Bitcoin Forum

I'm writing a paper on bitcoin mining (and cloud hashing services), and I'm wondering what your opinions are on its sustainability longterm considering different factors like increasing electricity costs (it has been going up in fiat value), price volatility (especially at times of low prices), competition (miners out doing other miners hashing power) and the halving of miners' reward

Do you think it will be sustainable for decades to come?

No, unless you can get cheap (and i mean dirt cheap) electricity and the price goes up after the next halving, also, the larger the operation, the higher the chance of breaking a profit

It is not option for normal people, that is for sure. There are too many issues that piled up since early days of bitcoin when you can mine with your graphics card and actually earn something.
First of all, you need ASICs not, a lot of them, one or two miners are not enough unless you are doing this purely for fun and to test the waters.
Secondly if your electricity cost is expensive, don't waste your time, great part of the Europe beside countries like Iceland (I guess it is not EU) or maybe Ukraine are out, due to high energy pricing.

tl;dr unless you want to start professional mining farm, mining bitcoin is not good anymore for normal users

It's not. Not at all. And one of the many reasons why the bitcoin economy is guaranteed to collapse, essentially making it a ponzi scheme.

I'm not asking for an opinion on what's going on right now, but what your opinion is on BTC mining sustainability decades long going to the future.  What do you think is in store for it?

?

Eventually the miners have to be paid by fees only, forcing the transaction fee to skyrocket. Mining competition is really tight so there are only a hand full of big mining farms.. they will eventually eliminate the weaker ones leaving one or two parties. Meaning bitcoin is no longer decentralized and very vulnerable to manipulation,  lowering its value. Making international wire transfer with your bank 100 times cheaper than using bitcoin.

Could you explain when and why the transaction fee will "skyrocket"? Will it skyrocket when the block reward drops to 0, or will it (and this is my suspicion) increase roughly in proportion to the reduction of the block reward for each block reward reduction up to and including the final block reward reduction?

BTC is the first experiment of crypto currencies. I`m sure a coin (or maybe several coins) will pop up that will:

1) Need far less mining power;

2) Offer super fast transactions;

3) Address bloating issue and finally

4) Offer real anonymity. 

More time will pass, better people will see the deficiencies of BTC`s features.

In the long run BTC is not a winner even in the mining field.

Good question,i think in many places will  be  more alternative electicity  recources.Technology will help btc miners
but difficouly will remain

Its available I know Even One of close friend He is using Solar Miner. He bought that to reduce the electricity consumption But Still He sustaining very hard in that. If you do mining Best We have do in a big project else We will get that much success. This what I saw in my life.

In the long term I think quantum computers will crack the elliptic curve cryptography that bitcoin's based on. If good enough quantum computers are invented then bitcoin's basic code will need changing round to something quantum computers can't crack. That change of code base will render all mining hardware obsolete, and a new generation of hardware will need inventing to replace it.

Such a situation could permanently break both bitcoin and its miners if new mining hardware is not invented quickly enough.

If/when quantum computers become a threat to Bitcoin, the same threat will apply across the financial sector. I doubt that that threat would stand for long: even if Bitcoin devs don't invent a solution, others will and it'll soon be implemented in Bitcoin.

Edit: the FAQ on the wiki discusses QC, its risks, and how they're mitigated. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Quantum_computers_would_break_Bitcoin.27s_security)

Considering that the difficult self-adjusts pretty quickly, surely will be, but maybe not without some short time adaptations that may hurt some people

Since mid 2013, mining has always been a bad investment for all sorts of reasons, but if you build just one gpu miner to mine altcoins, it can be fun and a good way to learn about crypto.

The mining system is self-adjusting. It will always be profitable for someone.

Please show me your fantasy magic box that can crack the universe.

i think itll last because once the block reward is insignificant, the fees for transactions will be enough to keep mining profitable for the miners.

^Kwukduck is an account that was bought by JIDF Zionists to claim that the price is going to 0 every day.  Look at his post history.

Hitting the nail on its head. Someone, most likely a single big party in total control of bitcoin.

This algorithm only ensures short run profitably vs electricity. It does not ensure anyone gets an ROI on their equipment in the long run, especially not you. To make matters worse, some people even have free electricity.

The algorithm ensures that someone somewhere is always going to be trying to drain every last mbit to cut their equipment losses as small as possible.

It's designed to support the network, not you.

I don't think the electricity and hardware costs will keep up with the rewards for the miners. That's a bit of a worry.

From what I gather, most people think BTC mining is not sustainable in the very longterm.  I'm thinking satoshi might have missed the possibility of ASICS and the cartelization of mining.  That said, are the miners of today still making profit at a 25 BTC block reward?  If they are, would they still be after the halving next year (assuming the BTC price still stays the same)?

the efficiency will help the profit for the miners, if the demand will not be there

miners need much less than the current price to have their profit, at 1k-2k in value they have their ass covered up to 2028-2032 halving

crazy value must come in play only when we approach the fee era, otherwise the mining scene will be fine

They profit for sure.  But remember they invested significant capital upfront to start mining BTC.  So how much do they need in terms of block rewards until they get their investment back at current prices?

It's not profit until they roi.

Exactly.  Which begs the question how much in block rewards will it take until they do get to ROI at the current price?

Did you mine or try to mine yourself? If so, you know it's not easy profit, it's risky and requires very large investments for very small profits. The only big profit to be made with mining is if you hold and the price will rise a lot, which is rather unlikely.

The miners that we still have left aren't mining for profit, they are dedicated to a cause, they are people who were around with bitcoin when it all started,  for an idea!

I'm fairly certain the large Chinese mining operations weren't around when I was mining, back in 2010-2011. I don't recall Chinese miners being a significant factor until 2012-2013. Maybe they were solo mining like the rest of us, in Slush's pool. They certainly weren't large enough to register on the mining pools radar.

Incidentally, any response to my "skyrocket" question? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1295652.msg13298510#msg13298510)

i think the majority already roied on their old equipments, they are there since many years already

a random chinese farm with 100 peta spent something like, what...100k btc?(5 btc 1 antminer s7 x 20k s7(100peta/5tera)), but they can produce 500 btc daily x 365 = 180k btc...

this mean that any farm running s7 can pay their equipment in 6 months, and then every new added asic can be payed in no time, they only need to face the electricity bills at present

this electricity bills is ridiculous low, because the ratio between the earning and consumption for 1 s7 is 8:1(8 in earning 1 in consumption), $360/$45(monthly) at 0.05 cent per hour

It would be nice to have solid numbers on this to complete my paper...

Is this the current top end gear? Because that would still not be profitable in my country due to electricity prices.

What do you mean by "sustainable"?

If you mean "will economic incentives guarantee security for transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain", then the answer is... I don't know, but it seems likely.

Basically, a single party with malicious intent getting 51% or more of the hashrate is the scenario we need to avoid. So, economically speaking, potential gains from double-spend attacks need to be lower than the cost of gaining that much hashrate. As long as that is true, it doesn't matter what happens to miners.

Unless you want to get into attacks not motivated by direct profit... I don't know how to evaluate the risk/reward proposals there, though.

yeah, and if you don't factor the diff increase, it is profitable to run one even at 0.2 electricity


well it simple math, if one s7 can roi in 5-6 months, because it give you a net of $320 and cost 1500-1800

then any number of this beast can roi in the same time, no matter how big is the farm, well yes you need to take into account the cost of the psu

which would be $300 for each s7, then you can just add 1 month for the time that is needed to roi

Interesting to see all these 'expert' opinions missing out on very high maintenance costs...
You people certainly never did any mining of any significant scale....

maintenance cost can be done by some 2-3 guys, once in a months, i don't see a big problem with it, it would not increase the overall cost by much, probably peanuts

if you give $1k a month to one chinese guy, i'm sure he can clean you 1k machine in one day...

Again.. It would be nice to have solid numbers on this.

well i'm not working in a chinese farm  ;D, there is one guy in the mining section, that is living in a farm, maybe he know the right numbers, but it will not be so far from what i've said

Mining beign and staying profitable on the long term is possible for the big guys.
The home miner should hope they eventually get their investment back.

The Asic manfacturers have no problem earning money these days, since their ROI is much earlier because they only pay 'production cost'

It always depends on the price and rewards policy, the lower the rewards, the higher the price should be for the miners to be able to generate revenues/profits for running their equipment...