Re:Bitcoin Breaks $60k
by _fs on Saturday March 13, 2021 @10:53AM
(#26447355)
Are you posting this to start a flame war? Has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
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The nature of Bitcoin's power use does directly matter to the pricing. The availability of "cheap" power is directly related to the price floor due to mining costs. If you can't afford to mine coins at a profit the network will shut down. That means either higher transaction fees, more efficient mining hardware, or a change to the network design (proof of work). Power consumption is very central to the future of Bitcoins and how you should consider pricing it.
Edit: fixing some sentence wording :)
The difficulty can adjust downward. If the price goes below miner costs, then some miners quit, difficulty decreases, and remaining miners become profitable again. The network keeps going just fine, without needing any changes.
A 50% hashrate dump right after a difficulty adjustment would result in the next epoch running at half-speed for 4 weeks.
Network would keep going, but if would not be "just fine".
No, certainly not: the ramp-up in price directly corresponds to trade and the load on the mining network. Hence, we've seen quite a significant increase in energy consumption, recently. The problem isn't going away, as long as BTC is traded in volume (for which valuation is an indicator).