Bitcoin Forum

Related to Consensus 2015, there are seven different industry sectors:
-Wallets
-Payments processing
-Mining
-Financial services
-Exchanges
-Infraestructure
-Universal

Moreover blockchain and hibrid startups have raises 243m of total venture capital funding to date, that represents 22% of companies
It looks like the ecosystem it's changing, which could be the new framework? For you which is the most important industry sector? why? Is this relevant for keep the growing of the industry?

It's all about the mining man , If the mining is gone then the supply/trust is gone, and if those are gone then Bitcoin is gone .
Take for example the next halving block reward for example , In July 2016 when the halving happens if Miners see that they make no profit anymore with the 12.5 BTC per block then they will shutdown their miners for good and we are screwed .

well yes i agree with you that is mostly all about miners and everything related to them, you know, hardware providers etc etc, btw about the halving don't forget that the price of bitcoin can go high too, so even if block rewards going down to 12.5, maybe in that scenario, mining bitcoin can continue being profitable, who know, everything can happen.


minning-minning ;)

Where's the money in the bitcoin industry?  ;)

I believe it's asic manufacturers, payment gateways and exchanges. It's a tough business in the 3 sectors I mentioned. Asics are cheap to manufacture if R&D is able to catch up. Payment gateways and exchanges take a cut from the transactions. The percentage may be low, but the potential volume is huge.

Would gift card retailers fall under the payments processing industry sector or the universal sector? Bitpay claimed they accounted for 9% of its volume with e-Gifter and Gyft taking the lion's share. They aren't the most important industry sector today, but they might be in a few years. There is a learning curve involved before you can use Bitcoin, but anyone can use gift cards brought with Bitcoins even if they don't know Bitcoin exists.

I also agree that the mining is probably the most important.

Even though it's off topic for this thread I would like to state that what you have written above will not happen. Mining is very profitable at these prices and will stay profitable for many even if the price stays the same and don't increase because of the halving.

We have enormous amount of hash power at the moment and the truth of the matter is that we don't even need it that much. So even if some miners get shut down, we will be OK.

The miners face the dilemma of falling price and increasing difficulties. The having block reward is near. What will they do?
Besides that, exchange industry, a lot of hacks and stealing happened or will happen in the future. It will cause the collapse of the business and crash the confidence from bitcoin users.

If the price crashes and Bitcoin users lose confidence there will be some users who start buying at rock bottom in the hope Bitcoin will recover. If miners who stopped mining because it's unprofitable see those users have raised the price, and the mining difficulty has dropped low enough for them to make a profit then some miners will start mining again. Other users will seethe price going up and start buying again in the hope of making profit. Eventually Bitcoin would recover.

This is kind of like how the gold industry went down. Mining started again when the gold price skyrocketed.

I am more worried that Bitcoin mining will become less profitable in other countries and only profitable in China. This will seriously influence the security of the whole network, if all

mining is done by Chinese mining farms. We do not want centralized control over any aspect of Bitcoin, especially in the mining sector. 

Let's hope the price increase enough to cover for the reduced reward, after the halving.  ???

So what if it's only in China ? Bitcoin is digital so I don't see how this is a problem since they can be transfered worldwide , I'am pretty sure that not all bitcoins are being sold to Chinese people .  ???

It's a major thing, because any political decision could shut down a whole network, if all mining was centralized in one geographical location. The Chinese are already subjected to

very controversial censoring and firewalls on internet traffic. It's not about the location where it's bought or sold, it's where it's created/mined and the calculations being done

to confirm transactions for everyone. Bitcoin is nothing without mining.  ;)