Insightful)
...authorities were instructed to force mining operations out of business using measures linked to electricity pricing, land use, tax and environmental protection.
Let's all welcome China to the First World! We're going to redefine the phrase to include them now. How very American of them, to use electricity pricing, land use (zoning), taxes, and environmental protection regulations to crush something they don't like. We're so proud of them.
Being a capitalist dictatorship sure sounds so much better than being a communist dictatorship, don't you think? Remember kids, it's not an edict from the Powers That Be. It's just a change in zoning. Nothing to see here.
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+10 Insightful.
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...I'm all for a decentralized block chain currency that is as carbon neutral as, say, pornhub ...
Hmmmm. Porncoin or Pr0nC0in? Maybe. Pussycoin? WeinerCoin? Nah. BoinkCoin? Yea. Dat's da ticket.
Umm difficuty? (Score:2)
What is Bitcoin these days? (Score:2)
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It's never going to be a transaction system. It takes too long to process transactions and there are global limits to the number of transactions per day (based on blocks mined and transactions per block) It's limited to about 10 per second.
To contrast that with a real global payment network, Visa can do 65,000 per second.
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Do people use Bitcoin to complete transactions for material goods or has Bitcoin become an investment vehicle?? I.e. What percentage of Bitcoin transactions pay for pizza (or Teslas or houses) and what percentage are people saying "I'll just buy low and sell high and make a killing like everyone else". I assume there's no way to look at the blockchain and determine this ... that would pretty much kill the idea of anonymity.
It's more a reference system right now.
You can have smaller centralized systems like coinbase where you can do fee-less, instant transactions but it's not on the blockchain. However, the conversion from fiat to BTC is done with reference to the exchange systems.
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blockchain isn't anon.
but really, right now BTC is being used as a speculation vehicle and payment on black market stuff. That's about it.
Opportunity (Score:3)
Perhaps this will decentralise mining operations further around the world. Perhaps there will also be a flood of cheaper mining equipment too as a result of mining operations ending in China.
Could be a fantastic opportunity for more smaller players to get on board.
Game over (Score:2)
They've completed their pump-and-dump scheme.
GOOD! (Score:2)
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E-Coin will take over.
Which means the dark army wins... You think these are related? ;^)
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E-Coin will take over.
Which means the dark army wins... You think these are related? ;^)
Has anyone summoned me? :-))
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Surely you mean Dogecoin.
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They should have spelled it "doggycoin" or "doggiecoin"...though that latter might be mistaken for cattle based coinage.
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I remember there was a trade show where they had these little Java key-fobs that were battery/solar powered, had wi-fi connectivity, could receive commands to do computations and send the results out. Imagine doing something like that with bitcoin mining.
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That sounds like a thing. Smart currency. The more you have, the more processing capacity they command.
"I'm saving up to run Ubuntu."
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Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs.
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For a while you couldn't turn a profit with a GPU. With insane bitcoin prices you can earn (I'm told) about $250/month after electric cost with a 1080ti. Which is why the price of 1080s has gone up.
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For a while you couldn't turn a profit with a GPU. With insane bitcoin prices you can earn (I'm told) about $250/month after electric cost with a 1080ti. Which is why the price of 1080s has gone up.
But you are not mining bitcoin. If you are receiving bitcoins from GPU mining you are likely selling your hashing power to someone doing alt-coin mining and who is paying for this hashing in bitcoin. Because who wants whatever goofy alt-coin they want to mine. :-)
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I don't believe thats so. The GPU miners are working on alternate crypto currencies. The one's that the ASICs can't mine.
Re:Smart (Score:5, Insightful)
We know you do. We also know you're not smart enough to make the connection between authoritarian government and lack of free speech, which is why we don't allow you to prevail.
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"we" ? :)
Re:Smart (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, we're talking about the type of authoritarian government that locks up millions of citizens, often for political crimes such as using the wrong substances that the authoritarians don't like.
It's actually pretty common for a large percentage of the population to like the authoritarians, look at America where they keep actually voting them in.
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The mining hardware won't be scrapped. If they managed to stop people mining in China, the machines will be exported to other countries.
Maybe not (Score:2)
Although normally I'd agree with you, I think China would be prone to seizing the equipment and destroying it to prevent it from being used, since what they would prefer is for Bitcoin to go away.
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The difficulty level is set I think every 14 days or so.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
If all chinese BC mining farms went offline then after that time cost to compute for non chinese farms would drop to compensate
Impact: fun 14 days then normal.
The Chinese will just move the farm to Mongolia or Eastern Europe. The farms will not go offline.
Do *not* join the Cryptocurrency Mining Scene (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene ...
Stop yourself, don't do it. Take either of these two paths:
(1) You were going to buy a GPU anyway for some non-mining reason. Go ahead, buy the GPU. Maybe, **maybe**, buy a model up one level of performance/price from what you would have otherwise bought, if its a low to midrange model. Say if you were otherwise planning on a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ***maybe*** get a GTX 1060 6GB, ****maybe****. If you were otherwise getting a high performer, say a 1070 Ti for that 4K monitor, do *****not***** go up a level to a 1080 Ti. Then let the GPU mine when you are not using the machine. Use a watt meter to determine the total power consumption of your machine to determine power usage, do *not* trust online references that say your GPU uses so many watts. When your GPU is mining other parts of the computer are also drawing power, especially the CPU which may also be mining. You want to know the total system power and make sure your mining proceeds exceed that amount. Be sure to use above baseline residential power rates in your calculations, do *not* just look at your current bill and expect the current rate. If it is not profitable to mine do *not* fall into the trap that "the coin price will eventually rise and make it profitable", that is a losing game. Instead, take whatever money you would spend on power and just buy the coins directly, you will have more coins that way if the price rises. But above all else, do not get into the mindset of joining the mining scene, that is a path to losing money. Stay in the scene "the GPU I have anyway can make some coin when I'm not using it".
(2) Take whatever money you were willing to spend on a GPU for mining and just buy coins with that money. You will likely do better that way if the price rises. Many miners fall into the trap that they are profitable and pat themselves on the back. They do not consider the opportunity cost of the alternative of just buying coins directly. The following are very rough estimates but the point will nonetheless be clear. Lets say you spent $500 on a GPU last summer and another $500 on a GPU last fall. At above baseline residential power rates maybe you have about an extra $1,000 after factoring in power. Congrats your GPUs are now paid. However your friend bought $500 worth of bitcoin in the summer and another $500 in the fall and now has $3,000 worth of bitcoin. You are at net $0, he is at net $2,0000. If you are willing to gamble on increasing coin prices you may be better off just buying coins directly. Things are not as simple as a mining rig being profitable, the opportunity cost of the just buy directly must be considered. Many other things must also be considered before joining the mining scene.
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Much like the '49 gold rush.
John Sutter did not make his money off the gold found at his mill, he made his money selling shovels and picks to the miners that showed up afterwards. The miners themselves barely broke even for the most part.
I have no interest in mining, but I do have an interest in a couple of shover manufacturers and am looking to start employment with a shovel seller.
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If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene ...
Stop yourself, don't do it. Take either of these two paths: (1) You were going to buy a GPU anyway for some non-mining reason. Go ahead, buy the GPU. Maybe, **maybe**, buy a model up one level of performance/price from what you would have otherwise bought, if its a low to midrange model. Say if you were otherwise planning on a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ***maybe*** get a GTX 1060 6GB, ****maybe****. If you were otherwise getting a high performer, say a 1070 Ti for that 4K monitor, do *****not***** go up a level to a 1080 Ti. Then let the GPU mine when you are not using the machine. Use a watt meter to determine the total power consumption of your machine to determine power usage, do *not* trust online references that say your GPU uses so many watts. When your GPU is mining other parts of the computer are also drawing power, especially the CPU which may also be mining. You want to know the total system power and make sure your mining proceeds exceed that amount. Be sure to use above baseline residential power rates in your calculations, do *not* just look at your current bill and expect the current rate. If it is not profitable to mine do *not* fall into the trap that "the coin price will eventually rise and make it profitable", that is a losing game. Instead, take whatever money you would spend on power and just buy the coins directly, you will have more coins that way if the price rises. But above all else, do not get into the mindset of joining the mining scene, that is a path to losing money. Stay in the scene "the GPU I have anyway can make some coin when I'm not using it". (2) Take whatever money you were willing to spend on a GPU for mining and just buy coins with that money. You will likely do better that way if the price rises. Many miners fall into the trap that they are profitable and pat themselves on the back. They do not consider the opportunity cost of the alternative of just buying coins directly. The following are very rough estimates but the point will nonetheless be clear. Lets say you spent $500 on a GPU last summer and another $500 on a GPU last fall. At above baseline residential power rates maybe you have about an extra $1,000 after factoring in power. Congrats your GPUs are now paid. However your friend bought $500 worth of bitcoin in the summer and another $500 in the fall and now has $3,000 worth of bitcoin. You are at net $0, he is at net $2,0000. If you are willing to gamble on increasing coin prices you may be better off just buying coins directly. Things are not as simple as a mining rig being profitable, the opportunity cost of the just buy directly must be considered. Many other things must also be considered before joining the mining scene.
Buy a dual 1080 Ti. Stick it your computer and it will pay for itself in 3 months. You can also game on it once in a while.
Investing a little in crypto is silly because even if things go really well, you get a little bit. Most of the benefits goes to the early investors or big fishes. You'll just spend all this time and energy figuring out the snakepit that is crypto trading for minute amounts of gain.
Go big or just go enough to pay for your Ryzen 7 and 1080 Tis.
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Buy a dual 1080 Ti. Stick it your computer and it will pay for itself in 3 months. You can also game on it once in a while.
*Iff* coin prices do not decline.
**Iff** difficulty levels do not increase.
Normal difficulty increases will likely stretch that 3 months to 6 months. 3 months is an extrapolation of today's revenue, poor planning to bank on that.
Now if you want to gamble on increasing coin prices, you can take the money for those two 1080 Ti's and invest that up front by buying the coins directly at an expected relative low. You may be tempted to make an "averaging in" argument, but we aren't talking about consistent p
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You might not get rich. Who cares.
Paying some of the highest local market rates, my normal workstation with an outdated video card pulls in real actual profit by the real actual honest numbers.
But you must understand that this is like anything else. If you half ass it, you're going to lose a lot of time and money.
If I had the money to drop to build a high end, dense mining rig, then I would do it without hesitation.
I've been listening to people who don't put
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If you run the real numbers, it's profitable.
Case (2) above is based on real numbers, modestly rounded for convenience. Reality is 3x the earning just buying coins directly 6 months ago compared to buying gpus last summer and last fall. Delaying those purchases 3 to 6 months is the difference between paid for $1,000 GPUs (mining) and paid for $1,000 GPUs plus an additional $2,000 in cash (buying coins directly).
Paying some of the highest local market rates, my normal workstation with an outdated video card pulls in real actual profit by the real actual honest numbers.
As I said, if you are buying a GPU for non-mining purposes then mining to subsize the GPU is fine. Might even justify getting a slightly bette
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If you run the real numbers, it's profitable.
Case (2) above is based on real numbers, modestly rounded for convenience. Reality is 3x the earning just buying coins directly 6 months ago compared to buying gpus last summer and last fall. Delaying those purchases 3 to 6 months is the difference between paid for $1,000 GPUs (mining) and paid for $1,000 GPUs plus an additional $2,000 in cash (buying coins directly).
Sorry, I described the scenario incorrectly. 3x is the result of buying coins rather than a GPU 6 months ago and again 3 months ago. I erroneously implied by all the coins six months ago, that would result in 4.5x but that is an unfair comparison since money is being spent at different times. Spending money at the same time is the fair comparison and that is a 3x result.
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That does not remove the profitability of the mining that allows those coins to function in the first place.
We can incorporate the dense mining rig into the day trading you're talking about, pointing it at newer lower difficulty coins for the long term.
We can buy cheapcoin at fractions of a cent and make a stupid return if it pops even a little bit, but that cheapcoin won't pop without the miners.
The crypto
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water vapor and methane do as well (and if i'm not mistaken, are much more potent greenhouse gases than CO2?)
Not to dispute AGW, but trying to reduce something as ridiculously complex as climatology to a single variable is disingenuous at best.
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Sort of. Methane is much more potent per-mol than carbon dioxide, but it's a matter of quantity and persistence as well. Methane doesn't last long in the atmosphere - it eventually degrades into carbon dioxide, which does hang around. Carbon dioxide is also released in much greater quantities than any other gas by human activity, as 'burn stuff' remains the dominant means of producing useful energy.
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"Methane doesn't last long in the atmosphere - it eventually degrades into carbon dioxide, which does hang around."
FSVO 'not lasting long' - the forcing effect of Methane is 20 times higher than CO2 over a one century timescale. On a decade scale or less it's about 100 times higher.
This means that 1-5GT of methane burping out of the Arctic ocean around the Leptav sea continental shelf would not make for happy fun times, vs 1-5GT of CO2, which would merely be a bad day on planet Earth. (I pick those location
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That'd be nice. Most ASIC bitcoin miners are about 2.5x marked up on amazon and ebay right now.