And indeed, it couldn't possibly. The EMH almost guarantees that hobby mining can't be profitable once the coin is popular enough.
So given his current return, of 1.01 bitcoins, that means each 2.4 bitcoins mined use around the electricity that a US household does annually.
And people wonder why there are those of us who are concerned about the environmental impact...
Mostly they're concentrated around cheap hydroelectricity, with major mines in Labrador (2c/kwh), Central China (varies, but <4c/kwh), and Georgia (unknown, bitfury likely has a special deal with the local government). A few exceptions are Northern China (coal grid @ ~3c/kwh) and Iceland (geothermal @ maybe 5c/kwh, this isn't too clear either).
Solar panels are not effective for bitcoin mining, because hardware needs to run 24/7 (a shitload of batteries are needed) and the upfront cost is high.
Why?
Now if the price of solar electricity is completely free and bitcoin doesn't crash then mathematically there'll come a point when you'll break even but it might take a long while as the mining rewards keep dwindling as difficulty increases while you spend most of your time not mining. Eventually your miner hardware or solar panels will need maintenance and that will increase your costs.
You'd have to do the math to see how long it'll take you to break even, but something tells me that it won't be nearly as competitive as those server farms using cheap hydroelectricity.
The problem is that you have the difficulty going up, and the capital costs.
Track those three curves and you have a good sense of the window for profit.
The biggest mining operations have legal partnerships with local and national governments.[1] As well, Russia isn't a major place for bitcoin mining: instead, mining is mostly concentrated in Georgia (the country, not the state) and China.
TL; DR Why economists don't like deflation.
I pay my VPN using bitcoin. Also have a GPU bought with bitcoin. Just saying.
That's a real world use case.
In Europe, I split a 0.36 Euro SEPA fee for a 1000 Euro transaction between two different banks in two different countries.
Bitcoin would have cost me $3-5 if not more.
People are cheering this crap because they hold coins and when ordinary people get burned they shrug and say "you shouldn't have done that". Ordinary banking systems have a number of brakes built in so that people do not lose their money in an instant -- at least not that easily.
As an example, more than one person made the mistake of typing in an Ethereum address instead of copy-pasting and losing their money in the process. Or when someone's account on an exchange get hacked and thieves walk away with the money the usual answers are "why you didnt have 2fa" or "why did you leave money in the exchange". If someone hacks my online account they can't do an outgoing transfer to a new address without verifying a code first -- that's 2FA -- and more likely than not, there'll be a daily/per transfer limit I can report to the police, contest the wire and so forth. There are remedies. If it's crypto"currency"? Sorry for your loss!
When I say, legit uses, and people say, VPN, I am like sure you want to do a public service of seeding Linux images and your evil ISP stops torrenting so you need to use a VPN. I get it. The fact that you are using an anonymous way to pay has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the traffic you run through this VPN is breaking the law. Surely No True Scotsman or in this case No True Hacker News Reader would do such a thing!
When I say, legit uses, and people say, various businesses accept Bitcoin, no, they absolutely don't, they integrate the separate sell your bitcoin step into the checkout, the moment Bitpay dropped Canadian dollars, Newegg Canada dropped Bitcoin without a second's hesitation. No business wants Bitcoin on their books, that's a horror bookkeeping / accounting wise.
I maintain: all there is illegal money transfer out of China and more than a little hype with the occassional Ponzi and other scams thrown in. Just because sometimes VCs are on top of a pyramid scheme it doesn't cease to be a pyramid.
(1) snark on HN about HN talking about something—that's incongruent and supercilious;
(2) paste earlier comments into new threads;
(3) rant in a flamewar fashion. It never persuades anyone and it damages the commons.
Except for paying people for services and goods with bitcoin? There are plenty of legal venues to use bitcoin.
>It's the worst sort of gambling: you do not even know the odds.
So...like all investing? lol. Like seriously dude what the fuck do you know? Can you please take your blowhard bullshit somewhere else?
The actual problem, especially in the past, was that you could pay for the hardware but not actually obtain it for months, by which point it was no longer profitable. Presumably, the manufacturers were using the hardware themselves during that period.
There are practical concerns as well, these machines are usually pretty poor quality and the immense heat + poor cooling typically means the chips will burn out one-by-one over time. The PSUs are especially poor and will burn out and need replacing as well. Getting a used ASIC means these will be problems sooner.
So he would have been much better off just spending that 1,200 on Bitcoin rather than on a mining rig.