Bitcoin Forum

What will happen if Tech Giants Like Google, Microsoft, Amazon starts investing in Bitcoin or Altcoin Mining?

If they did it right (developing new generations of ASIC's and running them in places with low energy costs), the diff would probably rise even more than it already did, forcing some smaller miners and miners with relatively high energy rates to stop mining.

For the rest, not much would probably happen, unless they suddenly added a ton of hashrate to the network one week, and took everything offline a couple months later... In this case the average time between two blocks would first be smaller than 10 minutes untill the next readjustment, then when they took their farm offline it increase drastically untill the next readjustment (every 2016 blocks)

We will get good quality of miner from them! That would be great!

Sure, but i wouldn't get my hopes up, i think chances that google or amazon would actually get into bitcoin or altcoin mining are very, very, very slim.

There will be also a possibility of manufacturing efficient multialgo yet upgradable miners!

I know chances are less though they would get into it

Yeah, that would be great to have big tech company join in bitcoin but China miners will still lead the mining due to their advantages in the country (hardware and low cost electricity).
I think so, it wouldn't/never be happen as they have their own project and interest. We just depends on developers to solve blockchain problems, to handle transaction issues and the block.

Rather than getting into mining, its better to start accepting bitcoin into their services. As a beginning most big giants have started implementation and usage of Blockchain technology into their business. Recently Microsoft along with azure had initiated Blockchain technology for their needs in India.

Would probably mean there would be more competition and more miners being produced at a lower cost for all of us which is a win win :)

I expect they'd mine the crap out of our little Bitcoin and we'd get to 21 million really fast. For us, users nothing would change as home mining is mostly dead. The only ones mining Bitcoin now are already giants to people like me. They are running farms the size of a football field, filled with electronics worth more than my yearly income and my savings combined :D

So potential they good harm the enter Bitcoin system right?

I believe that all of these multinational giant companies have an army of consultants and "weigh" very carefully the pros and cons of every business decision they think to make. So if they decide to take part in mining they will invest vast amounts of funds for long time.

They will not invest in bitcoin but rather will accept bitcoin as their mode of payment or any related things to that. There's no chance that they will soon include bitcoin as part of their investment. As you said, they are already big.

What is the benefits of accepting bitcoin as part of their financial cycle? Popularity and expect a heavily usage of bitcoin around the world which will result for strong foundation around the bitcoin price rate. Just expect now a little bit stability of bitcoin price.

let's just assume that it is going to happened, then we will see a huge amount of miners, which will be good for us, our transaction will be faster, and the other effect of this will be the increase of bitcoin popularity, with the big tech investing in bitcoin, automatically bitcoin reputation will be increase and bitcoin will become more famous and it will bring more users, so if they joined bitcoin world it will be a lot of positive effect, the negative one will be, it will be more difficult for us to mine

everything will change and the market will not dominate by chinese market, because we see that tech giants in every where really want to dominate the market so they can make big profit. we see that this is happen in every industry especially with google and microsoft and there are many example for this, google dominate the android phone, microsoft dominate the computer technology.

Not really, there is a diff adjustment every 2016 blocks. This means if they made enough asic's to tenfold the current network's hashrate, and turned on these asic's all at once, there would be a maximum of 2016 blocks mined with 1 minute between two blocks (on average), then the diff would double* and there would be 2 minutes between blocks (on averate) for 2016 blocks, then there would be 4 minutes for 2016 blocks, then 8 minutes, then 10 minutes (on average)

* at least, i once read from a member that the diff can maximum double/halve each diff adjustment... I cannot find the source for this tough! If this statement is untrue, it'll only take a maximum of 2016 to regain an average time between blocks of ~10mins

This will boost bitcoin credibility and therefore the btc price will go up.

But the bitcoin independence will be lost forever....

tech giants like these that you named are too big to care about the profit they may get from bitcoin and remember that bitcoin is still not a fully established system but still in its beta initial phase and many even consider it risky and experimental.

those giants would either invest in something that can have a much bigger return 100 times bitcoin mining profit or if in a very unlikely scenario they decided to get in bitcoin they would buy and invest in it.

This is very true on which those big companies would really not bother to engage into bitcoin mining since they would see that they could only make small money with it infact they would rather choose to stick their traditional ways of making money which is even more bigger profits rather than on bitcoin mining. The would really not tend to jump on and you are right they would really hesitate since bitcoins value is still unstable and they dont like that for sure.

i agree. none of these tech giants will ever be interested enough to get into bitcoin "mining"
but on the other hand i think they will eventually start integrating bitcoin into their systems someday soon. Microsoft has been working with some altcoins in their Microsoft Azure, and i am sure that Amazon has been receiving so many requests requesting them to add bitcoin and they will give in to the requests. and these two are enough for bitcoin to go mainstream and to the moon from then on.

Then it will be a big time opportunity to bitcoin to be more popular since tech giants will use it. Also the price will rise because these tech giants are monsters that can earn billions. So if they choose bitcoin for their transactions, im sure its q big time price hike. I heard some rumors about dell. Dell i heard they are accepting bitcoin. But when i search it, it says that they are not accepting bitcoin directly. They use middleman to quickly converts it to money. If these tech giants adopts bitcoin. I think bitcoin price will increase atleast $1800 a piece.

If Amazon started to use Bitcoin, they would probably run a mining operation to handle their own payments. That would probably be a useful addition to the mining mix.

Me either, but when it happens probably google will be taking us bitcoin users to what we always dreamed of. We all know that google always provide an open source software unlike microsoft(that loves to always make money) But the danger ahead on this is that we also do know that google always have an issue when it comes to compromising its users security(when it comes to identity eg: locating you)

If these big big companies will enter in Bitcoin then the technology in Bitcoin will  progress daily  because after get into the Bitcoin competition will increase sharply to give best service :)

It would be great because they would have more resources and money for mining.  If big name tech giants got in, it could also give more legitimacy to Bitcoin.

Altcoin mining is different as pretty much anyone can do it with less resources these days - just a personal desktop for most alts.

for sure they can provide a big help for bitcoin to get widely adopted . these tech companies for sure can provide a large facility for mining equipment and build a large mining farm . but I think if they could provide a help for sure there will be a compensation just my opinion ;D

It will be very, very difficult to keep developing ASICs that are better than past generation by the magnitude of order we have been seeing in the past few years. This video by Andreas A is very useful in understanding this fact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-fUosBOu58

What I don't get is, it will always be way cheaper to do it in china than in the rest of the world due electricity low prices... so how can we end china's monopoly in hashing power while this continues being the case?

I think I read somewhere that UAE, Saudi and India have electricity prices that are lower than China.
Venezuela seems to be distorted as well, I gather some part have too much electricity, and others have none.

I wont get my hopes high for them getting into Bitcoin because all these big companies rub shoulders with people that matter in government at the same time they are multi-nationals who prefer to have a clean slate in any country they operate. For them coming in wont mean much if government has not sanction the currency because it could be interpreted to mean a way to evade tax which will be bad for business among other media paparazi that might follow suit...

That makes sense. Tech Giants compete with each other and they will try to make their services better and bitcoin or altcoin mining is not in their league. I would like to see NVIDIA or AMD coming into this arena with some brand new GPUs which are powerful enough to take mining to the next level.

Those big businesses are probably not very interested in mining at all, but if they did difficulty will skyrocket, some of the least profitable miners will go bankrupt and probably will be bought by other miners.

Only Time will Tell us what's in the box of tech giants for bitcoin.

Something like that could probably be the tipping point for bitcoin. Price would skyrocket! Hence buy and hold.

The only way tech giants are going to be getting into bitcoin is by allowing their products to be bought via bitcoin. They will not do anything in regards to mining bitcoins
and they will not care much about the bitcoin community and the whole scheme of cryptocurrency. Most businesses will probably allow their products to be bought via bitcoin and some really smart business will most likely hire some bitcoin experts that control when to buy/sell the bitcoins they have. The risk for these major companies having bitcoin is the volatility.

Simple, it will make bitcoin even more secure.  lets get as many peple mining bitcoin as we can.  ;D

Why do you say if? because they are already doing it with small hashrates to avoid difficulty increases too much.
Though they wont sell their mined coins anytime soon and rather hold on to them to make the price go and rise even higher or they may sell in low volumes to avoid price drop.
Cheap electricity and full pocket are equal to profit in mining bitcoin but I doubt any altcoin is profitable for them to mine due to their fishy dev teams and price fluctuation.

Good Question. Looking at the difficulty of bitcoin mining, I feel some giants must have already joined the raise, they must be keeping the entire thing hidden from the public, I will not be surprised if any tech giants admit it in the coming days. I have heard of rich people just mining and dumping bitcoin simply to make quick bucks.

The same people feel bitcoin will fail and it is just a bubble.
They are in just to profit from the "bubble".

They will end up centralizing the network and controlling bitcoin,in short words - we're fucked.
You can write a essay about logical side of the story and prove me I'm wrong but Tech Giants don't do anything besides making money .Plus it wouldn't really make sense for Tech Giants to take up Bitcoin Mining on a large scale since it isn't lucrative in  the long run.

I dont think that they will get into bitcoin or altcoin mining, however if someday they starts investing in mining i think they would create their own cryptocurrency and mining their own rather than investing in bitcoin or any altcoins since people will interested on what they've created.
To be honest i really love if those Tech Giants starts accepting bitcoin as payment processor it would make bitcoin gain more popularity as well as the price would be up, also give us an opportunity to spend our coin.

Well, they will get some btc and some slight ability to control it which is good for them. As for us, the price is very likely to grow in this case, because of the investments. And yet there will be some people (around 2% of btc users I guess) who will stop using btc, because they are very paranoic that this way the government can spy on them and all that.

But small individual miners cannot compete with these giants and eventually these giants will take over all mining, form a cartel and dictate the transaction fee.
Big giants are also under government contol and will oblige government agencies to influence bitcoin technology

This would be bad. If they really would want that, then i think they could achieve it and all we could do is to accept it or start using some altcoin. But i guess it would be only a matter of time until they would take over the altcoin to. So we would need an altcoin where everybody could mine making more or less the same.

companies like Google are too big to even see bitcoin mining as a viable option. Google alone is worth $527 billion dollars! miners are earning peanuts compared to that :D
and besides these companies are mostly offering some service or product, if they want profit they will do that with bitcoin for example we may see Microsoft make a bitcoin wallet and release it with windows next version when you can buy bitcoin directly through microsoft and pay them fee.

It is good bitcoins will be more popular and the bitcoin's price will going up if they make investing into bitcoin business,
But if they make investing on altcoins mining the of altcoins will be increase too.
For altcoins mining depend on to what are the coins be mined and not all of altcoins will be increasing. :D

Altcoin mining would only make sense for them if they create their own token.They will not mine any other already existing altcoin.
In terms of Bitcoin if that would happen you may see some boost in hashrate and price as this would signal the big tech giants give Bitcoin a serious try.I can not see them trying to attack Bitcoin if you mean that with mining.Expect them to create their own shitcoin scams.

Bitcoin mining won't be profitable to anyone without few PH/s of power. Only tech giants will be able to afford such kind of hardware and maintenance cost. So if these tech giants get in to bitcoin mining, then they will get a major share in to bitcoin within a very short period of time. Also in the other hand the bitcoin market cap will be increased and the price will follow suit. The general bitcoin users will be benefited.

If they get in to altcoin mining, it will again help to stebilize the price of of that particular altcoins. Specially ETH or Monero. Similar way, the price of these altcoins will be increased as the public trust will be increased for them. Overall, I don't see any downside of it.

Right now bitcoin is only being mined by small companies that can't afford a huge tech to increase their mining speed so the more the bitcoin gets harder to mine the more power it is gonna need and the more price it is gonna cost , however in china there are dedicated servers and companies that are specifically made for mining bitcoin and that explains why it has the largest portion of hash power, so if by any mean the big world companies like Google or Amazon or any other large company get into the world of bitcoin mining they will dominate the market and the bitcoin will became much easier to get.

A lot of the hash percentage will be keeping by the big companies, they can do anything like manipulating the price. I will be expecting about 51% attack.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/658/what-can-an-attacker-with-51-of-hash-power-do

In my opinion, their business model and IT infrastructure would not be ideally suitable for Bitcoin mining. Their computers and servers and

data farms are currently geared for other tasks. {not hashing Bitcoin algorithms} A government researcher once tried to use the super

computers to mine some bitcoins and only managed to mine about 16 bitcoins. http://www.businessinsider.com/researcher-bitcoin-supercomputers-2014-6

I don't think that tech giants would go into mining bitcoins. I suppose from their point of view it's not profitable enough.
What I can imagine is that they might create an altoin of their own and implement it as a part of their payment system.
For such a coin there are big chances that it could remove bitcoin as number one crypto-currency in a relatively short time.

Would be great as they could develop cheaper miners for us, but all i remember about those giants companies is that they like the power and the control, soo joining bitcoin mining would have a hiden purpose to take control over it, and its something we dont need to bitcoin, someone with 70-80% of all bitcoins, manipulating the price anytime.

I think that big tech would just pay founders of new coins royalty to make wallets that have their logo or ads in them thats next I think. Good topic

If the big tech giants are to enter mining they will definitely be the power house of mining with millions of bank roll they would get but they will analyze the possibility of cost versus profit percentage before investing into something like mining.

I do not see the tech giants to enter mining but the possibility of getting involved in bitcoin or altcoin in a different role is a big posssibility and still there are untapped business opportunities in the crypto currency sector and these giant corporates will be eyeing for an entry in the near future.